The Play of Masks: An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Perspectivism

Imagine a mask. It is a seemingly false face that covers a face, but yet there are ears

exposed to the world in this mask. Eyes, ears, and all sense exposed, masks are

nonetheless imbued with a protective lens—as a concealing face from the other, masks

frame the world as “this” or “that.” A mask is not the enframing scenario of thinking; it

merely allows thinking to commence. Masks can figure, but cannot prefigure the image

of thought. Thinking is the claim to new territory. Masks are either static or dynamic.

They project thought into an infinite horizon (a conceptual plane) when they are figured

by difference. Interpreting Nietzsche means interpreting the will to power through forces.

All forces seek to fill the mask, but interpretations are neither good nor bad and they are

certainly never neutral. Forces act, but do not interpret. They are either passive

interpretations imbued with bad conscience, guilt, or ressentiment or they are active

interpretations that are continually interpreting. Interpretation is the creative act of the

self that acknowledges the mask underlying every interpretation and destroys the ego-

centered self erected by science.

Nietzsche’s greatest concern is to conceive of science from the perspective of the

artist and art from the vantage of life. Nietzsche’s interpretation means seeing art and

oneself from beneath in an act of self-reflexivity (GM III.3-4), i.e., acquiring the ability

to play—seriously. By playing I mean the disguising element of thought, where each

character or every mask and costume are the work of difference itself. Disguising is

thinking where the mask greets another mask. Every interpretation must turn towards the

interpreter and towards the forces driving the interpretation. But forces do not interpret,

the interpreter interprets forces. No great move is singular. All interpretation requires

broaching upon many issues at once. The image of the dicethrow resounds this thought

astutely. When the dice falls back in a favorable manner, is it love that Zarathustra speaks

of when one asks, “Am I a cheat?” (Za. Prologue). To love the fate of the return of the

dice is to interpret the return.1 Thus Spoke Zarathustra clarifies, “If ever I played dice

with Gods at the Gods’ table of the earth, so that the earth quaked and broke open and

pushed up floods of fire:—for the earth is a Gods’ table and trembles with creative new

words and dice-throws…” (Za. III.16.3) (Creative new words are not simply the

destruction of grammar through genealogy, but it is the invention of new language). Here

it would mean that the perspectival character has returned as the very returning and

willing return.

Philosophy after Nietzsche is fundamentally a question of acquiring the strength

to continually interpret (WP 852), not towards any thing or any “ground of being,” but

only as a creative act of interpreting that is always becoming by transfiguring and

transvaluating the self through the will to a creative act of becoming. For thinking to

mobilize, it must no longer be a matter of the concept generalizing or representing

thought as it has been under the reactive domain of knowledge.2 Knowledge not only

opposes life (because it is reactive it sees life as a means to knowledge), but it also limits

life by confining thought to reason. However, even logic as a will to knowledge, is a kind

of becoming, a becoming reactive of forces (WP 517). To send thought out, the classical

question Greek question “ti esti…?” was figured by a “who” (Plato), and is now a matter

of “which one?”3 Quite simply, “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective

1 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. (New York: Columbia University Press. 1983), 30-31. 2 Ibid., 100-101.3 Ibid., 77.

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‘knowing’” (GM III.12). Logic creates the concept beforehand, of what always remains

the Same and thus, Nietzsche’s contestation of Kant’s concepts is that the eternal return is

not an a priori judgment of phūsis, but eternal return is something that wills thought as a

projection of thought, an ontology of sense that wills beyond phūsis (by returning to

phūsis?) (GS 39). There must be something higher that does not retreat back to phūsis.

What he means is the übermensch, of course.4 In a sense, we have encountered the same

method of philosophizing from Parmenides to Hegel. Habit and memory as mediations

merely re-present thought and can no longer account for ontological difference. When

Nietzsche says, “The change in general taste is more profound than that of opinions,”

(GS 39) he means thinking as difference from the perspective of the interpreter.

Whereas the Kantian deliberates that thought is a faculty of knowledge that is

represented either through conformity or desire towards the object (i.e., they are both

states of exterior judgment),5 Nietzsche pronounces, “The philosopher seeks to hear

within himself the echoes of the world symphony and to re-project them in the form of

concepts” (PTG 3). And never could we say that we judge with désintéressement. It is not

enough that the Kantian judges as the first spectator, but actually thinks that he is

disinterested. But Kant himself is a taste; a taste that interprets art with great interest (GM

III. 6).6 It is no coincidence that the Greeks held the “sage” to be he who has the keenest

taste (PTG 3), as not merely an affect of sense, but a projection of thought.

4 Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volumes I and II. Translated by David Farrell Krell. (San Francisco: Harper Collins. 1991)220. Heidegger’s interpretation regarding the “[perspective] of life” is one that he thinks will reopen the question of Being. He interprets the übermensch as a grounding horizon for Being (that is, being human). He writes, “Overman is the man who grounds Being anew—in the rigor of knowledge and in the grand style of creation.” See Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy, 169.5 Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. 3.6 Heidegger contradicts this claim and seeks to show that Nietzsche, through his readings of Schopenhauer, misunderstood Kant and that the two philosophies of art were likely very close. See “Kant’s Doctrine of the Beautiful. Its Misinterpretation by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche” In Heidegger, Nietzsche, 107-114.

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Returning to the concept of thinking as the dicethrow, we see it has two features.

First, it must be said that thinking wills the dice to be thrown.7 If it is thinking, it is

necessary that thinking be mobile. There is no thought to be snared. Secondly, the

dicethrow is absurd. The absurdity is figuring life through reason or logic.8 All symbolic

language that figures life through representation is not thinking. Willing states that are

not poised to repeat eternally to power, i.e., to continually live through them, is absurd.

The will to power is not the want of power, it is be “like the bee that has gathered to

much honey” (Za.Pro.), the will to power does not want—it bestows; it gives back.9

Those who are over-full of life welcome the return of the dice, of what comes back when

thinking is sent out.

To test this absurdity, to try to play the game with “loaded dice” is to deny life

(Za. II.16). The interpreter of “good conscience” stumbles upon error and is seized by

this feeling because it marks the moment of a revaluation of the self (GS 297).

Revaluation is to let the soul take flight. Falsity occurs when problems are tied-down,

when “Truth” is erected. Nietzsche could not be more sanguine when he celebrates the

arrival of a broken instinct. He writes, “It is a sign of a broken instinct when man sees the

driving force and its “expression (“the mask”) as separate things—a sign of self-

contradiction…” (WP 377) (This is not the same as a Platonic aporia that prefigures

confusion as a will to knowledge). We should welcome this state of confusion as the

friend or lover of eros, as Dostoevsky’s Idiot, as Nietzsche’s Dionysos, all psychical

masks contesting a self fabricated from foreign materials.

7 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy., 32.8 Ibid., 33.9 Ibid., 84-85.

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Asking the question from the perspective of the mask further details the seduction

of “truth” that we “think” a self finds lurking in the text. It means that one could errantly

expect to tackle an aphorism of Nietzsche’s and totalize “Nietzschean” thought there

within (Hegelian totality of consciousness will simply falter). One must acquire “long

legs” to stretch out over many aphorisms (Za.I.7). From summit to summit, each

compositional tone delivers not a single solution to understanding Nietzsche. Readers are

nevertheless ensconced in the maelstrom of philosophical problems within one aphorism

alone. Alone, to be alone, is how one tackles these texts (see Za. II.22). Problems of

depth are to be handled like “cold baths,” he says. Exit them as quickly as they were

entered (GS 381). Precipitous and dangerous, Nietzsche’s thought moves like a “nomad”

defying any attempt at “codification.”10 Supposing your self to be deep, which one

interprets? Are you strong enough the fill the deepest mask? “Everything deep loves a

mask,” he says, because “Every deep spirit needs a mask…around every deep spirit a

mask is continually growing, thanks the to the constantly false…shallow interpretations

of his every word…” (BGE 40). How can any reader, or which one, can seize thought

within these texts? Nietzsche’s thought is a war-machine, a mobilizing juggernaut of

meditations bypassing any will to knowledge.

Nietzsche is redefining sense. Zarathustra is not simply overturning all philosophy

he is sharpening arrows because he has learned how to handle a bow well (EC IV.3). He,

the warrior philosopher projects his arrows like dangerous children at play (Za.I.18).

However, behind every maxim, underlying every opinion and conjecture lay another

philosophy. He could not more direct when he writes, “Every philosophy also conceals a

10 Deleuze, Gilles. “Nomad Thought” In The New Nietzsche. Edited by David B. Allison. (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. 1997), 143.

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philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word also a mask” (BGE 289).

Every attempt to snare thought is feeble. Interpreting Nietzsche’s texts is to project

thought into the distance, into the very distancing of distance itself. It would mean

interpreting the metaphor with an acumen sense of that distance. As Derrida has

observed, an interpretation not only distances the interpreter from Nietzsche, but this is a

necessary distance because of the mobile language of the text.11 Distancing the interpreter

is the very act of the creative will to power destroying the ego. Distancing is becoming

difference. In a sense, the mask is what the text shows the reader, of what gets refracted

when thinking, feeling, interpreting, destroying, and creating occur. A mask provides the

stage for viewing our self from a distance, as “simplified and transfigured,” a distance

that surrounds a self with “eternal perspectives” (GS 78). Philosophy is thus distance, that

is to say, thinking is difference, but difference demands embarking upon self-

overcoming, a feat that is viable only by contesting the interpreter. Following the

projection of thought is not merely longitudinal it is latitudinal along the plane of the

concepts Nietzsche gathers, bestows, and evades from. Genealogy is the tide that brings

interpretations forth. There is no truth to the text. Each interpreter wages war against the

text and himself. This double sense of contestation is genealogy.

These summits are not meant to act as a form of mediation that would allow us to

extract a representational meaning. Each aphorism is difference itself. The aphorisms are

an atlas detailing the contours of your failures. “Yes! To look down upon myself and

even my stars (thoughts): that alone I would call my summit; that is still left for me as my

ultimate summit!” (Za III.1). Nietzsche cannot merely negate valuation. He must bypass

11 Derrida, Jacques. “The Question of Style” In The New Nietzsche, 178-179.

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any sense of reactive valuation by transfiguring the notion of force as something that is

contesting the topos of valuation. Nietzsche bestows the figure of such a man:

“[He] needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveler and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and ‘free spirit’ and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences form the heights into every distance…the task itself calls for something else—it calls for him to create values” (BGE 211).

Hence, all interpretations are not merely separated by degrees, but they are separated by

the kind of force driving the interpretation. Revaluation contests the site of the metaphor.

The genealogist revaluates all language and values hitherto as the symptoms of active and

passive valuations.12 In a positive sense it means the creation of new and active values,

negatively, however, it is the self as a becoming reactive of forces. Nietzsche writes, “The

lordly right of giving names extends so far that one would allow oneself to conceive the

origin of language itself as an expression of power…[the genealogist] says ‘this is this

and this,’ they seal every thing and…take possession of it” (GM 1.2).

If genealogy is Nietzsche’s method, he must acquire a second sense of

interpreting the will to power as an active force. Having examined the origin of all values

as distinctions of either base or noble values and distinctions of disparity,13 the

philosopher-physician stands all values on their head—or back on their feet? Indeed, the

latter would suggest a revaluation of forces becoming active. In the passage “On the

Great Yearning,” he tells us of the turning of need [Wende der Not]. He sings, “I myself

gave you the ‘Turning of Need’ and ‘Fate’” (Za., III, 14). The turning of need is a song

for Ariadne. It entreats listeners to the resonating chords of pathos that lay amid the sense

12 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 74-75.13 Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press. 1977), 143.

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of the aphorism, every tome means death of the self you know. To truly love the turning

of need would mean that the created act of the will creates the future and the past in the

act of interpreting. All of history flows through Zarathustra precisely for that reason. The

historical self is a self in which all history flows as a willing return. In a sense, the

misunderstanding of ressentiment, bad conscience, and the duality of good and evil has

equally been the result of previous philosophers unable to think historically (GM I.1). To

“think historically” is the perspective of those who are over-full from life. Thus,

interpretation requires the breakthrough of an ego-centered self into the self of becoming.

Indeed, one of the many critiques Nietzsche offers in the self-criticism preface is

that his voice was masked under the “scholar’s hood” and lacked the strength to interpret

(BT Pref., 3). It lacked the strength to dig beneath the roots of Wagner’s Christian ethos

or his Hegelian fervor—in short, Nietzsche required more than one psyche to create

anew. What he required was the psychologist, the physician, a philologist, and even a

dancer who equally expressed the compulsive elements of life. This transitioning of the

self to compulsion—a move to self-overcoming—is the most elemental feature of life.14 It

is rhythm. A rhythmic compulsion featured in humans most astutely is in the form of

dance. Dancing not because the gods compel, but because it is dancing that compels

gods. As Nietzsche writes, “one tried to compel the gods by using rhythm and to force

their hand: poetry was thrown at them like a magical snare” (GS 84). The dance is no

mere scion. It does not represent a glorious age or some kind of affinity with fine arts.

14 This sentiment is captured well in the following idiom: “It is only from particular perspectives that we see these interrelated events and their effects as not being a part of the greater self-same activity of this or-ganic process, which has already presupposed our interpretations of its flow-ing process where every event in the world is intimately connected to every other event. Hence, the will to power will always include interpretation as its fundamental modus operandi for understanding the world.” See,Jones, David. “Empty Soul, Empty World” In Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School. Edited by Bret W. Davis., Brian Schroeder, and Jason Wirth. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2010), 113.

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Dancing is the harmonic and rhythmic movement of interpretation (infinite movement).

To dance one needs to interpret swiftly and relish the danger of such movement.

“Movement is symbolism for the eye,” he says, “it indicates that something has been felt,

willed, thought” (WP 492). Thinking is the soul’s movement (GS 280). Learning to take

a walk within our self, philosophy has become infinite movement where the most exterior

is held within the interior.15 It is the supreme reign of immanence, of exteriority and

alterity and also interiority and Selfsame cutting through the image of thought—not new

territory proper, but that which dethrones and claims; territorializes and deterritorializes;

it is a conceptual persona (thinking) that saves and destroys.16 It requires a “warlike soul”

with a desire to mobilize thought and transfigure the scene of every interpretation (GS

32). The cadence of the interpretative dance as metaphor is indicative of the dynamism

inherent to the Dionysian life; continual death and return (the problem with the death of

God is that he has merely died once). It is no surprise that Zarathustra “should only

believe in a God who knew how to dance” (Za., I, 7). Do not mistake Zarathrusta for

being facetious. Indeed, “Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being,

or a musical composition are…can they dance?” (GS 366).

Dancing is to interpret eternal return as an interpretation where one cannot wager

or go beyond the act of interpreting. One cannot leap over this decision, but rather, dance

gleefully through the moment as though it were eternal. Dancing is to send thinking out.

As Zarathustra states, “Only in the dance can I tell the allegory of the highest things”

(Za.II.11). It is a dicethrow to dance. It means one would play the game and affirm the

dice thrown, regardless of the outcome.17 Nietzsche’s affirmation is a dancing over the

15 Deleuze, Gilles. What Is Philosophy?, 59.16 Ibid., see chapter 3 “Conceptual Personae,” 61-83.17 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 37.

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abyss. It is to throw the dice and not only will the fatal outcome, but to love the outcome.

To love not the “willed combination, but the fatal combination.”18 When the dice falls

back, the bad player relies on causality and probability, which is rooted in the web of

reason—it is the spirit of ressentiment. The dice falling back hurl the metaphor across the

abyss creating the territory of interpretation. As interpreters you “shall seek your enemy,

you shall wage your war—and for your own thoughts!” (Za.I.10). That the Persian wages

war with morality as his self-overcoming testifies for his need to shoot arrows, to use the

bow well. It is a matter of opposing forces against (moral) laws that Nietzsche goes to

war. War means contesting grounds.

War means contesting the ego self with crisis. But krisis (Gr. Krisis) also implies

an opportunity. It is an opportune arising of conflicting forces contesting the decision to

affirm or negate.19 Which one contests? As Foucault observes, “Contestation does not

imply a generalized negation, but an affirmation that affirms nothing, a radical break of

transitivity…the act which carries [values of existence] to their limits…to the Limit

where an ontological decision achieves its end…”20 The crisis in question is the question

of the self, an existential crisis composed by the rhythmic tonalities of interpretation. The

self does not merely have a mask; it has a mask that masks other masks. Infinite

movement of thought is something like undressing, always becoming. Can you still hear

out of this mask? The question asked of the interpreter is to simply listen to the

aphorisms. Their brevity is their dexterity. When the friend (the one that is contesting) is

moved to invite himself closer, some of us would prefer to place a chair in front of the

18 Ibid., 26-27.19 Davis, Bret W. “Nietzsche After Nishitani” In Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School. Edited by Bret W. Davis., Brian Schroeder, and Jason Wirth. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2010), 82. 20 Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 36.

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door, to not let the mask expose itself to the mask that lay underneath (GS 365). It is the

inattentive listener that broaches the scene with insincerity, always preferring the facile

decorum of a retreating difficulty to the ardor of attuning one’s gaze towards the distance

of the text (GS 80; 60). The prescriptive means for interpreting is to listen, that is to say,

to ruminate (GM Preface, 8). The sonority Nietzsche breaches in the address of

Zarathustra is the dissolution of the ego self. It requires one to not merely look, but to

listen. Nancy has observed that listening is the very act of the question, i.e., of the

question of the self as a crisis of the self.21 Interpreting Zarathustra is to interpret the self.

This does not mean that interpretation is a great event. “The ears of men” are

incapable of listening to the effects of great deeds (GS 125). Ears to listen, ears to

ruminate, ears that service the self as an umbilicus to the world. Zarathustra writes, “Slow

is experience for all deep wells: long must they wait before they know just what has

fallen into their depths” (Za.I.12). Unlike the Hegelian who waits for history or God or

some other kind of metaphysical absolute to signal a great event, Nietzsche prescribes to

live dangerously to those “who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be

overcome…” (GS 283). Listening is forgetting the ego self.22 What must be overcome is

the mask of the ego self. How poignantly Nietzsche iterates, “[the] feeling of

intoxication, in fact corresponding to an increase in strength…is a consequence of

enhanced strength” (WP, 800). Given strength marks a resonating tone in the eternal

return (Zarathustra epitomizes each sentiment clearly, “I come eternally again to this self-

same life” (Za. III.13.2). Indeed, Zarathustra states, “Courage is the best of killers,

21 Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Translated by Charolotte Mandell. (New York: Fordham University Press. 2007), 9.22 Jones, David. “Empty Soul, Empty World,” 109. “This [ego] self has relinquished itself as a ‘narrative self’ for an enhanced narrative for which there is ultimately no listener, reader, or evaluator as a ‘world-self.’”

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courage that attacks…for it says: ‘Was that life? Well then! One more time!’” (Za. III.2).

Each aphorism delivers the strength or power to interpret life (to live through it) as

opposed to the desire to cross over life. Life for Nietzsche is sheer drama, the world is the

theatre,23 and Nietzsche’s thought is the very mis-en-scène directing all interpretations

through scores of theatric perspectives. Interpretation is not simply philosophy it is

drama. Such is the reason why Nietzsche would write such good books; “Always

presupposing that there are ears…One must be worthy of hearing…” (EC, I.4). Which

one listens? As Nietzsche protests, “One hears only those questions for which one is able

to find answers” (GS 196). It brings forth the mask and lets one listen, but which one

listens?

Are there any ears left? It means interpreting through the torrent of masks

underlying interpretations in the text. Every mask exposes ears. Every interpretation is

driven by active or reactive force. The interpreter has to be a great rope-dancer (not a

rope-maker), one that can go over and beyond himself by seeing his art beneath himself,

by seeing the reactive forces of a self as adumbrations toward a self-overcoming.

Index of Abbreviations

BGE Beyond Good and Evil

23 Parkes, Graham. Composing the Soul, 343.

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BT The Birth of Tragedy

EC Ecce Homo

GM The Genealogy of Morals

GS The Gay Science

PTG Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

WP The Will to Power

Za. Thus Spoke Zarathrustra

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