DUNIA KATA: Nietzsche and Postmodern Philosophy

Nietzsche is commonly regarded as the grandfather of philosophical postmodernism. If, to cite its most prominent exponent, postmodernism is characterized by "incredulity toward metanarratives," a "delegitimation [of metanarratives] fueled by the demand for legitimation itself," Nietzsche's relevance is not difficult to see.[1] Such incredulity and delegitimation is precisely what Nietzsche reveals to be the defining feature of our intellectual-historical situation, one marked by what he calls the "death of God" and "nihilism"—the self-overcoming of theological and metaphysical world interpretations.[2]

Nietzsche's analysis of this situation over a century ago was certainly precocious (or, on his own account, "untimely"), given that only in the postwar period have these issues of postmodernism come to prominence in European and Anglo-American thought. It is no coincidence, then, that the past few decades have seen a remarkable "Nietzsche renaissance" throughout Europe, Great Britain, and the United States.

This renewed interest in Nietzsche has been most significant in France and the United States. Nietzsche's tremendous influence on postmodern French philosophy has been direct and well documented.[3] Beyond Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, and beyond Marx and Freud, it was Nietzsche who provided the central figures in contemporary French philosophy (Deleuze, Foucault, previous hit Derrida next hit, Lyotard, and Irigaray) with their most basic problems and resources.[4] The Anglo-American Nietzsche renaissance has had a less direct effect on mainstream contemporary philosophy in the United States. Yet here, too, Nietzsche has arguably "prefigured" the moves made by "postmodern American philosophers" (e.g., Quine, Sellars, Goodman, Davidson, Rorty, and Kuhn) toward antirealism in ontology, antifoundationalism in epistemology, and antidualism in the philosophy of mind.[5] Nietzsche's philosophy, then, is not only of interest for the history of ideas but is of genuine relevance to contemporary philosophy.

It is in this context that I have written the present book. Nietzsche is taken here as an important antecedent for more recent attempts at formulating a postmetaphysical epistemology and ontology, as traversing the same philosophical territory as the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer, the poststructuralism of Foucault, previous hit Derrida next hit, Deleuze, and Lyotard, the neo-pragmatism of Quine, Goodman, and Rorty, and the philosophy of science of Kuhn and Feyerabend. For the most part, these more recent figures remain in the background and the focus is on Nietzsche. But, throughout, my aim remains twofold: to make a contribution to Nietzsche studies by providing a systematic interpretation of his later epistemology and ontology; and to uncover Nietzsche's solutions to some current philosophical problems.

The Argument
A particularly important contemporary problem animates this project. Critics have consistently identified in Nietzsche's work a difficulty that has also been said to plague more recent postmodern positions: the problem of how an antifoundationalist philosophy can avoid vicious relativism and legitimate its claim to provide a platform for the critique of arguments, practices, and institutions. In Nietzsche, the problem is that of reconciling his genealogy and perspectivism (which seem to reject the notion that there is a uniquely correct conception of the world) with his doctrines of becoming and will to power (which seem to present just such a normative—perhaps even metaphysical—conception). I argue that Nietzsche successfully navigates between relativism and dogmatism and offers a viable, indeed exemplary, postmetaphysical epistemological and ontological position. I show that Nietzsche accepts the scientific project's naturalistic critique of metaphysics and theology but maintains that a thoroughgoing naturalism must move beyond scientific reductionism to accept a central feature of aesthetic understanding: an acknowledgment of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation. I argue that the apparent relativism of perspectivism is held in check by Nietzsche's naturalism (which offers the doctrines of becoming and will to power in place of all theological interpretations) and that the apparent dogmatism of these doctrines is mitigated by his perspectivism (which grants that these doctrines are themselves interpretations yet ones that are better by naturalistic standards).

The first two chapters present an overview of Nietzsche's project. Chapter 1 situates this project within a genealogy of European thought that begins with Platonist metaphysics, passes through Christian theology to positivistic science, and culminates in "the death of God." It shows that Nietzsche accepts this inheritance and takes upon himself the task of rigorously thinking through the consequences of the "death of God." This "event," he believes, requires an elimination of the theological posits that remain implicit in the scientific concern for presuppositionless truth. Thus, Nietzsche sees "God's death" as forcing a reconciliation between truth and its traditional opponents, becoming and appearance, and a reconciliation between science and its traditional adversary, art. Chapter z explores the consequences of the death of God for epistemology and ontology and introduces the book's guiding figures: naturalism and interpretation. It shows that Nietzsche's

rejection of the traditional epistemological ideal of a "God's eye view" leads him to a thoroughly naturalistic conception of knowing and being. Yet it maintains that Nietzsche also comes to reject the corollary to the "God's eye view": the notion of an absolute ontology, the idea that there must be some one, true way that the world really is. Instead, Nietzsche comes to see ontologies as always relative to background interpretations and to claim that interpretations can be challenged only by other interpretations, not by recourse to brute facts. Nonetheless, Nietzsche's naturalism is seen as providing him with compelling, if not final, reasons for the assertion that some interpretations are better than others.

The remainder of the book calls on the twin notions of naturalism and interpretation to make sense of Nietzsche's central epistemological and ontological doctrines: perspectivism, becoming, and will to power. These chapters argue against prominent readings that hold that perspectivism assumes the existence of a pre-given world upon which there are perspectives, a world that becoming and will to power are taken to describe. Chapter 3 argues that Nietzsche's misleading language of "perspective" ought to be subsumed within his broader and richer language of "interpretation" and that "interpretations," for Nietzsche, are not construals of some primary ontological ground but rather reconstruals of world conceptions already on hand. It argues that Nietzsche's naturalism leads him to dissolve the traditional epistemological dualism of "subject" and "object" into a common field of "interpretation" in which "subject" and "object" are of a piece and boundaries between them are constantly shifting. Chapter 4 argues that, on the one hand, Nietzsche views "becoming" as a naturalistic doctrine that counters the metaphysical preoccupation with being, stasis, and eternity by foregrounding the empirically evident ubiquity of change in the natural world. On the other hand, "becoming" is also seen as describing the incessant shift Of perspectives and interpretations necessitated by a world that lacks a grounding essence. In the final chapter, I provide a similar reading for the doctrine of will to power. On the one hand, I see will to power as the empirical theory at which Nietzsche arrives after the elimination of all theological posits from prevailing scientific accounts of the natural world. On the other hand, I argue that natural change essentially involves "interpretation" in Nietzsche's vastly extended sense, that is, as every entity's impulse to extend its domain and incorporate others in its environment.

Questions of Terminology
My use of some contemporary philosophical terminology calls for comment. Throughout the book, I describe Nietzsche's position as a kind of "naturalism," a term ubiquitous in recent Anglo-American discussions of epistemology and metaphysics. As David Papineau has recently written, "nearly everybody nowadays wants to be a 'naturalist,' but the aspirants to the term nevertheless disagree widely on substantial questions of philosophical doctrine."[6] Though the term has a long history, its current usage is associated with the work of W. V. Quine, for whom "naturalism" signifies the rejection of first philosophy, the priority of natural science, and the redescription of philosophy as continuous with science.[7] Though Nietzsche does not himself use the term, his consistent appeals to "nature" and "the natural" and his overall project of "de-deifying nature" and "naturalizing humanity" (GS 109) ally him with Quine and other recent proponents of philosophical naturalism. Nietzsche's "naturalism," too, rejects first philosophy, whether conceived as metaphysics or epistemology. It denies the existence of supernatural entities and explanatory principles and endorses a broadly scientific conception of the world.

Yet Nietzsche insists that a thoroughgoing "naturalism" cannot be a scientism; that is, it cannot accept the Quinean view that "[t]he world is as natural science says it is" and "[n]aturalism looks only to natural science [ . . . ] for an account of what there is and what what there is does." [8] Nietzsche's genealogy of European thought (presented

in chapter 1) uncovers a residual theology in the modern scientific project's claim to describe the way the world really is. He argues that, if one carries through the naturalistic program implicit in modern science, one will discover that science overcomes itself, giving way to another discourse that can claim to be more rigorously naturalistic and that reveals the scientific to be but one among many true accounts of the world. That discourse is the aesthetic, which affirms sensuousness, materiality, multiplicity, becoming, historicity, creativity, and the irreducibility of interpretation. The aesthetic cannot and does not claim to take the place of science as the one true theory. It justifies itself holistically, by reference to a genealogical story; and it challenges the very idea of a single, final account.

I describe Nietzsche's naturalism as "antimetaphysical" or "postmetaphysical." This usage, too, must be qualified, since "metaphysics" has a notoriously wide range of uses. I use the term in two related senses. The first of them is quite literal. In this sense, metaphysics refers to discourses about what is beyond, above, or outside physis or nature. "Naturalism," then, is antimetaphysical in an obvious sense: it denies the existence of super-natural entities (souls, Forms, God, etc.) and extranatural (disembodied, ahistorical, noncontextual, foundational, infallible) points of view. This does not rule out talk of theoretical entities or principles such as quarks, force-points, différance, or will to power. Such entities and principles are perfectly admissible, provided that they are taken as revisable posits whose role is to explain (aspects of) experience and nature and are acknowledged to be the productions of a particular natural creature with its own peculiar purposes and projects. I also occasionally use the term "metaphysics" in a more specific sense drawn from Heidegger and previous hit Derrida next hit. In this sense, "metaphysics" names "the determination of Being as presence, " that is, the privilege of what is given, existing purely and simply—not contextually, holistically, or differentially.[9] In this sense, recourse to "the immediate facts of experience," to necessary and universal categories of the mind, to mental meanings, or to underlying substances and subjects (to name but a few examples) is "metaphysical." Indeed, Heidegger and previous hit Derrida next hit often call this metaphysics "ontotheology," since God is the archetype of such entities: a being untouched by becoming, context, or

difference. A "naturalism" that repudiates not only God but also his "shadows" (GS 108) will have no place for such entities.

A final set of terms needs to be qualified. I often speak of Nietzsche's "epistemology" and "ontology." Yet in contemporary philosophy it is common to view "epistemology" as a transcendental, foundational discipline that assumes the preexistence of subjects and objects and attempts to explain how the former can adequately represent the latter. As such, the discipline has been repudiated by those who, like Nietzsche, wish to move toward an antifoundationalist, holist conception of knowledge.[10] Nietzsche rarely uses the term (in German, Erkenntnistheorie ); and where he does, he, too, tends to treat with disdain the discipline it names (see GS 354; BGE 204; TI "Reason" 3; WP 253, 410, 462, 591). Yet the term can also be taken in a more literal and innocuous sense to refer to a "theory of knowledge," that is, a theory about what we know, what knowledge is, and how we arrive at this knowledge. In this sense, Nietzsche certainly has a "theory of knowledge," albeit a naturalistic, holistic, antifoundationalist one. Given the awkwardness of alternative terminology, I have opted to use the term "epistemology" in this latter sense. The same is true of "ontology," which can be taken to describe a metaphysical discipline dealing with "what ultimately, truly, or really exists." But, here too, the term has a broader and less metaphysical sense; in this sense, "ontology" describes "what there is" qualified however one likes (e.g., "what there is relative to a theory or interpretation"). Again, it is in this latter sense that I use the term.

Questions of Method
It has become obligatory, in works on Nietzsche, to make explicit and to justify one's methodological decisions regarding which of his texts one has chosen to take into account. There are two such decisions, one concerning periodization (how one divides up Nietzsche's corpus and which texts one takes to represent the "mature" Nietzsche), the other concerning use of the Nachlaß (whether or not to make use of those texts and notes that Nietzsche left unpublished). With regard to periodization, I generally restrict myself to the later texts, by which I mean the texts from The Gay Science onward.[11] I do so for several reasons,

most important of which is that in The Gay Science Nietzsche first proclaims the "death of God" and begins a concerted inquiry into issues of truth, knowledge, and being that results in the doctrines of perspectivism, becoming, and will to power. This is not to say that Nietzsche is unconcerned with these issues in earlier works, nor that his position on these matters is markedly different in those earlier works. In the earlier texts—particularly in "Homer's Contest," "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Human, All Too Human, and Daybreak —one can find a host of claims, arguments, and analyses dealing with epistemological and ontological topics that resonate richly with those found in the later texts. Because of this, I occasionally quote or refer to these earlier texts in relation to issues raised in the later texts. But there is also another reason I choose to concentrate on the later texts. While I think there are significant problems with the standard tripartite periodization of Nietzsche's corpus—a schema first proposed by Hans Vaihinger and prevalent ever since—and with the more elaborate periodization of Nietzsche's epistemological and ontological writings more recently proposed by Maudemarie Clark, my view on this issue is heterodox, and substantiation of it would require a separate study.[12] Therefore, I opt for a fairly uncontroversial restriction to the texts beginning with The Gay Science, which provide sufficient material for the development and elaboration of my reading. Only in chapter 4 do I undertake an extended reading of an early text, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks . I think the reasons for this are made clear and that I have given sufficient indication of how fully this text accords with the view of Heraclitus, becoming, and metaphysics Nietzsche articulates in his later work.

Among these later works, I refer to, but rarely quote or discuss at length, Nietzsche's long prose-poem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra . This text has much to offer on the issues that concern me. Yet the profusion of voices, styles, and narrative situations one finds in that text makes it especially difficult to quote and explicate in the sort of expository essay I offer here. I also believe that the philosophical themes explored in

Zarathustra are presented elsewhere in a style more amenable to my expository aims.
An explanation is also in order concerning my use of the Nachlaß, and especially The Will to Power . It can no longer be supposed that the set of notes compiled by Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, under the title The Will to Power represents what Heidegger called "the preliminary drafts and fragmentary elaborations" of "Nietzsche's chief philosophical work," "his planned magnum opus ."[13] This view has been effectively discredited by the publication, under the editorship of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, of the new critical edition of Nietzsche's works and correspondence. On the basis of this edition, several scholars have shown that neither the selection nor the arrangement of notes that appear as The Will to Power is Nietzsche's own and that, before composing his final books, Nietzsche had, in fact, abandoned the project of writing a book to be called The Will to Power .[14]

For decades, Nietzsche scholarship has been divided over whether or not the Nachlaß constitutes a legitimate source from which to draw in developing an interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy.[15] And the recent discoveries concerning the construction of The Will to Power have sharpened the debate, leading some scholars to consider suspect any interpretation that makes substantial use of this collection.[16] Yet some of the most influential and respected accounts of Nietzsche's philosophy have been offered by those who draw freely from the Nachlaß and, especially, The Will to Power: for example, Jaspers, Heidegger, Kaufmann, Deleuze, Danto, Müller-Lauter, Schacht, and Nehamas. These interpreters have provided a variety of justifications for continuing to make use of this material.[17] On my view, the most persuasive of these was offered recently by Richard Schacht, whose hermeneutical principles I most fully share.[18] Schacht grants the general interpretive rule that priority should be given to what an author published or intended for publication. Yet, he argues, Nietzsche's case is unusual and presents special considerations that warrant consultation of his unpublished material. Nietzsche's collapse was abrupt and untimely, coming upon him at a moment in his career when he had begun to publish with increasing frequency. The notebooks were always the workshop for Nietzsche's published writings; and the Nachlaß no doubt contains the seeds of what would have been Nietzsche's future projects. Moreover, Nietzsche's published works do not differ significantly in form from the material left in the notebooks. Like the notebooks, the published works contain relatively brief discussions and remarks that rarely, if ever, exhaust or provide Nietzsche's definitive view on any given issue. Instead, as in his notebooks, Nietzsche's published work continually revisits earlier themes, issues, and problems, adding new insights and perspectives

in piecemeal fashion. The large mass of material left in the notebooks provides a wealth of such insights and perspectives on which we can draw in constructing our interpretations of Nietzsche. And, while we can never be sure just how much or what parts of this material Nietzsche fully endorsed or intended for publication, responsible use of the notebooks as a supplement to Nietzsche's published work gives us a much broader and deeper view of his philosophical thinking than a purist restriction to the published texts alone could provide.

The same considerations support use of the material in The Will to Power . It is certainly true that, unlike The Gay Science or Beyond Good and Evil, The Will to Power cannot be read as a book, let alone as Nietzsche's Hauptwerk . But it is nevertheless a collection of notes that Nietzsche himself wrote and, moreover, the only such collection available in English translation. It is true that the editors of The Will to Power occasionally cut and splice Nietzsche's notes, instead of leaving them whole. But this occurs less frequently or egregiously than is claimed by critics of The Will to Power .[19] It is true that The Will to Power severs Nietzsche's notes from their original contexts and that a reconsideration of them in these contexts can be revealing. But we must remember that Nietzsche's notebooks are just that, books of notes rather than continuous works; that is, they are fragmentary and, hence, their original context is of somewhat less importance than it is in his fully composed books. Furthermore, just as in the treatment of Nietzsche's published works (which, after all, are composed of semiautonomous sections or aphorisms), it is often equally or even more revealing to consider these notes in other contexts, to consider them, for example, in relation to other notes or published passages that take up similar themes and issues. Because I aim to construct a general interpretation of Nietzsche's epistemological and ontological position rather than to present a reading of one or another of his books, this has been my interpretive practice: to read Nietzsche across his oeuvre[*] , "looking cautiously fore and aft" (D P:5).

For these reasons, I consider it not only legitimate but wise to draw on the Nachlaß and The Will to Power as supplements to Nietzsche's published work. Where I quote the published texts, I often refer the reader to notes in The Will to Power or the Nachlaß that correspond to or develop the issues under discussion in the quoted passage. And,

where I quote The Will to Power or the Nachlaß, I try to note passages in the published work that, I think, corroborate or significantly connect with the views presented in the notebook entry. For readers who wish to consult Nietzsche's original, or who want to consider the original context for any of these notes, I have provided, as an appendix, a concordance between The Will to Power notes to which I refer and corresponding entries in Kritische Studienausgabe .