Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy: The Nature, Method, and Aims of Philosophy

Abstract

In this edited volume, Paul Loeb and Matthew Meyer have assembled thirteen contributors to address the topic of Nietzsche and metaphilosophy. We know that Nietzsche was preoccupied with questions about the nature and tasks of philosophy from the very beginning of his intellectual career, notably in his lectures on the pre-Platonic philosophers, and that these questions assume a central role in the writings of his late period, notably BGE.The volume is divided into four main parts. The first part is entitled “Evolving Metaphilosophies” and features three chapters: Marco Brusotti on metaphilosophy and natural history in Nietzsche, Matthew Meyer on the dialectics of Nietzsche's metaphilosophies, and Antoine Panaïoti on Nietzsche as metaphilospher. Part II is entitled “The Nature of Philosophy” and also features three chapters: Rebecca Bamford on the relationship between science and philosophy in Nietzsche, Paul Loeb on genuine philosophers, value creation, and will to power, and Robert Pippin on philosophy and religion in BGE. The third part, “The Method of Philosophy,” again features three essays: Mark Alfano on affective perspectivism as a method of philosophy, Tsarina Doyle on Nietzsche's philosophical naturalism, and Paul Katsafanas on Nietzsche's moral methodology. Part IV features a further four chapters: João Constâncio on Nietzsche's aesthetic conception of philosophy, focused on an interpretation of GS 373 (this in my view is the standout essay in the volume), Beatrix Himmelman on metaphilosophy and metapolitics in Nietzsche and Heidegger, Scott Jenkins on Nietzsche's psychology of metaphysics (or metaphysics as revenge), and Jacqueline Scott on Nietzsche's tragic philosophy and philosophy's role in creating “healthier racialized identities,” as the title of her essay has it. The volume is a strong one with a number of solid, first-rate contributions. The majority of commentators confine themselves to explicating and illuminating Nietzsche's metaphilosophical ambitions, which is an important task. However, given that philosophical legislation has important pretensions, one also wants to learn how the contributors think Nietzsche's recommendations can be made pertinent to our contemporary planetary and political situation, and this is not adequately attended to in the volume. Owing to the constraints of space I shall restrict this review to commenting on the first three contributions that make up part I of the volume, along with commenting on Loeb's contribution as co-editor of the volume and the final contribution.The volume kicks off with a contribution by Marco Brusotti on metaphilosophy and natural history in BGE. Brusotti correctly notes the shift that has taken place in Nietzsche's thinking between 1878 and 1886: whereas in HH he had pleaded for “historical philosophizing” as something inseparable from natural science, in the chapter on “We Scholars” in BGE, philosophy is credited with a noble character that signals Nietzsche's alarm at the positivistic subordination of philosophy to science and his rebellion against this as a modern development. Brusotti draws attention to key aphorisms in BGE, as well as to the “Note” that ends the first essay of GM, where it is clear that Nietzsche holds to the view that philosophy has a specific and unique task that distinguishes it from the goals of science, notably that whereas science deals with causal questions the genuine philosopher is preoccupied with value issues (the former may, of course, be a preliminary contribution to the key task of creating values). Brusotti seeks to clarify just what solving the problem of value means for Nietzsche, and suggests that it entails taking the decision to set new values, in which the “decision” amounts to a “fiat,” as in “thus it shall be!” (BGE 211). It is at this point in his interpretation that he instructively considers the topic of Nietzsche's naturalism. He asks the question: “Is he a naturalist when he tries to explain historically given values but not when he intends to create new ones?” (18). His response is to suggest that the distinction here is an artificial one and rests on a too narrow conception of naturalism. We find this at work, he claims, in Brian Leiter's attempt to distinguish between a Humean Nietzsche and a therapeutic and rhetorical Nietzsche, with the former seeking to explain morality in naturalistically respectable terms and the latter relying on rhetorical devices. Brusotti argues, however, that once it is recognized that a possible coexistence of naturalism and a therapeutic project is not at issue in Nietzsche, it follows that Nietzsche's “whole program does not deserve to be called naturalistic” (18). This is obviously an unwelcome conclusion, and one that he does not propose to resolve: “Should we conclude that creating new values belongs to Nietzsche's naturalism? In any case, it belongs to his philosophy” (19).Brusotti's essay is instructive in making clear that a key issue to be reflected upon with respect to the late Nietzsche is how the legislative task of value creation is to be squared with naturalism. For those who are not happy with Leiter's distinction between different Nietzsches, with one being more acceptable than the other, and who also may have concerns over the possibly arbitrary character of philosophical legislation, let me suggest that the volume would have benefitted from considering another kind of naturalist Nietzsche. This is one we find at work in texts such as D and GS, where Nietzsche implements a naturalism that is at the same time a genuinely therapeutic practice of philosophy, centered as it is on the identification of causes that then serves to free the mind from fear, superstition, and moral and religious phantasms. Such a practice of philosophy clearly connects Nietzsche with other philosophical naturalists such as Epicurus and Spinoza. The rhetorical dimension of Nietzsche's philosophizing can then be understood as a means for enriching, and possibly enhancing, the effectiveness of this therapeutic naturalism.In his contribution, “The Dialectics of Nietzsche's Metaphilosophies,” Matthew Meyer highlights the difficulties involved in presenting a coherent theory of Nietzsche's metaphilosophy and rightly warns against succumbing to the impulse to construe his intellectual development in terms of a linear narrative. Nietzsche's development is marked by complex twists and turns, and displays what Nietzsche himself calls in D “a passionate history of the soul” characterized by crises and catastrophes (D 481). As Meyer also correctly points out, Nietzsche provides his readers with a multiplicity of different and even conflicting conceptions of philosophy in his oeuvre. His basic thesis is to suggest that we ought to approach Nietzsche's free spirit works of 1878–82 as a “consciously constructed dialectical Bildungsroman” in which Nietzsche educates himself as a free spirit and “in a way that executes a dialectic between truth-seeking and science, on the one hand, and art and the affirmation of life, on the other” (23). Furthermore, Meyer argues that by the end of the free spirit works Nietzsche has recognized the need for a self-overcoming of the will to truth in which the philosopher is liberated from an obligation to pursue the truth at all costs. This then leads directly to the late texts of 1886–88 in which the truth-drive is restrained “for the purpose of life and is closely aligned with Dionysian art” (24). In his late writings, Meyer further argues, Nietzsche reconnects with the conception of philosophy propounded in his early writings, namely, creating and legislating life-promoting values. On Meyer's reading it is only in HH, a text he reads as creating a hiatus in the oeuvre, that Nietzsche “embraces a traditional conception of philosophy as unrestrained truth-seeking … divorced from any interest in promoting life and legislating value” (23). In addition, he argues that while Nietzsche comes across as a champion of Enlightenment thinking in his middle writings, he also recognizes that such a project reaches its limits and must overcome itself in favor of an aesthetic conception of philosophy that allows for simplification, falsification, and even anthropomorphism: “the philosopher is no longer driven by a will to truth that seeks to discover a pre-given reality. Instead, the philosopher is driven by a will to power that creates life-promoting values […] that bear witness to who the philosopher is” (40).Meyer's essay is rich in insight, and the diligent manner in which he has worked through Nietzsche's corpus in his recent work, also exemplified in his contribution to this volume, is admirable. I take issue with his reading of Nietzsche on specific points of interpretation and think that he underestimates the extent to which Nietzsche puts into play a multiplicity of philosophical methods and virtues in his late writings, some of which he has first developed in his middle writings. For example, it might be argued that the project of philosophical psychology that Nietzsche first develops in HH, and in direct opposition to what he sees as the obscurantist character of German philosophy, is never abandoned by him, and it is unclear why he would have felt the need to abandon it. It is also with HH that Nietzsche first becomes a skeptic and embraces skepticism in his writings—having done all he could to warn against its dangers in UM—and this skepticism continues well into his late writings, including AC, where Nietzsche states that all great minds have been skeptics and even Zarathustra is said to be a skeptic (AC 54). There is also much more going on in HH than simply “unrestrained truth-seeking.” Nietzsche's relation to Enlightenment modes of thinking is much more nuanced and interesting than Meyer allows for. For example, even in one of his earliest middle writings, AOM, Nietzsche astutely locates the dark art of obscurantism at the heart of Kant's so-called Enlightenment project (AOM 27). In D, Nietzsche commits himself to developing a new Enlightenment, one that is beyond both “revolution” and “reaction.”Finally, it needs to be appreciated that Nietzsche is expressing a concern over what he calls “the tyranny of the true” as early as D, and not, as Meyer has it, at the end of the free spirit writings. In D 507, for example, Nietzsche stages an anxiety that admittedly takes on a more dramatic form in his later writings and their questioning of the will to truth. In this passage he asks why it should be considered desirable that truth alone should rule and be omnipotent. We can esteem it as a great power, but we should not allow it to rule over us in some tyrannical fashion. Much healthier is to allow truth to have opponents and for us to find relief from it from time to time, and be at liberty to reside knowingly in untruth. Failure to place truth within a rich economy of life will make it, and us in the process, “boring, powerless, and tasteless” (D 507). I appreciate this is not the same as the critique of the will to truth Nietzsche calls for in GM. Nevertheless, it serves to show that Nietzsche has a concern with “truth” running throughout his middle writings, and not simply at the culmination of them.Antoine Panaïoti directly tackles the issue at the heart of this volume with an essay simply entitled “Nietzsche as Metaphilosopher.” He wishes to mobilize the exegetical results of his appreciation of a wide range of Nietzsche's texts “to mount a Nietzschean metaphilosophical critique of the Analytical Nietzsche genre,” which he dates to Arthur Danto's study of 1965 (59). The Analytical Nietzsche, he maintains, builds on a Socratic conviction that the purpose of philosophical inquiry is to secure truth by applying the same basic methods used in the sciences and as a way of finding solutions to a circumscribed set of recognizable philosophical problems. This Analytical Nietzsche sets itself the task of extracting and reconstructing “rationally defensible theories” from Nietzsche that address such problems. Panaïoti argues that this is completely at odds with Nietzsche's own philosophical practice and ambition: “the vast majority of contemporary Anglo-American Nietzsche reception is metaphilosophically discontinuous with Nietzsche” since it assumes “the appropriateness of precisely the conception of philosophy that Nietzsche contests” (62). He wishes to go even further than this, insisting that the Analytical Nietzsche tradition “is guilty of reinforcing precisely what Nietzsche, as metaphilosopher, sought to combat and reverse” (62). In short, what Panaïoti wishes to retrieve and have us take up again is “world-transforming” philosophy with “big ideas.” Instead of construing philosophy as a neutral, objective scientific activity aiming at truth, we should follow Nietzsche's lead and engage in “world-transformative axiological legislation” (60).It is not clear that this impassioned plea for axiological legislation does justice either to Nietzsche's variegated oeuvre or to the contribution made to our appreciation of Nietzsche's philosophical character by Analytical Nietzscheans. There are several key points worth making. The first is to draw attention to the important “analytical” work—work that is sober, rational, enlightened, and skeptical—that Nietzsche does in his middle writings, as well as to the exemplary character of his devastating criticism of metaphysics, especially Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will to life. Nietzsche—rightly in my view—regards this “will to life” as an empty generalization that only proves disastrous for science (see AOM 5), while in D he tells us that he has no desire to be the latest unriddler of the world in which all questions are solved with one answer or with a single word or concept (D 547). Nietzsche has done a great deal of critical work in his middle writings that dramatically calls into questions many of our cherished assumptions and ideas about the nature of the human being, and he has done this by casting a cold and skeptical light on things. Are we to suppose that all of this work is simply jettisoned in the late writings and that these labors are now completely overtaken by the world-historical task of philosophical legislation? In the middle writings Nietzsche teaches his readers to be skeptical and suspicious in the face of “big ideas” (such as “the will to life”); the fact that a number of Analytical Nietzscheans today avoid his “big ideas” and devote most of their attention to probing and using Nietzsche as a philosophical psychologist, one who mines and undermines human presumption and vanity, is readily understandable. Whilst one might agree with the author that the practice of simply assimilating Nietzsche to a circumscribed set of recognizable philosophical problems merits being questioned, it is also the case that Nietzsche is making an important contribution to core and fundamental problems, albeit in ways that significantly transform our appreciation and formulation of them. This includes the use of novel methods and styles of philosophizing to which Analytical Nietzscheans have a tendency to pay insufficient attention or to which they do not fully do justice. But this has nothing to do with Nietzsche as philosophical legislator, and everything to do with Nietzsche as philosophical educator.In his contribution, Paul Loeb provides an illuminating appreciation of BGE 211, which is the aphorism where Nietzsche puts forward his key distinction between philosophical laborers and genuine philosophers who are legislators. He begins by asking a number of key questions, which are most welcome: Just what is value creation? What kinds of values are to be created? How does the philosophical legislator differ from religious founders and leaders? Just what is the will to power? He suggests provocatively that even if critics of Nietzsche disagree with his naturalistic theory of life as will to power, “it is incumbent on them to naturalize their own conception of philosophy” (104). According to Loeb, a genuine philosopher is someone who issues commands and makes laws that are inherently normative: this is what should happen and this is how things should be. He readily acknowledges that knowledge-seeking is involved in this task but maintains that on Nietzsche's model genuine philosophers are those for whom “knowing” is creating and in turn lawmaking. It follows from this, he argues, that genuine philosophical activity is a vehicle for will to power, and this means directing the thoughts and actions of others in which values and ideals function as “instruments of domination, mastery, and control” (90). Readers of Loeb's work to date will not be surprised to learn that he holds to the view that it is only the figure of Zarathustra that fits this bill of a genuine philosopher in Nietzsche's corpus and that in his other texts, such as BGE and GM, Nietzsche does not have the pretension of being one.Readers familiar with his work will also not be surprised when he accords key importance to the superhuman as a new species that is no longer human and that has surpassed it. Loeb ends his essay by stating that the great majority of traditional philosophers, including philosophers today, are not genuine philosophers in Nietzsche's eyes and so unable to understand his conception of genuine philosophy from their own experience. Perhaps what blinds us most to seeing the need for genuine philosophy and philosophers is “the dominance of natural science and the pervasive bias of democratic ideology” (105). Although these unfashionable thoughts are powerfully stated, surely one key issue that needs addressing is how philosophers today, especially those who philosophize on or with Nietzsche, are to be persuaded by Nietzsche's legislative project on the level of concrete detail. Although Loeb does an excellent job of clarifying the nature and pretensions of philosophical legislation in Nietzsche, critical questions remain: Has there ever been, and will there ever be, a society governed by philosophical legislators? How would such a society be instituted, and how would it actually operate?In the final essay of the volume, Jacqueline Scott seeks to provide a constructive account of Nietzsche's tragic philosophy in relation to the concerns of the philosophy of race, arguing that there is a need “for us to affirm our lives as racialized subjects and as a racialized society” (261). “Tragic” thinking is relevant here to enable us “to get ourselves out of the despair and resignation that plague our racist society” (261). Scott writes of philosophy as a discipline being a microcosm of a larger society “where protests against a rash of deadly shootings of African-American men by police officers” result in protracted discussions about the methods of protest or the abilities of police officers to do their job, and all too little about the subject of the protest itself (263). From Nietzsche, then, she thinks we can draw the inspiration needed to carry out healthy racialized experiments. Her intellectual boldness on this front is to be applauded—and I write this review in the immediate wake of the racist murder of George Floyd and the anger and protests it has given rise to—and her essay has the great merit of using Nietzsche's philosophy for tangible transformative ends.This volume contains a number of lucidly written essays with a good number of commentators displaying an impressive acquaintance with Nietzsche's corpus. I have, though, two main concerns about the volume and the Nietzsche it is most keen to promote. My first concern is the one I expressed at the beginning of this review. It is clear that Nietzsche's texts, especially the middle and late writings, contain an immense wealth of important psychological and historical insights into, and analyses of, the (sick) human animal, amounting to what is perhaps an unsurpassable achievement in modern thought. It is also clear that Nietzsche saw well how the onset of European nihilism, with its will to nothingness, imperils the future and what might yet become of the human animal. But then we need to raise and confront some difficult questions: Are we to suppose that the situation can be remedied today, taking stock of the problems contemporary humanity faces, by the decrees of philosophical legislators? Are we being invited to sacrifice humanity and work for the coming the superhuman as a task that may require we make a giant leap of faith into the unknown? Is there not an urgent need today for philosophers, taking their inspiration from Nietzsche's example, to assume their responsibilities as genuine educators?My second concern is that in privileging Nietzsche's conception of the philosopher as legislator a number of essays in the volume simplify what is a much more complex picture with regard to the character of Nietzsche's actual philosophical practice in the late writings. This privileging also fails to acknowledge the fact that Nietzsche himself had doubts about whether this philosophical figure was still possible, for example, his acknowledgment that the scope of what is known today may simply be too great, and his worry that in the attempt to command the philosophical legislator may be forced to become a great actor, a kind of philosophical Cagliostro (BGE 205). One might also refer to Nietzsche's recognition in 1887 that it was “modesty” that created the word “philosopher” in Greece, and his criticism of “actors of the spirit” (GS 351).