Phenomenal Realm Research Articles

Technoscientific speculations: the anti-mimeticism of Japanese science fiction in the literary context of the late Meiji period

This article proposes that Japanese science fiction emerged as an escape from the limits of the realistic representation of the world proposed by Naturalism. It reads three science fiction short stories published in the magazines Tanken sekai (World of Exploration) and Bōken sekai (World of Adventure) between 1907 and 1910 to discuss early science fiction in which authors utilised technoscientific discourse. Engaging in a set of textual practices centred on developments of modern science and technology, these authors developed one of science fiction’s distinctive features: anti-mimeticism, a literary mode focused on the depiction of anything that cannot happen in real life. This article focuses on the modalities by which these stories—Tenkūkaikatsu Dōjin’s ‘Gessekai shinkon ryokō’ (Lunar Honeymoon), Ishii Kendō’s ‘Gessekai dokuryoku tanken’ (Self-made Exploration to the Moon), and Hakui Michihito’s ‘Yukai to benri wo kiwametaru ōgon jidai no tokai seikatsu’ (The Extremely Amusing and Comfortable Golden Age of Urban Life) 1 —employ a rationalistic view of the phenomenal realm to generate fictional worlds that relinquish the dominance of a mimetic representation of reality. An analysis of early Japanese science fiction from the late Meiji period reveals two elements that eschewed the realistic literature such as Naturalism: objective narration and an anti-mimetic base for the fictional world.

Émilie Du Châtelet’s Theory of Simple Beings

Abstract The first part of this paper investigates the purpose, methodological approach, and fundamental thesis of Du Châtelet’s theory of simple beings. The paper shows that ‘simple beings’ in Du Châtelet is a theory concerned with the understanding of extended bodies. The second part of the paper shows that her theory of simple beings, while it has important roots in both Leibniz and Wolff, is remarkably different from theirs. Thus, contrary to a common thread in the literature, Du Châtelet’s theory of simple beings does not commit her to an ontology that can be equated with that of Leibniz or Wolff. Instead, her theory of simple beings is faculty-centred and draws a fundamental and novel distinction between the phenomenal realm of the senses and ‘real’ substances, which can only be grasped through the understanding.

Kant on phenomenal substance

ABSTRACT In this paper, I offer a systematic account of Kant’s view on ‘phenomenal substance’. Several studies have recently analysed Kant’s notion of substance. However, I submit that more needs to be said about how this notion is reconceptualized within the critical framework to vindicate a genuine and legitimate sense of substance in the phenomenal realm. More specifically, I show that Kant’s transcendental idealism does not commit him to a rejection of substantiality in phenomena. Rather, Kant isolates a general notion of substance (as ultimate subject) and argues that (i) the relationality of phenomena is compatible with this notion; and that (ii) matter and all its parts are the ultimate subjects of everything existing in space (as what is independently movable in space). I suggest that vindicating a genuine and legitimate notion of phenomenal substance has far-ranging consequences for the interpretation of Kant’s empirical realism.

The Change of Heart, Moral Character and Moral Reform

AbstractI examine Kant’s claim in part one of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason that moral reform requires both a ‘change of heart’ and gradual reformation of one’s sense (R, 6: 47). I argue that Kant’s conception of moral reform is neither fundamentally obscure nor is it as vulnerable to serious objections as several commentators have suggested. I defend Kant by explaining how he can maintain both that we can choose our moral disposition via an intelligible choice and that we become good through a continuous struggle. I then provide an interpretation of how moral reform occurs in the phenomenal realm.

The Instant between Time and Eternity: Plato's Revision of the Parmenidean Now in the Parmenides

Plato's view on time, a key aspect of his doctrine of forms, is influenced by his reception of Parmenides, but the way in which Plato takes up and modifies Parmenides' view is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate. In this article, the author analyzes Plato's revision of Parmenidean time by exploring four temporalities: the eternal present, timeless eternity, the enduring present, and the instant between time and eternity. Through this examination, she uncovers the common origin of both eternal present of Parmenides' fragment B8 and the flowing present of the phenomenal realm in the instant (ἐξαίφνης) in the Parmenides. This perspective on time offers a promising solution to Plato's problem of participation, bridging the gap between the eternal being of the form and the being in time of the particulars.

The Role of Valence in Perception: An ARTistic Treatment

Attempts to account for the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences have so far largely focused on their sensory aspects. The first aim of this article is to support the claim that (perceptual) phenomenal character has another, significant, aspect—the phenomenal realm is suffused with valence. What it’s like to undergo perceptual experiences—from pains to supposedly “neutral” visual experiences—standardly feels good or bad to some degree. The second aim is to argue, by appealing to theoretical and empirical considerations pertaining to the phenomenon of (perceptual) valence-variance, that perceptual valence cannot be accounted for by extending the prevalent representationalist account of phenomenal character. Thus, a revision in the understanding of phenomenal character is called for. Finally, the phenomenon of valence-variance serves to make some headway toward defending a new Attitudinal-Representational Theory of perceptual valence, according to which perceptual valence is constituted by first-order conative attitudes directed toward the representational objects of experiences.

An Argument from Normativity for Primitive Emotional Phenomenology

Uriah Kriegel has attempted to describe the varieties of consciousness, that is, the primitive elements that constitute the phenomenal realm. Perceptual, imaginative, algedonic, cognitive, entertaining, and conative are the types of phenomenology acknowledged by him. This list, though right, is incomplete. My main claim is that for it to be complete it should include sui generis emotional phenomenology. To motivate that thesis, I will highlight the characteristic normativity of emotional phenomenology and contrast it with the characteristic normativity of Kriegel’s phenomenal elements. I will conceive, by means of a mental experiment in the form of a phenomenal contrast, a felt normative clash between emotional phenomenology and Kriegel’s primitive phenomenal states. The idea behind it is that the felt normative clash is possible because emotional phenomenology and Kriegel’s phenomenal elements are metaphysically distinct.

German Idealism and Tragic Maturity

ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin viewed value conflict as tragic, as it requires the sacrifice of some values for others. It is a mark of maturity, he thought, to accept this tragic truth. This view raises certain conceptual problems that can be attributed to Berlin’s subtle departures from the German authors (Kant, Schelling, and Hegel) who originated the doctrine of tragic maturity—figures who had, in turn, transformed the earlier idea that enlightenment is a natural and morally neutral process of maturation. Kant moralized the notion of enlightened maturation by portraying it as contingent on our courage to bring it about, such that we are responsible if we remain immature. This theory of maturity rested on the idea, which would have been uncongenial to Berlin, that we are intelligible creatures inhabiting the noumenal realm, duty bound to exercise moral freedom, even though this duty surpasses our ability to carry it out, as we also inhabit the phenomenal realm, where our natural inclinations tend to make us resist laboring to fulfill our duties. However, according to Kant, the metaphysical limitations we face as individuals can be transcended to an extent, allowing us to make moral progress as a species—so long as we do not lazily persist in our immaturity. Schelling built upon Kant’s notion of freedom to bring out the tragic and heroic dimension of individual moral life, where the tragedy is our doomed but noble struggle to exert moral freedom in a world of natural necessity. Hegel turned these metaphysical notions in a more recognizably Berlinian direction by extending Schelling’s account of tragic conflict to conflicts of values. But he identified the ultimate tragic hero as an ethical totality that enacts eternal justice by reconciling such conflicts, while Berlin attempted to repudiate both the notion of a historical totality and the possibility of reconciliation on empirical grounds, even though these are metaphysical claims. Thus, Berlin asserted the absolute, trans-historical necessity of tragic value conflict, while the evidence for this assertion was merely his personal conviction that in his particular time and place, specific values were, as a matter of empirical fact, tragically irreconcilable. In this manner he illicitly portrayed Cold War value pluralists (such as himself) as courageously accepting the tragic inevitability of value conflict, while Marxists, the legatees of Hegel and thus German Idealism, immaturely shrank from this reality by embracing the fantasy of total reconciliation.

A ética da individualidade de Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher

O objetivo deste artigo é o desenvolvimento de elementos para análise dos primeiros esforços intelectuais de um dos maiores filósofos e teólogos do período moderno, a saber, Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher. Tais elementos terão como cerne o desenvolvimento do pensamento ético do filósofo alemão. Em um primeiro momento, Schleiermacher dialogará constantemente com o sistema ético kantiano, deste diálogo surgirão alguns elementos fundamentais de seu pensamento. O elemento central da crítica schleiermacheriana ao sistema ético kantiano gira em torno da incompreensibilidade do conceito de liberdade transcendental. Se o agir humano é um problema, então ele deve poder ser completamente pensado no âmbito fenomênico, sendo desnecessária a postulação do âmbito numênico. Desta forma, mostrar-se-á como Schleiermacher tenta oferecer a sua alternativa à ética kantiana. Esta tentativa se dará através da constante tensão entre racionalidade e sensibilidade. Posteriormente, a sua concepção ética própria será apresentada como uma ética da individualidade. Schleiermacher discorrerá sobre a experiência da formação de sua própria individualidade. Uma individualidade que deve estar em conexão com as outras individualidades e com o Infinito.

Normativity without Cartesian privilege

A dialectical relationship between doubt and certainty characterises Cartesian epistemology: radical doubt about the outer world is quelled by the epistemic security of the inner. In viewing the phenomenal realm as a safe harbour from error, much contemporary philosophy inhabits the Cartesian worldview.1 But recent arguments from empirical psychology and armchair epistemology alike suggest that the Cartesian presumption of privileged phenomenal access should be rejected. If these arguments are sound, we are left to conclude that there is no realm to which we enjoy privileged access. For if we do not have such privileged access to our own minds, then presumably we do not have it to anything whatsoever. My question is this: what does rejecting Cartesianism imply for our relationship to the normative realm? My answer is that it implies that this relationship is more fraught than many would like to think. Without privileged access to our own minds, there are no norms that can invariably guide our actions, and no norms that are immune from blameless violation. This will come as bad news to those normative theorists who think that certain central normative notions—e.g. the ethical ought or epistemic justification— should be cashed out in terms of subjects’ mental states precisely in order to generate norms that are action-guiding and immune from blameless violation. Meanwhile Anti-Cartesianism might come as good news to those normative theorists who resist cashing out norms in terms of mental states. For Anti-Cartesnianism implies that no norms—however closely tied to the mental—can be perfectly action-guiding or totally immune from blameless violation. More generally, once we have accepted that our relationship to our own minds lacks the perfect intimacy promised by Cartesianism, we are, for better or worse, left with the view that the normative realm is suffused with ignorance and bad luck.2

Present moment, past, and future: mental kaleidoscope.

alongwitha succession of discrete thoughts that giverise to feeling of the past and future, areference to mechanisms outside the phe-nomenal realm is necessary (Revonsuo,2003). Thus, the question of what couldbe the neurophysiological mechanismsresponsiblefortheseexperiencesshouldbeaddressed.In this Opinion Article we shall buildourargumentbasedonthebiologicalreal-ism approach to consciousness proposedby Revonsuo (2006). According to thisapproach,subjectiveconsciousnessisarealphenomenon that is tightly anchored to abiological reality within the human brain.Broadly speaking, the human brain is thespecificphysical“location,”wherethesub-jective mental reality and the objectiveneurobiological reality are intimately con-nected along a unified metastable contin-uum (Fingelkurts et al., 2009, 2013).Wehavearguedpreviously(Fingelkurtset al., 2010) that phenomenal conscious-nessreferstoahigherleveloforganizationin the brain and captures all

Looking inward: La Monte Young, Arvo Pärt, and the spatiotemporal dwelling environment of minimalist music

Mid-century phenomenology suggested that works of art disclose a sort of ‘world’, which can be understood as a phenomenal ‘space’, or the total lived experience. Indeed, this is found to be a common theme throughout the writings of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As both contend, although the phenomenal realm encompasses sensory stimuli, it is concerned with essences and will, at some point, transcend the merely perceptual. In minimalist music, the essential typically points inward, toward dwelling inside a sound, process, or texture. The aim of this paper is to posit the effect of certain minimalist devices namely reduction, stasis, and automatism in constructing a particularly innate spatiotemporal environment, and to distinguish between the perceptual and phenomenal experiences associated with the music of La Monte Young and Arvo Part. Young has expressed notions of entering inside the ‘world’ of sound, and, although less explicit, several of the works Part composed during his tintinnabuli period can be considered an extension of reaching into the sensorial experience. However, whereas Young’s landscapes evoke the suspended moment, the circularity of Part’s work impresses a sort of mythic or immersed time and space. Thus, although the psychosomatic particularities diverge in certain ways with each composer, the common appearance of outer stasis nevertheless exposes the more meaningful movements that occur within.

The Breivik case and "conditio psychiatrica".

In Denmark, a Scandinavian country linguistically proximate to Norway, the Breivik case (BC) stirred a similar, media-based, diagnostic debate, involving lay public, psychiatrists, and other professionals. The BC merits a commentary, not related to the judicial/forensic specifics, but concerning the current status and problems of psychiatric diagnosis and profession that the account of this case 1 so emphatically brings forth. More than 30 years ago, psychiatry, attempting to match somatic medicine in its scientific aspirations, underwent an “operational revolution”, introducing criteria-based diagnoses and “operational definitions” of such criteria. The BC shows, quite dramatically, that such criteria are not, in fact, operational in the original sense of specifying action rules 2, intended to link the psychiatric concepts with their counterparts in reality (operations, as in: X is harder than Y because X can make a scratch on Y, but not vice versa). None of the divisive issues in the BC was disambiguated through an appeal to operational action rules. What “operational” criteria actually amount to is no more than simple, lay-language descriptions of symptoms and signs. Moreover, the operational project came at a price. It radically abridged, simplified and compressed the then existing corpus of clinical knowledge into diagnostic manuals accessible to grand publique, because written in lay-language and stripped of theoretical and psychopathological reflection. These manuals have been for long the main source of clinical knowledge for psychiatrists in training 3 and it is mistakenly assumed 4,5 that a structured interview, asking preformulated questions in a fixed sequence, is an adequate methodology for obtaining psychodiagnostic information, even in sensitive situations, where the patient can be expected to dissimulate 1. This “death” of psychopathology 3 has created an intellectual hypodensity that blurs the professional borders of psychiatry, thereby welcoming any opinion as a voice a priori worthy of attention, equal, and legitimate. Unfortunately, operational revolution also failed to fulfil its motivating promise of a breakthrough to actionable etiological knowledge. “A gaping disconnect” is now widely recognized between the impressive progress in genetics and neurosciences and “its almost complete failure” to elucidate the causes and guide the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders 6,7. As the BC illustrates, psychiatry will continue to crucially depend on the distinctions in the phenomenal realm, that is, domains of experience, expression, behaviour, rationality, and so forth. However, at the same time, the BC reveals important problems there. The discussion of Breivik's potential psychosis/delusions appears to have revolved around apparently mutually independent issues (e.g., are his views really shared; how to consider his affect and isolation; how to view his peculiar linguistic expressions; is surveillance of behaviour an adequate substitute for the knowledge of his inner world; etc.). It seems forgotten that falsity of a thought content is not a definitive feature of delusion. Jaspers emphasized that his triad of falsity, conviction, and incorrigibility (imported into the current diagnostic criteria) was not defining but merely suggestive of delusion 8. Delusion usually involves alterations in the patient's subjective framework with its interconnecting perspectives on himself, world, and others 8,9. Delusion is, therefore, typically identified in a larger temporal, situational, and experiential context. The collateral information feeds into that context, which also entails considerations of “double book-keeping”, ability to dissimulate, and (ir)rationality of the transition between belief and action. The BC discussion reveals an implicit epistemological tension in the very conception of psychiatric diagnosis, a tension apparently only vaguely perceived by the discussing parties and rarely explicitly addressed in the literature. It is a tension between an operational, cross-sectional approach of “symptom counting”, without a guiding hierarchy and intelligibility principle 10, and a more prototypical perspective, which articulates a psychopathological Gestalt, emerging from the interactions between the whole and its reciprocally implicative aspects 11,12. The BC also illustrates a universal interpersonal human attitude, often interfering with clinical tasks, the so-called “principle of charity” 13. This is a subconscious, automatic, compensating tendency to make one's interlocutor appear as more rational than he actually is, for example, by smoothening out the bumps of his reasoning, filling up the gaps of his logic, and normalizing the instances of his flagrant irrationality. It is worthwhile to recall that the BC-type debate is not unique to our times. Foucault devoted a seminar to a quite similar public diagnostic discussion in 1835 14. It concerned a suspected insanity of Pierre Riviere, a just literate peasant, who murdered his mother, sister, and brother and was able to present in his defence a 100-page account of his life and motivations. Psychiatry was, is, and will continue to be an object of intense societal attention and extra-scientific pressures. Only rigorous psychopathological standards can empower psychiatry to fulfill its clinical obligations and resist or modify the external pressures.

Reflections on the history of Australasian gardens and landscapes

Where appearances recede into the depths of space and time even as they come forward to stake their claim on the phenomenal realm, they make special demands on our powers of observation. 1 When Eur...

The Theological Origins of Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: The Theological Origins of Modernity Michael Lackey Michael Allen Gillespie. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. xiii + 386 pp. Dauntingly ambitious and consistently insightful, The Theological Origins of Modernity is to date the most informed study to convincingly demonstrate that secularization is an overstated fiction, which has significantly distorted our understanding of intellectual and political history. In stark contrast to Steve Bruce’s God is Dead: Secularization in the West (2002), Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), and Theodore Ziolkowski’s Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (2007), which claim that secularization is either well underway or an established fact in the contemporary West, Gillespie’s book is in the tradition of Vincent P. Pecora’s Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, & Modernity (2006), Tracy Fessenden’s Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (2007), and Pericles Lewis’s Religious Experience in the Modernist Novel: God’s Afterlife (forthcoming, 2010), which demonstrate that what we witness in the West is not so much “the erasure or disappearance of God but the transference of his attributes, essential powers, and capacities to other entities or realms of being” (274). What makes Gillespie’s book relevant and groundbreaking is not so much his major claim as it is the nuanced and complicated journey he takes to arrive at his conclusion. Gillespie begins the journey by tracing the theological origins of modernity back to a medieval crisis in Christianity between scholasticism, which reifies universals as the incarnation of divine reason, and nominalism, which provisionalizes the universal as it prioritizes the particular. According to Gillespie, it was ultimately [End Page 463] nominalism that shaped European thought by calling being into question and thereby producing “a new ontology, a new logic, and a new conception of man, God, and nature” (16). This triad of man, God, and nature turns out to be decisive, for Gillespie defines humanism, the Reformation, and modernity in relation to each one. Humanism prioritizes man and thus interprets God and nature on the basis of man, while the Reformation prioritizes God and thus interprets man and nature on the basis of God. Given their radically different approaches, humanists and reformers waged intense battles. Gillespie reads these battles in relation to Pelagianism, a “heretical” doctrine that holds that humans have not been irreparably damaged by original sin. Hence, humans can behave as moral agents without divine assistance, so they are primarily responsible for their own salvation and Jesus’s sacrifice on the Cross is not the basis for redemption. Pelagianism had a polarizing effect. In the tradition of Pelagius, many Christian humanists developed philosophies that limited divine power and underscored human freedom and moral responsibility as the way to the divine. In opposition to Pelagius, many Christian reformers developed theologies that extended divine power and underscored human servitude as the road to the divine. Modernity sought to sidestep the conflicts between humanists and reformers by prioritizing nature. However, and this is where Gillespie is at his scholarly best, modernity neither overcame nor resolved the earlier conflicts about God and man but merely concealed them within its metaphysics. To clarify and justify his approach, Gillespie reads Kant’s third antinomy, which foregrounds the contradiction between the mechanical laws of natural necessity and the insistent claim to human freedom, as one of the most unresolved dilemmas haunting western philosophy. Kant prioritizes the mechanistic view of nature “as a self-evident truth of reason” (276). As an offshoot of this nature-first approach, Kant believed transcendental idealism solved the conflict between mechanical necessity and human freedom “by differentiating the phenomenal realm of nature and necessity from the noumenal realm of freedom and morality” (277). However, if modernity has understood “the world not as a product of a Promethean freedom or of a radically omnipotent divine will but of the mechanical motion of matter” (262), this certainly did not eliminate the crucial questions about the contradiction between mechanical necessity and human freedom that are central to Kant’s third antinomy. What Kant did was merely to conceal or ignore rather than resolve the conflicts between humanists and reformists by prioritizing nature as the axiomatic...

Hallucinations for disjunctivists

In this paper, I examine the so-called disjunctive views on hallucinations. I argue that neither of the options open to the disjunctivist is capable of accommodating basic phenomenological facts about hallucinatory experiences and the explanatory demands behind the classical argument from hallucination. A positive characterization of the hallucinatory case is not attractive to a disjunctivist once she is disposed to accept certain commonalities with veridical experiences. Negative disjunctivism glosses the hallucinatory disjunct in terms of indiscriminability. I will argue that this move either renounces to characterize phenomenally the hallucinatory experience or does not take seriously questions about why indiscriminability is possible in the phenomenal realm.

In defence of Kant’s moral prohibition on suicide solely to avoid suffering

In Ian Brassington’s article in a previous issue of this journal, he argues that suicide for the purpose of avoiding suffering is not, as Kant has contended, contrary to the...

The two Kantian notions of causality: an analytic enquiry

为了回应休谟关于因果性与自由关系的难题， 康德提出了两种因果性概念：自然因果性 和自由因果性。前者指涉思辨理性语境中的现象领域；后者在思辨理性的超验的自在之物领 域， 只是一个否定性概念， 但在实践理性的语境中， 它获得了客观实在性。自由因果性所肯 定的是先验的自由， 而不是心理学的自由。在康德那里， 这两种因果性以分裂的方式共存于 人（既是现象领域的存在者， 又是自在之物领域的存在者）的身上。康德之后， 马克思批判 性地综合了黑格尔和叔本华的成果， 揭开了康德两种因果性概念的谜底——生产劳动。生产 劳动既蕴含着目的性和自由因果性的维度， 又蕴含着自然因果性和历史因果性的维度。在马 克思的历史唯物主义的语境中， 生产劳动这个必然王国构成自由王国的真正的基础。 In response to the tricky problem, raised by Hume, of the relationship between causality and freedom, Kant came up with the concept of two kinds of causality: causality of nature and causality of freedom. While the former belongs in the phenomenal realm in the context of speculative reason, the latter, no more than a negative notion in the transcendental realm of things‐in‐themselves, nevertheless acquires actual objectivity in the context of practical reason. What causality of freedom confirms is freedom in the transcendental rather than the psychological sense. As Kant saw it, these two kinds of causality coexist in divided form in man, who is an existing being both in the realm of phenomena and in that of things‐in‐themselves. After Kant, it was Marx who, critically synthesizing the contributions of Hegel and Schopenhauer, succeeded in revealing the hidden answer to the question of Kant's concept of two kinds of causality. That is productive labor, which implies both the dimension of goals and the causality of freedom and that of the causality of nature and historical causality. In the context of Marx's historical materialism, productive labor emerges as a kingdom of necessity at the very basis of the kingdom of freedom.

“Unseen Engineer”

A number of linguistic studies in recent decades have sought to explain the nature of war discourses, and a number of recurring features have been identified (van Leeuwen, in press). Taking a corpus of press briefings by Coalition military spokesman from the beginning of the Iraq invasion, this paper combines detailed grammatical analysis (based on four days of briefings), with an excursus into prosodic motifs created through certain lexical tendencies (based on seven days of briefings), in order to explore the kind of ‘existential fabric’ (Butt, 1988) this discourse creates in its particular representation of the phenomenal realm of war. The grammatical method involves the analysis of the experiential function of language, using systemic functional grammar. An additional resource drawn on is Roget’s Thesaurus, against which particular elements of the discourse – such as the lexical verbs which construe material action – are mapped. The analysis reveals the lexical and grammatical patterns which function as resources for muting the intensely violent nature of war.

Nietzsche's Mirror: The World as Will to Power (review)

Reviewed by: Nietzsche’s Mirror: The World as Will to Power Thomas Leddy Linda L. Williams . Nietzsche’s Mirror: The World as Will to Power. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. Linda Williams provides a valuable aid to the reader who wishes to explore the concept of "will to power" in Nietzsche. She hopes to "write the kind of book that I would have wanted to read when I first was taken with Nietzsche's famous phrase." Her book also takes a position in the continuing debates over this concept, and over some others as well. Williams traces the development of "will [End Page 66] to power" to Nietzsche's early discussions both of "will" and of various manifestations of power. For Schopenhauer, the ultimate nature of the world (Will) is chaotic, and Mind imposes order on it. Nietzsche agrees that the world is chaotic and that the mind imposes order. However, for Nietzsche, it is this imposing of order that really manifests will to power, not the underlying flux. In The Birth of Tragedy, the Dionysian corresponds to Schopenhauer's chaotic noumena and the Apollonian to the ordered phenomenal realm. In his middle period, Nietzsche increasingly refers to "power" (Macht) in a variety of contexts, although he mainly uses it to refer to government. By 1880, he is making references to "lust for power" as a psychological motivation. The second edition of The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra see the first appearances of "Wille zur Macht." Williams thinks Nietzsche may have turned to this formulation partly because of his coming to question the effectiveness of psychological motivation. Williams provisionally defines will to power as "striving for superiority." This applies especially to the appearance of will to power in humans, but it extends also to animals, and even to unconscious, nonhuman life. However, the theory that will to power is a metaphysical or cosmological principle assumes that it applies also to inorganic matter. Williams observes that, in the published writings, only Beyond Good and Evil §36 makes this extension explicit, for it claims that there is no matter, only will, and that the inorganic is only a preform of the organic. Yet, since this aphorism begins with the word "suppose," and seems to be offered only as an experiment, it is too problematic to determine whether Nietzsche extends will to power beyond the organic. The Nachlass writings provide us with a distinctly different view of will to power. On the Nachlass view, things are actually quanta of fluctuating forces constantly struggling to maintain their natures (or not) amid surrounding forces. Williams rejects both the interpreters classically called "lumpers" and those "splitters" who favor the Nachlass over the published works. Yet, she argues, we need not entirely ignore the Nachlass. Bottom line: any interpretation of Nietzsche's "final position" requires "ample support" from his published materials. Williams then reviews Nietzsche on truth. It is often said that Nietzsche's epistemological antifoundationalism engenders a self-referential problem, for his perspectivism could itself be only one interpretation, no better than any other. Nietzsche is aware of this, referring, for instance, to a group of statements about women in Beyond Good and Evil as "my truths." It matters less to Nietzsche whether he holds a correspondence or other theory of truth than that the truths are his. Nietzsche is a perspectivist, but he does not hold that all competing perspectives must be tolerated. Scientists mistakenly believe that they are not engaged in interpretation, and that there is such a thing as objective observation. By contrast, Nietzsche does not consider his "will to power" theory to be True (capital T). This is no problem for him since he does not consider it an objection to a judgment that it is not True. Contra Kaufmann, Williams argues that, rather than thinking of the sentence "the world is will to power" as an empirical truth, we should think of it as getting us to say "Nietzsche believes the world is will to power. I wonder why he sees it this way?" The answer is: because he thinks doing so will engender healthier human beings and nourish greatness. In this, Nietzsche is basically a consequentialist (though not a...