5.2.5—
Beyond Mechanism and Vitalism:
Nietzsche's Materialism

Recall, however, that Nietzsche rejects any fundamental distinction between organic and inorganic nature. As we have seen, he believes that the hypothesis of will to power helps to explain even the most basic inorganic, physical processes. The solar power that animates the biosphere,

[57] cf. BGE 13 and GS 349, cited above. See WP 935: "True graciousness, nobility, greatness of soul proceed from abundance; do not give in order to receive—do not try to exalt themselves by being gracious;—prodigality as the type of true graciousness, abundance of personality as its presupposition." Cf. WP 943, 864.

[58] Bataille, Accursed Share, 70.

[59] Bataille, "Notion of Expenditure," 122–23. Thus Bataille: "power is characterized as power to lose" (122; cf. Accursed Share, 71), and Nietzsche: "how much injury [one] can endure without suffering from it becomes the actual measure of [one's] wealth" (GM II:10). Cf. also WP 949.

then, must be only one of many forms of energy that drive natural becoming. Let me, then, conclude this discussion by working backward from the domain of culture, life, and biology to the realm of the inorganic from which we began.

Darwin's revolution promoted the conception of a naturalized humanity thoroughly enmeshed in a de-deified nature. Rejecting creationism, essentialism, progressivism, adaptationism, and teleology, it saw species as mere statistical generalizations, viewed all living beings as derived from a common ancestor, and refused to see human beings as apart from, or as the pinnacle of, this natural distribution. Indeed, Darwin espoused a thoroughgoing materialism that denied the immateriality of the soul (or mind) and the existence of any extra-natural vital force in the organic world.^[60]

Nonetheless, scientists and laypeople alike continued to view human beings as fundamentally different in kind from animals and to make an analogous separation between living and nonliving matter.^[61] It is in this context that Nietzsche intervenes to complete Darwin's revolution.^[62] The rigorous naturalist cannot accept such essential divisions in nature. If Nietzsche and Bataille often restrict their hypothesis of will to power and expenditure to the realm of life, Nietzsche, at least, often realizes the inadmissibility of this restriction and seeks to extend it to the whole of nature. Thus, Nietzsche counts among "man's four errors" that "he endowed himself with fictitious attributes [ . . . ] and placed himself in a false order of rank in relation to animals and nature" (GS 115). Against vitalist evolutionary theorists, and despite his critique of mechanism, Nietzsche retains the materialism promoted by classical physical theory, which asserts the continuity of the organic with the inorganic world (see KSA 11:26[432] and A 14, quoted in §5.2, above). Organic matter is the result of a set of peculiar chemical reactions that took place in "the primeval soup" and set off the evolutionary chain. Hence, though

[60] See Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, together with Darwin's Early and Unpublished Notebooks, ed. Paul H. Barrett (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974); Gould, Ever Since Darwin, 21–27, and "In Praise of Charles Darwin," 5–6.

[61] See Stephen Jay Gould, "Eternal Metaphors of Palaeontology," in Patterns of Evolution as Illustrated by the Fossil Record, ed. A. Hallam (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1977), 14 and passim .

[62] Again, like many nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists and laypeople, Nietzsche seems not to have fully appreciated the radical nature of Darwin's de-deification and naturalization. Despite this ignorance, Nietzsche undertakes a philosophical campaign that, in many respects, continues and furthers Darwin's revolution.

remarkable in many ways, living beings are not so by virtue of any extra-natural origin or endowment. "The entire distinction" between "the inorganic and the organic world," Nietzsche writes, "is a prejudice" (WP 655). "The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type" (GS 109).

Recall that Nietzsche criticizes mechanism for promoting a passive, reactive principle of natural movement that could only have been made possible by an original divine push. Similarly, he criticizes biology for taking a reactive principle, "adaptation," to be the driving force of evolutionary change.^[63] In place of these, Nietzsche seeks an active principle that can explain natural movement and change without recourse to ontotheological posits. Moreover, Nietzsche's naturalism requires that this principle apply equally to mechanical, chemical, biological, and cultural change. It is this that leads him to propose will to power as a unifying theory. Thus, after noting that all human functions (including thought and reason) and, indeed, all organic functions (nutrition, excretion, procreation, etc.) can be explained in terms of the interrelation of "desires," "passions," and "drives," he suggests that this might "be sufficient for also understanding [ . . . ] the so called mechanistic (or 'material') world" (BGE 36). "In short," Nietzsche continues, "conscience of method demands" that we "risk the hypothesis whether will does not affect will wherever 'effects' are recognized—and whether all mechanical occurrences are not, insofar as force is active in them, will-force, will-effects." If one grants this hypothesis, "one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power . The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its 'intelligible character'—it would be 'will to power' and nothing besides."^[64]

[63] See GM II:12, and WP 70, 647, 681, 684. Cf. Gould ("Eternal Metaphors of Palaeontology," 21–22): "physical scientists are forever trying to extend their 'billiard ball' models to major events in the history of life. (By 'billiard ball model,' I refer to a habit of explanation that treats organisms as inert substances, buffeted by an external environment and reacting immediately to physical stress without any counteracting, intrinsic control or even temporary resistance.) [ . . . ] I have labeled as 'physicalist' these purely environmental explanations, based upon billiard ball models: i.e., stimulus leads to immediate and passive response. [ . . . ] For all my general support of environmental control, I applaud the attempt of several palaeontologists to counteract these physicalist explanations by asserting the independence and internal dynamic of biological processes in complex systems, particularly of ecological interaction and the genetic and morphological prerequisites of complexity."

[64] Cf. WP 619: "one is obliged to understand all motion, all 'appearances,' all 'laws,' only as symptoms of an inner event and to employ man as an analogy to this end.In the case of an animal, it is possible to trace all its drives to the will to power; likewise all the functions of organic life to this one source."

One could take this hypothesis as an attempt to resolve the quarrel between mechanism and vitalism by asserting a sort of hypervitalism that would extend the vital force over the entire domain of matter. But this is not Nietzsche's move. Time and again he asserts that human beings and life itself must be "translated back into nature," not the reverse: "life is merely a special case of the will to power" (WP 692), he writes. On the issue of mechanism and vitalism, Nietzsche advocates the position held by most twentieth-century scientists: that the very distinction ought to be rejected.^[65] For Nietzsche, the trouble is that both positions retain theological posits, vitalism proceeds from the spiritual conviction that life must be more than, higher than, different from the rest of the material world; and mechanism maintains a passive and deterministic conception of matter that is incapable of explaining becoming and the production of difference without recourse to an extra-natural motive force. Instead, Nietzsche looks at matter and everywhere sees motion and change, from the simplest chemical reactions and the most basic material forces to the nutritive and reproductive activity of animals and plants and the formative activity of artists and athletes. Everywhere this motion and change is driven by struggle and pathos: by attraction, repulsion, tension, resistance, integration, disintegration, assimilation, incorporation, alliance, and so on. Having rejected any transcendent source, Nietzsche comes to hold that the principle of this becoming and struggle must lie in material things themselves, things considered as "dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta" (WP 635). In the words of Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine: "since there is no one to build nature, we must give to its very 'bricks'—that is, to its microscopic activity—a description that accounts for that building process. [ . . . M]atter is no longer the passive substance described in the mechanistic world view but is associated with spontaneous activity."^[66]

[65] See, e.g., Gould, Flamingo's Smile, 377–91, and Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, 8–21.

[66] Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 7, 9. Nietzsche's view might also be compared with that of another materialist, atheist, antidualist critic of mechanism, Denis Diderot, who asserts "a simple hypothesis that explains everything—sensitivity as a property common to all matter or as a result of the organization of matter" (Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream, ed. and trans. Leonard Tancock [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966], 159).