Chapter Two—
Naturalism and Interpretation:
Nietzsche's Conception of Epistemology and Ontology

We laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of "man and world," separated by the sublime presumption of the little word "and"!
Nietzsche, The Gay Science §346

2.1—
The "Death of God" and the Naturalist Project

In the previous chapter, I argued that Nietzsche's notorious claim, "God is dead," condenses an elaborate genealogy of Western thought, a sequence of worldviews stretching from metaphysics and theology through science and art. The "recent event" of "God's death," I maintained, marks a turning point in that genealogy, ushering in a "revaluation" of all the "values" that have hitherto reigned supreme. Foremost among those values is the value of truth; and, thus, we saw that "God's death" immediately calls for a revaluation of truth. In this chapter, I want to continue this exploration of Nietzsche's "revaluation of values" as it concerns broader issues of epistemology and ontology.

We have seen that the "death of God" leads to a sort of naturalism, that is, to a rejection of all other- or unworldly frameworks and posits, and to a resituation of knowing and being within "the world of life, nature, and history" (GS 344).^[1] In what follows, I elaborate on this idea,

[1] Again, "naturalism," in contemporary philosophy, is often associated with scientism; and we have seen that Nietzsche is critical of science's ability to give a full account of human experience. This seems to be the reason for Heidegger's suggestion that the term "naturalism" poorly characterizes the project of Nietzsche's later philosophy (see Nietzsche, vol. 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David F. Krell [San Francisco: Harper, 1984], 93–94). However, I argue that Nietzsche accepts a broadly scientific view of the world and only criticizes science for its residual theology, its claim to describe pureand unmediated "facts" about the world. I aim to show that Nietzsche's "de-deification of nature" leads to a rejection of this claim and instead forces upon science a feature commonly associated with the aesthetic: the irreducibility of interpretation. Thus, as I suggested at the end of chapter 1, Nietzsche holds that the naturalistic discourse par excellence would be one in which science and art were inextricably intertwined. For this reason, I support neither the aestheticist, antinaturalist reading of Nietzsche offered by Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 29–35, nor the naturalist, antiaestheticist reading offered by Brian Leiter, "Nietzsche and Aestheticism," Journal of the History of Philosophy 30 (1992): 275–88. For other discussions of Nietzsche's naturalism, see Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 102; Eugen Fink, "Nietzsche's New Experience of the World," trans. Michael A. Gillespie, in Nietzsche's New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, ed. Michael A. Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 206; Richard Schacht, "Nietzsche's Gay Science, Or, How to Naturalize Cheerfully," in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 68–86; and David C. Hoy, "Two Conflicting Conceptions of How to Naturalize Philosophy: Foucault versus Habermas," in Metaphysik nach Kant? ed. Dieter Henrich and Roll-Peter Horstmann (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988), 743–66.

showing that Nietzsche's naturalism leads him to replace metaphysical and transcendental explanatory principles and entities with a naturalized epistemology and ontology.^[2] Yet we will see that, rigorously pursued, naturalism demands a rejection of both the epistemological ideal of a "God's-eye view" and the ontological ideal of a "pre-given world," leading Nietzsche to a holistic or hermeneutic position that accepts the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation.^[3] Nevertheless, I will argue that Nietzsche's naturalism constrains the potential relativism of this position, allowing him to claim that some interpretations (namely naturalistic ones) are better than others. Indeed I suggest that Nietzsche's conception of the world as "will to power" or "innocent becoming" is an example of such an interpretation—one that cannot and does not claim to be uniquely correct but that still has reasonable grounds for claiming to be better than rival interpretations.

I take my departure from §108 of The Gay Science, where Nietzsche

[2] Following Kant's usage, I call "metaphysical" or "transcendent" those features that are dogmatically claimed to exist, though their existence cannot be empirically demonstrated; and I call "transcendental" those nonempirical features the existence of which is said to be established through a deduction that shows them to be the necessary conditions for the empirical.

[3] This distinguishes my construal of Nietzsche's naturalism from the more realist version offered by Brian Leiter in "Nietzsche and Aestheticism." Leiter argues that, for Nietzsche, the natural, organic world is a "fact of the matter," the ground and basis of all interpretation, and that the will to power is the most faithful, least distorting construal of this world. Contrary to this view, I argue that Nietzsche's thoroughgoing naturalism leads him to reject such primitive "facts." As I noted above, instead of rejecting aestheticism, as Leiter would have it, Nietzsche's naturalism indeed demands a sort of aestheticism, though not, perhaps, of the Nehamasian sort Leiter criticizes.

first announces the "death of God" and the concomitant demand that all the remaining "shadows" of God be "vanquished." He writes: "New struggles .—After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of humanity, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will still be shown.—And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too!"

In §109, Nietzsche informs us that the struggle against these "shadows" must take place on two fronts, requiring both a "naturalization of humanity" and a "de-deification of nature." Having rejected a host of theological worldviews, Nietzsche asks rhetorically: "When will all these shadows of God cease to darken us? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to naturalize humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?" (GS 109).

I argue that the "naturalization of humanity" foregrounds Nietzsche's commitment to a thoroughgoing naturalism in epistemology and ontology, while the "de-deification of nature" foregrounds his commitment to the view that there is no "pre-given world" but only ever perspectives (or interpretations) and the entities internal to them.

2.2—
The "Naturalization Of Humanity"

2.2.1—
Naturalism Versus Metaphysics

The "death of God" leads to a devaluation of all super- or extra-natural posits and explanatory principles. In the wake of this "death," Nietzsche calls for a revaluation of all those features of natural life previously maligned by theology and metaphysics: sensation, instinct, and affect; change, temporality, and history; contingency and conditionality; procreation, nutrition, growth, decay, and death; psychology, physiology, biology, and sociology; and so forth. Nietzsche's attempt to "naturalize humanity" is guided by the conviction that these characteristics of "the world of life, nature, and history" can give us a full account of being, knowing, and valuing that does without the superfluous and mendacious claims of the super-natural.

As a philosophical program, this naturalism is directed against metaphysics (or first philosophy, or transcendental philosophy), which Nietzsche suspects of doing theology even when it forgoes explicit talk of God. A discourse is metaphysical, for Nietzsche, if it maintains a strict

division between the natural (the empirical, affective, physical, apparent, contingent, transitory, etc.) and the extra-natural (the rational, moral, mental, essential, necessary, eternal, etc.) and grants to the latter an ontological and epistemological superiority and priority. Metaphysics, he argues, attempts to avoid any contamination of the extra-natural by the natural and is thus led to the supposition that its two realms have entirely separate origins. Hence, he writes in Human, All Too Human:

Almost all the problems of philosophy once again pose the same form of question as they did two thousand years ago: how can something originate out of its opposite, for example rationality in irrationality, the sentient in the dead, logic in unlogic, disinterested contemplation in covetous desire, living for others in egoism, truth in error? Metaphysical philosophy has hitherto surmounted this difficulty by denying that the one originates out of the other and assuming for the more highly valued thing a miraculous source in the very kernel and being of the "thing in itself." (1)

This line of thought is taken up again in the second section of Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche parodies this dualism and its hierarchy, attacking that "fundamental faith of the metaphysicians [ . . . ] the faith in opposite values ":

"How could anything originate out of its opposite? for example, truth out of error? or the will to truth out of the will to deception? or selfless deeds out of selfishness? or the pure and sunlike gaze of the sage out of lust? Such origins are impossible; whoever dreams of them is a fool, indeed worse; the things of the highest value must have another, peculiar origin—they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, paltry world, from this turmoil of delusion and lust. Rather from the lap of Being, the intransitory, the hidden god, the 'thing in itself'—there must be their basis, and nowhere else." This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudgment and prejudice which give away the metaphysicians of all ages. (cf. TI "Reason" 4)

And in The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche continues this parody of metaphysical dualism, elaborating on its degradation of the "world of life, nature and history":

You ask me which of the philosophers' traits are really idiosyncrasies? For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming. They think that they show their respect for a subject when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni —when they turn it into a mummy. All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been conceptmummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. [ . . . ] Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds objections—even

refutations. Whatever is does not become; whatever becomes is not. . . . Now they all believe, desperately even, in what has being. But since they never grasp it, they search for reasons why it is kept from them. "There must be mere appearance [Schein ], there must be some deception which prevents us from perceiving that which has being: where is the deceiver?—We have found him," they cry ecstatically; "it is the senses! These senses, which are so immoral in other ways too, deceive us concerning the true world." Moral: let us free ourselves from the deception of the senses, from becoming, from history, from lies;—history is nothing but faith in the senses, faith in lies. Moral: let us say No to all who have faith in the senses, to all the rest of humanity; they are all "plebs" [Volk ]. Let us be philosophers! Let us be mummies! Let us represent monotono-theism by adopting the expression of a gravedigger! And above all, away with the body, this wretched idée fixe of the senses, disfigured by all the fallacies of logic, refuted, even impossible, although it is impudent enough to behave as if it were real!" ("Reason" 1; cf. HH 2)

Against the perverse and extravagant claims of metaphysics, which embroils itself in this host of dualisms and degrades the very world with which we are most intimately acquainted, Nietzsche argues that "conscience of method " (BGE 36) and "economy of principles" (BGE 13)^[4] demand that we question these dualisms and attempt to provide an account of all phenomena on the basis of "this world, our world," "the world of life, nature, and history" (GS 344). That is, he seeks to explain the binary oppositions erected by metaphysics as responses to the contingent needs and desires of natural beings. He comes to reject the metaphysical notion that there exist essential differences in kind, revealing instead that these represent nothing more than differences of degree within the natural. Thus, Human, All Too Human §1 continues:

Historical philosophy [ . . . ] which can no longer be separated from natural science, the youngest of all philosophical methods, has discovered in individual cases (and this will probably be the result in every case) that there are no opposites, except in the customary exaggeration of popular or metaphysical interpretations, and that a mistake in reasoning lies at the bottom of this antithesis: [ . . . opposites] are only sublimations, in which a basic element seems almost to have dispersed and reveals itself only under the most pains-

[4] This phrase appears within a discussion of the hypothesis of "will to power," but it applies equally well to Nietzsche's broader naturalistic project; for, as we will see, the notion of will to power is, for Nietzsche, the naturalistic interpretation par excellence, one that envisions the natural domain as a continuum in which the inorganic, the organic, the animal, and the human represent merely differences of degree but not of kind.

taking observation. All we require, and what can be given us only now that the individual sciences have attained their present level, is a chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations, likewise of all the agitations we experience within ourselves in cultural and social intercourse, and indeed even when we are alone: what if chemistry would end up by revealing that in this domain too the most glorious colors are derived from base, indeed from despised materials?^[5]

If the problem with metaphysics, then, is its otherworldly dualism, the solution, Nietzsche proposes, is a this-worldly antidualism. The means for realizing this solution lie in Nietzsche's "genealogical" method, which plays a double role: on the one hand, it criticizes "the highest concepts" (TI "Reason" 4) by offering counterinterpretations that reveal their probable pudenda origo; on the other hand, it constructs new interpretations that replace these metaphysical dualisms with a thoroughly naturalized ontology and epistemology. Rejecting the notion that there exist fundamental divisions between the natural world and humanity, or between humanity and God, Nietzsche argues that the "death of God" serves to place human beings squarely within the natural world as creatures like any other and without special ontological status. Rejecting the "peculiar" origins and functions of such features as reason, morality, logic, and language, Nietzsche instead attempts

[5] This critique of opposites and the dissolution of differences-in-kind into differences-of-degree is a central feature of Nietzsche's philosophy. He writes, e.g.: "between good and evil actions there is no difference in kind, but at the most of degree" (HH 107); "The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature opposites (as e.g., 'warm and cold') where there are only differences of degree" (WS 67); "Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type" (GS 109); "Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces" (GS 112); "It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things—maybe even one with them in essence" (BGE 2); "'being conscious' is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive" (BGE 3); "Even if language, here as elsewhere will not get over its awkwardness, and will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation" (BGE 24); "what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of 'true' and 'false'? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness" (BGE 34); "Health and sickness are not essentially different. [ . . . ] In fact, there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state" (WP 47; cf. WP 812); "rest—motion, firm—loose: opposites that do not exist in themselves and that actually express only variations in degree that from a certain perspective appear to be opposites. There are no opposites: only from those of logic do we derive the concept of opposites—and falsely transfer it to things" (WP 552).

to provide hypothetical, contingent, and pragmatic explanations of their origins and functions that draw upon the resources of physiology, psychology, history, sociology, philology, and evolutionary theory.

2.2.2—
Nietzsche's Naturalized Ontology

To translate man back into nature, to become master over the many vain and overly enthusiastic interpretations and connotations that have so far been scrawled and painted over that eternal basic text of homo natura; to see to it that the human being henceforth stands before human beings as even today, hardened in the discipline of science, he stands before the rest of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him all too long, "you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin"—that may be a strange and insane task, but it is a task —who would deny that? (BGE 230)

Nietzsche makes this task his own. He argues that with the repudiation of God (and the otherworldly in general) must come a repudiation of the metaphysical and theological notion that human beings are "higher" and "of a different origin" compared to the rest of the natural world. For Nietzsche, the human being "has become an animal, literally and without reservation and qualification, he who was according to his old faith, almost God ('child of God,' 'God-man')" (GM III:25). "We no longer derive the human from 'the spirit' or 'the deity,'" he writes, "we have placed him back among the animals" (A 14; cf. HL 9 and D 49).

Such statements no doubt reveal the influence of Darwin (see §§5.2.3–5.2.4, below). With the broad acceptance of evolutionary theory in the twentieth century, they may seem uncontroversial and commonplace to us today. Yet Nietzsche goes further, attacking more persistent philosophical and scientific notions that, he feels, ought to go the way of creationism. Prominent among these is the notion that human beings possess something extra-natural (whether consciousness, mind, spirit, rationality, language, or morality) that sets them apart from, and places them above, other natural creatures. While granting that there are certainly significant differences between human beings and insects, for example, Nietzsche argues that this difference is not hierarchical. On his view, the allegedly extra-natural features of human beings are simply "the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves—since they have been denied the chance to wage the struggle for existence with horns or the sharp teeth of beasts of prey" (TL p. 80).

"Man is by no means the crown of creation," he writes; "every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection" (A 14).^[6]

Metaphysics has always conceived of human beings as divided creatures: half-beast and half-God, at once animal and rational, natural and super-natural. As natural beings, humans are said to be endowed with the animal capacities of sensation, perception, and desire; and it is by virtue of these capacities that they are contingently bound up with the rest of the natural world. Yet, as rational beings, humans are said to be endowed with the capacities for logical thought, language, and morality; and it is by virtue of these capacities that they confer necessity upon their actions and the world. Such capacities, it is said, allow human beings, at least partially, to extricate themselves from the contingencies of nature and ascend to a rational world of freedom.^[7]

Against this conception, Nietzsche submits all the putatively transcendent or transcendental faculties and capacities to a deflationary critique. Detailed discussion of these critiques would take us too far afield; but a general characterization should suffice for the project at hand: to reveal Nietzsche's commitment to a thoroughly naturalized ontology. Against the description of human beings as divided between reason and nature, mind and body, consciousness and instinct, Nietzsche argues that the former terms are explicable on the basis of the latter. He writes that "'being conscious' is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive" (BGE 3), that it "is actually nothing but a certain behavior of the instincts toward one another " (GS 333), that "thinking is merely a relation of [ . . . ] drives to each other" (BGE 36), and that "reason"

[6] Cf. GS 115, where Nietzsche writes that one of the "four errors" of "man" is that "he placed himself in a false order of rank in relation to animals and nature." Cf. also WP 684: "man as a species does not represent any progress compared with any other animal. The whole animal and vegetable kingdom does not evolve from the lower to the higher—but all at the same time, in utter disorder, over and against each other." Cf. Stephen Jay Gould: "much as we may love ourselves, Homo sapiens is not representative, or symbolic, of life as a whole. We are not surrogates for arthropods (more than 80 percent of animal species), or exemplars of anything either particular or typical. We are the possessors of one extraordinary evolutionary invention called consciousness—the factor that permits us, rather than any other species, to ruminate about such matters (or, rather, cows ruminate and we cogitate). But how can this invention be viewed as the distillation of life's primary thrust or direction when 80 percent of multicellularity (the phylum Arthropoda) enjoys such evolutionary success and displays no trend toward neurological complexity through time—and when our own neural elaboration may just as well end up destroying us as sparking a move to any other state that we could designate as 'higher'?" (Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin [New York: Harmony, 1996], 15).

[7] Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (books I, VI, and X) offers an early version of this account, one that continues to inform the history of philosophy through Kant and beyond.

is "rather a system of relations between various passions and desires" (WP 387). Elsewhere, he writes, "body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body" (Z: 1 "On the Despisers of the Body");^[8] "the 'pure spirit' is a pure stupidity; if we subtract the nervous system and the senses—the 'mortal shroud'—then we miscalculate —that is all!" (A 14).^[9]

These terse formulations condense a theory of consciousness as simply an extension of bodily instinct, impulse, passion, and desire.^[10] According to Nietzsche, consciousness is not what directs the body and its instincts but is only a residuum of the body's instinctual processes. He conceives of the body as a host of competing instincts, drives, desires, and passions, some of which join together in an alliance so as to dominate, control, and subordinate the others. In "higher creatures," the result of this struggle "enters consciousness," which provides a vastly simplified picture of the myriad "unconscious" instinctual processes and allows these creatures to perceive themselves as a unity.^[11] This supplemental consciousness has a specific evolutionary function: "consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication " (GS 354; cf. BGE 268). That is, the result of the struggle among the instincts enters consciousness only insofar as human beings, "the most endangered animal," need to be able to express their conditions to others, to make their needs felt, so as to make others sympathize and come to their aid. "The development of language and the development of consciousness," then, "go hand and hand" (GS 354). In brief, for Nietzsche, consciousness and language do not set human beings apart from nature but have developed merely as tools aiding a particular natural creature that is otherwise poorly endowed.

Hence, "rational animals," on Nietzsche's view, turn out to be simply animals with particular capacities and not others. But Nietzsche goes even further than this. His suspicion of metaphysical dualism leads him to suspect that the same prejudice that separates the rational from

[8] Cf. BGE 230: "actually 'the spirit' is relatively most similar to a stomach."

[9] Cf. WP 526: "there is no ground whatsoever for ascribing to spirit the properties of organization and systematization. The nervous system has a much more extensive domain; the world of consciousness is added to it. Consciousness plays no role in the total process of adaptation and systematization."

[10] This theory can be gleaned from such texts and passages as TL; GS P: 2, 111, 333, 354; BGE 19; Z:1 "On the Despisers of the Body"; A 14; WP 504–5, 523–30. In chapter 3, I discuss in further detail Nietzsche's theory of affects and the body.

[11] See GS 333: "the greater part of our spirit's activity remains unconscious and unfelt."

the nonrational also separates the organic from the inorganic; and so he comes to wonder whether there is any essential difference between these latter. Indeed, in the same passage in which he first calls for a naturalization of humanity, Nietzsche suggests that "the organic" is simply a "derivative, late, rare, accidental" extension of the inorganic and concludes that we must "beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type" (GS 109).

This view foreshadows Nietzsche's bold and often misunderstood supposition that all natural entities, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, are "'will to power' and nothing besides" (BGE 36; cf. WP 1067). Generalizing from his theory of the body as a complex of drives and affects, each of which seeks to dominate and assimilate the others, Nietzsche decides "to make the experiment and to ask the question whether [our world of desires and passions] would not be sufficient for also understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or 'material') world." "In the end," he concludes, "not only is it permitted to make this experiment; the conscience of method demands" that we "determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power ."

In chapter 5, I explore this difficult and enigmatic doctrine in greater detail. For the present discussion, we need only see that this theory is developed as an attempt to construct a naturalized ontology that accepts no essential differences of kind in the natural world. Seen in this light, the doctrine of will to power is not an a priori account of the universe as a whole but rather an empirical hypothesis that pushes to its limits Nietzsche's rejection of the metaphysician's "faith in opposite values." The doctrine becomes less mysterious once we consider it as incorporating and extending certain basic scientific insights. Chemistry, for example, shows us that every known entity is simply a certain combination and arrangement of a limited number of materials and forces. Organic chemistry teaches us that the organic differs from the inorganic only by the structural incorporation of carbon compounds. Chemical analysis of both inorganic and organic matter also reveals that some compounds are more stable than others, that certain forces or the presence of particular materials can cause these compounds to break down and form new compounds, and that, in the course of these reactions, these elements and compounds are attracted to some elements or compounds and repelled by others. Nietzsche suggests that there is no fundamental difference between these sorts of chemical reactions and the biological phenomena of procreation, growth, and extension of influence that we witness from the level of the protoplasm to that of the hu-

man being. Reversing the direction of this analysis, he suggests that the human activity of "interpretation" (which, he argues, involves assimilating, adapting, taking over, transforming, subduing, forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, and falsifying)^[12] is discernible throughout the natural world, from the scholarly activities of human beings to the nutritive and procreative activities of the amoeba and the actions and reactions of inorganic chemical compounds.

Thus, despite significant differences between these various levels and kinds of activities, Nietzsche comes to construe the natural world, via the doctrine of will to power, as a continuum with many differentiations but no radical breaks. Gone are the "God-like" capacities that served to separate human beings from animals and the miraculous pneuma that brought dead matter to life. Instead, Nietzsche argues for a thoroughly naturalized ontology, one that explains all entities on a single model, as assemblages of "dynamic quanta," the incessant change and transformation of which is the result of successful and unsuccessful attempts by each assemblage to extend its control over environing assemblages.

2.2.3—
Nietzsche's Naturalized Epistemology

No less does Nietzsche attempt to naturalize epistemology.^[13] Against metaphysical accounts that claim to reveal the indubitable, extranatural, and extra-empirical conceptual foundations for knowledge and experience, Nietzsche offers an alternative account that explains from within "the world of life, nature, and history" the origins and functions of these alleged transcendent or transcendental foundations. This account turns out to be, broadly speaking, evolutionary—or, in more Nietzschean terms, "genealogical."

[12] This catalogue is culled from two important later texts on "interpretation," GM II: 12 and III: 24. Cf. also BGE 230, which attributes these operations to "everything that lives, grows, and multiplies." For more on this issue, see §5.3, below.

[13] Nietzsche's naturalized epistemology has also recently been discussed by George Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche: Critique of Knowledge," in Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Routledge, 1991), and "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," Dialogos 59 (1992): 75–101. I disagree with Stack that Nietzsche's evolutionary version of Kant's transcendental deduction commits Nietzsche to a Kantian skepticism or agnosticism. Nietzsche makes clear that what such tools of knowledge as language, logic, and the categories "falsify" is not an unknowable world in itself but rather a realm of experience that is available to us through science and ordinary perception (see, e.g., HH 16, 18, 19; GS 110, 112) and the senses (see, e.g., TI "Reason" 2). I discuss this idea in §2.2.4 and in chapter 4.

As we have seen, Nietzsche accepts the basic tenets of evolutionary theory, rejecting only the progressivist, teleological assumptions that construe the course of evolution as a process of development resulting in the survival of the most perfect individuals and species.^[14] Genealogy dispenses with these assumptions and instead considers evolution to be a continual struggle for power, the movement of which is not a steady climb along an ascending line but a series of irregular displacements within a field of forces:

[T]he entire history of a "thing," an organ, a custom [ . . . is] a continual sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in purely chance fashion. The "evolution" of a thing, a custom, an organ, is by no means its progressus toward a goal, even less a logical progressus by the shortest route and with the smallest expenditure of force—but a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. (GM II: 12)

The "evolution" of knowledge and its faculties, according to Nietzsche, is no different. The framework of our knowledge has no extra-empirical or extra-natural source; nor is the development of our cognitive faculties evidence of progress toward perfection. Rather, these faculties and capacities are only chance endowments that have happened to aid human beings in their struggles with other natural creatures and forces.

Genealogical accounts of this sort can be found throughout the Nietzschean corpus (e.g., TL; HH Part I; GS 110–12, 344, 354–55; BGE 268; TI "Reason" and "Errors"; WP 466–617). The early essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," for example, explains the origin of the human conceptual and linguistic apparatus as the attempt of physically ill-equipped creatures to secure survival by controlling their environment through cunning and strategic alliance. Bombarded by sensory stimuli, Nietzsche explains, the human intellect learns to se-

[14] Nietzsche's attitude toward evolutionary theory is explored more fully in chapter 5. Like his heirs, Deleuze and Guattari, Nietzsche criticizes the traditional notion of "evolution" for its subordination of "becoming" to "being" and attempts to reconceive the notion as a "becoming" without origin, destination, or purpose. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 238ff. For more on Nietzsche's own evolutionary model, see TL; HL 9 and passim; BGE 13, 262; GM I:1–4, II:12–13; A 4; WP 90, 647–50, 684–85. Also, see Hoy, "Two Conflicting Conceptions," 745–51, and Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche" and "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology."

lect a set of these salient to its survival and to encourage a forgetting of the rest. Toward the same end, these feeble creatures form herds and develop language as "a uniformly valid and binding designation [ . . . ] for things" that serves "to banish from [their] world at least the most flagrant bellum omni contra omnes " (TL p. 81; cf. GS 354).

This naturalistic story also accounts for the origin of metaphysics. It explains the evolutionary benefit involved in the move from sensation to concept and concept to word, showing that the conceptual and linguistic framework provides human beings with a theory of nature that simplifies and codifies their sensuous experience so as to make it manageable, predictable, and communicable. Yet Nietzsche argues that the evolutionary primacy of the repression or demotion of a whole range of experiences, along with the promotion of a simplified and stable world, comes to be transmuted into a metaphysical primacy, that the pragmatic "necessity" of this late-born conceptual and linguistic framework gets taken for a stronger, metaphysical necessity given in the structure of the world: "This awakens the [Platonic] idea that, in addition to leaves, there exists in nature the 'leaf': the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original" (p. 83). Or, in a more critical moment, this a posteriori "necessity" awakens the (Kantian) idea that the conceptual and linguistic apparatus must be more than merely contingent, that it must be a priori, given in the structure of the human mind "—as though the world's axis turned within it" (p. 79).

Against these "arrogant" and "mendacious" suppositions, Nietzsche suggests that "the human intellect [ . . . ] has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life" (p. 79), that it is merely a device for securing human survival. Moreover, it is only a means for securing a particular sort of human life. Thus, alongside the "rational man" Nietzsche imagines the "intuitive man" who (though he lives a more precarious and uncertain existence) sees the world as "eternally new" and constantly reveals the contingent, conditional, pragmatic, and sensuous origins of the conceptual edifice reified and elevated by his more conservative and secure opponent (TL pp. 89–91).^[15]

[15] This praise of the fleeting exceptions appears throughout Nietzsche's work. A characteristic passage from Beyond Good and Evil runs: "The human beings who are more similar, more ordinary, have had, and always have, an advantage; those more select,subtle, strange, and difficult to understand, easily remain alone, succumb to accidents, being isolated, and rarely propagate. One must invoke tremendous counter-forces in order to cross this natural, all too natural progressus in simile, the continual development of man toward the similar, ordinary, average, herdlike—common! " (268). Similarly, in a note from 1888, Nietzsche laments "the elimination of the lucky strokes, the uselessness of the more highly developed types, the inevitable dominion of the average" and remarks that "strange though it may sound, one always has to defend the strong against the weak" (WP 685). Cf. also HL 9; Z (on "the last men"); BGE 269; GM I:8–9; WP 684.

This naturalistic account of the development of our cognitive faculties is expanded in part 1 of Human, All Too Human, the first section of which, we have seen, urges the replacement of "metaphysical philosophy" with "historical philosophy." "Lack of historical sense," Nietzsche writes, "is the family failing of all philosophers" (2). With Kantian transcendental philosophy clearly in mind, he explains that philosophers "take the most recent manifestation of man [ . . . ] as the fixed form from which one has to start out. They will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of cognition [das Erkenntnissvermögen ] has become; while some of them would have it that the whole world is spun out of this faculty of cognition" (2).

Continuing this critique several sections later, Nietzsche writes:

Philosophers are accustomed to station themselves before life and experience—before that which they call the world of appearance—as before a painting that has been unrolled once and for all and unchangeably depicts the same scene: this scene, they believe, has to be correctly interpreted, so as to draw a conclusion as to the nature of the being that produced the picture: that is to say, as to the nature of the thing in itself.

Yet this is to "overlook the possibility that this painting—that which we humans call life and experience—has gradually become, is indeed still fully in course of becoming, and should thus not be regarded as a fixed object on the basis of which a conclusion as to the nature of its originator [ . . . ] may either be drawn or pronounced undrawable" (16).

Against this sort of transcendental account of human experience and the cognitive faculties, Nietzsche advocates the development of "a history of the genesis of thought " (16), which would replace "metaphysical explanations" with "physical and historical explanations" (17), those having to do with "the physiology and history of the evolution of organisms and concepts" (10).^[16]

Putting this methodological recommendation into practice, Nietz-

[16] Cf. GS 354, where Nietzsche argues that "the problem of consciousness" is now explicable via "physiology and the history of animals."

sche proceeds to a task that would occupy him throughout his career: that of providing naturalistic, evolutionary explanations for the existence and operation of all the so-called transcendental faculties of human knowledge: language, logic, mathematics, and the "categories of reason."^[17] Without engaging in an extensive examination of these critiques (which, though frequent, are often tersely formulated and thus call for careful explication), we can provide an overview that should suffice to give a sense of their role in Nietzsche's more general project of developing a naturalized epistemology.

One notices at the outset that Nietzsche often blurs the lines of distinction between the operations of language, logic, mathematics, and the categories. That is because he sees them as thoroughly bound up with one another and serving, in slightly different ways, the same basic evolutionary role. All four are functions of consciousness (which we have seen to be a late-born and superficial extension of the sensuous, affective animal); and, as such, each of these forms serves to simplify and schematize the sensuous manifold into a calculable and communicable system. Logic and mathematics are said to have the basic role of equalization: the reduction of sensuous differences and similarities to cognitive identities (on logic, see HH 18; GS 111; TI "Reason" 3; WP 508–22, 554; on mathematics, see HH 11, 19; GS 112, 355; TI "Reason" 3; WP 516, 530, 554). The categories are said to have the role of individuating the sensuous manifold and subsuming it under a small set of cognitive forms (see TL p. 83; GS 110, 112; TI "Reason," "Errors"). Finally, language is said to make manifest and communicable this simplified and schematized cognitive world (see GS 354; BGE 268). Words, Nietzsche writes, unify groups of sensations and apply to these groups general designations that allow quick and abbreviated reference (see TL p. 83; BGE 268). Grammar serves the equalizing function through the copula "is" and reverses the genetic sequence by placing the conceptual and logical abstractions ("subjects," "substances," "causes") syntactically before the different manifestations ("actions," "accidents," "effects") from which they are, in actuality, derived (see BGE 17; GM 1: 13; TI "Reason").

[17] Nietzsche's language here is imprecise. At times, he refers individually to the various categories (causality, substance, etc.), while at other times he simply uses the general notion of the "concepts," "categories of reason," or "presuppositions of reason." In each of these instances, however, Nietzsche seems to have in mind something like the Kantian a priori concepts or categories of the understanding.

From his earliest to his last writings, Nietzsche is keen to point out the specific role that these "transcendental" forms play within the overall conditions of human life.^[18] As with consciousness, of which they are a function, he characterizes logic, language, and the categories of reason as simply products of natural selection that have aided human beings in the "struggle for existence" (see TL p. 80; cf. GS 354). He assures us that they are entirely contingent, stemming from "the earthly kingdom of desires" (WP 509) rather than from some inherent and necessary faculty or other nonempirical source. "All our categories-of-reason are of sensual origin: derived from the empirical world" (WP 488), he writes. Elsewhere he argues that

The inventive force that invented categories labored in the service of our needs, namely of our need for security, for quick understanding on the basis of signs and sounds, for the means of abbreviation:—"substance," "subject," "object," "being," "becoming" have nothing to do with metaphysical truths. (WP 513)

In the formation of reason, logic, the categories, it was need that was authoritative: the need, not to "know," but to subsume, to schematize for the purposes of calculation . . . the development of reason is adjustment, invention, with the aim of making similar, equal—the same process that every sense impression goes through! Here, there was no pre-existing "idea" at work, but rather the utilitarian fact [die Nützlichkeit ] that only when we see things coarsely and made equal do they become calculable and usable to us [ . . . ] life miscarries with any other kinds of reason, to which there is a continual impulse—it becomes difficult to survey—too unequal—. (WP 515)

As we have seen with regard to consciousness in general, logic and language deal only in superficialities and superfluities and do not evidence any deep, rational core. Our categories, logic, and language, and eventually our senses, "merely glide over the surface of things and see 'forms.' [ . . . ] We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species." (TL pp. 82, 83)

Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept precisely insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar

[18] We find such empirical deductions of logic and language throughout Nietzsche's work, and with a remarkable consistency of argument. From "On Truth and Lies" through Book Five of The Gay Science (e.g., 354) and the later Nachlaß (e.g., WP 508–22), Nietzsche's genealogies of logic and language are nearly identical.

cases—which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept of "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. (TL p. 83)

Logic is said to arise due to the same practical necessity of overlooking particulars or reducing them to generalities and identities:

Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases . In fact, to make possible logical thinking and inferences, this condition must first be treated fictitiously as fulfilled. (WP 512)

On the origin of logic . The fundamental inclination to posit as equal, to see things as equal . [ . . . ] This whole process corresponds exactly to that external, mechanical process (which is its symbol) by which protoplasm makes what it appropriates equal to itself and fits it into its own forms and files. (WP 510; cf. WP 501)

This last analogy is important. Having externalized logic and language—revealing them as trading in superficialities rather than pointing toward some deep structure of thought—Nietzsche here makes the further claim that the seemingly immaterial operations of logic are really no different in kind from such a basely physical and material process as ingestion, the incorporation and conversion of matter into a form that is usable for a particular body's nourishment and sustenance. Elaborating on this analogy in another note, Nietzsche claims that it is not some special a priori determination that governs the categorization of our sense impressions but rather simply the historical embeddedness of a primeval physiological need: "The same equalizing and ordering force that rules in the idioplasma, rules also in the incorporation of the outer world: our sense perceptions are already the result of this assimilation and equalization in regard to all the past in us; they do not follow directly upon the 'impression'" (WP 500).

For Nietzsche, then, logic, language, and the categories cannot be derived from anything but the contingent development of human beings as natural creatures. Reasoning and speaking are perhaps peculiar to a certain species of animal, but this "rational animal" is not different from other animals by virtue of some extra-natural faculty. Rather, it is different only due to the means it has developed to relate its peculiar constitution to its particular environing conditions. In considering our dealings with the environing world, Nietzsche argues, we should be

careful not to posit, in the manner of Plato and Kant, two realms—a realm of logic, language, and reason and a realm of the sensual or empirical—because, according to Nietzsche, language and logic are themselves thoroughly empirical in origin and function and are no less bound up with our contingent existence than are such patently noncognitive features of animal life as ingestion and growth.

2.2.4—
Nietzsche's Empiricism and Nominalism

While Nietzsche is concerned to show the evolutionary "necessity" of the so-called transcendental forms of human cognition, he also notoriously refers to them as "the fundamental errors of mankind" (HH 18), our "erroneous articles of faith" (GS 110), or the "lies" and "prejudices" of reason (TI "Reason" 2, 5). Such claims reveal the basic empiricism and nominalism that is at the root of Nietzsche's epistemology.

All of our knowledge, Nietzsche theorizes, originates in sense experience and ends in our various attempts to codify past and present experience so as to predict future experience. Such codification, as we have seen, entails the grouping of items in terms of unity and identity. Yet Nietzsche points out that something is lost or forgotten in this movement from sensation to concept. While sense evidence reveals to us a multiplicity of individuals, conceptual knowledge delivers over a world arranged according to a relatively small number of generalizations and abstractions. Thus, we read in "On Truth and Lies" (p. 83) that words and concepts derive from "unique and entirely individual experience[s]," that they equalize "cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal," and that they "overlook [ . . . ] what is individual and actual," since "nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts and likewise with no species." A similar critique of the Platonizing tendency of language and thought is presented in the first part of Human, All Too Human, where Nietzsche writes:

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that in language mankind set up beside the world a separate world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of things. [ . . . ] A great deal later—only

now—it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. (11) ^[19]

And, in a note from fall 1887, Nietzsche reiterates this nominalist view:

The form counts as something enduring and therefore more valuable; but the form has merely been invented by us; and however often "the same form is attained," it does not mean that it is the same form—rather, what appears is always something new, and it is only we who are always comparing, who include the new, to the extent that it is similar to the old, in the unity of the "form." As if a type should be attained and, as it were, was intended and inherent in the process of formation. Form, species, law, idea, purpose —in all these cases the same error is made of giving a false reality to a fiction. [ . . . ] One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws—"a world of identical cases "—as if they enabled us to fix the true world; but rather as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible. (WP 521)^[20]

In these and other passages, Nietzsche argues that words and concepts make unities and identities out of what are really multiplicities and similarities. Since everything is similar to everything else in infinitely many respects,^[21] Nietzsche implicitly asks why some groups of things are called "unities" and "identities" while others are not. Of course, he himself provides the answer to this question: such presumed unities and identities have aided human beings in their struggle for survival.^[22] Yet, for several reasons, Nietzsche is reluctant to rest with this answer.

First, as we have already seen, the evolutionary establishment of these unities and identities has tended to lead to a Platonistic reification of words and concepts such that they become not only independently existing entities but even the ultimately real entities from which all sensuous particulars are derived. In this way, a reversal occurs whereby the "actual" world—the only world with which we are acquainted: the sensuous world of particulars—gets taken as the "world of mere appearance," derived from the "true" world of forms, concepts, laws, and

[19] Cf. TI "Reason" 5: "'Reason' in language—oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar."

[20] See also HH 19 ("in fact nothing is identical to anything else") and GS 354 ("all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that").

[21] A poignant remark made by Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 64.

[22] See GS 110–11. This evolutionary answer has been more recently proposed by W. V. Quine, "Natural Kinds," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays . (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 126ff. Stack, "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," 88ff., discusses the similarities between Nietzsche's and Quine's views on this matter.

so on: "the leaf" becomes "the cause of leaves" (TL p. 83).^[23] Nietzsche's talk of the "errors" of reason and knowledge serves, then, to set this reversal aright by reminding us of the actual derivation of the "true world" from the "world of appearance": "The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable" (TI "Reason" 6). And again, "The 'apparent' world is the only one: the 'true' world is merely added by a lie " (TI "Reason" 2).^[24]

The primacy of this "apparent world" of sensuous particulars, Nietzsche thinks, can be shown through "scientific" inquiry, by which he seems to mean the macroscopic view afforded by historical, philological, and evolutionary research and the microscopic observation of biological, chemical, and physical phenomena. "Rigorous science," he contends, "can quite gradually and step by step, illuminate the history of the genesis of this world as idea [itself 'the outcome of a host of errors and fantasies'] and, for brief periods of time at any rate, lift us out of the entire proceeding" (HH 16). "Knowledge educated in the highest scientificality," he writes, "contradicts [ . . . ] the belief that there are identical things " (HH 18). Scrupulous scientific observation, he says elsewhere, uncovers "a manifold one-after-another [ein vielfaches Nacheinander ] where the naive man and inquirer of older cultures saw only two separate things" (GS 112). The passage continues:

Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists—in truth we are confronted by a continuum [ein continuum ] out of which we isolate a couple of pieces. [ . . . ] An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux of occurrences [Fluss des Geschehens ] and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect.

Such conclusions, Nietzsche sometimes claims, are even available to attentive ordinary sense perception, which, he argues, is confronted by an

[23] Wittgenstein (The Blue and Brown Books [New York: Harper and Row, 1958], 17–18) uses the same example in a very similar analysis of the "metaphysics" and "philosophical confusion" caused by "our craving for generality." Wittgenstein's warnings about "the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language" (Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953], §109) bear comparison with Nietzsche's critique of "the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language" (TI "Reason" 5). For some comparison between these two thinkers, see Erich Heller, "Wittgenstein and Nietzsche," in The Importance of Nietzsche: Ten Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), and Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, exp. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 78–86.

[24] Cf. EH "Destiny" 8: "The concept of the 'beyond,' the 'true world' invented in order to devaluate the only world there is [ . . . ] our earthly reality!"

ever-changing array of appearances. In praise of Heraclitus, Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols:

When the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity. Heraclitus too did the senses an injustice. They lie neither in the way the Eleatics believed, nor as he believed—they do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence . . .  "Reason" is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. ("Reason" 2)

Besides reminding us of the sensuous basis of all our knowledge, Nietzsche refers to the truths of logic, language, and the categories as "errors" for another reason. The evolutionary scenario tends toward a reification and ossification of words and concepts, Nietzsche thinks, because it is essentially conservative; its basic aim is the preservation of the species. To this end, it forbids any tampering with the established conceptual framework and discourages novel sortings of appearances. The process of reification aids this prohibition by encouraging the view that the established unities and identities not only are useful fictions but indeed are given in the nature of things.

Nietzsche, however, continually argues that "the wish to preserve oneself is a symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life, which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation" (GS 349).^[25] In a note from the same period, he reiterates this view:

"Useful" in the sense of Darwinist biology means: proved advantageous in the struggle with others. But it seems to me that the feeling of increase, the feeling of becoming-stronger, is itself, quite apart from any usefulness in the struggle, the real progress [Fortschritt]: only from this feeling does there arise the will to struggle. (WP 649)

These claims have important consequences for a consideration of Nietzsche's epistemology; for, if self-preservation is not the sole or ultimate goal of our cognitive processes, the way is opened for a consideration of

[25] Cf. BGE 13: "Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results ." Cf. also WP 649–51.

other possible sortings of appearances. These, in turn, provide us with foils that help to expose the contingent nature of our established conceptual framework.

Hence, having reminded us of the sensuous origins of our ordinary conceptual scheme, Nietzsche goes on to remind us of its artistic, "metaphoric" origins, which have been lost or sublimated into the literal truths of scientific fact. This artistic drive, or "intellectual play impulse" (GS 110), according to Nietzsche, is not only the real origin but also the real end of human activity. As with life in general, human beings ultimately seek not to preserve themselves but to become more, better, different; and this requires constant innovation, novel sortings, new interpretations. Intellectual endeavors begin in art and they end in art—which is to say that they do not end at all, because art, for Nietzsche, consists in ceaseless transformation. He writes:

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. [ . . . ] That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the audacious feats of the most liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the ghostly land of schemata, the land of abstractions. (TL pp. 88–90)

Years later, Nietzsche again voices this view, arguing that

[w]here need and distress have forced men for a long time to communicate and understand each other quickly and subtly, the ultimate result is an excess of this strength and art of communication—as it were, a capacity that has gradually been accumulated and now waits for an heir who might squander it. (Those who are called artists are these heirs [ . . . ]—all of them people who come at the end of a long chain, "late born" every one of them in the best sense of the word and, as I have said, by their nature squanderers.) (GS 354)

Thus, as we saw in the previous chapter, Nietzsche ultimately sides with the artistic or "intuitive man" rather than with the scientific or "rational man." Unlike the latter, the former "do not lie at all" (in the metaphysical sense). They do not try to pass off words and concepts as entities or conditions for experience; rather, they affirm that all knowledge originates in the sense experience of particulars and that words and concepts are simply groupings of these toward various ends, self-preservation being neither the only nor the ultimate of those ends.

2.3—
The De-Deification of Nature

In his attempt to naturalize epistemology, then, Nietzsche endorses a basic form of empiricism. Against the Platonic and Kantian priority given to the conceptual, Nietzsche warns of "confusing the last with the first" by placing "the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last smoke of evaporating reality, in the beginning, as the beginning" (TI "Reason" 4). Instead, he argues, "all credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses" (BGE 134).

Yet Nietzsche is not uncritical of empiricism, traditionally conceived. Anyone who would characterize him as a straightforward empiricist must confront prominent passages in which he decries "the coarse sensualistic prejudice that sensations teach us truths about things" (WP 516) and scoffs at "the eternally popular sensualism" according to which "what is clear, what is 'explained,'" is "only what can be seen and felt" (BGE 14). These and neighboring passages affirm Copernicus's and Boscovich's "triumph over the senses" (BGE 12) and "the Platonic way of thinking," which, contrary to the "fundamentally plebeian tastes" of the sensualists, he calls "a noble way of thinking [that] consisted precisely in a resistance to obvious sense evidence" (BGE 14; cf. GS 372). How are we to reconcile such claims with the positive revaluation of the sensual called for by Nietzsche's naturalism? The answer, I think, can be found in the second part of the project to eliminate the "shadows of God": namely, the "de-deification of nature."

We have seen that the "naturalization of humanity" (the first part of the project to eliminate the "shadows of God") requires a rejection of the notion that human beings possess some divine feature that separates them from, and raises them above, the natural world. It thus rejects the ideal of knowledge as providing a God's-eye view on the world that could secure necessary, unconditional, and objective truths. We saw Nietzsche oppose metaphysical epistemology and ontology with a natu-

ralism that firmly resituates human beings within the contingent, sensuous world and refigures human reason as one more device aiding the struggle for survival and flourishing. Thus, Nietzsche argues that knowledge is always contingent and conditional, relative to some interest, purpose, or perspective.

The "de-deification of nature" (the second part of the project to eliminate the "shadows of God") itself has two aspects. On the one hand, it is a corollary of the first part of the project. It maintains that, if we want to get rid of all the "shadows of God," we must reject the notion of a pre-given world—the world "as it really is," as it would be given to a God's-eye view. The "death of God," Nietzsche argues, enjoins us to reject both the notion that there is an absolute perspective from which the world could be viewed "as it really is" and the notion that there is such an absolute world. Instead, it asks us to refigure knowing as relative to some perspective, theory, or interpretation^[26] and being as relative to the ontological commitments of a particular perspective.^[27] On the other hand, the "de-deification of nature" also leads Nietzsche to privilege a certain set of perspectives and interpretations: namely, naturalistic ones that withdraw from our conception of nature all theological posits. Once we have done so, Nietzsche thinks we will come to see the world as an "innocent becoming" or as "will to power."

2.3.1—
Nietzsche's Holism:
The Primacy and Irreducibility of Interpretation

If Nietzsche's epistemology supports an empiricism, it is not what more recently has been called a "reductionist" empiricism, which holds that

[26] I make little differentiation, here, among the terms "perspective," "interpretation," and "theory." "Perspective" and "interpretation" are quite often found together in Nietzsche's writing and are never sharply differentiated, a point I discuss at the beginning of chapter 3. I also see little difference between what Nietzsche calls "perspective" or "interpretation" and what contemporary philosophers call "theory"—namely, a more or less systematic web of beliefs that arranges and makes sense of the world (or a portion of it) according to a set of purposes and desires.

[27] This view can be gleaned from Nietzsche's critique of positivism. He argues that the positivist belief in pre-given facts about the world is an ascetic, ultimately theological belief that attempts to get beyond the conditionality and contingency of interpretation and perspective toward some "true world of being" (GM III: 24). Against this view, Nietzsche claims that there are no essences-, facts-, or meanings-in-themselves; that, on the contrary, there are only "definitions," "facts" and "meanings" within an interpretation, which answers from a particular perspective the question "what is that?" (see WP 556, 481). For a brief but poignant discussion of this antirealism in Nietzsche and Hegel, see Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 328–29 n 15.

all knowledge and experience is reducible to immediate observations that deliver a unique and full meaning.^[28] In a passage partially cited above, Nietzsche shows his contempt for this kind of empiricism:

It is perhaps dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only a world-interpretation and -exegesis [eine Welt-Auslegung und -Zurechtlegung ] (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation [eine Welt-Erklärung ]; but insofar as it is based on belief in the senses, it is regarded as more, and for a long time to come must be regarded as more—namely, as an explanation. Eyes and fingers speak in its favor, visual evidence and palpableness do, too; this strikes an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes as fascinating, persuasive, convincing —after all, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternally popular sensualism. What is clear, what is "explained"? [Was is klar, was »erklärt«? ] Only what can be seen and felt—every problem has to be pursued to that point. (BGE 14)

This passage appears in Beyond Good and Evil, part I, entitled "On the Prejudices of the Philosophers." Neighboring passages make clear that prominent among these "prejudices" is a "myth of the given," what Nietzsche calls the belief in "immediate certainties" (16, 17, 34). This myth encompasses the beliefs of rationalists and empiricists alike: the Cartesian cogito ("as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly" [16]) ^[29] as well as "Locke's superficiality regarding the origin of ideas" (20). In §12, Nietzsche presents a critique of materialistic atomism that celebrates Roger Boscovich's and Copernicus's "triumph over the senses." Boscovich in particular is credited with having criticized Newton's and Leibniz's conception of the atom as the ultimate unit of matter in favor of a relational notion of the atom as a quasi-material nodal point within a network of force.^[30] In

[28] The term "reductionist empiricism" is taken from W. V. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961). One of the "two dogmas of empiricism," Quine writes, "radical reductionism" is the doctrine that "every meaningful statement is [ . . . ] translatable into a statement (true or false) about immediate experience" (p. 38). Though he is concerned to attack the theory as it survives in contemporary analytic philosophy, Quine argues that the doctrine "well antedates" analytic philosophy and can be found, for instance, in Locke and Hume (p. 38).

[29] Nietzsche's critique of the Cartesian cogito continues in the following passage, BGE 17.

[30] For further discussion of Boscovich's conception of the atom and Nietzsche's fascination with it, see §5.2.1, below; George Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovich's Natural Philosophy," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62 (1981): 69–87, and Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983); Claudia Crawford, The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 87–89, 298–99: and Alistair Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology (Berlin: Peter Lang, 1990), chap. 5.

each of these seemingly disparate cases, Nietzsche uncovers the myth of "immediate certainty," a basic conviction that there exists some foundational, simple, present item (whether it be the "I" of consciousness, immediate sense data, or the atom as the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter) that provides the basis of all knowing and being and is the goal of all inquiry.

Against these "immediate certainties," Nietzsche argues for a more complex, relational, and holistic conception of knowledge and its objects. Rejecting the Cartesian notion that the "I" is an irreducible, intuitive given, Nietzsche conceives of it as "a social structure," a complex of sensation, thought, and affect (BGE 19; see chapter 3, below). Contrary to the Schopenhauerian conception of "the will" as "something simple, a brute datum, underivable, and intelligible by itself" (GS 127), Nietzsche contends that "willing is above all something complicated, something that is a unit [Einheit ] only as a word" (BGE 19). And, "by way of rejecting Locke's superficiality regarding the origin of ideas," Nietzsche explicitly puts forward the holistic view "[t]hat individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other; that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent" (20).

Combining this conceptual holism, the evolutionary analogy that appears in this last phrase, and the claim that this section as a whole is meant as a rejection of Locke's reductionist empiricism, the passage can be read as arguing that perception is not pure and simple but rather is overdetermined by the other physiological, psychological, and intellectual functions that coexist with it in a complex organism whose constitution and activity has been shaped by a long evolutionary history.

These theses are presented much more explicitly in a passage from The Gay Science addressed "To the realists." Nietzsche writes:

You sober people who feel well armed against passion and fantasy and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and an ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it appears to you. As if reality stood unveiled before you alone. [ . . . ] But in your unveiled state are not even you still very passionate and dark creatures compared to fish, and still far too similar to an artist in love? [ . . . ] You are still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries. Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextinguishable drunkenness. Your love of "reality," for example—oh that is a primeval "love"! In every sensation and every sense impression there is a

piece of this old love; and some fantasy, some prejudice, some unreason, some ignorance, some fear, and ever so much else has woven it and worked on it. That mountain there! That cloud there! What is "real" in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human ingredient from it, you sober ones! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training—all of your humanity and animality. There is no "reality" for us—not for you either, you sober ones. (GS 57)

Here, Nietzsche states outright the twin theses (1) that there is no such thing as naked perception and (2) that what perception perceives is not a pre-given world. Rather, he argues, perception functions as part of the total human organism, and what it perceives is a world that is a palimpsest of previous interpretative construals. Perception and interpretation are inextricably intertwined.^[31]

Nietzsche underscores these positions in his critique of a contemporary form of reductionist empiricism: the positivism that flourished in the latter half of the nineteenth century. A famous note from 1886–87 runs:

Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—"there are only facts"–I would say: no, facts is precisely what there are not, only interpretations [Interpretationen ]. We cannot establish any fact "in itself": perhaps it is nonsense [Unsinn ] to even want to do such a thing. [ . . . ] In so far as the word "knowledge" has any meaning [Sinn ], the world is knowable: but it is interpretable [deutbar ] otherwise, it has no meaning [Sinn ] behind it, but countless meanings [Sinne ]—"Perspectivism." (WP 481)^[32]

This insight finds its way into the Genealogy, written shortly thereafter. Discussing the relationship of modern science to theology and metaphysics, Nietzsche asserts that the positivist's "renunciation of all interpretation" in the effort to discover unmediated "brute facts" constitutes

[31] Cf. Nelson Goodman (Languages of Art, 2d ed. [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976], 7–8): "The eye always comes ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by old and new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart, and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-empowered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice. It selects, rejects, organizes, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, and constructs. It does not so much mirror as take and make; and what it takes and makes it does not see bare, as items without attributes, but as things, as food, as people, as enemies, as stars, as weapons. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked. The myths of the innocent eye and of the absolute given are unholy accomplices. Both derive from and foster the idea of knowing as a processing of raw material received from the senses, and of this raw material as being discoverable either through purification rites or by methodical disinterpretation. But reception and interpretation are not separable operations; they are thoroughly interdependent."

[32] Dated late 1886-spring 1887 (KSA 12:7[60]).

an "ascetic [ . . . ] denial of sensuality" (III: 24, see 1.5.2, above). And, during the same period, in Book Five of The Gay Science, Nietzsche criticizes "that impetuous demand for certainty that today discharges itself among large numbers of people in a scientific-positivistic form. The demand that one wants by all means that something should be firm." No less than Christianity and metaphysics, he continues, "this, too, is still the demand for a support, a prop" (GS 347).

This group of passages makes clear what Nietzsche finds objectionable in the positivist project: its belief in the existence of, and its desire to represent, some given and certain ontological foundation for our knowledge—"the world as it really is." This belief and desire, Nietzsche contends, is simply "metaphysical" (GM III:24), for, as he argues in the first passage, "we cannot establish any fact 'in itself," "the world has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings." That is, the world we know is the world as constructed by one or another interpretation or perspective, of which there are many. The notion of the world "as it really is" or "as it is in itself" is simply fabricated through a negation of, a desire to transcend, the world we know (the world as it is constructed by the many interpretations/perspectives).^[33] It is this metaphysical belief and desire that allows Nietzsche to say that positivism, which claims to be the most empirical doctrine, expresses an "ascetic" "denial of sensuality": in its desire for some firm, solid, "real" or "true" world, positivism disavows the actual conditions of our knowledge (the necessity and irreducibility of interpretation) and the world that this knowledge reveals (a world with "no meaning behind it, but countless meanings"). This putative "true" world, Nietzsche argues, is simply the world as it would be given to a God's-eye view. And having abandoned the notion of a God's-eye view, Nietzsche also abandons its correlate: the notion of a pre-given world.

Thus, Nietzsche criticizes every reductionist attempt to discover something "in itself," which always involves such ascetic "renunciation of interpretation."

"Things that have a constitution in themselves"—a dogmatic idea with which one must break absolutely. (WP 559)

That things possess a constitution in themselves totally apart from interpretation and subjectivity is a totally futile hypothesis: it presupposes that inter -

[33] See TI "Reason" 6 and 2, quoted in §2.2.4, above.

pretation and subjective-being are not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships [i.e., all perspectival construal] would still be a thing. (WP 560)

A "thing in itself" just as perverse as a "sense in itself," a "meaning in itself." There are no "facts in themselves," for a sense must always first be projected into them before there can be facts . The "what is that?" is a determination of meaning [eine Sinn-Setzung] from some other viewpoint. "Essence" [Die »Essenz«], "being" [die »Wesenheit«] is something perspectival and already presupposes a multiplicity. At bottom there always lies "what is that for me? " (for us, for all that lives, etc.). A thing would be defined once all beings [Wesen ] had asked "what is that?" and had answered their question. Supposing that one single being, with its own relationships and perspectives for all things, were missing, then the thing would not yet be "defined." In short, the being [Wesen ] of a thing is always only an opinion [Meinung ] about the "thing." Or rather: "it is considered" is the actual "this is," the only "this is." (WP 556)

Against the very notion of the "in itself," Nietzsche advances a view akin to what more recent Anglo-American philosophers have called the doctrine of "ontological relativity," according to which (1) questions concerning "what there is" can only be answered relative to (what Nietzsche calls) an "interpretation" or "perspective"; (2) the only alternative to one "interpretation" is another; and (3) it is nonsense to ask (or answer) what things are absolutely, or "in themselves."^[34]

Rejecting the notion of a pre-given world, then, Nietzsche's "dedeification of nature" requires that we revise our conception of empirical knowledge. We must give up the idea that sensation delivers some pure, unmediated content, that it mirrors a world with pre-given partitions and essences. This is not, however, to assert the Kantian, transcendental view that sensuous intuition can only ever appear to us already

[34] The phrase "ontological relativity" is Quine's; but similar theses (deemed "irrealism," "internal realism," "antirealism," etc.) are found in the work of Goodman, Putnam, and others. Cf. Goodman ("The Way the World Is," in Problems and Projects [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972], 31): "For me, there is no way that is the way the world is; and so of course no description can capture it. But there are many ways the world is, and every true description captures one of them. The difference between [the realist] and me is, in sum, the difference between absolutism and relativism"; Quine ("Ontological Relativity," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays [New York: Columbia University Press, 1969], 50): "What makes sense is to say not what the objects of a theory are, absolutely speaking, but how one theory of objects is interpretable or reinterpretable in another"; and Putnam (Reason, Truth, and History, 49, 52): "what objects does the world consist of? is a question that it only makes sense to ask within a theory or description. [ . . . ] 'Objects' do not exist independently of conceptual schemes. We cut up the world into objects when we introduce one or another scheme of description." I discuss this idea more fully in §3.4.3.

shaped by the a priori forms of intuition and categories of the understanding.^[35] Unlike Kant, Nietzsche does not separate cognition into passive and active faculties. Having dismissed the very idea of the "in itself," Nietzsche rejects the notion that sensation receives from "the world" a raw material that is then processed by our various interpretative schemes. Sensation and interpretation, for Nietzsche, are inseparable activities. "Our sense perceptions," he writes, "are already the result of [ . . . ] assimilation and equalization with regard to all the past in us; they do not follow directly upon the 'impression'" (WP 500). That is, sense perception is not new and innocent every moment; rather, what we experience each moment is the result of an entire evolutionary history. Elsewhere, he argues that "all sense perceptions are permeated with value judgments " (WP 505),^[36] namely, interpretive decisions concerning what counts as "what there is." ^[37] Against both the reductionist empiricist and the Kantian transcendentalist, then, Nietzsche advances the naturalistic, evolutionary view that sense perception only functions within an ongoing network of interpretations—within what he calls an "already-created world, constructed out of nothing but appearances but become firm to the extent that this kind of appearance has preserved life" (WP 520).^[38]

According to Nietzsche, then, impressions, sensations, and perceptions do not offer any pure, simple, or unmediated picture of the world. Yet neither do judgments or statements of fact. "There are no isolated judgments!" Nietzsche writes: "An isolated judgment is never 'true,'

[35] Babette Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 95 and chap. 3 passim, attributes to Nietzsche this Kantian view.

[36] Cf. GS 114: "How far the moral sphere extends .—As soon as we see a new image, we immediately construct it with the aid of all our previous experiences [ . . . ] All our experiences are moral [i.e., evaluative] experiences, even in the realm of sense perception."

[37] See WP 556, cited above, on how ontological ascriptions are judgments made according to one perspective or another.

[38] My interpretation here relies fairly heavily on the Nachlaß, where Nietzsche discusses epistemological issues more directly and extensively than anywhere else. Nevertheless, I find this interpretation entirely consistent with (and, indeed, helpful in making sense of) much of the published material on these matters. Nietzsche's rejection of the "thing in itself" can be found throughout his published work (see, e.g., GS 335, 354; D P:3; and the other passages discussed in §4.3, below). Nietzsche's basic empiricism is stated fairly plainly in BGE 134; TI "Reason" 1–3; and A 4 (and discussed in §2.2.4, above). His resistance to positivist or reductionist versions of empiricism is presented in such passages as BGE 12, 14; GS 347; and GM III:24 (discussed in the present section). And his assertion of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation can be found in such passages as GS 57 and GM II: 12, III: 24 (also discussed in the present section).

never knowledge; only in the connection and relation of many judgments is there any surety" (WP 530). Thus, against a reductionist empiricism, Nietzsche espouses a holistic empiricism, which maintains that, while all knowledge is generated out of sensuous affection, the unit of empirical significance is neither the individual sensation nor the isolated statement of fact but the theory or interpretation as a whole in which sensations and statements are lodged.

This naturalistic, holistic view is not a skeptical view. It does not claim that human interests, desires, perspectives, and interpretations get in the way of some "true" knowledge that would reveal "the way the world really is." Nietzsche altogether dismisses the notion of a God's-eye view and, with it, the notion of a standard of truth transcending all contingent perspectives (see GM III: 12). Yet this does not mean that there is no common measure for interpretations or perspectives. After all, Nietzsche holds that perspectives and interpretations are, in large part, developed to help us cope with our sensuous imbrication in the natural world. A basic standard for interpretations, then, is how well they do this. Considerations of entrenchment, simplicity, scope, coherence, utility, and novelty, as well as political considerations of ideology and power, will also figure significantly in the acceptance or rejection of interpretations.^[39]

Despite these constraints, however, Nietzsche grants that the "dedeification of nature" permits a proliferation of interpretations.^[40] There will be different interpretations over time, because no interpretation is immune from revision (see GS 58 and WP 616). And there will be different coexisting interpretations, because there are different purposes and goals in different areas of life and areas of life where several interests, purposes, and goals compete.^[41] Yet Nietzsche also maintains that

[39] Nietzsche emphasizes entrenchment, e.g., in GS 57–58, 110, and BGE 188. He emphasizes simplicity ("economy of principles" or "conscience of method") in BGE 13 and 36. Considerations of scope permeate his discussions of "will to power," which aim at giving a comprehensive account of all natural knowing and being, from the human to the inanimate (see, e.g., BGE 36). Coherence is stressed in such passages as GS 54; BGE 20; WP 530. Utility is stressed throughout Nietzsche's work (e.g., BGE 4; WP 493ff.). Novelty is stressed, e.g., in TL pp. 88—91 and GS 110. Finally, considerations of ideology and power fill his writings, particularly his analyses and critiques of Christianity and "slave morality."

[40] The locus classicus for this view is GS 374 (partially quoted at the end of §1.6. 1, above, where some of the critical problems with the passage are noted). See also GS 2, 347, and 373 (also quoted and discussed in §1.6.1) and WP 410, 470, 481, 600.

[41] In GS 110, for example, Nietzsche shows how, in the area of truth and knowledge, two impulses come to compete with one another: on the one hand, an impulse to-ward self-preservation that strives to produce and maintain a simplified and selective version of the world and, on the other hand, an "intellectual play impulse" with a penchant for honesty and skepticism that delights in showing the contingency of the preservative "primeval errors."

there will be different interpretations of "the same phenomena"; and that, because there is no pre-given world and no God's-eye view, there is no absolute fact of the matter as to which one is correct.^[42]

In Beyond Good and Evil §22, Nietzsche provides a basic example. He argues that "the physicists'" notion of "nature's conformity to law" is a "bad mode of interpretation" motivated by the desire to show that the physical world conforms to the democratic values of modern European politics. Deeply suspicious of such ascriptions, Nietzsche offers a counterinterpretation. He claims that, "with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation," one "could read out of the same nature, and with regard to the same phenomena," a view of the world as "will to power," as "the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of claims of power"—an interpretation that, like the physicists' view, would also see the course of the world as "necessary" and "calculable" "not because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment."

Bracketing, for now, the substantive view proposed in this passage, let us focus on its methodological point. Nietzsche prefaces and concludes his account of the "laws of nature" model with the claim that it is "no matter of fact" but rather an "interpretation." Yet things are no different, he grants, with his alternative model, following the proposal of which he writes: "Supposing that this also is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection?—well, so much the better." The point of this concluding remark seems to be that, without a God's-eye view on a pre-given world, there are only interpretations with no absolute fact of the matter as to which one is correct. To challenge an existing view, one cannot simply present "the plain facts" but can only offer a counterinterpretation.^[43] As Nietzsche puts it in The

[42] Nietzsche's genealogies make clear his commitment to the notion that "the world [ . . . ] has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings" (WP 481). In the Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere, for example, Nietzsche maintains that, while both parties agree that affective life involves change, suffering, passion, pain, and pleasure, the strong, active person, who affirms affective life in its entirety, gives a wholly different interpretation to this "fact" than does the sickly ascetic, who rejects the sensuous world precisely on account of its changeability, pain, and suffering. See also GM II:12–14, where Nietzsche catalogs the multiple interpretations of punishment, revealing how "one and the same procedure can be employed, interpreted, adapted to ends that differ fundamentally."

[43] Contrary to the view of some Nietzsche scholars (e.g., Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher [New York: Columbia University Press, 1965], 82ff.), Nietzsche is not a veri-ficationist who can do away with metaphysical and theological beliefs simply by pointing to the lack of empirical evidence for them. On Nietzsche's view, as we have seen, interpretations can be criticized only on the basis of other interpretations, not by recourse to some bare, uninterpreted fact. Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics and theology, then, will have to be much more complex and hypothetical. Thus, it takes the form of genealogy, an elaborate attempt to retell the story of theology and metaphysics in a way that reveals them to be rooted in base and pathetic impulses. Nietzsche will argue not only that the supposedly unconditional and otherworldly posits of metaphysics and morality are explicable in naturalistic terms but also that such explanation reveals them to be pernicious and contemptible, generated through a psychological projection that sets up, as the antithesis of "the world of life, nature, and history," another world that allows us to escape life's sufferings and deceptions. The desire for the otherworldly, Nietzsche concludes, is nothing but "life's nausea and disgust with life" (BT SC:5; cf. WP 12).

Gay Science: "We can destroy only as creators!—But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new 'things'" (GS 58).

2.3.2—
Will to Power and the Innocence of Becoming

Yet this is not the end of the story. While Nietzsche's "de-deification of nature" allows for a proliferation of interpretations and admits that no interpretation could be uniquely correct, it does not concede that every interpretation is as good as any other. We saw, in the passage from Beyond Good and Evil quoted above, that Nietzsche deems the physicists' interpretation "bad 'philology,'" a "bad mode of interpretation." Conversely, everywhere that Nietzsche presents his own picture of a "de-deified world" (e.g., GS 109; BGE 13, 36; and TI "Errors" 8), he seems to want to promote it as a better interpretation. One might reasonably ask what criteria Nietzsche has for such an evaluation.

The answer is that naturalism itself provides the criterion. While the "death of God" leads to a rejection of all necessary, unconditional, or absolute perspectives and facts, we have seen that it also leads to a rejection of theological interpretations of nature, those that posit supernatural entities and explanatory principles. This is made particularly clear in the section of The Gay Science that immediately follows Nietzsche's first pronouncement of the "death of God"—a passage that bears quoting in full:

Let us beware! —Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and make of it something essential,

universal, and eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism. This nauseates me. Let us even beware of believing that the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a "machine" does it far too much honor. Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance into the Milky Way raises doubts whether there are not far coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc. The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the relative duration that depends on it have again made possible an exception of exceptions: the formation of the organic. The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. Judged from the point of view of our reason, unsuccessful attempts are by all odds the rule, the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune which may never be called a melody—and ultimately even the phrase "unsuccessful attempt" is too anthropomorphic and reproachful. But how could we reproach or praise the universe? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word "accident" has meaning. Let us beware of saying death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.—Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances: matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to naturalize humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature? (GS 109; cf. WP 12)

This is a rich and difficult passage. For most of it, Nietzsche seems to be arguing that none of our human, anthropomorphic conceptions provide sustainable interpretations of the world. Yet the coda suddenly speaks of these as "shadows of God " and calls for a "de-deification, " rather than a "de-humanization, " of nature. In retrospect, we can see that what Nietzsche has been urging all along is that we withdraw from the world all those things that we have imagined God to have put there and orchestrated: purpose, order, aim, form, beauty, wisdom, eternal nov-

elty, law, hierarchy, and so forth. What we are left with, Nietzsche tells us, is a world that is "in all eternity chaos."

This last remark has led some commentators to suppose that Nietzsche is committed to a form of metaphysical realism: to the view that the world "in itself" is a "chaos" that only appears to us, filtered through our "aesthetic anthropomorphisms," as ordered, arranged, or formed.^[44] Yet we can and should read this passage otherwise (see also §4.7.1, below). Recall that Beyond Good and Evil §22 argued against the naive anthropomorphisms involved in the "physicists'" conception of "nature's conformity to law" and advocated instead a view of the world as a "tyrannical" and "inconsiderate" "will to power" with no laws or aims, expending itself fully at each moment. Such a world might approximate the "chaos" of the Gay Science passage. Indeed, having criticized a prevailing view, each passage advocates a view of the world as "necessary" yet lacking order, law, purpose, et cetera, one passage calling this "will to power," the other calling it "chaos." Recall, too, that Nietzsche conceded that his view of the world as "will to power" was "only interpretation" and not text or fact. Reading these passages together, then, we can see that the world as "chaos" is not offered as a fact—as what the world really is like before it is conceptualized by us—but as another, perhaps better (because atheological), interpretation. We can see that it is not a question of distinguishing the real from the apparent world but of distinguishing different ways of constructing apparent worlds. Seen in this light, Nietzsche is far from advocating metaphysical realism. Rather, he is seen consistently to hold the view that there is no fact of the matter that could be determined by a correct apprehension of the world in itself but only a host of competing interpretations.

As with the passage from Beyond Good and Evil, then, the one from Gay Science asserts Nietzsche's two-sided argument: on the one hand, there are only interpretations with no fact of the matter as to which one is absolutely correct; on the other hand, "better" interpretations are

[44] Jean Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation" and "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos," both in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), and, at times, Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1984), 94–95, read Nietzsche this way. Despite her critique of Granier's reading, Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 138–39, reads Nietzsche this way as well. I discuss Nietzsche's conception of "chaos" more fully below, in §§3.4.1 and 4.7.

those that attempt to eliminate all the "shadows of God." This elimination, Nietzsche contends, leaves a world without theological efficient causes (God as causa prima ), formal causes (the world-as-organism, -cycle, -machine, -melody, -law abiding), final causes (equilibrium, progress, happiness), or material causes (materialistic atomism, pantheism).^[45] The effort to imbue the world with such causes was an attempt to see the world from outside, to view its natural, internal features as representations of, or as guided by, some grander plan.^[46] But this is just what Nietzsche's naturalism cannot allow. There is no "judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole" of life and nature (TI "Errors" 8; see also TI "Morality" 5), for that would require a position outside of life and nature, the possibility and intelligibility of which, Nietzsche points out, is not afforded living, natural creatures such as ourselves (and, of course, there are no creatures other than natural ones).^[47]

Nietzsche urges us to give up the desire for such impossible and superfluous perspectives and instead to try to see the world "from inside." If we do so, he believes, we will come to see it as "'will to power' and nothing besides" (BGE 36): a world without beginning, end, aim, purpose, foundation, or privileged aspect (see GS 109; WP 55, 1062–67). To see the world in this way is to restore "the innocence of becoming" (TI "Errors" 7–8). It is to see that there is no unique way the world is, that the world is capable of many formulations and transformations precisely because it has no essential character.^[48] It is to see that there are

[45] Against God as causa prima, see TI "Reason" 4–5, "Errors" 7–8; and WP 1066–67. Against the world as organism, etc., see GS 109, 357. Against the world as teleological, see TI "Errors" 8; Z Prologue and passim (on the last man); WP 55, 627, 708, 1062, 1066, 1067; and the discussion in §5.2.3, below. Against materialistic atomism, see BGE 12, 17; WP 624; and the discussion in §5.2.1, below. And against pantheism, see GS P:4 (the view that "God is everywhere" is precisely what the "de-deification of nature" sets out to reinterpret) and WP 55, 1062.

[46] GS 357 makes this especially clear.

[47] See TI "Socrates" 2: "Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: in themselves such judgments are stupidities. One must by all means stretch out one's fingers and make the attempt to grasp this amazing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated . Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not judges; not by the dead, for a different reason."

[48] Nietzsche's advocacy of an interpretation in which "laws [ . . . ] are completely lacking" is, I think, nothing more than the advocacy of a thoroughly antiessentialist, antitheological view of the world and of ourselves. He asks only that we give up the strong, ontological notion of necessary laws inherent in nature or in the human mind, not that we give up the notion of "law" altogether. I do not see that he has trouble with the notion of "law" understood in a weaker sense, as describing a regularity or priority internal to a particular interpretation.

as many ways the world is as there are "perspectives and affective interpretations" (GM III: 12). Even apparently antinaturalistic perspectives and interpretations are admissible, provided that they are reinterpreted as disguised naturalistic interpretations—as, for instance, expressions of an ascetic desire for the otherworldly.

2.4—
The Circle of Naturalism and Interpretation

Let me summarize what I have argued thus far. The "death of God"—incredulity toward theological and metaphysical interpretations—enjoins us to give ourselves and our world a naturalistic reinterpretation. It asks that we stop seeing human beings as demi-Gods or as the center and goal of the universe and that we begin to see them as natural organisms who do not differ fundamentally from other natural organisms. It asks us to stop seeing human reason as a divine feature that provides access to the necessary, the universal, and the unconditional and to start thinking of it as a complex device for managing past, present, and future experience. The "death of God" also enjoins us to stop believing that there is some absolute point of view from which the world could be seen "as it really is." Instead, it tells us that "the way the world is" can only ever be determined by our various ongoing perspectives and interpretations, none of which is inherently unchangeable, and not all of which are of a piece or entirely consistent with one another. And it tells us that we can hope for no convergence of these perspectives, that no "absolute knowledge" is forthcoming. Finally, and coming full circle, Nietzsche's affirmation of the "death of God" asks that our interpretations do without theological entities and explanatory principles. It asks that we see ourselves as thoroughly enmeshed in a world that is contingent, conditional, temporal, and affective through and through, a world without absolute beginning, essence, purpose, or aim.

This naturalism yields Nietzsche's central epistemological and ontological doctrines: perspectivism, becoming, and will to power. With the doctrine of perspectivism, Nietzsche rejects the theological ideals of a God's-eye view and a pre-given world. He argues instead that there are only ever contingent perspectives (or interpretations) and the entities internal to them and that there is no absolute fact of the matter about which of these is uniquely correct. With the doctrines of becoming and will to power, however, Nietzsche gives his own naturalistic rendering

of a world without the "shadows of God." Taken together, these doctrines tread between relativism and dogmatism without yielding to either extreme. The apparent relativism of perspectivism is held in check by Nietzsche's naturalism, which offers the doctrines of will to power and becoming in place of all theological interpretations; the apparent dogmatism of will to power and becoming is mitigated by perspectivism, which grants that will to power and becoming are themselves interpretations, yet ones that are better by naturalistic standards.

Of course Nietzsche grants that even his naturalism is an interpretation and not a matter of fact. He acknowledges that "God's death" is capable of being interpreted in a variety of ways (see GS 108, 125, 343; WP Book I).^[49] Yet he maintains that his own naturalistic interpretation has "honesty" and "intellectual conscience" on its side, insofar as it takes up and pushes to the limit a centuries-old "will to truth" that finally forbids itself the lie involved in absolutist interpretations (see GS 344, 357; GM III:23–28; WP Book I). In short, Nietzsche grants that his view is itself an interpretation, which is all it could ever be; but he challenges objectors to come up with a better one. He is indeed committed to his naturalistic position yet well aware that it does not settle matters once and for all but only ushers in "new struggles" (GS 108)—which, like all struggles and contests, Nietzsche encouraged and relished.

Having presented this general picture of Nietzsche's epistemology and ontology, I can now provide a more thorough explication of his epistemological and ontological doctrines: perspectivism, becoming, and will to power.

[49] For an elaboration of this point, see Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 152–59.