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.