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.