PART TWO—
NIETZSCHE'S EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL DOCTRINES

Chapter Three—
Perspectivism:
The Ubiquity Of Interpretation

Oh, the false oppositions: war and "peace"! reason and passion! subject object!
Nietzsche, note from spring-fall 1881, KSA 9:11[140]

3.1—
Is There a Doctrine of Perspectivism in Nietzsche?

Any interpretation of Nietzsche's "perspectivism" confronts a peculiar difficulty: the scarcity of explicit reference to the doctrine in Nietzsche's texts, published and unpublished. The term "perspectivism" appears in only a single passage in the published work: in The Gay Science §354, where it is associated with "phenomenalism" but receives little explanation and is not offered as a unique contribution. Even in the large body of epistemological notes collected in The Will to Power —where the German editors saw fit to employ the term in a section heading (Third Book, I, d: "Biology of the Drive to Knowledge. Perspectivism")—"perspectivism" is mentioned only twice: in the oft-cited §481 and in §636. Hence, one is led to wonder whether it is legitimate to claim that perspectivism is a "doctrine" at all, let alone one central to Nietzsche's work.

Despite this difficulty, I think there are good reasons for continuing to use the term "perspectivism" to describe a central feature of Nietzsche's later work. There is, first of all, a strong critical precedent for doing so: as already mentioned, the term was used as early as 1906 by the editors of The Will to Power to describe the later Nietzsche's theory of knowledge; subsequently, it was taken up by Vaihinger in 1911, by Heidegger in the 1930s, by Morgan in the 1940s, by Danto in

the 1960s,^[1] and by nearly every European and Anglo-American commentator since. More important, while Nietzsche rarely refers to "perspectivism" as a doctrine, the terms "perspective," "perspectival," and "perspectivity" do appear with considerable frequency in Nietzsche's later texts. Finally, and most significant, these terms appear in contexts that articulate something central and unique in the later Nietzsche: namely, the notion that all natural beings are inextricably caught up within a nexus of competing worldviews, each of which has its origin in particular physiological, psychological, historical, cultural, and political needs, desires, beliefs, and values.

In what follows, I explore this idea in detail. But a further proviso must still be added. While there are reasonable grounds for attributing to Nietzsche a "doctrine of perspectivism," this doctrine will always be a critical construct. That is, we must give up the desire, expressed by Daniel Conway, to distinguish between "Nietzsche's perspectivism" (the explication of "Nietzsche's position") and "Nietzschean perspectivism" (the delineation of "a position that he could [or should] have held in light of his other insights").^[2] However one characterizes "Nietzsche's doctrine of perspectivism," that characterization will always be underdetermined by the textual evidence. All one can do is fill out the few comments concerning "perspectivism," "perspective," and "perspectivity" in light of their contexts and of Nietzsche's other central positions. Insofar as there are different conceptions of what those positions are and different interpretations of those contexts, there will also be different accounts of perspectivism.

This is not to say that all accounts of perspectivism will be equally valid or equally good. Indeed I will argue for an interpretation of perspectivism that I believe to be better than others. Nonetheless, it must be recognized that, in this situation, there are no "facts"—no transparent, doctrinal statements against which to measure interpretations. Interpretations of perspectivism can only be measured according to how well they articulate Nietzsche's remarks on "perspective" within a

[1] Hans Vaihinger, "Nietzsche and His Doctrine of Conscious Illusion," in Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 94. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh et al. (San Francisco: Harper, 1987), 199 and passim . George A. Morgan, What Nietzsche Means (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), 273 and passim . Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), chap. 3.

[2] Daniel W. Conway, "The Eyes Have It: Perspectives and Affective Investment," International Studies in Philosophy 23 (1991): 103.

whole that gives them a sense. As it turns out, this textual situation concerning perspectivism exemplifies what I take to be a central feature of the doctrine itself: the proposition that this holistic relationship of facts to interpretation, empirical evidence to system, part to whole obtains in every sphere of human inquiry—and beyond.

3.2—
Perspective and Affective Interpretation

We have seen that foremost among Nietzsche's concerns is a naturalism, the epistemological and ontological consequences of which involve a rejection of the ideals of a God's-eye view and a pre-given world and a rejection of the distinction between appearance and the true world, reality, or the thing in itself. We must now try to offer an account of perspectivism that is faithful both to Nietzsche's explicit texts on the matter and to this thoroughgoing naturalism.

To begin this task, we must find some clue that connects Nietzsche's comments on "perspective" to this larger project. Such a clue appears, I think, in a notion that Nietzsche closely associates with "perspectivity": the notion of interpretation.^[3] To indicate this connection, let us return to the famous passage on perspectivity from the Genealogy of Morals, paying close attention to the relationships between perspective and interpretation. Nietzsche writes:

"[O]bjectivity" [ought to be] understood not as "contemplation without interest" (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability to have one's For and Against under control and to engage and disengage them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations [Perspectiven und Affect-Interpretationen ] in the service of knowledge. Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject"; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as "pure reason," "absolute spirit" [«absolute Geistigkeit»], "knowledge in itself": these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces [die aktiven und interpretirenden Kräfte ], through which alone seeing becomes a seeing-something, are supposed to be

[3] Nietzsche employs a variety of terms for "interpretation"/"to interpret." The most frequently used are Interpretation/interpretieren and Auslegung/auslegen, though Ausdeutung/ausdeuten and Deutung/deuten are relatively common, and Umdeutung/umdeuten ("reinterpretation"/"to reinterpret") is occasionally used as well. Yet Nietzsche does not appear to draw any significant denotative or connotative distinctions among these various terms. Different terms are used in strikingly similar contexts, often in the same passage. The choice of terminology appears to be stylistic rather than semantic.

lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing [ein perspektivisches Sehen ], only a perspective "knowing" [ein perspektivisches «Erkennen» ]; and the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can lend to the thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this—what would that mean but to castrate the intellect? (III: 12)

Here Nietzsche entwines the notion of "perspective" with the notion of "affective interpretation." He claims that a perspective is constituted and directed by a matrix of "active and interpreting forces" that allow something to appear as a particular something. A "perspective," then, would seem to be an ontological and evaluative horizon opened up by the operation of a particular "affective interpretation."^[4]

Sifting through the various texts on perspectivity, one finds a number of passages in which the language of perspective is closely associated with the language of interpretation (e.g., GS 357, 374; WP 5, 556, 565, 590, 616, 617, 678, 804). In §357 of The Gay Science, for instance, Nietzsche alternately speaks of "the Christian interpretation" and "those Christian-ascetic moral perspectives." In §374 of the same text, he alternates between "perspective" and "interpretation" without differentiating between the two, at one point speaking of "the perspective character of existence," at another of "all existence" as "essentially an interpreting existence"; here of the possibility of many different "perspectives," there of the possibility of "infinite interpretations ." In a note from 1885–86, Nietzsche writes that "previous interpretations have been perspective evaluations by virtue of which we can survive in life" (WP 616). In a note from 1886–87, he refers, at one point, to "our perspective 'truths' which belong to us alone" and, at another, to "our human interpretations and values" (WP 565). Finally, in another note from 1886–87, the terms are so imbricated as to become indissociable:

Whether the origin of our apparent "knowledge" is not to be sought solely in older evaluations which have become so much a part of us that they belong to our basic constitution? So that what really happens is only that younger needs grapple with the results of the oldest needs? The world seen, felt, interpreted [ausgelegt ] as thus and thus so that organic life may preserve

[4] See WP 616: "that every elevation of man brings with it the overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every strengthening and increase of power opens up new perspectives and means believing in new horizons—this idea permeates my writings." On the relation between horizons and perspectives, see Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 3, §§13, 19.

itself in this perspective of interpretation [dieser Perspective von Auslegung ]. Man is not only a single individual but one particular line of the total organic world. That he endures proves that a species of interpretation [eine Gattung von Interpretation ] (even though accretions are still being added) has also endured, that the system of interpretation [das System von Interpretation ] has not changed. "Adaptation." Our "dissatisfaction," our "ideal," etc., is perhaps the consequence of this incorporated piece of interpretation, of our perspective point of view [dieses einverleibten Stücks Interpretation, unseres perspektivischen Gesichtspunkts ]; perhaps organic life will in the end perish through it. (WP 678)

The evolutionary hypothesis proposed in this passage notwithstanding,^[5] the close connection it draws between perspective and interpretation is highly important. The basic "needs" and "evaluations" of an organism are said to form an "incorporated" "system of interpretation" that gives the organism a particular "perspective point of view." "Perspectives," then, seem to be "outlooks" directed by "incorporated interpretations," which themselves are "systems of evaluation" made from the standpoint of particular "needs."

Indeed, one finds that the language of "interpretation" is more common and more significant in Nietzsche than the language of "perspective."^[6] Virtually every sphere of human activity—from "morality," to "physics" and "natural science," to "rational thought" in general—is called, in one passage or another, an "interpretation."^[7] Indeed, for Nietzsche, "interpretation" is present wherever there is "meaning" and "value" at all (see GM II: 12; WP 590, 604–6, 616).

Given this, I want to suggest that commentators have been wrong to read Nietzsche's "perspective" language too rigidly (as describing the fixed bounds of a species' knowledge) and too literally or narrowly (as developing a simple analogy between seeing and knowing).^[8] Instead,

[5] Here, Nietzsche hypothesizes that the proper sphere of investigation concerning perspectives and interpretations is organic life as a whole. Elsewhere, he suggests that the proper sphere is that of the species (see GS 354, 374). Still elsewhere, he maintains that perspectives and interpretations are proper to intrahuman groups such as master and slave, Christian and Dionysian, etc. (see, e.g., GM ). I will argue below that the best candidate is this third. For present purposes, suffice it to say that the passage under discussion is a hypothesis rather than a conclusion.

[6] A search through the KGW CD-ROM reveals that "interpretation" terms (see n. 7) appear more than twice as often as "perspective" terms.

[7] On morality as interpretation, see GS 357; TI "Improvers" 1; WP 1, 5, 114, 228, 254, 258, 270. On physics and natural science as interpretation, see BGE 14, 22; WP 682, 689. On rational thought as interpretation, see WP 522.

[8] Heidegger and Mark Fowler also argue against the over-narrow construal of perspectivism as developing an ocular metaphor. Heidegger (Nietzsche, 3: 197–98) writes:"The 'perspective' is never the mere angle of vision from which something is seen; rather, this perspectival vista looks toward 'conditions of preservation/enhancement.' As conditions, the 'viewpoints' posited in such 'seeing' are of such kind that they must be reckoned on and reckoned with . They take the form of 'numbers' and 'measures,' that is, values." Fowler ("Having a Perspective as Having a 'Will': Comment on Professor Conway's 'The Eyes Have It,'" International Studies in Philosophy 23 [1991]: 115) writes: "too often, Nietzsche's ocular metaphors continue to deceive if only by obscuring the centrality that affects have in his theory of perspectivism and, accordingly, what we need is a thorough reinvestigation of the question: What, on Nietzsche's theory, is a perspective?" Fowler goes on to suggest an account of "perspectivism" and "affect" that is very close to my own. See also Fowler, "Nietzschean Perspectivism: 'How Could Such a Philosophy Dominate?'" Social Theory and Practice 16 (1990): 119–62.

I will argue that we should read Nietzsche's "perspective" language within the broader bounds of a general theory of interpretation.^[9] Unlike the notion of "perspective"—which, literally construed, generates serious epistemological difficulties—^[10] the notion of "interpretation" operates within a rich and increasingly important literary and philosophical tradition. Taking what has been called "the interpretive turn,"^[11] philoso-

[9] Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1990), 145ff., also relates the notion of "perspective" to the notion of "interpretation" but draws a sharper distinction between the two notions and assigns them more definite roles. On Schrift's view, "perspectives" are relatively fixed physiological, instinctual, and sociohistorical outlooks, while "interpretations" are the various ways in which these "perspectives" can be organized and hierarchized. Nonetheless, Schrift grants that, "[o]n some level, this distinction will reveal itself to be merely heuristic" (p. 145).

[10] David C. Hoy, "Philosophy as Rigorous Philology? Nietzsche and Poststructuralism," New York Literary Forum 8–9 (1981): 173, and "Nietzsche, Hume, and the Genealogical Method," in Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 24ff., for instance, argues that Nietzsche's language of "perspective" runs into a host of problems and paradoxes and that it should be rejected in favor of the language of "interpretation." Narrowly and literally construed, the language of "perspective" is indeed problematic. However, I disagree with Hoy that Nietzsche's notion of "perspective" is to be taken in this literal sense and thus that the language of "perspective" is incompatible with the language of "interpretation." I am arguing here that Nietzsche construes the notion of "perspective" so broadly that it merges with the notion of "interpretation." Elsewhere, in an explication of Gadamer's hermeneutics, Hoy makes a connection between perspective and interpretation that is quite similar to the one I am urging with regard to Nietzsche. He writes (The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], 51–52): "'Alles Verstehen ist Auslegung,' insists Gadamer repeatedly [ . . . ]; all understanding includes interpretation. This point follows from the necessary situatedness (Situationsgebundenheit ) of understanding. Because an understanding is rooted in a situation, it represents a point of view, a perspective, on what it represents. There is no absolute, aperspectival standpoint [ . . . ] from which to see all possible perspectives."

[11] On "the interpretive turn," see Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, "The Interpretive Turn: Emergence of an Approach," in Interpretive Social Science, eds. Rabinow and Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); David Hiley et al., eds., The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and David C. Hoy, "Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn," in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Prominent figures associated with this "turn" include Martin Heidegger, Hans-GeorgGadamer, Thomas Kuhn, W. V. Quine, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Paul Ricouer.

phers in both the "Continental" and "analytic" traditions have come to argue that our knowledge is not an edifice built upon a foundation of indubitable beliefs but rather an interpretive web of mutually supporting beliefs and desires that is constantly being rewoven.^[12] These philosophers maintain that we are always already immersed in a world full of significances that we pre-theoretically understand and that the role of epistemology is to discover how particular sensory experiences, beliefs, and desires relate to our understanding as a whole, and vice versa.

I argued in the previous chapter that Nietzsche agrees with this turn from foundationalism to holism and the concomitant turn from first philosophy to naturalism. We have just seen that Nietzsche conceives of the understanding as always directed by one or another "interpretation," each of which opens up a particular horizon of meaning and value. He goes on to propose that the world in which we find ourselves is a world of struggle and that this struggle is among interpretations, each of which seeks to overwhelm [überwältigen, überwinden ] others by incorporating their terms into its own and articulating these terms according to its own system. This is how "interpretation" is characterized in an important passage from the Genealogy of Morals . Discussing

[12] The most succinct statement of this view, articulated from a standpoint between hermeneutics and Quinean analytic philosophy, is Richard Rorty, "Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation," in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Also see Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), esp. §§31–33: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., trans. John Cumming and Garrett Barden (New York: Continuum, 1989), esp. 345–66: W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), chap. 2, and "Ontological Relativity," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Donald Davidson, "Radical Interpretation," in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976) and Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978); and Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988). On the connection between hermeneutics and the Quinean strand of analytic philosophy, see Richard Rorty, Pbilosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), chaps. 4–8; Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), chap. 3; Bjørn Ramberg, Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), chaps. 9–10; J. E. Malpas, Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning: Holism, Truth, Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and David C. Hoy, "Post-Cartesian Interpretation: HansGeorg Gadamer and Donald Davidson," in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Hahn (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1997).

the idea of punishment, Nietzsche pauses to "emphasize [a] major point of historical method"—to distinguish the origin of something from its current purpose . He writes:

[T]he cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends [auf neue Ansichten ausgelegt ], taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, becoming master [ein Überwältigen, Herrwerden], and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation [ein Neu-Interpretieren ], an adjustment through which any previous "meaning" and "purpose" are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. However well one has understood the utility of a physiological organ (or of a legal institution, a social custom, a political usage, a form in art or in a religious cult), this means nothing regarding its origin. [  . . . P]urposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function; and the entire history of a "thing," an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations [Interpretationen ] 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 thus 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 the succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing [Überwältigungsprozessen ], plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. The form is fluid, but the "meaning" is even more so. (GM II: 12; cf. GS 58, WP 556, 604, 643, 616)

What is particularly striking in this passage is that what Nietzsche calls "interpretation" extends far beyond what the term ordinarily signifies. He claims that "all events in the organic world" and, indeed, "whatever exists" essentially involves interpretation and that this involvement concerns not only their apprehension by subjects but their very constitution as objects or events . At the end of the section from which this passage is cited, Nietzsche goes so far as to identify "interpretation" with "the essence of life, its will to power, [ . . . ] the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions [die  . . . neu-ausgelegenden, neu-richtenden und gestaltenden Kräfte ]" (cf. BGE 259 and WP 643). Nietzsche is arguing that "thinghood," "eventhood," "history," "development," and "evolution" are, at bottom, only manifestations of "will

to power," the incessant drive for interpretation and reinterpretation, forming and reforming; and that the very origin, history, and growth of "a 'thing'" (whether it be an object, practice, or institution) should be seen as the consequence of its role in a struggle among interpretations, each of which is "aggressive" and "expansive," seeking to increase power and control over its environment.

This same generalization and extension of meaning can also be found in Nietzsche's language of "perspective." Rather than functioning simply as an optical analog, Nietzsche calls upon the term "perspective" to characterize something about life in general—"the perspective optics of life, " he puts it in Beyond Good and Evil (11, my emphasis). Elsewhere in that text, he speaks of "perspective" as "the basic condition of all life" (preface), claiming that "there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective estimates and appearances" (34) and that "the narrowing of our perspective [ . . . is] a condition of life and growth" (188).

We see, then, that Nietzsche's "perspective" language is quite peculiar and ought not to be taken at face value. Not only is the language of "perspective" subsumed under the broader language of "interpretation," but both "perspective" and "interpretation" are generalized far beyond their ordinary senses. "Perspective," for Nietzsche, comes to characterize a particular form of life's^[13] directedness toward the conditions that preserve and enhance it, conditions that are codified in the "interpretation" that directs the perspective.^[14]

This can serve as a rough characterization of the notions of "perspective" and "interpretation" as Nietzsche uses them. Yet many questions still remain. Two sets of questions, in particular, present them-

[13] This Wittgensteinian phrase is felicitous precisely because of its flexibility. It is loose enough to capture the entire range of systems of valuation that Nietzsche considers important (e.g., active and reactive, ascending and descending, weakness and strength, master and slave, Dionysian and Christian, etc.) while refusing to identify perspectives with either the private points of view of individuals or the fixed physico-psychological schemas of biological species. I note that this phrase has circulated in previous discussions of Nietzsche's epistemology. See Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, exp. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 45, 79ff.; Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 63; and Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 52. The term has also been employed by Bernd Magnus in a discussion of Nietzsche's Übermensch, "Nietzsche's Philosophy in 1888: The Will to Power and the Übermensch, " Journal of the His tory of Philosophy 24 (1986 ): 95.

[14] For a somewhat similar assessment, see Martin Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God is Dead,'" The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 71.

selves and demand answers. On the one hand, we are led to ask about the subject of perspectives and interpretations: who or what is it that has perspectives and interpretations? On the other hand, we are led to ask about the object of perspectives and interpretations: what are these interpretations of or perspectives on? Answering these questions will allow us to fill out the schematic characterization of perspectivism presented above. Before turning to Nietzsche's texts, I want first to consider some previous and, I believe, inadequate answers to these questions.

3.3—
The "Subject" of Perspectivism

3.3.1—
Two Recent Accounts

It has become common, in Nietzsche scholarship, to view Nietzsche's epistemological position as a modified version of Kant's.^[15] According to one such account (what, for reasons that will become clear, I call the skeptical neo-Kantian account), Nietzsche accepts Kant's phenomenalism or idealism but gives it an evolutionary rather than a transcendental deduction. That is, what Kant takes to be logically and conceptually

[15] This view was proposed early on by Vaihinger, "Nietzsche and His Doctrine of Conscious Illusion," 84, and has gained currency in recent years. It has been suggested, asserted, or argued for by Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, AntiChrist, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 205ff.; Rüdiger Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977), 53 and passim; George J. Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-in-Themselves," Dialogos 36 (1980): 48, "Nietzsche and the Correspondence Theory of Truth," Dialogos 38 (1981 ): 108, "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," Dialogos 59 (1992): 75–101; Bernd Magnus, "Nietzsche and the Project of Bringing Philosophy to an End," in Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker, ed. Yovel, 52; Schacht, Nietzsche, 62, 83, 139, "Nietzsche's Gay Science, Or, How to Naturalize Cheerfully," in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen Higgins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 79; Eric Blondel, Nietzsche. The Body and Culture, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 98ff.; Steven G. Crowell, "Nietzsche's View of Truth." International Studies in Philosophy 19 (1987): 17 n. 2; Nicholas Davey, "Nietzsche and Hume on Self and Identity," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 18 (1987): 20–21; Daniel W. Conway, "Beyond Realism: Nietzsche's New Infinite." International Studies in Philosophy 22 (1990): 99ff.; Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 121 and passim; Brian Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 351; Stephen Houlgate, "Kant, Nietzsche, and the 'Thing in itself,'" Nietzsche-Studien 22 (1993): 132, 148, and passim; and Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 2–3, 77–78, 85, 90, 95. This view is also implicit, I think, in the distinction between perspectival appearance and the unknowable world "in itself" assumed by Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 96, and Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 26ff.

a priori, Nietzsche, following the neo-Kantian F. A. Lange, sees as having only an evolutionary priority. What Kant argues is necessary and universal for rational thought and experience, Nietzsche views as the contingent product of a particular "physico-psychological organization," itself a result of the natural selection of traits that have proven their practical value for the survival of the species.^[16] Due to their different "physico-psychological" constitutions and organizations, different species can be supposed to have different "perspectives."^[17] On this view, then, the proper subjects of perspectives are biological species.

It is certainly the case that Nietzsche's "perspective" language most frequently appears in contexts that discuss the conditions necessary for particular species (often, human beings) to preserve themselves and to enhance their power (see, e.g., BGE P, 11, 34, 188; WP 259, 293, 616, 678, 789, 904). Yet the interpretation of perspectivism generated by this account commits Nietzsche to a position that, I believe, he does not accept: the skeptical position that every species is in principle unable to apprehend the world as it is in itself and the world as it is apprehended by other species.^[18] Nietzsche does not seem to believe, for example, that there is anything like a specifically human perspective, a unified and coherent totality rigorously differentiable from the "perspectives" of other species. First of all, Nietzsche's naturalism commits him to regard all living beings as, in fundamental respects, similar. He claims, for instance, that the human process of cognition is only a more complex and specialized form of the process of ingestion (or "incorporation" or "assimilation") found in the protoplasm (see WP 500, 501, 510, 511, 654, 666; also see §5.3, below). Indeed, a central theme of Nietzsche's later work is that knowledge is only a form of will to power, the drive to incorporate and subdue found in all organisms and species (see BGE 13, 36; GM II:12; WP 466–617). Second, Nietzsche argues that the human species itself does not have a unified worldview but rather is

[16] See Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-in-Themselves," 33–35. This reading draws on passages such as GS 110, 354, and 374.

[17] See Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche: Critique of Knowledge," Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Routledge, 1991), 44–45, and GS 374.

[18] The more general Kantian metaphysical realism implicit in this account is rejected by Nietzsche's harsh critique of dualism and the notion of the thing in itself. See, e.g., GS 54, 354; TI "Socrates" 2, "Reason" 6, "World" 6; WP 552, 567. This argument against metaphysical realism is presented more fully in chapter 4, below. For a powerful argument against the species interpretation of perspectivism, see Alexander Nehamas, "Immanent and Transcendent Perspectivism in Nietzsche," Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983): 473–94.

divided into a host of antagonistic "perspectives" or "interpretations": e.g., master and slave, Dionysian and Christian, Homeric and Platonic, Roman and Judaic, Goethean and Kantian, and various hybrids of these.^[19] Such differences of perspective, for Nietzsche, are not simply minor differences of opinion; on the contrary, they designate significantly different modes of perception, desire, cognition, evaluation, and action that compose different forms of life.

Thus, rather than demarcating insurmountable divisions between species, perspectives mark both extra- and intraspecies differences and similarities. According to Nietzsche, the biological field is crossed by a continuum of perspectives, none of which is in principle disjoint from another but each of which can be shown to differ from others in important respects and to significant degrees.^[20] The subject of perspectivism, then, must be something other than biological species.

This conclusion is shared by another recent interpretation (what I call the realist neo-Kantian account of perspectivism) that is explicitly "neo-Kantian" while rejecting the skepticism inherent in the species view.^[21] Instead, it construes perspectivism as a doctrine limited to the description of human knowledge. Claiming that the doctrine simply draws an analogy between a commonsense conception of human vision and a commonsense conception of human knowing, this account maintains that the subject of perspectivism is simply the ordinary, individual, human viewer/knower.

Brian Leiter, for example, begins from the obvious premises that "necessarily, we see an object from a particular perspective: e.g., from a certain angle, from a certain distance, under certain conditions," and "the more perspectives we enjoy—the more angles we see the ob-

[19] On master vs. slave, see BGE 260 and GM I. On Dionysian vs. Christian, see EH "Destiny" 9 and WP 1051 and 1052. On Homeric vs. Platonic, see GM III: 25. On Roman vs. Judaic, see GM I: 16. On Goethean and Kantian, see TI "Skirmishes" 49. On the various hybrids of these, see GM I: 16 and BGE 260, and 200. In the oft-cited GM III: 12, Nietzsche argues that we should learn to inhabit "a variety of perspectives and affectire interpretations in the service of knowledge"—which certainly seems to argue against the view that we inhabit only some unified "human" perspective. See WP 339: "This mankind is not a whole: it is an inextricable multiplicity of ascending and descending lifeprocesses [ . . . ] the strata are twisted and entwined together." Cf. Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 261: "Nietzsche holds not only that there are countless varieties of perspectives for countless forms of living process, but also that we human beings inhabit, not one, but a veritable nest of perspectives."

[20] For a more detailed argument to this effect, see Nehamas, "Immanent and Transcendent Perspectivism in Nietzsche," 476–77.

[21] Prominent proponents of this view are Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, and Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals ."

ject from—the better our conception of what the object is actually like will be."^[22] He goes on to argue by analogy that "necessarily, we know an object from a particular perspective: i.e. from the standpoint of particular interests and needs," and that "the more perspectives we enjoy—the more interests we employ in knowing the object—the better our conception of what the object is like will be."^[23] His argument concludes that, contrary to an overzealous skepticism, "we do indeed have knowledge of the world, though it is never disinterested, never complete, and can always benefit from additional non-distorting [cognitive] perspectives."^[24]

According to this account, then, just as there is no visual perspective that in principle is unavailable to us, so too is there no knowledge that in principle escapes our grasp. Unlike the skeptical account, this realist account has the merit of acknowledging Nietzsche's claim that we can and do have access to other perspectives. It suggests that, just as we can gain a new visual perspective on an object of vision by changing our position relative to it, so too can we gain different cognitive perspectives on an object of knowledge by bringing different sets of cognitive interests to bear upon it. Moreover, insofar as it grants the interestladenness of all inquiry, it suggests that we might come to appreciate and acknowledge the legitimacy of perspectival interests other than our own, even if we ourselves do not share them.^[25]

Yet this construal of the subject of perspectivism also runs into difficulties. Foremost among these, I think, is its assumption of a pre-given subject who has perspectives or interpretations. According to the commonsense account of vision called upon by this realist interpretation, when I move around an object, there is a change of perspective but no change of subject; it is the same I that takes up different perspectives . Perspectives are cumulative and thus, too, is knowledge. While I cannot simultaneously inhabit different perspectives, I nonetheless can take up

[22] Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 344. Leiter draws on Clark, whose presentation of this view is more fully elaborated. I draw on Leiter's presentation, because it is more concise and schematic yet, in important respects, the same as that of Clark.

[23] Ibid., 345.

[24] Ibid., 346. Cf. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 134–35.

[25] Leiter ("Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 345–46) says that "there are an infinity of interpretive interests that could be brought to bear" on the object of knowledge. Similarly, Clark (Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 135) writes: "We are, after all, finite creatures with a limited amount of time to discover truths, whereas there are surely an infinite number of truths to discover. We should therefore expect people with different interests to discover different truths."

consecutively a number of different perspectives on the same object and thus gain a richer visual sense of it. The situation is analogous in the cognitive case, according to the realist account. It holds that, although our knowledge is always "interested," we can bring a variety of "cognitive interests" to bear upon an object and thus come to know it better. Once again, across these different sets of "cognitive interests," there is a central, stable subject who consecutively occupies these different sets of interests and thus accumulates a more complete knowledge of the object on which these interests are brought to bear.

This view does, of course, receive some support from the passage privileged by its advocates. After all, in that passage, Nietzsche claims that "There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'; and the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe the thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity,' be" (GM III:12).^[26] This certainly lends some credence to the notion of perspective accumulation proposed by the realist account. Yet this account too narrowly focuses on this passage and, more specifically, on the optical analogy presented in it, to the neglect of more important features of the passage and Nietzsche's other central concerns. As I have indicated, it neglects to discuss the explicit connection between perspective and interpretation developed in this passage, a connection that we have seen to be fundamental to an understanding of perspectivism.^[27] Furthermore—and more important for the present discussion—it fails to account for another central feature of Nietzsche's later work: his critique of the notion of a pregiven subject—what he calls "ego-substance" (TI "Reason" 5).

3.3.2—
Nietzsche's Critique of "Ego-Substance"

A critique of the notion of mental- or subject-substance is found throughout Nietzsche's later work. Though, like many of Nietzsche's

[26] For Leiter ("Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 343), this is "[t]he primary text in [Nietzsche's] mature work in which he does offer a sustained discussion of [perspectives and perspectivism] in an epistemological context," while, for Clark (Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 128), this passage is "the only statement of Nietzsche's perspectivism in [the mature works]."

[27] Leiter ("Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 343) notes that "Nietzsche uses the language of 'interpretation' freely throughout the material published during his lifetime [while] discussions of 'perspectivism' and 'perspectives' are far less frequent." Yet Leiter proceeds to discuss perspectivism without reference to the notion of interpretation.

major ideas, it is never developed at length, this critique appears in much the same form in Beyond Good and Evil, the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and the later Nachlaß (see, e.g., BGE 12, 16, 17, 19, 34, 54; GM I:13; TI "Reason" 5, "Errors" 3; WP 229, 370, 477, 481–92, 531, 545–53, 631–32). Not surprisingly, the critique of ego-substance is a result of Nietzsche naturalism, which is both antimetaphysical (against the posit of any otherworldly entity or explanatory principle) and holistic (against every absolute foundation or origin). Thus, Nietzsche considers theological the belief that there is some "being" or subject-substratum "behind doing, effecting, becoming" (GM I:13). To assume such a being is to posit an otherworldly entity that initiates or produces the happenings, effects, and appearances that constitute the natural world while remaining outside that world, unchanged by its contingencies and exigencies (see TI "Reason" 5, "Errors" 3; WP 487). The notion of ego-substance is also a form of the "myth of the given," what Nietzsche calls the myth of "immediate certainties," those simple, atomic unities that are supposed to serve as the absolute foundation of all being and knowing.^[28] Nietzsche's naturalism rejects the idea that there is any entity that is not essentially dependent upon other entities for its genesis and continued existence and the idea that there is any fundamental, obvious "fact" that need not justify itself by relation to other "facts." For, according to Nietzsche, there are "facts" only against the background of a particular interpretation, and the only entities that exist are natural, that is, essentially relational and contingent, entities (see WP 481; BGE 34; and GM I:13). Thus, in rejecting the foundational presuppositions of "materialistic atomism," Nietzsche also rejects what he calls "soul atomism [ . . . ], the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon " (BGE 12). Such an idea, he claims, is not only super-natural but also fails to account satisfactorily for important features of human psychology, which reveals the human subject to be an amalgamation of competing impulses and drives rather than an atomic unity.^[29]

As Nietzsche himself acknowledges, this critique of mental substance

[28] See BGE 16, 17, 19, 34. Other "immediate certainties" repudiated by Nietzsche are God, the thing in itself, substance, and cause.

[29] True to his naturalism, Nietzsche regards psychology as "the queen of the sciences," "the path to the fundamental problems" (BGE 23), against the Kantian view that claims this role for epistemology and metaphysics.

stems from the critique of that notion by Hume and Kant.^[30] Following Hume, Kant argues that, because the subject or self is not discoverable among the contents of experience, some other justification must be sought for its postulation. Nietzsche takes up this line of thought in Beyond Good and Evil §54. For Nietzsche, as for Hume and Kant, we only ever experience discrete impressions, actions, and effects but never the "subject" that is supposed to have those impressions or initiate those actions and effects.^[31] Yet whereas Kant came to regard the notion of the self as a formal requirement of reason and to posit the antinaturalistic notions of noumenal self and noumenal causality, Nietzsche comes to regard the self as merely a grammatical habit that supports a moral fiction. For the radically empiricist Nietzsche—who maintains neither Kant's distinctions between intuition, understanding, and reason nor Kant's conviction that practical reason must be taken for granted and its postulates deduced—we have justification only for belief in actions, effects, doings, becomings, and appearances; and it is only a "seduction of language" that leads us to posit a "'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything" (GM I:13).^[32] Furthermore, this linguistic habit serves the Christian, moral purpose of making some isolable thing (i.e., a specific subject) responsible and accountable for these actions and deeds. The separation of doer from deed, the subsequent removal of this doer from the conditioned and contingent world of effects and happenings, and, finally, the ascription of a "free will" to this subject serve to isolate some being as responsible for every eventuality and to claim that this being was free to do otherwise.^[33]

Of course Nietzsche also criticizes determinism, the notion of an "unfree will" (BGE 21). But this is not the place to delve into what

[30] On Kant, see BGE 54. Hume is certainly the precursor to Nietzsche's critique of metaphysical conceptions of causality and the self, a fact that Nietzsche seems briefly to acknowledge in WP 550. For more comparison between Hume's and Nietzsche's critiques of the self, see Davey, "Nietzsche and Hume on Self and Identity." For a comparison between Nietzsche's and Kant's critiques of the self, see Schacht, Nietzscbe, 138–40.

[31] For Kant on the phenomenality of "inner sense," see Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929), 87–88, 165–69; for Nietzsche on the "phenomenality of the inner world," see WP 477, 479.

[32] For more on our metaphysical seduction by the subject-predicate form, see BGE 16, 17, 19, 34, 54; TI "Reason" 5; WP 482, 484.

[33] See BGE 21, 219; GM I:13; TI "Reason" 5, "Morality" 6, "Errors" 3, 7–8. According to Nietzsche, human decisions and actions should not be viewed as the result of a detached "free will" possessed by every human being. Rather, they are to be seen as the results of a struggle among competing instincts, drives and desires. On this, see A 14.

would need to be a lengthy discussion of Nietzsche's philosophy of mind and moral theory. I simply want to indicate that a critique of the notion of a pre-given subject-substratum is basic to Nietzsche's naturalism. The point is that to assume the existence of a "free will" behind every action is to assert that the source of the contingent and the conditional is something given and unconditioned, in short, something unworldly. According to Nietzsche, this scenario "deprives becoming of its innocence"—and it is the primary goal of Nietzsche's naturalism to restore the "innocence of becoming."^[34]

3.3.3—
Nietzsche's Conception of Subjectivity:
"The Subject as Multiplicity"

This does not mean, however, that we should alter the subject-predicate structure of our grammar or that we should completely do away with the notion of "subject" (or "soul" or "ego" or "will").^[35] "Between ourselves," Nietzsche writes:

it is not at all necessary to get rid of "the soul" [ . . . ] and thus to renounce one of the most ancient and venerable hypotheses—as happens frequently to many clumsy naturalists who can hardly touch on "the soul" without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal soul," "soul as subjective multiplicity," and "soul as social structure of the drives and affects," want henceforth to have citizens' rights in science. (BGE 12; cf. AOM 17; D 501; WP 490)

Thus, Nietzsche's rejection of the notion of subject as unmoved mover, causa sui, causa prima, or soul atom leads him to construct an alterna-

[34] See 2:3 "Before Sunrise"; TI "Errors" 7–8; WP 552, 787. Nietzsche's relatively few, and always enigmatic, comments concerning free will and determinism might be further elaborated by comparing them with Heidegger's much more substantial discussion of being-in-the-world as a rejection of the Cartesian "worldless subject." See Heidegger's Being and Time and the discussion of these issues by Charles Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 85, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

[35] The terms "subject," "soul," "ego," and "will" are used more or less interchangeably by Nietzsche. He alternately speaks of the soul-atom (BGE 12), the subject-atom (GM I:13; WP 488, 636), and the ego-atom (BGE 17; WP 635), "the soul as subjective multiplicity" (BGE 12), and "the subject as multiplicity" (WP 490; cf. WP 492). In various passages, he identifies "soul" and "subject" (WP 485), the "I" and "the will" (BGE 19), "doer," "will," and "ego" (TI "Reason" 5), "subject," "ego," and "doer" (WP 488). It should be noted that what is often translated as "the ego" is, in German, simply das Ich, "the I."

tive theory of subjectivity. Following a recurrent strategy, he begins by reversing our common linguistic and philosophical habits, arguing that what is primary are actions, deeds, accidents, and becomings rather than subjects, doers, substances, or beings.^[36] A naturalistic theory, Nietzsche contends, must start from these former and construct the latter out of them rather than vice versa. Hence, just as Nietzsche comes to conceive of "a thing" as "the sum of its effects" (WP 551), so, too, does he come to conceive of the subject as the sum of its actions and passions.

Nietzsche's initial premise is that the natural world in which we are situated and that we observe is, first and foremost, a world of becoming, that is, a world of myriad actions, happenings, effects, and appearances. Yet we can and do individuate this becoming into particular sets or assemblages. The subject, Nietzsche argues, is just such an assemblage. Subjectivity in general is characterized by a specific set of activities and appearances; and each particular subject is individuated by a peculiar subset of those activities, by a disposition to act in a particular manner and direction: "'the subject'" he writes, "is [ . . . ] a created entity [ . . . ] a capacity [ . . . ]—fundamentally, action collectively considered with respect to all anticipated actions (action and the probability of similar actions)" (WP 556; cf. WP 485).

Yet, for Nietzsche, the subject is only a relative unity. The unity of the subject is that of a disposition, merely a probability that groups together a range of more or less similar and more or less connected activities for the purpose of simplification and calculation.^[37] Subjects, Nietzsche tells us, are irreducible multiplicities.^[38] The disposition that

[36] This conception is developed more fully by the twentieth-century French Nietzschean Gilles Deleuze, for whom the empirical individual is a "concentration, accumulation, coincidence of a certain number of converging preindividual singularities" (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 63), also called "pure events" or "pure becomings" (The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale [New York: Columbia University Press, 1990]).

[37] See WP 561: "All unity is unity only as organization and co-operation: no differently than a human community is a unity—as opposed to an atomistic anarchy; it is a pattern of domination that signifies a unity but is not a unity." Cf. WP 490.

[38] See BGE 12, 19; WP 488–92, 636, 660. This Nietzschean conception of subjectivity has been advocated more recently by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. See Foucault and Deleuze, "Intellectuals and Power," Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 206, and Foucault, "The Confession of the Flesh," trans. Colin Gordon, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 208.

composes them is itself made up of microdispositions—what Nietzsche variously calls "drives" (Triebe ), "desires" (Begierden ), "instincts" (Instinkte ), "powers" (Mächte ), "forces" (Kräfte ), "impulses" (Reize, Impulse ), "passions" (Leidenschaften ), "feelings" (Gefühlen ), "affects" (Affekte ), pathos (Pathos ), and so on. Starting from the premise that there are, first and foremost, actions, becomings, and appearances, Nietzsche posits "affects"^[39] as the interior states that help to explain and predict these actions, becomings, and appearances.^[40]

These affects are as close as one comes to a "bottom floor" in Nietzsche's multileveled theory of subjectivity. With this hypothesis, he would seem to be arguing that the subject is not an atomic, pre-given unity simply because it itself can be broken down further into component parts. That is, he would seem to be replacing one sort of "subject atomism" with another, taking considerable force away from his critique of "ego-substance."^[41] Indeed, in the Nachlaß, Nietzsche seems to say that the "subjects" of interpretations and perspectives are affects:

[M]oral evaluation is an interpretation, a way of interpreting. The interpretation itself is a symptom of certain physiological conditions, likewise of a certain spiritual level of ruling judgments: Who interprets? —Our affects. (WP 254; cf. D 119; BGE 187, 556)

It is our needs that interpret the world: our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm. (WP 481; cf. BGE 6; GM III:8; Z: 1 "On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions"; WP 567)

Here, Nietzsche seems to argue that every affect is or has a particular "For and Against" (cf. BGE 284) that makes it a kind of instinctive interpretation, a particular manner of construing and responding to its

[39] I use "affect" as a general term to encompass the host of other associated terms, because "affect" seems to combine the active senses of "drive" and "desire" with the more passive senses of "passion" and "feeling." (Heidegger attempts to distinguish these terms from one another, though he grants that Nietzsche himself often equates them and gives no real clues to help us sort out their different senses. See his Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art, trans. David F. Krell [San Francisco: Harper, 1979], 44–53.) Moreover, the term in its various forms (affectus/affectio, der Affekt, l'affect/l'affection ) has a long and rich history in philosophy (from the Scholastics to Spinoza, Kant to Deleuze), rhetoric, and the aesthetics of music.

[40] See BGE 36; WP 619, 635. Note that, in WP 619, the translation should read "an inner world [not 'will'] must be ascribed to it."

[41] This charge is made by Davey, "Nietzsche and Hume on Self and Identity," 23, 26. Deleuze (Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], chap. 2), too, seems to read Nietzsche this way, as positing two basic and irreducible forces: active and reactive.

environing conditions. On the basis of these texts, one could argue that there is a simple answer to the question "who or what is the subject of interpretations and perspectives?" and that this answer is simply: "our affects."^[42]

Yet while affects are in some sense primitive, for Nietzsche, he refuses to conceive of them as entities, much less the atomic, singular, and unified entities that could be the proper bearers of perspectives and interpretations. First of all, on a micro-level, Nietzsche thinks of affects as an organic form of the basic "force-points" posited by Boscovich to replace the materialist atom.^[43] Boscovich maintains that these basic items are "not [ . . . ] particles of matter in which powers somehow inhere"^[44] but dynamic, differential "centers" or nodes within a force-field.^[45] They are, as it were, temporary dams or accumulations of force rather than subsisting entities. Second, on a more macro-level, affects are tendencies and processes ("becomings") rather than definite entities ("beings").^[46] "Fear," "love," "exuberance," "ressentiment," and "envy," for example, are not adequately described as "things"; rather, they are what Nietzsche calls "dynamic quanta of force or drive" that have their specific expression and direction. Third, affects are, by definition, relational: they relate one state of affairs to another. As the terms "drive" and "impulse" suggest, affects are a pulling or pushing of the organism in one direction or another. They are, as it were, the state between two states—what Nietzsche describes as "the state 'towards which ' [der Zustand, von dem weg]" or "the state 'away from which ' [der Zustand, zu dem hin]" (BGE 19). Finally, Nietzsche argues that it makes no sense to speak of an affect in isolation from other affects. We

[42] Sarah Kofman (Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], 93ff., 135ff.) takes this to be Nietzsche's position.

[43] See BGE 12, 36. On Boscovich and Nietzsche's relationship to Boscovich, see chap. 2, n. 30.

[44] Charles C. Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 455, quoted in Kaufmann's note to BGE 12. Gillispie paraphrases the account provided by Michael Faraday (Experimental Researches in Electricity, vol. 2 [New York: Dover, 1965], 290), who brought Boscovich's notion into the mainstream of modern scientific theory.

[45] Cf. Deleuze (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 6): "Every force is thus essentially related to another force. The being of force is plural, it would be absolutely absurd to think of force in the singular." This notion of being as an irreducible plurality is at the heart of Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche.

[46] See WP 556: "One may not ask: 'who then interprets?' for the interpretation itself, as a form of will to power, has existence (but not as a 'being,' but rather as a process, a becoming ) as an affect."

have seen that he considers affects to be, in a rudimentary sense, interpretive. Like the interpretations described in GM III: 12, each affect is or has a "For and Against" [Für und Wider ] "that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm" (WP 481). Yet just as interpretations are always essentially engaged in a struggle with other interpretations, just as each interpretation always begins from and tends toward other interpretations that it reinterprets or by which it is reinterpreted, so, too, each affect is always engaged in a struggle with other affects, each of which "would like to compel the other[s] to accept [it] as a norm." Affects, Nietzsche tells us, are "dynamic quanta in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their 'effect' upon the same" (WP 635, my emphasis).^[47] Indeed, the world is a "becoming," for Nietzsche, precisely because it is composed entirely of these volatile relations. "My idea," Nietzsche writes (speaking here of "bodies," though the same holds for affects and interpretations),

is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (—its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they conspire together for power . And the process goes on—. (WP 636; see chapter 5, below)^[48]

Instead of individual affects, each with its own interpretation or perspective, then, what we encounter are always "unions" of affects. This description comes closer to capturing Nietzsche's idea of "perspective" or "interpretation." While each affect is or has an interpretation in a rudimentary sense, Nietzsche tends to think of interpretations and perspectives as hierarchical aggregates of affects in which some dominate and others are subordinate.^[49] Instead of being the proper subjects of in-

[47] Once again, the language of "dynamic quanta" is the language of "affect" extended to encompass "all efficient force" (BGE 36). What holds for the more general language of "dynamic quanta," therefore, also holds for the subcategory of "affect."

[48] Cf. GS 333, where Nietzsche describes knowledge and understanding as a contract that temporarily settles accounts between struggling drives and relates them to one another in a nonantagonistic way. Cf. also WP 567.

[49] This view of interpretation has recently been suggested by Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, chap. 6, and Fowler, "Nietzschean Perspectivism" and "Having a Perspective as Having a 'Will.'" Fowler ("Having a Perspective as Having a 'Will,'" 115–16) writes: "As I see it, a Nietzschean perspective can be correctly characterized as being a certain configuration of affects—or perhaps better, a certain 'common-wealth of affects.' [ . . . ] which are related in such a way that some of these affects are dominant and so responsible for imposing order on what would otherwise be a chaos of motives and emotions. [ . . . ] A perspective is just a structure of affects governed by a basic dominant affect (or small cluster of them)."

terpretations and perspectives, then, affects turn out to be "subjects" only in a political sense: namely, members of the hierarchical structure of an interpretation.^[50]

This description recalls our earlier characterization of interpretations as systems of evaluation directed by particular needs. But what is it that unifies a particular system and what makes a particular set of needs dominant? Nietzsche tells us that every interpretation and perspective is oriented toward the preservation and enhancement of a specific level of organization in life, from the individual to the group, the species, and life as a whole.^[51] Are the "subjects" of perspectivism, then, perhaps just these particular levels of life? In a sense, the answer is yes; for a particular perspective does represent the "point of view" of a particular type, group, culture, people, and so forth. Yet, once again, these perspectives are never encountered in isolation. That is, we never come across these perspectives independent of the individual human beings to whom they are attributed. And each individual cuts across all the various levels of life: human beings are individuals as well as members of communities, cultures, subcultures, races, classes, genders, nationalities, religions, political parties, and other groups. Thus, on the one hand, we always encounter perspectives within individual subjects, while, on the other hand, individual subjects are aggregates of these perspectives and their forms of life.^[52]

For Nietzsche, the individual subject is an aggregate on at least two levels—what are usually called "the physical" and "the spiritual," "body" and "soul." According to Nietzsche, however, these do not form the two sides of an opposition between different kinds of entity but only mark differences of degree along a continuum from the more

[50] For a similar interpretation, in terms of the will to power, see Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, "Nietzsche's Teaching of Will to Power," trans. Drew Griffin, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 4–5 (1992–93): §3.

[51] "Insight: all estimation of value involves a certain perspective: that of the maintenance of the individual, a community, a race, a state, a church, a faith, a culture" (WP 259). Elsewhere, Nietzsche puts the stress on "enhancement" and "flourishing" rather than "maintenance" and "preservation." See the discussion in §§5.2.3–5.2.4, below.

[52] "[T]he concept 'individual' is an error because every being constitutes the entire process in its entire course (not merely as 'inherited,' but the process itself . . . )" (WP 785).

or less immutable to the more or less mutable.^[53] First, a subject has a quantitative identity insofar as it is born with a basic physical unity: an integral body. Yet even this basic unity and identity are only relative, because, according to Nietzsche, the body itself is "a political structure," "an aristocracy" (WP 660, 490; BGE 259) or "oligarchy" (GM II:1): that is, a hierarchy of organs, tissues, and cells, each of which has a particular role and function. In a healthy body, these various parts fulfill their functions in service of the whole; while in a sick or dying body, this relation of parts to whole (and thus the integrity of the body) is threatened or dissolving.^[54] Furthermore, the relatively pre-given unity of the body is not an eternal verity but the product or result of "interpretation" (in Nietzsche's extended sense of the word), that is, of millennia of evolutionary struggle.

Second, and more important for the present discussion, a subject has a qualitative identity insofar as it is or has a more or less stable "character" or "self." But this unity, too, is an aggregate, and, moreover, one that is intimately related to the physical, bodily aggregate.^[55] Indeed, Nietzsche argues that the organizational unity of the body provides the proper model for theorizing about the "soul," "self," or "subject":

The body and physiology as the starting point: why?—We gain the correct idea of the nature of our subject-unity, namely as regents at the head of a communality (not as "souls" or "life forces"), also of the dependence of these regents upon the ruled and of an order of rank and division of labor as the conditions that make possible the whole and its parts. In the same way, how living unities continually arise and die and how the "subject" is not eternal; in the same way, that the struggle expresses itself in obeying and commanding, and that a fluctuating assessment of the limits of power is part of life. The relative ignorance in which the regent is kept concerning individual activities and even disturbances within the communality is among the

[53] I note that my discussion here owes much to Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, chap. 6, to Davey, "Nietzsche and Hume on Self and Identity" and "Nietzsche, the Self and Hermeneutic Theory," and to Deleuze's work in general. On the notion of the body in Nietzsche and Deleuze, see Paul Patton, "Nietzsche and the Body of the Philosopher," in Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces, ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991), 43–54.

[54] On this process of growth and decay, see WP 647, 678. Also see GM II:12 and WP 643, on "physiological organs" as interpretive constructions.

[55] See Z: 1 "On the Despisers of the Body": "'Body am I, and soul'—thus speaks the child. [ . . . ] But the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body"; and Z: 2 "On Poets": "Since I have come to know the body better [ . . . ] the spirit is to me only quasi-spirit; and all that is permanent is also a mere parable." See also GS P:2 and WP 659.

conditions under which rule can be exercised. [ . . . ] The most important thing, however, is: that we understand that the ruler and his subjects are of the same kind, all feeling, willing, and thinking. (WP 492)

This last remark is important; for it suggests not only that the body presents the appropriate framework for a conception of the self but also that the latter is actually rooted in the former—in the affects, which are at once "physical" and "spiritual," that is, interpretive.^[56] The affects, then, are the point of contact between "body" and "soul." In mirroring formulas, Nietzsche tells us that "the soul" is a "social structure of the drives and affects" (BGE 12), while the "body is but a social structure composed of many souls" (BGE 19). We could summarize this by saying that the self (the physical-spiritual "subject-unity") is a composition of many "souls," each of which has its own perspective, its own arrangement of drives and affects, Fors and Againsts. The self is thus an aggregate of many different perspectives and interpretations, each of which is affective, rooted in the various drives, impulses, desires, capacities, and passions of the body (see GS P:2). The unity of the self is the result of the ordering, organizing, and subordinating power of the dominant affective interpretation(s).

This idea runs throughout Nietzsche's discussions of subjectivity, selfhood, and character. For example, in two related notes from 1884, he writes:

[A]ll sorts of contradictory estimations and therefore contradictory drives swarm within one man. This is the expression of the diseased condition in mankind, in contrast to the animals, in which all existing instincts satisfy very specific tasks—this contradictory creature has however in its nature a great method of knowledge: he feels many Fors and Againsts—he raises himself to justice —to a comprehension beyond the estimation of good and evil . The wisest man would be the richest in contradictions, who has feelers for all kinds of men: and, in the midst, his great moments of grandiose harmony —a rare occurrence even in us!—a sort of planetary movement—. (WP 259)^[57]

In contrast to the animals, man has cultivated an abundance of contrary drives and impulses within himself: thanks to this synthesis he is master of the earth.—Moralities are the expression of locally limited orders of rank in this multifarious world of drives: so that man should not perish through their contradictions . Thus a drive as master, its opposite weakened, refined,

[56] See BGE 19: "we are at the same time the commanding and the obeying parties."

[57] Cf. GS 297 and KSA 11:26[149]: "Justice, as the function of a broad panoramic power that looks beyond the narrow perspectives of good and evil and thus has a broader horizon of advantage —the intention to preserve something that is more than this or that person" (cited in Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:147 [Krell's translation modified]).

as the impulse that provides the stimulus for the activity of the chief drive. The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant "man" shows itself strongest, one finds driving instincts that powerfully conflict with one another [ . . . ], but are controlled. (WP 966; cf. Z: Prologue 3; BGE 284; TI "Skirmishes" 49; WP 881, 933)

Here, as elsewhere, Nietzsche argues that the human subject is a multiplicity. In contrast with animals, who are composed of only a few, very specific, instinctive "perspectives," human beings are far more complex—collections of a vast array of competing instincts, desires, drives, beliefs, and capacities and thus of a vast array of perspectives and interpretations.^[58] Hence, human beings are at once the most "richly endowed" and "the most imperiled" creatures (GM III:13).^[59]

Nietzsche contends that, for the most part, human beings have been unable to master or control the conflict of interpretations and perspectives that rages within them. Pushed and pulled in multiple directions, the majority of human beings have shown themselves to be incontinent, unable not to respond to the myriad stimuli to which they are continually subjected (see BT SC: 1; BGE 212, 258; TI "Socrates" 4, "Morality" 2, "Germans" 5; A 30; WP 778). As a defense against this wanton and painful condition, human beings have resorted to a drastic means of achieving order, control, and power: they have declared the entire range of affects evil and resolved to extirpate them (see GM III:13–14; TI "Morality"; WP 228, 383–88). Though it would appear to be a rather rare and extreme manifestation, Nietzsche argues that it is "one of the most widespread and enduring of all phenomena" (GM III:11; cf. A 8–9). He discerns this kind of evaluation not only in the practices of the religious ascetic but also in those of the rationalist philosopher (who draws an opposition between mind and body and subordinates the latter to the former) and the scholar-scientist

[58] On the struggle for supremacy of the affects, see D 109, 119; Z: 1 "On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions."

[59] Cf. A 14 and WP 684: "The richest and most complex forms—for the expression 'higher type' means no more than this—perish more easily: only the lowest preserve an apparent indestructibility. [ . . . ] Among men, too, the higher types, the lucky strokes of evolution, perish most easily as fortunes change. They are exposed to every kind of decadence: they are extreme, and that almost means decadents. [ . . . ] This is not due to any special fatality or malevolence of nature, but simply to the concept 'higher type': the higher type represents an incomparably greater complexity—a greater sum of co-ordinated elements: so its disintegration is also incomparably more likely. The 'genius' is the sublimest machine there is—consequently the most fragile." Also see GS 301–2; Z: 1 "On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions"; GM I:16.

(who strives for objectivity conceived as "contemplation without interest") (see GM III:12, 23–28). Indeed, "[a]part from the ascetic ideal," Nietzsche maintains, "man, the human animal, had no meaning so far" (GM III:28).^[60]

The ascetic solution is not only extreme but self-defeating. For, in the guise of extirpating the affects and denying the multiplicity of perspectives, it simply endorses one affective perspective and sets it against all the others. It, too, manifests a will to power and thus a privileged interpretation and dominant set of affects. Disgusted with sensuous existence, it plots revenge through the separation of mind and body and the elevation of the "spiritual" and "antinatural" over the bodily and natural. This condition is certainly paradoxical—for it pits a particular will of life against life itself (see GM III:10–13; TI "Morality"), an affect against all affects (see BGE 117), "nature against something that is also nature" (WP 228)—but it is nonetheless prevalent.

This strange phenomenon, Nietzsche argues, is "the expression of the diseased condition in man, " a sign of nihilism, decadence, and the degeneration of life.^[61] In this condition, human beings are primarily reactive and negative. They declare their contradictory nature evil and surmise that there must be a better condition—a good, noncontradictory, extranatural condition and world (see WP 579). Thus, they come to exemplify that unnuanced, binary morality of ressentiment, which declares an other (in this case, the natural and physical) "evil" and consequently infers that it (in this case the spiritual) must itself represent "the good" (see BGE 260 and GM I:10).

However, the contradictory swarm of drives in human beings also presents another possibility. Nietzsche contends that there are rare human beings in whom the many contrary drives, affects, perspectives, and interpretations are managed and organized into a rich and powerful unity (see GM III:14). In such beings, all the affective perspectives and interpretations are allowed to express themselves, but in the service of the whole (see BGE 200; TI "Skirmishes" 49). Such human beings "give style" to their characters. Nietzsche explains:

To "give style" to one's character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then

[60] Cf. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Nietzsche contends that this asceticism is such a pervasive feature that it can be said to characterize humanity as a whole; hence, Zarathustra's condemnation of "man" and call for the "overman."

[61] This theme runs throughout GM III, TI, and the notes on "nihilism" in the later Nachlaß (see WP Book One)

fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large part of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime [Erhabene umgedeutet ]. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. [ . . . ] It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own. [ . . . ] Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style. (GS 290)^[62]

Against the sensualist and relativist who submits indiscriminately to all drives and perspectives, and against the ascetic who attempts to annihilate the passions altogether, Nietzsche opposes the "highest human," who affirms that life is essentially affective and that it essentially involves the will to power (the forming, shaping, organizing, expansive drive of all life). This "highest human" is one capable of incorporating the multiplicity of affective perspectives and employing them in the service of the whole. Thus, Nietzsche says, such a person raises him or herself to "knowledge," " justice," and "an estimation beyond good and evil."

Yet this necessitates a redescription of "knowledge" and "justice." "Knowledge" can no longer mean "objectivity [ . . . ] understood as 'contemplation without interest,'" for this is "a nonsensical absurdity" (GM III: 12) that denies the affective character of life and the affective perspectives and interpretations that are the very conditions for any knowledge whatsoever. Similarly, "justice" can no longer mean the equalization of power, the prevention of struggle, and the insurance of

[62] One finds this same idea throughout Nietzsche's notes of the late 1880s. See, e.g., WP 46, 384, 778, 881, 928, 933, 962ff., 1014. Yet this notion also appears in a much earlier text, where Nietzsche writes: "since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions, and errors, and indeed of their crimes; it is not possible wholly to free oneself from this chain. If we condemn these aberrations and regard ourselves as free of them, this does not alter the fact that we originate in them. The best we can do is confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge of it, and through new, stern, discipline combat our inborn heritage and inplant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate:—always a dangerous attempt. [ . . . ] But here and there a victory is nonetheless achieved, and for the combatants [ . . . ] there is even a noteworthy consolation: that of knowing that this first nature was once a second nature and that every victorious second nature will become a first" (HL 3, pp. 76–77).

peace, for this represents "a principle hostile to life " (GM II:11), because it denies "the relations of supremacy under which the phenomenon of 'life' comes to be" (BGE 19).^[63] Rather, for these "higher types," "knowledge" and "justice" signify the affirmation of affective life and of the organizing force that controls it in the service of the subject as a whole.

There is no better formulation of these aims than the passage on perspectivity cited at the outset. For the "higher types," "knowledge" and "justice" are precisely "the ability to have one's For and Against under control and to engage and disengage them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge" (cf. BGE 212, 284). Such a nuanced, multifaceted estimation is indeed something other than the binary, slavish morality of "good and evil." It points toward a different ethics: a model of practice firmly rooted in the ethos, which affirms difference and variety and extols self-control and fine discrimination in the estimation of the particular passions and actions appropriate for any given situation. Indeed, in this sense, perspectivism might be seen as encapsulating Nietzsche's conception of practical wisdom: it advocates the cultivation of a variety of affective centers within an overall organization (the subject) that is finely attuned to its capacities and environment, aware of the affective perspectives that are appropriate to a given circumstance, and able skillfully to deploy these perspectives as required.^[64]

[63] Jean Granier ("Perspectivism and Interpretation," trans. David B. Allison, in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977], 199) construes "knowledge" and "justice" in just this way, that is, as attempts to see things as they are, to "be true" to a putative ontological ground: "the text of Being."

[64] See TI "Skirmishes" 49, where Nietzsche praises Goethe for conceiving "a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom." This passage and the conception of ethics presented above invite comparison with Aristotle's ethics of areté, phronesis, and megalopsychia . Robert C. Solomon ("A More Severe Morality: Nietzsche's Affirmative Ethics," in From Hegel to Existentialism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987]) draws just such a comparison, arguing that Nietzsche's "affirmative ethics" is much closer to Aristotle's than to any other ethicist in the Western philosophical tradition. A similar comparison is made, with reservations, by Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 193. Walter Kaufmann discusses Nietzsche's debt to Aristotle's ethics in general and, particularly, to his conception of megalopsychia (Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, 4th ed. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974], 382–84 and his note to BGE 212), while Bernd Magnus finds little of Aristotle's notion in Nietzsche ("Aristotle and Nietzsche: Megalopsychia and Übermensch, " in The Greeks and the Good Life, ed. David J. Depew [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980]). Jean-François Lyotard draws on both Nietzsche's perspectivism and Aristotle's phronesis to develop more fully this "postmodern" conception ofethics and justice. See Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), and Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

3.3.4—
The Subject As Interpretation

We can now make explicit the result of this discussion for the issue at hand, the issue of the "subject" of perspectivism. We have seen that the subjects of perspectivism are not simply biological species; for, according to Nietzsche, there is no such thing as, for example, "the human perspective," because the human subject is itself composed of a multiplicity of perspectives formed at the micro-level of affects. We have also seen that the subject of perspectivism cannot be the individual human knower presupposed as atomic and given; for Nietzsche maintains that the human subject is a multiplicity that is constantly being achieved, accomplished, produced, constructed . Moreover, the subject does not have these various perspectives and interpretations; rather, they are what the subject is . According to Nietzsche, the subject is nothing over and above the various physical/spiritual affective perspectives and interpretations—the complexes of belief, desire, action, perception, and thought—that compose it and the relationships between these perspectives and interpretations.

This is not mysterious provided that we take seriously Nietzsche's conception of the subject as a political organization. Every such organization is a more or less temporary union of various individuals and groups that often have different experiences, views, and desires but agree (or are made to agree) about some central ideas, practices, and goals that supervene and serve to unify the membership. The force of the organization resides in the collective power of its members, in their ability to struggle in a particular direction and yet be flexible and responsive to changing circumstances by drawing upon the capacities of individual members or subgroups. There is no organization without these members and no membership without the existence of the organization as a whole.

Nietzsche argues that the subject is just like this.^[65] It is nothing over

[65] Along the lines of Quine's "web of belief," Rorty ("Inquiry as Recontextualization," 93) has described the subject in a similar fashion: as a self-reweaving web of beliefs and desires separate from which there is no subject or "self." Though a Nietzschean orientation is only implicit in their work, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have developed in detail this political model of subjectivity in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

and above the sum and arrangement of the affective perspectives and interpretations that compose it. These are not, and need not be, homogeneous. Indeed, Nietzsche argues that the more heterogeneous they are—provided that they maintain some coherence—the richer and more flexible the whole will be. (This is a basic theme of Nietzsche's later work. See GS 295–97, 344, 373, 375; BGE 212; GM III:12; TI "Morality" 3, 6; WP 259, 410, 600, 655, 881, 933, 1051.) This union, however, is "mortal"; it is a changeable entity. Different circumstances often force the acquisition of new perspectives and/or the loss of old ones, thus altering the overall structure. And if these changes are significant enough, or if particular factions cease to remain subordinate to the whole, that whole is threatened or falls apart. Nietzsche writes:

No subject "atoms." The sphere of the subject constantly growing or decreasing, the center of the system constantly shifting; in cases where it cannot organize the appropriate mass, it breaks into two parts. On the other hand, it can transform a weaker subject into its functionary without destroying it, and to a certain degree form a new unity with it. No "substance," rather something that in itself strives after greater strength, and that wants to "preserve" itself only indirectly (it wants to surpass itself—). (WP 488; cf. GS 290 and WP 715)

We thus discover not only that the human subject is a fabricated entity but that its fabrication takes the same form as that of an interpretation. Recall that, in his highly generalized account of interpretation (GM II:11), Nietzsche writes:

whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it;^[66] all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adjustment through which any previous "meaning" and "purpose" are necessarily obscured or obliterated.

If "all events in the organic world" are submitted to this process, it is not surprising that this description also applies to the formation of subjectivity. Indeed, we find that Nietzsche not only views the subject as a

[66] I take it that "some power superior to it" does not refer to a subject outside the field of interpretation that controls that field from without. Rather, it refers to an affect, perspective, or interpretation—within the general field of interpretative struggle—that is able to dominate and subordinate the previous interpretation by assimilating the old terms into its new system (see, e.g., WP 492). For more on this conception of interpretation, see §5.3.1, below.

multiplicity of micro-interpretations and -perspectives; he also views the subject itself as a macro-interpretation. The point is simply that, for Nietzsche, interpretation goes all the way down and all the way up. Rather than positing the subject as something outside the realm of interpretation, something that stands behind and fabricates interpretations, Nietzsche maintains that the subject itself is fabricated by and as an interpretation. Thus, the famous passage that claims that there are no facts but only interpretations, concludes:

"Everything is subjective," you say; but even this is interpretation [Auslegung ]. The "subject" is nothing given [nichts Gegebenes ], but something added, fabricated, and stuck behind [etwas Hinzu-Erdichtetes, Dahinter-Gestecktes ].—Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter [Interpreten ] behind the interpretation [Interpretationen ]? Even this is fiction, hypothesis. (WP 481)^[67]

3.4—
The "Object" of Perspectivism

Nietzsche thus reverses our grammatical and philosophical conceptions of the primacy of the subject. At the beginning of our analysis, we saw that, instead of first positing a given subject who then acts or is acted upon, Nietzsche argues that what is primary are those actions and passions and that the subject is constructed after the fact as a particular configuration of these. At the end of our analysis, we saw that this reversal extends to the notions of interpretation and perspective: instead of first positing a given subject who then acquires various perspectives and interpretations, Nietzsche maintains that interpretation is primary and that the subject is itself an effect of interpretation.

This conception inveighs against the view that the subjects of perspectivism are biological species that have, through evolution, acquired a fixed interpretation or perspective, because, for Nietzsche, the process of interpretation resists this fixity and, instead, involves the constant acquisition and/or forfeiture of perspectives and interpretations. It also inveighs against the view that the subjects of perspectivism are ordinary human knowers conceived of as pre-given entities that then acquire perspectives and interpretations, because, for Nietzsche, "the subject is

[67] Cf. BGE 34: "Why couldn't the world that concerns us —be a fiction? And if somebody asked, 'but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?'—couldn't one answer simply: why? Doesn't this 'belongs' perhaps belong to the fiction, too? Is it not permitted to be a bit ironical about the subject no less than the predicate and object?" Also cf. WP 556.

nothing given, but something added, fabricated, and stuck behind" (WP 481). In short, for Nietzsche, the subject is a piece of the incessantly transformative process of interpretation rather than something other than, outside of, or prior to interpretation.

But Nietzsche's conception of interpretation no less alters our everyday and philosophical views about objecthood . On my reading, Nietzsche's theory of interpretation holds that objects are nothing given but that they, too, are only ever constructions of one or another interpretation. While it is often granted that Nietzsche rejects some form of the given, commentators have been reluctant to ascribe to Nietzsche the radical and thoroughgoing holism that, I believe, is warranted.^[68] Before offering my own account of Nietzsche's perspectivist theory of objecthood, then, I want briefly to return to the accounts of perspectivism considered above. Doing so will allow us to determine both where these accounts are supported by Nietzsche's texts and where those texts render these readings problematic and call for an alternative view.

3.4.1—
Objecthood, Becoming, and the "Chaos of Sensations"

In order for there to be perspectives or interpretations, there presumably must be some object upon which there are perspectives, or some primary "text" that provides the impetus for the various interpretations. Prima facie, that is, the notions of perspective and interpretation seem to rely upon some notion of "the given." Since Kant, philosophers have come to identify two forms or levels of "the given": one can regard "the given" ontologically as the objects or "world out there" that we come to know (Kant's "thing in itself" or "noumenal world"); or one can regard it epistemologically as the immediate contents of perceptual awareness, the "sense data" that provide the raw material for conceptual understanding (Kant's "sensuous intuition"). While one may not be able precisely to isolate these "given" elements in experience, it is said that, nonetheless, they are necessary to avoid the untenable position Kant called "empirical idealism," according to which there exists

[68] The exceptions, perhaps, are Schacht, Nietzsche, 140–56, and Nehamas, "Immanent and Transcendent Perspectivism in Nietzsche" and Nietzsche: Life as Literature . See also Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 328 n.

no ontologically distinct world to serve as the object, source, and goal of our knowledge.

According to the skeptical account of perspectivism, Nietzsche's view also relies upon these "given" elements in experience. The skeptical reading acknowledges that Nietzsche rejects Kant's notion of the thing in itself insofar as this notion falsely ascribes the intraphenomenal predicates of unity and individuation to an extraphenomenal world.^[69] Yet it maintains that Nietzsche nonetheless posits the existence of a chaotic, undifferentiated "given" that provides the material for conceptual knowledge. This "given" is seen as taking one of the two forms mentioned above: what is "given" to knowledge is either the "world of becoming" or the "chaos of sense impressions."^[70]

There is, of course, some evidence for this view. Nietzsche's later texts often claim that "logic," "grammar," and "the categories of reason" "falsify" or "simplify" something more basic, to which these descriptions do not properly apply.^[71] Thus, he writes that "We operate only with things that do not exist: lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divis-

[69] See, e.g., Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 89, 96–97, and Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, 2, 18, 30, 53, 67–68. For Nietzsche's rejection on these grounds of Kant's thing in itself, see HH 16 and WP 553–54.

[70] Thus, on the one hand, skeptical accounts construe this "given" ontologically as: "the world of 'shifting,' 'evanescent' becoming" (Vaihinger, "Nietzsche and His Doctrine of Conscious Illusion," 84), "sheer, undifferentiated flux," "swirling complexity," "a blind, empty, structureless, thereness," "a primal undifferentiated Ur-Eine " (Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 89, 96, 97), "the chaotic being of a groundless depth" (Granier, "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos," trans. David B. Allison, in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977], 139), "a chaotic becoming," "the everchanging stream of becoming which is the world" (Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, 30, 32), the "unintelligible flux of becoming," "the radical flux of becoming" (Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative, 25, 169), "becoming in itself," "an evanescent stream of becoming" (Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-in-Themselves," 54, "Nietzsche and Boscovich's Natural Philosophy," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62 [1981]: 80), "a self-contradictory world of becoming and change" (Willard Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche," International Studies in Philosophy 16 [1984]: 5), "an a-cosmic, unimaginable, unknowable chaos of power-centers" (Babich, "Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Scientific Power: Will to Power as Constructive Interpretation," International Studies in Philosophy 22 [1990]: 83). Or, on the other hand, these accounts construe this "given" epistemologically as "an archaic strata of sense" (Granier, "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos," 137), "the 'flux' or 'continuum' of sensation," "the sensory manifold" (John T. Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics and Epistemology [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974], 133, 149), "the formless, unformulable world of the chaos of sensations" (Babich, "Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Scientific Power," 83, citing WP 569), "a presumed, chaotic 'manifold' of sensory impressions" (Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche: Critique of Knowledge," 35).

[71] These themes can also be found in Nietzsche's early work, particularly in TL .

ible time spans, divisible spaces" (GS 112), with "erroneous articles of faith," which assert "that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies," and so on (GS 110). Nietzsche also asserts that it is only "the prejudice of reason" that "forces us to posit unity, identity, permanence, substance, thinghood, being" (TI "Reason" 5) and thus "to impose upon becoming the character of being" (WP 617). "Being," however, "is an empty fiction" (TI "Reason" 2), and the philosopher's "world of being" is simply an imaginary world (WP 570; cf. TI "Reason" 6).

Such descriptions are "lies" (TI "Reason" 2), it seems, insofar as they cover over the "manifold one-after-another [vielfaches Nacheinander ]," the "continuum," and "flux" that "in truth we are confronted by" (GS 112). "Continual transition forbids us to speak of 'individuals,'" Nietzsche writes, "the 'number' of beings is itself in flux" (WP 520). This "flux" is sometimes spoken of ontologically as "a world of becoming [eine werdende Welt ]" (WP 517, 520), "becoming [das Werden ]" (WP 617), or "chaos" (GS 109; WP 515, 711), while, at other times, it is spoken of epistemologically as the "chaos of sense-impressions," "the chaos of sensations" (WP 569), "a chaos of ideas" (WP 508), "the medley of sensations [der Sensationen-Wirrwarr ]" (WP 552), "the multiplicity of sensations [das Vielerei der Sensationen ]" (WP 517), or "the motley whirl of the senses [der bunte Sinnen-Wirbel ]" (BGE 14).

Moreover, in these passages, Nietzsche often makes use of the Kantian distinctions between the knowable and the unknowable, form and matter, and the active and passive faculties. For Kant, knowledge is the result of an active imposition of the forms of sensibility and categories of the understanding upon the unknowable world in itself that is given to our sense receptivity. Similarly, Nietzsche often seems to claim that knowledge is the result of the active imposition of form upon the "chaos of sensations" or an unknowable "world of becoming."

The material of the senses adapted by the understanding, reduced to rough outlines, made similar, subsumed under related matters. Thus the fuzziness and chaos of sense-impressions are, as it were, logicized . (WP 569; cf. GS 354)

The character of the world of becoming as unformulable, as "false," as "self-contradictory." Knowledge and becoming exclude one another. (WP 517)

A world of becoming could not, in the strict sense, be "comprehended" or "known"; only to the extent that the "comprehending" and "knowing" intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, built out of nothing but appearances but become firm to the extent that this kind of appearance has

preserved life—only to this extent is there anything like "knowledge," a measuring of earlier and later errors by one another. (WP 520)

It thus seems that to know, for Nietzsche, is "to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require" (WP 515), "to impose upon becoming the character of being" (617).^[72]

These passages do lend credence to the view that Nietzsche conceives of the structure of knowledge in Kantian terms. Such a reading would certainly equivocate his own rejection of the appearance/reality distinction and put into doubt his expressed commitment to the primacy of the this-worldly (see, e.g., GS 54; TI "Reason" 2, 6, "World" 6; WP 552, 567), for it would commit him to the view that the world we know—the world of our experience—is built upon another, unknowable, primary, and pre-given world of becoming or chaos.

Yet there is another way to read these passages. This new reading would show that the above-cited passages are not only consistent with Nietzsche's naturalism but that they also repudiate the epistemological and metaphysical claims of Kantianism. On this reading, these passages simply continue the argument against the "prejudices" and "idiosyncrasies" of the metaphysicians, namely "their lack of historical sense; their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism" (TI "Reason" 1–3); their habit of "confusing the last and the first" (TI "Reason" 4–6); their "faith in opposite values" (BGE 2; cf. HH 1); their belief in the "fictions" of "'pure reason,' 'absolute Geistigkeit, ' ^[73] 'knowledge in itself,'" and "a 'pure, will-less, painless, timeless, knowing subject'" (GM III: 12); and their "faith in immediate certainties" (BGE 16, 34; cf. WP 406–9).

One can read Nietzsche's comments concerning the primacy of becoming as empirical and phenomenological claims.^[74] As such, Nietzsche simply wants to direct our attention to the fact that the world in

[72] It should be said that, in WP 515, Nietzsche actually claims that such schematization and imposition of form is not "knowledge." The passage runs: "Not 'to know' but to schematize—to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require . . . the need, not to 'know,' but to subsume, to schematize, for the purpose of intelligibility and calculation.—" Yet Nietzsche is not arguing that there is no such thing as knowledge. He is only arguing that there is no such thing as knowledge "in the strict sense" (WP 520), that is, knowledge conceived as a passive mirroring of the world. Against such a view, this passage and those that surround it are concerned to argue that there is knowledge only as the active imposition of form (see WP 517, 520).

[73] I take this to be a reference to Hegel's notions of "Absolute Spirit" and "Absolute Knowing."

[74] This idea is discussed further below, in §4.5.

which we live—and of which we ourselves are inescapably a part—is continually undergoing change and transformation. Physical objects that the naked eye perceives to be stable and durable are, when viewed microscopically, shown to be a swarm of molecules and, when viewed over large time spans, are shown to be undergoing various processes of expansion, contraction, reorganization, disintegration, decay, and so forth.^[75] Moreover, though we always retrospectively construct ourselves as unified and self-same entities, we are, in fact, always enmeshed in physical processes of growth, procreation, degeneration, and death and find ourselves to be an intellectual, psychological, and spiritual battleground of competing beliefs, desires, impulses, and needs.

Our perception, thought, and memory are carried along in this stream of lived experience. We have this perception or thought, then that. We attempt to unify and systematize these perceptions, thoughts, and memories, yet some of them slip away, either through passive forgetting or active repression. We constantly measure the new against the old, and vice versa, each time coming to a temporary equilibrium before this stability is again disrupted by a new experience, a memory, or both. Never do we achieve absolute knowing, the ideal point of totalization or stasis when "all reports are in" and all of them are in perfect order. Nor does the world ever stop its incessant movement and alteration to allow us to summarize, calculate, and totalize it. Measured according to the ideal of an absolute knowledge that comprehends a fixed and stable world of being, our knowledge of the world and the world we know are "false." Thus, Nietzsche writes: "The world that concerns us is false, i.e., is no fact, but rather a fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is 'in flux,' as something becoming [etwas Werdendes ], as an ever-shifting falsehood that never nears the truth: for—there is no 'truth'" (WP 616; cf. WP 542–43).

This is not a lament. It expresses neither the nostalgia for a lost truth nor the hope for a truth to come. On the contrary, it is an affirmative renunciation of "truth" conceived as the final comprehension of a world of being. Along with this renunciation comes a revaluation of the world we know and of our knowledge itself, an affirmation of the ever-

[75] For an empirical construal of Nietzsche's language of "becoming," see Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 244, 268, 271, 281. In "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche: Critique of Knowledge," 42 and passim, and "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," 94 and passim, Stack also makes this point but then goes on to draw the unwarranted conclusion that this entails a sort of skepticism.

changing and transforming world in which we exist as entities whose knowledge, too, is always relative to particular horizons that are forever shifting.

Of course, Nietzsche realizes that we do not experience the world as a radical flux. But he argues that this is because we have biologically and socially inherited and constructed elaborate conceptual and linguistic edifices that serve, at least partially, to simplify and stabilize ("logicize," "falsify") the actual fluidity of our experience. Once again, we should not read this as some nostalgia for a lost world of becoming. On the contrary, Nietzsche greatly admires this tendency of humanity and these edifices themselves, arguing that they represent the "genius of the species" (GS 354) and show humanity to be "a mighty genius of construction, [that] succeeds in piling up an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water" (TL p. 85). "In this man is greatly to be admired," he writes, "but not on account of his drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things" (TL p. 85).

Nietzsche's contention that such structures are "false" is not a claim that something else—for instance, the world of becoming—is true. Here, as elsewhere, he makes polemical use of the terms "true" and "false," reversing the assignments given to them within the old schema that he is attempting to dismantle. Contrary to the metaphysicians, he argues, such edifices do not grant us "the truth" conceived of as the total comprehension of a stable world of being. In this sense, then, they are "false." But that is because such "truth" is not forthcoming, and such "falsity"—such provisional and pragmatic horizons—is all we ever have, "for—there is no 'truth.'" Nietzsche's aim here is to show that, contrary to the metaphysical view, our conceptual and linguistic edifices ought not to be set over and against becoming and do not provide us with a glimpse of another "true world." Rather, they themselves are a part of becoming: that is, they are themselves instances of the construction and inhabitation of provisional, conditional, and contingent horizons that satisfy important needs and desires.

With this in mind, we can provide alternative renderings of the passages that seemed to give credence to the skeptical view. Will to Power §517, then, might be reread in the following manner:

The character of the world of becoming as unformulable, as "false," as "self-contradictory." [We can never stabilize and totalize from without a world that is in constant transition and of which we ourselves are a part.]

Knowledge and becoming exclude one another. [Conceived as the totalizing comprehension of a world of being, knowledge will be confounded by the world of becoming in which we live.] Consequently, "knowledge" must be something else: there must first of all be a will to make knowable, a kind of becoming must itself create the deception of beings . [If we want to maintain some notion of knowledge, we must conceive it differently. Instead of setting it over and against "becoming," we should see it as itself "a kind of becoming," as a process within becoming—as an active interpretation rather than a passive mirroring, as the will of living beings to select from, simplify, and stabilize their world so as to insure their self-preservation and/or -enhancement. Such a simplification and stabilization constitutes a "deception" insofar as it is not uniquely correct, for there are other purposes toward the satisfaction of which one might construe the world differently; and there is no construal that conjoins all possible purposes.]

Similarly, we might translate Will to Power §520 as follows:

[A world of becoming could not, in the strict sense, be "comprehended" or "known" [again, Nietzsche declares that knowledge, conceived as the full comprehension of things-in-themselves, is a bankrupt ideal]; only to the extent that the "comprehending" and "knowing" intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, built out of nothing but appearances but become firm to the extent that this kind of appearance has preserved life—only to this extent is there anything like "knowledge"; a measuring of earlier and later errors by one another. [What is given to knowledge is never "things as they are in themselves" but only previous appearances, previous interpretations, previous formulations of the world that are oriented toward some purpose or another (cf. GS 57–58). Knowing, then, becomes the weighing against one another of these interpretations, which, since they are not "truths," can polemically be called "errors."]

Finally, we might reread Will to Power §569 as follows:

The antithesis of the phenomenal world is not "the true world," but the formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations—another kind of phenomenal world, a kind "unknowable" for us. [ . . . ] The question is whether there could not be many other ways of creating such an apparent world. [What is excluded from the apparent world of our knowledge is not some "real, true, world in itself," but simply another apparent world, another arrangement of appearances. As Nietzsche writes in a note from the same period: "The 'real world,' however one has hitherto conceived it—it has always been the apparent world once again "(WP 566; cf. TI "Reason" 6). To put this another way, we might say that the world outside of our rational interpretation is not a fact or a given, but simply the world as fabricated by another interpretation. The latter might be "unknowable for us" in the sense that it does not conform to the rational structure of our ordinary experience (e.g., the indeterminate world of quantum mechanics or the

world of the artist's manipulation),^[76] but this does not rule out its actuality. In fact, Nietzsche wants to encourage such alternative constructions, especially aesthetic ones, and to insist that the more perspectives and interpretations we can construct, the richer our knowledge will be.]^[77]

Thus, Nietzsche's apparent oppositions between becoming and being, the world as it is known and the world as it is really is, turn out to be no oppositions at all. The world of becoming is nothing other than the world in which we live and of which we have experience; and being and knowledge are not opposed to but are indeed modes of this becoming. If Nietzsche occasionally reverses the standard metaphysical oppositions, this is to be seen as a polemical strategy directed against metaphysicians who are quick to sever being from becoming, reality from appearance, and to elevate the former to the status of Reality, Being, and Truth. Nietzsche's polemics on the part of becoming, appearance, and error, then, are to be seen not as skeptical hypotheses but as sobering reminders of our contingency and conditionality and affirmations of our creative power.

3.4.2—
Ordinary Objects and Human Finitude

The realist account of perspectivism also acknowledges that "perspectivism" seems to require that there be something given to our perspectives; yet it maintains that this relationship between subject and object ought not to be construed skeptically. For this account holds that Nietz-

[76] Think, for instance, of the way in which the dreamlike spatial and temporal manipulations made possible by cinema are "understandable," though such effects are "irrational" in comparison with our ordinary experience. This is precisely Nietzsche's point in "On Truth and Lies," where, against "the rational man of science," he sets "the intuitive man of art" for whom "anything is possible at each moment," "every tree can suddenly speak as a nymph, [ . . .  ] a god in the shape of a bull can drag away maidens," "and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods," "as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams" (p. 89).

sche rejects skepticism with the same stroke as he rejects the thing in itself. The object of perspectivism, then, cannot be some unknowable "becoming" or preconceptual "chaos of sensations" but must be something readily available to our knowledge.

However, according to the realist account, Nietzsche also rejects idealism. As such, the object of perspectivism cannot itself be a representation but must be something independent of our knowledge and its representations. This account thus comes to hold that the objects of perspectivism are simply the "ordinary," "commonsense" things of our everyday experience.^[78] And this makes perspectivism "an obvious and nonproblematic doctrine."^[79] Thus, Maudemarie Clark writes:

The perspectivist metaphor does invite us to think of a thing that is independent of the perspectives on it. If the same thing can be seen from different perspectives, its existence is not reducible to the existence of representations. It must be an extramentally existing thing, a thing with its own foothold in reality. Such a thing has existence in itself, as opposed to having only the kind of existence Berkeley or Schopenhauer would grant it: existence as a representation or appearance, existence in relation to a mind . However, this does not make it a thing-in-itself. The possession of extramental existence (existence in itself ) is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a thing-in-itself. What is required is rather an essence in itself, an essence or nature that is independent of what it can appear to be. The affirmation of an independently existing thing (common sense realism) will seem to affirm a thing-in-itself (metaphysical realism) only if one conflates the thing/appearance and the reality/appearance distinctions. Given that conflation, it follows that a thing with extramental existence, that is, a thing that is independent of its appearances, must possess a reality that is independent of how it appears. [ . . .  ] Without this conflation, we have no basis for assuming that an extramentally existing thing has a reality that is independent of how it can appear (i.e., that it is a thing-in-itself). Nietzsche's use of the metaphor of perspective helps us to see the conflation for what it is. It sets an independently existing thing over against the perspectives on it, but it does not thereby commit him to the existence of a thing-in-itself, for it equates the latter with something completely contradictory (what something looks like from nowhere).^[80]

[78] See Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 107, 121.

[79] Ibid., 135. Cf. Leiter ("Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 351–52): "perspectivism turns out to be much less radical than is usually supposed: we get, as one writer recently put it, 'a Nietzsche who is merely rehashing familiar Kantian themes, minus the rigor of Kant's exposition.' [ . . . ] Yet this is not a problem, particularly since Nietzsche's primary concerns lie elsewhere," namely, "with philosophical theories of agency and value." Leiter's reference is to Ken Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 49.

[80] Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 136–37.

In a similar vein, Brian Leiter writes that Nietzsche's perspectivism urges us to

give up [ . . . ] the metaphysical construal of the epistemic notions in our practice: e.g., the idea that truth might be glossed in a metaphysically realist sense, as that which is available from no perspective at all (i.e., independent of all human interests); or conversely, the vulgar idealist gloss that it is nothing other than what particular human interests take it to be. A metaphysical realism of this sort is rendered unintelligible because human interests are conditions of anything being true or knowable (whereas the metaphysical realist would have truth transcend all human interests). And a crude idealism is avoided because: interests are only conditions of our knowledge of objects; hence particular interests are not constitutive of objects. So just as it is a condition of seeing a thing that we see it from some perspective, so too it is a condition of knowing that we do so from the perspective of some interest (need, affect). Similarly, this epistemic interest—like the analogous visual perspective—determines what piece of the object of knowledge we pick out. But the object of knowledge is never constituted by that or any other particular interest. In that sense, it remains an independent object. Yet it is not—and this is the key point—a transcendent object, i.e. a thing-in-itself. For the thing-in-itself is the thing that would transcend all possible perspectives on it; but the thing—the object of knowledge— as conceived by Nietzsche would not be left over after all possible perspectives were taken. It would just be a thing itself (not in-itself).^[81]

In short, the objects of perspectivism, according to the realist account, are simply the ordinary things with which we are acquainted in our everyday experience. Every such thing "is independent of its appearances," since it is not constituted by our perspectives; though it has no "essence or nature independent of what it can appear to be," since essence or nature is, presumably, attributed to it by our perspectives and interests. In other words, while it is a condition of our knowledge that we know the thing "from somewhere," this knowledge is not constitutive of the object, which has an existence of its own.

If we always know the object "from somewhere," there are an infinite number of such "somewheres," an infinite number of perspectives on the object. Hence, the force of the "metaphor of perspective," according to the realist account, is that human knowledge is necessarily finite. Clark writes:

Our capacity for truth is limited [ . . . T]here are always more truths than any human being can know. We are, after all, finite creatures with a limited

[81] Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 350.

amount of time to discover truths, whereas there are surely an infinite number of truths to discover. We should therefore expect people with different interests to discover different truths (as well as many common ones). Our interests will determine where we look, and therefore what we see.^[82]

Similarly, Leiter argues that one of the central features of Nietzsche's perspectivism is the "Infinity Claim," which stipulates that: "We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of knowledge (there are an infinity of interpretive interests that can be brought to bear)."^[83] He concludes that, for Nietzsche, "we do indeed have knowledge of the world, though it is never disinterested, never complete, and can always benefit from additional non-distorting perspectives."^[84]

We see that the realist account duly attempts to respect Nietzsche's critique of ontological and epistemological dualism. Yet this account is problematic for two reasons. First, it harbors a fatal contradiction. Both Clark and Leiter argue that, while the object of perspectivism does have its own independent existence, it does not have an "essence," "nature," or "reality" of its own. Yet both commentators are concerned to counter the claim "that reality holds no epistemic constraint on our interpretations of the world."^[85] They maintain that the goal of knowledge is "to correspond to [the independently existing world], that is, get it 'the way it is,'" or "know about its actual nature."^[86] But one cannot have it both ways. If the independently existing thing or world has no "essence," "nature," or "reality" of its own, then it cannot constrain our various attributions to it of "essence" or "nature." If, however, it does so constrain our perspectival attributions, then it must have some "essence" or "nature" of its own—that is, it must be, in Clark's and Leiter's terms, a "thing-in-itself," making it objectionable on all accounts.

Second, and more important for this discussion, the realist account is not supported by Nietzsche's texts. Once again, this account assumes the ordinary distinctions between knower and known, subject and object, perspective and thing—distinctions that Nietzsche relentlessly

[82] Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 135.

[83] Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 345–46.

[84] Ibid., 346, cf. pp. 350–51.

[86] Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 39; Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 345.

challenges. The view that the objects of perspectivism are simply ordinary, independently existing things is nowhere found in Nietzsche. On the contrary, he vigorously argues against this view. In The Gay Science, we find that only "erroneous articles of faith" cause us to hold "that there are enduring things; that there are identical things; that there are things" (110). And in Twilight of the Idols, he exposes "the lie of thinghood" ("Reason" 2), arguing that it is only "the metaphysics of language" and "the prejudice of reason"—a projection of the "faith in the ego-substance"—that "forces us to posit [ . . . ] thinghood" ("Reason" 5; cf. TI "Errors" 3 ). Moreover, he rejects the distinction between independent existence and attributed essence, maintaining that "[i]f I remove all the relationships, all the 'properties,' all the 'activities' of a thing, the thing does not remain over; because thingness has only been fabricated by us [ . . . ] to bind together the multiplicity of relationships, properties, activities" (WP 558).^[87]

Clark acknowledges that such passages might seem to put the realist interpretation in question. Yet she contends that they reject only "the metaphysical concept of a substance, the concept of an unchanging substrate that underlies all change" and not "the ordinary concept of a thing," "the common sense idea of an enduring thing or substance."^[88] The above-cited passages from Nietzsche clearly do reject the former, "metaphysical" conception of a thing. But Nietzsche does not make Clark's distinction between this "metaphysical" conception and an "ordinary" or "common sense" conception of thinghood. One might see this lack of distinction as simply intellectual carelessness on Nietzsche's part. Yet I think it is something else and that this points to a deep difference between Nietzsche's ontology and the commonsense realist account of it.

This difference becomes apparent once we consider Nietzsche's comments on the "lie of thinghood" within the larger framework of his theory of "interpretation," which we have seen to be so central and pervasive in his later work. In this light, we see that Nietzsche's perspectivism accepts neither the world of commonsense realism nor the thesis that this world is infinite and our knowledge of it finite. On the contrary, we

[87] Though both Clark and Leiter take only the published work as worthy of consideration, this passage from the Nachlaß seems to me simply an extension of the passages from the published work quoted in conjunction with it.

[88] Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 107, 121.

come to see that, for Nietzsche, there is no sense in speaking of "the world" outside of every interpretation and that the plurality of such interpretations follows not from "the world" being too much but from it being too little.

3.4.3—
Objecthood as Interpretive Construct:
Nietzsche Versus Idealism and Realism

Nietzsche conceives of the thing in itself in a twofold sense, both of which he rejects. On the one hand, he construes it in the Kantian sense: as a general posit naming that which gives content to our knowledge but which exists outside the structure of this knowledge. In this sense, the thing in itself is distinguished from the thing as it appears to our knowledge (see, e.g., GS 54; WP 553–54). Yet Nietzsche also thinks of the thing in itself more literally, as akin to the Cartesian conception of substance, namely, the pre-individuated, self-identical, unconditional, independently existing thing.^[89] In this sense, the thing in itself is distinguished from the conditional or relational thing (see, e.g., WP 555–60).

This latter construal is not simply a misreading of Kant.^[90] Nietzsche wants to extend his critique of the distinction between the thing in itself and appearance to a critique of the distinctions between substance and attribute, the absolute and the relational, the unconditional and the conditional. All the former terms, he argues, name entities and notions that are perniciously super-natural and metaphysical. Never in our experience of the natural world do we come across absolute and unconditional entities or things as they are in themselves. Everything we know to exist owes its genesis and continued existence to its dependence upon, and relations with, other things, forces, and events, past and present. Indeed, it is logically impossible for us to encounter such absolute

[89] Thus, Descartes (Principles of Philosophy, in Descartes: Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971], 192), writes: "We can mean by substance nothing other than a thing existing in such a manner that it has need of no other thing in order to exist." Cf. the reply to Arnauld ("Reply to the Fourth Set of Objections," in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967], 101): "Really the notion of substance is just this—that which can exist by itself, without the aid of any other substance."

[90] A charge leveled by Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche, 120, and Houlgate, "Kant, Nietzsche, and the 'Thing in Itself,'" 128.

and unconditional things, because such an encounter would place them in a conditional relationship to us.^[91] If things in themselves and absolute, unconditional things do not and cannot exist in our contingent, conditional, and relational world, they must exist in another world. But because this posit of the otherworldly arises within us, and because we are thoroughly contingent and conditional creatures with no extranatural source of knowledge or insight, Nietzsche concludes that this posit expresses nothing but a perverse desire for self- and world-negation.

Nietzsche thus rejects these notions and attempts to formulate an ontological theory that does without them. Following his usual strategy, he begins with the naturalistic premise that all the evidence we have for our ontology is sensory. But sensory evidence, Nietzsche acknowledges, reveals only so many appearances and effects, not the substantial "things" or "causes" that are said to underlie these appearances and effects.^[92] He thus proposes that "things" and "causes" simply designate particular assemblages of appearances, dispositions to particular manifestations.^[93] It is this line of thought that leads Nietzsche to claim that a "'thing' is the sum of its effects, synthetically united by a concept, an

[91] See WP 555: "One would like to know how things in themselves are obtained; but behold, there are no things in themselves! But even supposing there were an in-itself, an unconditioned thing, it would for that reason be unknowable! Something unconditioned cannot be known; otherwise it would not be unconditioned! Knowing is always but 'placing-oneself-in-a-conditional-relation-to-something'—one who seeks to know the unconditioned desires that it should not concern him. [ . . . ] This involves a contradiction. [ . . . ]"

[92] See, e.g., WP 551: "We have absolutely no experience of a cause. [ . .  . ] There is no such thing as a cause. [ . . . ] In fact, we invent causes after the schema of the effect: the latter is known to us." And see, e.g., GS 54: "What is 'appearance' for me now? Certainly not the opposite of some essence: what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place on an unknown x or remove from it!"

[93] Nietzsche's view is, then, a particular kind of phenomenalism, as he himself grants in GS 354 and WP 475, 477–79. Yet, unlike traditional phenomenalism, Nietzsche's theory of knowledge does not rest upon the "givenness" of "sense data," nor does it take the knowing subject as something "given" to which appearances appear. While he thus grants that all we have are appearances, and that these appearances depend upon the stimulation of our sense organs, Nietzsche also holds that appearances only ever present themselves within the context of an interpretation. His position is thus closer to that of W. V. Quine and Nelson Goodman, for whom physical objects are not "given" but are simply the "posits" (or, as Quine occasionally calls them, "myths") of physicalistic systems, which are superior to other systems only in relation to a particular set of objectives. See Quine, "On What There Is," in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 17ff., and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View, 44–46, and Goodman, "The Way the World Is," in Problems and Projects (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), Languages of Art, 3–10, and Ways of Worldmaking, 8, 117, and passim .

image" (WP 551), that "objects" are only "complexes of events apparently durable in comparison with other complexes" (WP 552), and that "the 'thing' in which we believe was only invented and added as a foundation for the various attributes" (WP 561).^[94]

The notion that objects are particular complexes of "appearances" and "effects" calls for a specification of that to which they appear and that which they effect; for "appearances" and "effects" do not exist "in themselves" but only relative to a particular standpoint. Nietzsche thus comes to hold that objects are what they are only under a particular description, for a particular perspective or interpretation. He writes:

That things possess a constitution in themselves entirely apart from interpretation and subjectivity, is a totally idle hypothesis: it presupposes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a thing. (WP 560)

The "what is that?" is an establishment of meaning from some other viewpoint. The "essence, " the "being " [«Wesenheit»] is something perspectival that already presupposes a plurality [i.e., a relationship between the thing and that for-which the thing is a thing]. At bottom, there always lies "what is that for me? " (for us, for all that lives, etc.) [ . . . ] In short: the being [Wesen ] of a thing is only an opinion about the "thing." Or rather: "it is considered " [es gilt ] is the actual "it is, " the only "this is." (WP 556)^[95]

We should be careful to distinguish this position from any simpleminded relativism, subjectivism, or solipsism. Nietzsche is not making

the claim that everything is subjective such that no one person can ever know how the world appears to another. We have seen that the term "perspective," for Nietzsche, does not characterize the private point of view of an individual but, instead, designates the particular interpretive horizon of a form of life, defined as an evaluative center situated anywhere from the micro-level of affects to the macro-level of cultural, social, and political organizations. And we have seen that the individual is a configuration of these micro- and macro-perspectives, not an atomic entity with a unique perspective of its own.^[96] We have also seen that Nietzsche conceives of these perspectives not as radically disjoint from one another but as always engaged in a struggle that incessantly leads to the blurring of old boundaries between interpretations and to the construction of new hybrids. Finally, we have seen that, for Nietzsche, the "active and interpreting forces" that constitute a particular perspective are that "through which alone seeing becomes a seeing-something " (GM III: 12, my emphasis)—that is, that interpretations determine what is to count as an object or thing.

In Nietzsche's usage, then, a perspective is not a private point of view but a public system of evaluation that assembles, selects, organizes, and hierarchizes appearances deemed relevant to its particular purposes and projects. In this light, we can see that Nietzsche's perspectival ontology has little in common with facile subjective relativism. It does, however, have much in common with the systematic and public "ontological relativity" more recently defended by American philosophers such as W. V. Quine, Nelson Goodman, Catherine Elgin, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty.^[97] In a general sense, this doctrine of "ontological

[97] plicable to those systems that are closest to Nietzsche's concerns, e.g., the evaluative systems of art and morality. See Goodman, Languages of Art, and Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy .

relativity" holds: (I) that it makes no sense to give an absolute description of "what there is"; (2) that it only makes sense to say "what there is" relative to a background theory, which will have its own purposes, principles, and criteria of individuation; (3) that there exist a host of such theories, many of which are equally warranted yet incompatible with one another; and thus (4) that there is no uniquely correct "way the world is" but rather as many "ways the world is" as there are warranted theories.

This view proceeds from the naturalistic premise that we never encounter "the world as it is in itself" but always "the world as it appears under a particular description." Because there is no comparing a "description of the world" with "the world as it is under no description at all," this latter notion turns out, at best, to be superfluous. All we ever can do is compare descriptions with other descriptions. And because there is no One True World, there is no description that could show itself to be the One True Description by "corresponding to" that World. Thus there will always be many descriptions and no single, independent world that they all describe. Each description, then, is actually a prescription that constructs a world, leaving us with no World but many worlds.^[98]

Moreover, this multiplicity is a permanent condition rather than the

temporary result of inadequate knowledge. The ontological relativist repudiates the idea that all these world-versions may eventually converge to form a total picture of the World. If one follows such theorists as Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, such an ideal is not even to be hoped for in the world of science, from whence it originates. The move from one scientific paradigm to another is seen as not so much a progressive accumulation as a series of perceptual and conceptual gestalt shifts, like those required when considering very different works of art.^[99] Even if the scientific world is conceived as progressive and cumulative, beside it sits the many worlds of art, religion, politics, and so on, which do not share these features and which can never be reduced to the scientific without remainder. Thus, we inhabit many worlds at once, and "objectivity" comes to name a competence in the many ways of worldmaking and the ability to shift skillfully and appropriately from one to another.

Nietzsche affirms each of these theses. For Nietzsche, there are only descriptions, interpretations, or perspectives . . .

There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing." (GM III: 12)

 . . . and no One True World of which they are all descriptions:

The "apparent" world is the only one: the "true" world is merely added by a lie . (TI "Reason" 2)

There is no "other," no "true," no essential being. [ . . . ] The antithesis of the apparent world and the true world is reduced to the antithesis "world" and "nothing." (WP 567)

Each perspective fabricates a world and its entities:

The question "what is that?" is an establishment of meaning from some other viewpoint. The "essence, " the "being " is something perspectival. (WP 556)

The perspective therefore determines the character of the "appearance." (WP 567)

There are many different, coexisting perspectives:

No limit to the ways in which the world can be interpreted. (WP 600)

The world [ . . . ] has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. (WP 481)^[100]

Thus there are many different, coexisting worlds; and "the world" is nothing other than the sum total of these "apparent" worlds:

Every center of force adopts a perspective toward the entire remainder, i.e., its own particular valuation, mode of action, and mode of resistance. The "apparent world," therefore, is reduced to a specific mode of action on the world, emanating from a center. Now there is no other mode of action whatever; and the "world" is only a word for the totality of these actions. (WP 567)

This collection is not a congruent synthesis but an assemblage of differences:

The world, apart from our condition of living in it, [ . . . ] does not exist as a world "in-itself"; it is essentially a world of relations; it has [ . . . ] a differing aspect from every point; its being is essentially different from every point; it presses upon every point, every point resists it—and the sum of these is in every case quite incongruent . (WP 568)

Nor is this assemblage cumulative, since each step of the way

involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous "meaning" and "purpose" are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. (GM II: 12)

Finally, for Nietzsche, "objectivity" no longer means the attempt to see the world under no description at all, or the achievement of an absolute knowing that could synthesize all these perspectives and aspects, but rather the cultivation of a variety of perspectives and the ability skillfully to shift among them:

"Objectivity" [ought to be understood] as the ability to have one's For and Against under control and to engage and disengage them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge. (GM III: 12)

The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions. (WP 259)^[101]

Not only does Nietzsche's perspectivism have nothing to do with solipsism or subjectivist relativism, it also has nothing to do with idealism, contrary to the suggestions of some of his commentators.^[102] In the first place, Nietzsche short-circuits idealism by rejecting the notion that subjects or minds are primary or given (see WP 481).^[103] As we have seen, both "subjects" and "objects," for Nietzsche, are what they are only by virtue of their relationships, that is, by virtue of their actions, reactions, and the ways in which these relate to the actions and reactions of the entities with which they coexist. Rejecting the notions of the noumenal self and the self-as-substance, Nietzsche argues that we know ourselves only empirically^[104] and that this self-apprehension and self-knowledge is a complex and ongoing process of balancing the ways in which we appear to ourselves and the ways in which we are described and situated by others.^[105] In short, then, for Nietzsche, "the subject," too, is a collection of appearances organized by an interpretation—the latter encompassing, rather than proceeding from, a conscious subject and extending far beyond the realm of consciousness and subjectivity to include the instinctive and, perhaps, even the inorganic.

Nor does Nietzsche deny the reality of the external world or claim that we can make interpretations, worlds, subjects, and objects any way we please. He understands that there are always constraints upon our worldmaking. He only refuses to grant that there is some pre-given world that can or should ultimately serve as that constraint. Rather,

what reality there is and what constraints there are, Nietzsche argues, are provided solely by the dominant, existing interpretations .^[106] We are born into and live among the worlds that have been fabricated by our forebears.^[107] These worlds need not be accepted in full, but neither can they be rejected altogether or even in large part. For, if we have relinquished the notion that there exists a pre-given world, nothing can serve as a foil for an interpretation except another interpretation; and, to perform a compelling transformation, we must use old interpretations as a lever.^[108] Transformation is effected only by slow and patient work, which proceeds by appealing to at least some of the accepted criteria in the service of novel construction.^[109] "We can destroy only as creators!" Nietz-

sche writes. "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).^[110]

If Nietzsche's ontological theory is, thus, not an idealism, neither is it a realism, whether "metaphysical" or "common sense." For Nietzsche holds: (1) that we never encounter a pre-given world (whether of "becoming" or of "ordinary objects"); (2) that the world we encounter is the world as constructed by one or another interpretation; and (3) that all interpretation is reinterpretation. In short, for Nietzsche, there is no escaping the world of interpretation; and, indeed, without interpretation, there is no "world."

Several important passages underscore these points. Nietzsche begins Book Two of The Gay Science with a section that foregrounds this "antirealism." Addressing his remarks to "the realists," he 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 [ . . . ] 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; cf. GS 54)

Here we find a series of reversals: the "realist" is a kind of "artist," her "reality" the product of a "fantasy," her "sobriety" a form of "drunkenness," her "objectivity," "reason," and "knowledge" forms of "passion," "prejudice," "unreason," and "ignorance." This is more than simply a gratuitous attack on "realism," "science," and "objectivity." As with so much in Nietzsche, the rhetoric of this passage is motivated by an important insight that issues from his thoroughgoing naturalism.

"Realism" is attacked only for deluding itself with sham ideals and for denying its actual cognitive and instinctual operations. It is attacked only for wanting "to see the world as it really is," stripped of every interpretation (see GM III: 24) and the background of "descent," "past," and "training" that is the condition of seeing anything as anything at all (see GM III: 12). Put in the affirmative, Nietzsche's point is simply that all "finding" is "creating," that all "science" is "art," insofar as science, too, necessarily involves "interpretation," a notion generally consigned to the realm of the aesthetic (which itself has been traditionally subordinated to the scientific due to its preoccupation with "appearances" and "styles," its conscious "fabrication," and its lack of concern with "truth").^[111]

Even the notion of "reality" and the desire to "lay it bare," Nietzsche argues, are the products of interpretation—of an antinaturalistic interpretation based on the central belief that there must be another, better, real, true world that contains indubitable facts, certainties, and foundations. Thus, later in The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes: "The truthful man, in the audacious and ultimate sense presupposed by faith in science, thereby affirms another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as he affirms this 'other world,' does this not

mean that he has to deny its antithesis, this world, our world?" (GS 344). This view is restated in that important passage from the Genealogy of Morals (III:24) in which Nietzsche argues that modern science is still ascetic and metaphysical insofar as it preserves an unconditional faith in truth, wishing to uncover "the factum brutum " and renounce all interpretation.

The point of these passages, I take it, is that there are "things" and "facts" only within the framework of an interpretation; and that, without interpretation—that is, without some system that makes ontological commitments and accords its entities meaning and value—there are no "facts" or "things" at all. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, we might say that the antithesis of the world of interpretation and world in itself is the antithesis "world" and "nothing" (see WP 567).

3.5—
The Finitude and Infinitude of Interpretation:
Nietzsche's Antiessentialism

Nietzsche's ontological theory, then, presumes neither a pre-given world of unknowable becoming nor a pre-given world of ordinary objects. Against all realisms, Nietzsche maintains that every ontology is the construction of an interpretation and that no world would remain over after the subtraction of every interpretation. Against idealism, he argues that interpretations are not the productions of isolated subjects or minds but complexes of evaluation and power that traverse the entire spectrum of organic life and are discernible even in the inorganic world. Indeed, Nietzsche short-circuits the distinction between idealism and realism by dissolving the poles of subject and object into the unified field of interpretation or will to power.

In the remaining chapters, I examine Nietzsche's ontological theory in detail. Yet before turning to this, I want to draw attention to one final consequence of the account of perspectivism presented above. I began by arguing that the term "perspectivism" is misleading, because it suggests that a visual analogy provides the key to Nietzsche's theory of knowledge. I argued that this is not the case and, instead, recommended that we refigure Nietzsche's conception of knowledge within a general theory of interpretation. We can now bring into relief an important contrast between the visual and interpretive conceptions of perspectivism.

The visual account maintains that the force of Nietzsche's doctrine lies in its assertion of the finitude of human knowledge and the infini-

tude of the world's being. Our field of vision is always only partial, largely ignorant of features and occurrences outside of it. The visual account of perspectivism takes Nietzsche to be making a similar point about human knowledge. Thus, for example, Jean Granier writes: "The idea of the fundamental perspectivism of knowledge has as its precise function the uprooting of the metaphysical conviction that subjectivity is capable of dominating the totality of Being. [ . . . ] The epistemological subject is necessarily situated, his field of knowledge is finite; thus no one perspective can exhaust the richness of reality."^[112] Arguing that truth is dependent upon our cognitive interests but independent of our cognitive capacities, Clark writes: "There are always more truths than any human being can know. We are, after all, finite creatures with a limited amount of time to discover truths, whereas there are surely an infinite number of truths to discover."^[113] Finally, Leiter writes that, according to Nietzsche's perspectival view of knowledge: "We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of knowledge. [ . . . W]e do indeed have knowledge of the world, though it is never disinterested, never complete, and can always benefit from additional non-distorting perspectives."^[114]

Relying on the optical analogy, these accounts presume a passive conception of knowledge, an essentialist conception of ontology, and a correspondence theory of truth. That is, they conceive of knowledge as prompted by, and directed toward, the accurate representation of the richness of an antecedent reality. Knowing is modeled on the accumulation of successive visual representations of a static object. Though total comprehension will always be impossible for finite creatures like ourselves, it nonetheless remains a cognitive ideal. Thus, conceiving the world as a text, Granier writes:

The rules of philology require that we sacrifice interest and utility for the demands of a textual understanding, one that would restore, to the extent to which it is possible, the original meaning of the text. The text is not a plaything of human subjectivity. [ . . . ] Here we must set out to discover this primordial ground, upon which every interpretation grows. For the noblest and most courageous spirits, one voice speaks louder than that of their own vital interests, commanding us to do justice to nature, to reveal things as they are in their own being.^[115]

[112] Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation,"190.

[113] Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 135.

[114] Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 345–46.

[115] Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation," 199. Evidence for this view appears in A 52, where, against theological hermeneutics, Nietzsche celebrates the virtues of"philology," construed as "the art of reading well—of reading facts without falsifying them through interpretation" (cf. BGE 38 and WP 479). This passage does pose a problem for the interpretation I have proposed. Yet the view it presents is so unusual in Nietzsche's corpus, and is so greatly outweighed by passages that express the opposite view (that there are no uninterpreted facts: GM III:24 marks a particularly striking contrast), that it is hard to take it at face value. I think we ought to read the passage as expressing Nietzsche's outrage at the mendaciousness and intellectual laziness of Christian interpretations and his frustration at their persistence in everyday life, despite the event of "God's death." For Nietzsche, such Christian interpretations must still submit to the challenge of scientific reason; only then can they submit to his own post-positivistic discourse. In short, I think this passage ought to be taken as part of Nietzsche's campaign for "intellectual conscience," which, as we saw in chapter 1, ultimately supports, rather than denies, the irreducibility of interpretation.

Clark, too, conceives of perspectival knowledge in this manner. On her view, perspectivism satisfies "the minimal correspondence theory of truth," according to which "our beliefs are about an independently existing world" and "they can be true only if they correspond to it, that is, get it 'the way it is.' "^[116] Following Clark's lead, Leiter holds that perspectival knowledge seeks correspondence with the external world. On his account, "the Perspectivist Thesis (Proper)" states that:

Knowledge of objects in any particular case is always conditioned by particular interpretive interests that direct the knower to corresponding features of the object of knowledge. [ . . . ] If they are not to distort the real (but non-transcendent) nature of objects, however, these particular interests must be adequate to relevant respects of [ . . . ] reality.^[117]

This version of Nietzsche's perspectivism is rendered problematic by the account of the doctrine I have presented above. I have argued that perspectivism is poorly conceived as developing an optical analogy and best read as functioning within a generalized conception of interpretation. Thus, Nietzsche regards all entities as interpretive complexes situated within a network of other such complexes, each of which constantly attempts to extend its range and power by interpolating, adjusting, and reworking the interpretations (or parts of interpretations) with which it is presented. On this model, then, interpretations strive not for the adequate representation of an ontologically distinct world but for power and influence over (via the incorporation and assimilation of) other interpretations.^[118] Thus, it makes no sense to say that the world

[116] Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 39.

[117] Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, " 351.

[118] See GM II:11–12 and WP 636–44. The drive for power will, no doubt,often involve fidelity to existing standards of representation but only as a means toward greater power. A similar point, I think, is made by Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking, 18): "The scientist who supposes that he is single-mindedly dedicated to the search for truth deceives himself. He is unconcerned with the trivial truths he could grind out endlessly;and he looks to the multifaceted and irregular results of observations for little more than suggestions of overall structures and significant generalizations. He seeks system, simplicity, and scope; and when he is satisfied on these scores, he tailors truth to fit. He as much decrees as discovers the laws he sets forth, as much designs as discerns the patterns he delineates." And, one might add, he decrees and designs in the interest of greater control over the environing world.

outside of perspective and interpretation is "infinitely rich," because, for Nietzsche, there is no such world. "In itself" the world has neither existence nor essence: both are interpretive constructions.^[119]

However, even on this antidualist rendering of Nietzsche's perspectivism, there is still some sense in which interpretations are finite and the world infinite. But the reasons for this are precisely the opposite of those appealed to by the visual conception of perspectivism. Alluding to Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida provides an appropriate formulation of the different conceptions of finitude under consideration here. He writes:

There are two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization. [ . . . ] Totalization can be judged in the classical style: one then refers to the empirical endeavor of either a subject or a finite discourse in a vain and breathless quest of an infinite richness which it can never master. There is too much, more than one can say. But nontotalization can also be determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept of play . If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of the field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field [ . . . ] excludes totalization. This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.^[120]

The first of these "two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization" summarizes the notion of finitude assumed by the visual account of per-

[119] See, e.g., WP 556 (" 'essence,' the 'essential nature' is something perspectival") and GM II: 121 which argues that form, meaning, existence, and essence are the constructions of an interpretive will to power. Cf. also WP 643.

[120] Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play," 289. Note that the Bass translation inadvertently omits the words "discourse in a vain and breathless quest of an infinite." The distinction between these two conceptions of "nontotalization" is also discussed by Nelson Goodman, who attempts to sort out the difference between the claims of "the mystic" and those of "the ontological relativist" or "pluralist." While both parties seem to agree that no description can ever be faithful to the world as it is, the former maintains that this is because the essence of the world is too great and ineffable for us to grasp, while the latter maintains that this is because the world is nothing in itself, because the world is something only insofar as it is construed by one of the many incompatible, true descriptions of it. See Goodman, "The Way the World Is."

spectivism. On this view, perspectivism describes "the empirical endeavor of either a subject or a finite discourse in a vain and breathless quest of an infinite richness which it can never master." Such a view presupposes the existence of a pre-given world that always remains outside of our perspectival grasp and dreams of an omniscient being who could encompass this infinite richness. But this is not Nietzsche's view. Nietzsche's perspectivism is captured in the second formulation, according to which the world is infinite and nontotalizable "not because the richness of the field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but [ . . . ] because, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions." Translating this into Nietzsche's idiom, "the world has become 'infinite' " (GS 374) precisely insofar as it is seen as lacking an essence, since essence is perspectival and perspectives are always contested, engaged in a perpetual struggle that forces the incessant substitution of one interpretation for another. For Nietzsche, there are "infinite interpretations" (GS 374)—and therefore world-versions—precisely because there is no World and no super-natural judge that could settle the struggle once and for all.

Recalling Nietzsche's description of this struggle in the Genealogy of Morals (II 12), Michel Foucault puts the point nicely:

If interpretation can never be brought to an end, it is simply because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, because at bottom everything is already interpretation. [ . . . ] There is never, if you will, an interpretandum which is not already an interpretans, so that there is established in interpretation a relation of violence as much as of elucidation. In fact, interpretation does not illuminate an interpretive topic that would offer itself passively to it; it can only violently seize an interpretation already there, which it must reverse, return, shatter with blows of a hammer.^[121]

Along with Derrida's, this formulation allows us to see that the world of ubiquitous interpretation is one of becoming and will to power and that these doctrines do not name some primary essence or interpretandum but are simply different ways of describing the struggle of interpretation itself. Thus, the doctrine of "becoming" holds that there is being only according to an interpretation and that one interpretation always passes

[121] Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx," trans. Alan D. Schrift, in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 64.

over into another, forming a "continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations." Thus, "will to power," too, names this incessant process of substitution—victorious new interpretations "becoming master" over previous and existing interpretations (GM II:12) and maintaining their hegemony only by subduing rebellious forces from within and encroachments from without. We must now turn to these doctrines to fill out these suggestions and the antidualist reading of Nietzsche's epistemology and ontology I have proposed.

Chapter Four—
Becoming and Chaos, or Différance and Chaosmos

[Heraclitus] denied the duality of totally diverse worlds. [ . . . ] He no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical one.[ . . . ] And after this first step, nothing could hold him back from a second, far bolder negation: he altogether denied being.[ . . . ] Heraclitus proclaimed: "I see nothing other than becoming."
Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks §5

Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world is the only one: the "true" world is only added by a lie.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols "Reason" 2

4.1—
Nietzsche and the "Battle of Giants Concerning Being"

From his early study of the Presocratics through the writings of his last productive year, Nietzsche relentlessly criticizes the philosophical obsession with being and asserts the priority of its conceptual opposite: becoming. Viewing the history of philosophy as a protracted celebration of Parmenides' victory over Heraclitus in what Plato called the "battle of giants concerning being," Nietzsche aims to revive this ancient agon and reverse its outcome.^[1]

Nietzsche's ontological sympathies and fondness for Heraclitus are well known. But this alone tells us little, for Nietzsche's great nineteenth-century rival, Hegel, also fancied himself a disciple of Heraclitus.^[2] The

[1] "Gigantomachia peri tes^[*] ousias" (Plato, Sophist, 246a).

[2] Thus, Hegel writes, "there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic" (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, Greek Philosophy to Plato, trans. E. S. Haldane [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995], 279).

crucial questions remain: "What is Nietzsche's 'becoming'?" and "Who is Nietzsche's Heraclitus?" These questions are commonly answered by reading Nietzsche as a Kantian skeptic and metaphysician for whom "becoming" names a sort of unknowable noumenon. After presenting and criticizing this view, I suggest another. I maintain that, as with Nietzsche's other doctrines, "becoming," too, must be seen through the twin lenses of naturalism and interpretation: that is, on the one side, Nietzsche's "becoming" is a naturalistic doctrine intended to counter the metaphysical preoccupation with being, stasis, and eternity by fore-grounding the empirically evident ubiquity of change in the natural world; on the other, "becoming" describes the incessant shift of perspectives and interpretations in a world that lacks a grounding essence.

4.2—
Becoming as Noumenon:
Nietzsche Among the Neo-Kantians

The story is often told: Nietzsche was drawn from philology to philosophy by his discovery of Schopenhauer in the mid-1860s. Attracted by Schopenhauer's tragic pessimism—so much at odds with the optimism of Hegel and the positivists—Nietzsche also absorbed Schopenhauer's Kantian dualism, which distinguishes the phenomenal from the noumenal world, the realm of appearance from that of things in themselves. Nietzsche's first published book, The Birth of Tragedy, explicitly pays homage to Kant and Schopenhauer and centers on what appears to be a dualistic schema: the Dionysian swarm of becoming, chaos, and indefiniteness that is represented by us as an Apollinian gallery of being, order, and definition. Yet whereas Schopenhauer was repulsed by the surging chaos he saw at the heart of things, Nietzsche and his tragedians were allured by it. Increasingly struck by this difference in attitude, Nietzsche became dismayed with Schopenhauer's crypto-Christian rejection of the physical world and retreat into the metaphysical solitude of timeless forms. By the late 1870s, this dismay had developed into outright repudiation.

Here the story becomes more controversial. Nietzsche is often read as implicitly maintaining a Kantian-Schopenhauerian framework even in his later writings. He is said to have supplemented Kant and Schopenhauer with Heraclitus, Boscovich, Darwin, and Lange to arrive at a conception of the world in itself as a "becoming," "chaos," or "will to power"—a fluid, impermanent, and undifferentiated Urwelt to which

the categories of knowledge (identity, substance, causality, etc.) do not apply. This reading of Nietzsche was advocated early in Nietzsche studies by the prominent neo-Kantian Hans Vaihinger and has continued to find supporters, among them Arthur Danto, and, more recently, Julian Young and Stephen Houlgate.^[3]

This interpretation of becoming proceeds from a skeptical epistemology, which it traces throughout Nietzsche's corpus.^[4] Thus, from the

[3] "Neo-Kantian" here refers to the skeptical version presented in the previous chapter, not to its realist variant, which has little to say about becoming. For versions of this interpretation of Nietzsche's epistemology and ontology, see Hans Vaihinger, "Nietzsche and His Doctrine of Conscious Illusion," in Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973); Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles F. Walraff and Frederick J. Schmitz (South Bend, Ind.: Regnery Gateway, 1979); Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh et al. (San Francisco: Harper, 1987); Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 80, 95–97; Jean Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation" and "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos," trans. David B. Allison, in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977); John T. Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics and Epistemology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), 132–34; Rüdiger Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977), 30, 53, and passim; George J. Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-In-Themselves," Dialogos 36 (1980): 50ff., Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), and "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche: Critique of Knowledge," in Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Routledge, 1991); Willard Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche," International Studies in Philosophy 16 (1984): 3–22; Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 98; Julian Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3, 41, 96–97, 160–61; and Stephen Houlgate, "Kant, Nietzsche, and the 'Thing in Itself,' " Nietzsche-Studien 22 (1993): 133, 135.

[4] For instance, Arthur Danto (Nietzsche as Philosopher, 38) writes: "In a precocious essay, written in 1873 [ . . . ] Nietzsche asks the old, cynical question, What is truth? It was to be a question that occupied him throughout his entire philosophical life, and the answer he gave it here [ . . . ] was one he never saw fit to modify in any essential respect." Daniel Breazeale concurs: "it is not only true that, as Arthur Danto has contended, Nietzsche never modified 'in any essential respect' the theory of truth which he advanced in his unpublished writings of the early 1870's, but it is also true that these same writings contain by far his most explicit, detailed, and sustained treatments of basic epistemological issues. Not only are most of his later published remarks on this subject compatible with these early discussions, they actually seem in some cases to presuppose them" ("Introduction," Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979], xlvi). While disagreeing with Danto that Nietzsche's epistemological position remained unchanged over the course of his career, Wilcox (Truth and Value in Nietzsche, 127) writes: "[Nietzsche] denies that anything is 'true' or that we 'know' anything in any sense which presupposes insight into the thing in itself, the transcendental reality which Kant thought had to be distinguished from appearance or phenomena. Doubt about that kind of truth or knowledge was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, largely because of the efforts of Kant. [ . . . ] That kind of intellectual pessimism, despair about that kind of truth, wasone of Nietzsche's concerns from early to late." In a similar vein, George Stack ("Nietzsche's Critique of Things-In-Themselves," 50) writes that Nietzsche "never really retreats from [the] theme" that "knowledge, especially of the Kantian variety, entails 'falsification.' " Note that my presentation of this skeptical interpretation is a composite that brings together the many different textual and historical strands of this interpretation as it is found among a host of commentators on Nietzsche.

early essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (which maintains that "truths are illusions that we have forgotten are illusions" [p. 84]) through the notes on epistemology in the later Nachlaß (one of which claims that "truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live" [WP 493]), Nietzsche is seen as consistently holding the Kantian position that our knowledge is limited to the phenomenal world of our own construction and can say little if anything about things as they are in themselves. Thus, we can hope for no correspondence between our language or thought and the world as it really is.^[5]

For Kant, this restriction of knowledge to phenomena is no cause for despair. On the contrary, it serves two of his aims. Insofar as it rejects as useless speculation any claim to knowledge concerning metaphysics and morality, this limitation can be said to place philosophy on a more firm, scientific foundation. Moreover, Kant's view can claim to "make way for faith" concerning those metaphysical and moral concerns that are now judged to lie beyond the scope of knowledge but within reach of Reason. Yet, for Nietzsche, who held no such faith in God, reason, or morality, this skeptical insight is said to have led to a more deeply felt sense of our fundamental ignorance about the world.^[6] Thus, in an early text, he claims that

despair of truth [ . . . ] attends every thinker who sets out from the Kantian philosophy, provided he is a vigorous and whole man in suffering and desire and not a mere clattering thought- and calculating-machine. [ . . . ] If Kant ever should begin to exercise any wide influence we shall be aware of it in the form of a gnawing and disintegrating skepticism and relativism; and only in the most active and noble spirits who have never been able to exist in a state of doubt would there appear instead that undermining and despair of all truth. [ . . . ] (SE 3, P. 140)

[5] On this point, see Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 72ff.; Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, 44–65 and passim; George Stack, "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," Dialogos 59 (1992): 83; and Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, 41.

[6] See Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche, 125–27; Stack, "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," 83. In Nietzsche as Philosopher, Danto deems Nietzsche's view an epistemological and ontological "nihilism."

Similarly, toward the end of his career, Nietzsche describes the Copernican revolution in astronomy and epistemology^[7] as "the self-belittlement of man":

Alas, the faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past—he has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith, almost God. [ . . . ] Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane—now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into—what? into nothingness? into a "penetrating sense of his nothingness"? (GM III: 25)

According to the neo-Kantian view, Nietzsche places himself among those "most active and noble spirits" who are overcome by Kantian "skepticism." Beyond the island of our knowledge, we see only "a blind, empty, structureless thereness" "tossing blackly like the sea, chaotic relative to our distinctions and perhaps to all distinctions, but there nonetheless."^[8]

This reading is aided by historical investigations into the sources of Nietzsche's putative skepticism. George Stack has done the most to promote the view that the later Nietzsche's perspectivist epistemology is an outgrowth of his early acceptance of the skeptical position held by many nineteenth-century neo-Kantian philosophers of science, particularly F. A. Lange.^[9] According to Stack, Lange followed Kant in claiming that we have only a mediated knowledge of the world and that what performs this mediation is a conceptual apparatus that arranges the world for us in terms of substance, cause and effect, unity, identity, continuous and irreversible time, and so forth. Kant took this intuitional and categorial framework to be given in our cognitive constitution. His transcendental arguments sought to show the necessary and universal

[7] Nietzsche clearly intends his description of the Copernican revolution to cover not only Copernicus's "defeat of theological astronomy" but also "Kant's victory over the dogmatic concepts of theology." Indeed, his discussion of astronomy moves directly into a discussion of Kant's critique.

[8] Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 96. This view has been endorsed more recently by Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, 96–97. The island analogy is presented by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929), 257.

[9] This argument is made in many of Stack's books and essays on Nietzsche. See, e.g., Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, and "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche." For more on the importance of Lange to Nietzsche, see Vaihinger, "Nietzsche and His Doctrine of Conscious Illusion," 83–84, 104, and Robert Nola, "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (1987): 528–33 and passim .

operation of the forms of sensuous intuition and categories of the understanding in human thought and experience. Lange, however, rejected Kant's transcendental account in favor of an evolutionary account of the existence and scope of the categorial system. What Kant took to be logically and conceptually a priori Lange viewed as having only a temporal and evolutionary priority. That is, what Kant maintained to be necessary and universal for rational thought and experience Lange saw as only the contingent product of a particular "physico-psychological organization,"^[10] itself a result of the natural selection of traits that have proven their practical value for the survival of the species.^[11]

Lange's neo-Kantian evolutionism, the story continues, was taken up by Nietzsche, who argued in similar fashion that "the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface and sign-world" (GS 354), a world determined by "those primeval basic errors" "which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species" (GS 110).^[12] Such "errors," for both Lange and Nietzsche, define the parameters of our "perspective," construed as a species-concept and not as an individual point of view.^[13] Due to their different "physico-psychological" constitutions and organizations, different species are supposed to have different "perspectives."^[14] According to the skeptical interpretation, this is what leads Nietzsche to claim that

the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner: it is hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects there might be. [ . . . ] But I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that

[10] See Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-In-Themselves," 33–37, and "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche," 39. Other commentators, such as Mary Warnock, "Nietzsche's Conception of Truth," in Nietzsche's Imagery and Thought: A Collection of Essays, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 41ff., have argued that what determines the parameters of our "perspective," for Nietzsche, is our language and grammar.

[11] Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-In-Themselves," 33–35.

[12] Cf. HH 16: "That which we now call this world is the outcome of a host of errors and fantasies that have gradually arisen and grown entwined with one another in the course of the overall evolution of the organic being, and are now inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past—as treasure: for our humanity now depends upon it." Cf. also GS 57. Houlgate, "Kant, Nietzsche, and the 'Thing in itself,' " 145–46 and passim, offers an interpretation similar to Stack's, though on exclusively textual, rather than historical, grounds.

[13] Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche," 39–40.

[14] Ibid., 44–45. Cf. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 40–41. For a critique of this conception of perspective, see §3.3.1, above.

would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. (GS 374)^[15]

This skeptical account of Kant's, Lange's, and Nietzsche's epistemologies is also an account of their ontologies. If the phenomenal world—the world as it exists for a particular perspective—is a "mediated" world, a world of "representations" or "appearances," by inference there must be some "real," "unmediated," "original" world that these perspectives distort, filter, or represent. For Kant, this is the noumenal world, the realm of things in themselves that is apprehended by the sensuous intuition and worked up by the categories of the understanding before it can be considered knowable. For Lange, this "original" world is the "evanescent stream" of " 'unknowable' becoming," a "presumed chaotic 'manifold' of sensory impressions."^[16] Finally, according to this view, Nietzsche is said to maintain that the world in itself is a "becoming," "chaos," or "will to power," a world devoid of definition and organization.^[17] The categories of knowledge, which define the pa-

[15] An earlier statement of this view appears in "On Truth and Lies" (p. 79), where Nietzsche writes: "how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. [ . . . T]his intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly—as though the world's axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself." Pages later (p. 86), he continues: "If but for an instant [man] could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his 'self-consciousness' would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which one of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available. " Cf. WP 616.

[16] Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovich's Natural Philosophy," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62 (1981): 80. Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche,"35.

[17] This formulation appears explicitly or implicitly in: Vaihinger, "Nietzsche and His Doctrine of Conscious Illusion," 84 and passim; Jaspers, Nietzsche, 212–13, 321, 351–52; Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art, trans. David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1979), 3–6, and Nietzsche, 3:3–9, 64ff.; George A. Morgan, What Nietzsche Means (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), 267ff.; Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 80, 96–97; Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation" and "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos"; Sarah Kofman, "Appendix: Genealogy, Interpretation, Text," in Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 138–39; Peter Heller in the "Discussion" following Paul De Man, "Nietzsche's Theory of Rhetoric," Symposium (Spring 1974): 46; Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche, 132–33; Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, 30 and passim; Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 25–32; Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-In-Themselves," 50ff., and "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche"; Mit-telman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche"; Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 93; Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 56–95, and "Kant, Nietzsche, and the 'Thing in itself,' " 133, 135; Nola, "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief"; Barry Allen, "Government in Foucault," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991): 423, and "Nietzsche's Question: 'What Good Is Truth?' " History of Philosophy Quarterly 9 (1992): 238; and Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 87 and passim . A more novel interpretation is presented by Blondel (Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, 98), who argues that "Nietzsche gives a reality, as a thing 'in itself,' to the body ."

rameters of our "perspective," impose order on this becoming and thus help us to cope with it and increase our chances for survival. Yet, for Nietzsche, "the categories are 'truths' only insofar as they are conditions of life for us" (WP 515). And "[i]t is improbable that our 'knowledge' should extend further than is strictly necessary for the preservation of life" (WP 494). As Karl Jaspers succinctly puts it: "Life quite properly believes in being, and were it to believe in becoming instead, it would perish. . . . [B]ecoming [is] a doctrine that [Nietzsche] considers 'true, but deadly.' "^[18]

4.3—
A Critique of the Neo-Kantian View

Without a doubt, then, there exists some textual, historical, and critical support for the neo-Kantian interpretation of Nietzsche's ontology. Yet this interpretation is problematic, for it is deeply inconsistent with positions central to Nietzsche's work, particularly his resolute antidualism. The claim that Nietzsche endorses a skeptical epistemology and a metaphysical ontology does not fit well with his explicit rejection of Kant's notion of the "thing in itself" and the very distinction between a "real" and an "apparent" world. This distinction is rejected in the very passage in which the notion of perspectivism is introduced. Having claimed that "the world of which we become conscious is only a surface- and sign-world," Nietzsche writes:

You will guess that it is not the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here: this distinction I leave to the epistemologists [Erkenntniss-theoretikern ] who have become entangled in the snares of grammar (the metaphysics of the people). It is even less the opposition of "thing in itself" [»Ding an sich «] and appearance [Erscheinung ]; for we do not "know"

[18] Jaspers, Nietzsche, 351.

[»erkennen «] nearly enough even to be allowed to distinguish in this way. (GS 354)

This may sound like a skeptical argument. Yet it actually amounts to a rejection of skepticism. Nietzsche's point is that, without access to a God's-eye view capable of confirming the existence of a thing in itself and distinguishing it from its appearances, we have no basis for making such a distinction at all and thus no basis for skepticism. Earlier in The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes a similar point: "What is 'appearance' [»Schein «] for me now? Certainly not the opposite of some essence [eines Wesens ]: what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place over an unknown x or remove from it!" (GS 54).

This critique of the distinction between appearance and its putative opposites (and of the subordination of the former to these latter) is taken up again in later texts. For example, in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes:

The reasons for which "this" world has been characterized as "apparent" [scheinbar ] are the very reasons which indicate its reality [Realität ]; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable. . . . The criteria which have been bestowed on the "true being" [»wahren Sein «] of things are the criteria of not-being, of naught; the "true world" [»wahre Welt «] has been constructed out of contradiction to the actual world [wirklichen Welt ]. (TI "Reason" 6; cf. WP 584)

The true world [wahre Welt ]—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent [scheinbare ] one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one . (TI "World" 6; cf. "Reason," 2)^[19]

These points are underscored in Nachlaß notes from the same period:

The antithesis of the apparent [scheinbaren ] world and the true [wahren ] world is reduced to the antithesis "world" and "nothing." (WP 567)

The antithesis "thing in itself" [»Ding an sich «] and "appearance" [»Erscheinung «] is untenable; with that, however, the concept of "appearance " also disappears. (WP 552)

[19] Reading this passage against the background of a dualistic, Kantian interpretation of Nietzsche's epistemology and ontology, Daniel W. Conway ("Beyond Realism: Nietzsche's New Infinite," International Studies in Philosophy 22 [1990]: 103) construes it as a "warning" rather than a celebration. Yet Conway's reading is implausible, especially since the passage goes on to characterize this event of abolition in a highly affirmative tone: "Noon; moment of briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA" (TI "World" 6).

Of course, these passages do not employ a consistent terminology: at times, Nietzsche explicitly refers to Kant's distinction between Ding an sich and Erscheinung while, at others, he refers to the Platonic or Christian distinction between die wahre Welt and die scheinbare Welt . Yet I think this vacillation is not mere terminological carelessness. Rather, Nietzsche wishes to equate the Kantian distinction between the thing in itself and appearance with the Platonic-Christian distinction between the true world and the apparent world:

Any distinction between a "true" [»wahre «] and an "apparent" [»scheinbare «] world—whether in the Christian manner or in the manner of Kant (in the end, an underhanded Christian)—is only a suggestion of decadence, a symptom of the decline of life. (TI "Reason" 6)^[20]

Taken together, these passages present the following naturalistic argument. Kant's distinction between the thing in itself and appearance is merely a version of the Platonic-Christian distinction between the true world and the apparent world (the un-earthly world of pure, unlimited knowledge, goodness, beauty, and peace versus the earthly, sensual world of ignorance and suffering). According to Nietzsche, this latter distinction is unjustified, because the only world with which we are acquainted [erkennen ] is the "apparent world." How, then, does the notion of "the true world" (and thus the "thing in itself") arise? Nietzsche sees it as "constructed out of contradiction to the actual world," that is, as originating out of a hatred of this world on the part of a this-worldly creature, a hatred that has led to the fictitious fabrication and elevation of "another world," which, as the antithesis to this "merely apparent" world, is deemed a "true world," a world "in itself."

This argument is pervasive in Nietzsche's later writings. How, then, can such passages and arguments be squared with the neo-Kantian interpretation according to which Nietzsche is a skeptic who maintains that there is a world in itself of becoming? One might argue that Nietzsche does not object to Kant's notion of a noumenal world but only to the characterization of that world as a world of "things in themselves" or a "true world." Nietzsche might be said to parallel Kant in claiming that the world of becoming, like the world of things in themselves, is unknowable. Thus, following Kant's claim that "knowledge has to do

[20] Recall that Nietzsche also calls Christianity "Platonism for 'the people' " (BGE P), thus completing the equation between Platonism, Christianity, and Kantianism. On Kant's "underhanded Christianity," see also GS 335 and GM III: 25.

only with appearances and must leave the thing in itself as indeed real per se, but as not known by us,"^[21] Nietzsche writes:

Knowledge and becoming exclude one another. (WP 517)

Knowledge in itself in a world of becoming is impossible. (WP 617)

A world of becoming could not, in the strict sense, be "comprehended" or "known"; only to the extent that the "comprehending" and "knowing" intellect encounters a coarse already-created world, built out of nothing but appearances [Scheinbarkeiten ] but become firm to the extent that this kind of appearance [Schein ] has preserved life—only to this extent is there anything like "knowledge." (WP 520)^[22]

In these passages, it would seem that Nietzsche is making the Kantian argument that what is available to our knowledge is only a world of appearance—the noumenal world filtered through the forms of intuition and categories of the understanding (Kant) or our "physico-psychological" apparatus (Lange).^[23] Were this the case, Nietzsche's only objection would be that Kant conceives of this noumenal world as a world of "things" that exist "in themselves." Perhaps Nietzsche disapproves of this conception only insofar as it falsely attributes the intraphenomenal notions of unity, individuation, and duration to a world that is really "a sheer, undifferentiated flux"^[24] or "an ever-flowing, ever-changing, chaotic 'reality.' "^[25] For the same reason, one might argue that it is wrong to characterize the world of becoming as a "true" world, because truth and knowledge require states of affairs that remain distinct and durable over time.^[26] Thus, Nietzsche might be said to argue that there is an ultimate, noumenal reality (the world of becoming); but, contrary to the Kantian and Platonic-Christian views,^[27] it is not a

[21] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 24.

[22] Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche," 5, and Stack, "Nietzsche's Critique of Things-In-Themselves," 52–53, draw upon these passages in support of their skeptical interpretation.

[23] See §3.4.1, above, for a different reading of these passages.

[24] Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 89, see also 96–97.

[25] Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, 18, see also 2, 30, 53, 67–68. Magnus (Nietzsche's Existential Imperative, 25, 196, xiv) writes of "the [ . . . ] unintelligible flux of becoming," "the radical flux of becoming," "an [ . . . ] incoherent stratum" upon which we "impose form."

[26] See Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 75; Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, 46–47 and passim; Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche," 4–5.

[27] Of course, Kant never calls the world of things in themselves (or of noumena) a "true" world. Nevertheless, the noumenal world is, for Kant, the realm of those supreme Ideas—God, freedom, and immortality—which it is the purpose of the first Critique to"make way for" (Critique of Pure Reason, 29). In this sense, then, Nietzsche has some justification for calling Kant an "underhanded Christian" (TI "Reason" 6) and for claiming that Kant's Copernican revolution is "the straightest route to—the old ideal" (GM III:25; cf. GS 335).

"true" but a "false" world, insofar as it is a "self-contradictory world of becoming and change."^[28]

Yet this version of the skeptical interpretation no more adequately solves the problem. Once again, it has Nietzsche both asserting the unknowability of becoming and positively characterizing it. But even if we leave aside this difficulty, other problems remain. In the above-cited passages from The Gay Science, Twilight, and the Nachlaß, it is clear that Nietzsche is not merely opposed to characterizing the noumenal world as a "true" world of "things"; rather, he is opposed to the very notion of a noumenal world and to every dualistic view that contrasts "appearance" with something other than "appearance." "The 'apparent' world," he maintains, "is the only world"; "any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable" (TI "Reason" 2, 6). We must recall that, with his rejection of Kantian, Platonic-Christian, and all other dualisms, Nietzsche proposes to abolish the very notion of "appearance" (TI "Reason" 6, "World" 6; WP 567, 552), for this notion has only ever functioned in opposition and subordination to "that which appears," namely, the world as it is in itself.^[29]

Indeed, Kant had to posit the "thing in itself" for just this reason. In the preface to the second edition of the first Critique, he writes:

[A]ll possible speculative knowledge of reason is limited to mere objects of experience . But our further contention must also be duly borne in mind, namely that though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in position to at least think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears.^[30]

Thus is Kant led into the notorious "problem of affection."^[31] He maintains that, for thought to have any content, our faculty of sensibility

[28] Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche," 5.

[29] This point is also made by Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1990), 190–91.

[30] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 27. Other relevant passages are collected and discussed in Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 238ff, and 363 n 15.

[31] See Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 247ff., for a nice discussion of this problem.

must be affected from without. That is, the world of phenomena or appearance, with which our knowledge is concerned, must have something outside it as its "cause" or "ground."^[32] This "something" cannot be an appearance, since Kant rejects the idealist thesis that a representation—that is, something in us—is the cause of our representations; but neither can this "something" he a thing in itself, for that would mean extending to things in themselves the category of causality, which, Kant himself claims, has only intraphenomenal validity.

We need not discuss in detail either this problem as it arises in Kant or the various solutions to it offered by Kant's commentators. I raise the issue only because Nietzsche joins the host of Kant's critics on this point, and because this criticism helps us to see that Nietzsche holds no skeptical or dualist position with regard to epistemology and ontology. In the Nachlaß Nietzsche criticizes Kant on precisely this issue:

The sore spot of Kant's critical philosophy has gradually become visible even to dull eyes: Kant no longer has a right to his distinction "appearance" and "thing in itself"—he had deprived himself of the right to go on distinguishing in this old familiar way, in so far as he rejected as impermissible making inferences from phenomena to the cause of phenomena—in accordance with his conception of causality and its purely intra-phenomenal validity. (WP 553)^[33]

Nietzsche's point here is clearly that, if Kant's only justification for positing a thing in itself is that it is a necessary causal corollary to the notion of appearance, then he is unjustified in making this posit according to his own view that causality cannot apply to things in themselves.

Yet, as Nietzsche is well aware, Kant provides another justification

[32] See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 441ff.

[33] Nietzsche mounts this critique of Kant even in Human, All Too Human . In a section entitled "Appearance and Thing in Itself [Erscheinung und Ding an sich]," he 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, which it is customary to regard as the sufficient reason [zureichende Grund ] for the world of appearance. Against this, more rigorous logicians, having clearly identified the concept of the metaphysical as that of the unconditioned, consequently also unconditioning, have disputed any connection between the unconditioned (the metaphysical world) and the world we know: so what appears in appearance is precisely not the thing in itself, and no conclusion can be drawn from the former as to the nature of the latter" (16). Nietzsche clearly agrees with this logical critique of the thing in itself, though he goes on to mount another, evolutionary, critique of the notion.

for positing a realm of things in themselves or noumena. The passage from the first Critique quoted above continues as follows:

Now let us suppose that the distinction, which our Critique has shown to be necessary, between things as objects of experience and those same things as they are in themselves, had not been made. In that case all things in general, as far as they are efficient causes, would be determined by the principle of causality, and consequently by the mechanism of nature. I could not, therefore, without palpable contradiction, say of one and the same being, for instance the human soul, that its will is free and yet is subject to natural necessity, that is, is not free. For I have taken the soul in both propositions in one and the same sense, namely as a thing in general, that is, as a thing in itself [Sache selbst ]; and save by means of a preceding critique, could not have done otherwise. But if our Critique is not in error in teaching that the object is to be taken in a twofold sense, namely as appearance and as thing in itself [ . . . ] then there is no contradiction in supposing that one and the same will is, in the appearance, that is, in its visible acts, necessarily subject to the law of nature, and so far not free, while yet, as belonging to a thing in itself, it is not subject to that law, and is therefore free .^[34]

We see here the more fundamental reason that Kant posits a world of things in themselves or noumena: to save the metaphysical Ideas of God, freedom, and the soul from their elimination by a thoroughgoing empiricism and naturalism.^[35] Nietzsche recognizes this and criticizes Kant on this account as well. From early on (see BT 18–19), he admires Kant for having dismissed metaphysical talk as unintelligible, for having restricted knowledge to "appearance," and for having granted that the objects of our knowledge are constructions. Yet, in his later work, Nietzsche is more critical of what he takes to be the real motivation behind Kant's critique—the restoration of those metaphysical, anti-natural specters: God, free will, and the soul. Nietzsche writes, in The Gay Science:

And now don't cite the categorical imperative, my friend! This term tickles my ear and makes me laugh despite your serious presence. It makes me think of the old Kant who had obtained "the thing in itself"—another very ridiculous thing!—by stealth and was punished for this when the "categorical imperative" crept stealthily into his heart and led him astray —back to "God," "soul," "freedom," and "immortality," like a fox who loses his way and goes

[34] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 27–28.

[35] See Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 103.

astray back into his cage. Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage! (335)^[36]

This critique is reiterated in the 1886 preface to Daybreak:

[T]o create room for his "moral realm" [Kant] saw himself obliged to posit an indemonstrable world, a logical "Beyond"—it was for precisely that that he had need of his critique of pure reason! In other words: he would not have had need of it if one thing had not been more vital to him than anything else: to render the "moral realm" unassailable, even better incomprehensible to reason. (3)

Thus, while Nietzsche praises Kant's critique of the possibility of metaphysical "knowledge," he criticizes the antinaturalistic motivation that lurks behind this critique: Kant's attempt to reinvigorate "faith" and metaphysics via the opposition between appearances and things in themselves.

Nietzsche's criticism of Kant, then, is not merely a critique of the notion of "things in themselves." It is a criticism of the very dualism between appearance and something other than appearance. Neither in his criticism of Kant's notion of "affection" nor in his criticism of Kant's metaphysical designs does Nietzsche object to the characterization of noumena as individual items: "things in themselves." Rather, he objects to the very distinction between noumena and phenomena. Indeed, Nietzsche's objection to the notion that phenomena are "affected" by things in themselves would apply equally well to the notion that "becoming" is the ontological ground of perspectival knowledge. For, were Nietzsche to claim that an unknowable becoming is the cause or ground of appearance, he would be subject to the same criticism he levels against Kant: namely, that nothing in our experience of the world, not even the notion of causality, can lead us to an extra-phenomenal world. "For we do not 'know' nearly enough even to be allowed to distinguish in this way" (GS 354).

For Nietzsche, as for Kant, we are led to this distinction only through the desire to justify such theological and metaphysical notions as God,

[36] Cf. A 55. Also cf. GM III:25, where Nietzsche argues that the Copernican revolution, though superficially antitheological, is really theological and ascetic through and through. Also cf. WP 578: "Moral values even in theory of knowledge: [ . . . ] the transcendent world invented, in order that a place remains for 'moral freedom' (in Kant)."

free will, soul, and immortality. Yet, unlike Kant, Nietzsche has no faith or belief in such ideas. Indeed, his naturalism aims to get rid of them altogether. He argues that, just as the notion of God is a manifestation of certain human beings' desire to be other than they are, so "things in themselves" and "essences" are manifestations of a desire that there be a world beyond that of "mere appearance." Nietzsche staunchly maintains, however, that there is no such world. For Nietzsche, the origin of the "true or real world" is not to be found outside appearance but within it. In naturalistic fashion, he argues that the noumenal world has only ever been a guise of the phenomenal world: the human fantasy that there is "another, better world." This is the meaning of Nietzsche's aphorism: "The 'real world,' however one has hitherto conceived it—it has always been the apparent world once again " ( WP 566).^[37] For Nietzsche, the question is not "what 'things in themselves' may be like, apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding. [ . . . ] The question is whether there could not be many other ways of creating such an apparent world " (WP 569, my emphasis). That is, the question is not what "other world" is indicated by our metaphysical ideas but rather what "this -worldly" features could have given rise to such ideas.

4.4—
Nietzsche, Becoming, Heraclitus

Whatever "becoming" is, for Nietzsche, it does not characterize some ineffable noumenal realm. Rather, it must describe something about the world we inhabit and know: the natural, physical world, the world of "appearance" (if this term can still function free of its discredited conceptual opposite).

To begin to answer our question, "What is Nietzsche's 'becoming'?" we must turn to our other question, "Who is Nietzsche's Heraclitus?"; for it is from Heraclitus that Nietzsche inherits the notion of becoming and to whom he often turns when discussing it. Moreover, while Nietzsche's infatuation with Schopenhauer and Kant was brief, his allegiance to Heraclitus is as evident in his first writings as in his last. Thus,

[37] Cf. TI "Reason" 6: "Any distinction between a 'true' and an 'apparent' world [ . . . ] is only a suggestion of decadence, a sign of decline of life. That the artist esteems appearance higher than reality is no objection to this proposition. For 'appearance' in this case means reality once again, only by way of selection, reinforcement, and correction. The tragic artist is no pessimist. [ . . . ]"

in one of his final statements—Ecce Homo 's discussion of The Birth of Tragedy —he writes:

I [ . . . ] understand myself as the first tragic philosopher, that is, the most extreme opposite and antipode of a pessimistic philosopher. Before me [ . . . ] tragic wisdom was lacking; I have looked in vain for signs of it even among the great Greeks in philosophy, those of the two centuries before Socrates. I retained some doubt in the case of Heraclitus, in whose proximity I feel warmer and better than anywhere else. The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy; saying yes to opposition and war; becoming, along with the repudiation of the very concept of being —all this is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date. ("Books" BT:3)

And in another text from the same year, having criticized "the philosophers' [ . . . ] hatred of the very idea of becoming," "the senses," and "appearance" in favor of "being" and "what does not become," Nietzsche writes:

With the highest respect, I except the name of Heraclitus . 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 injustic. [ . . . ] ^[38] But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. (TI "Reason" 2)

These passages recapitulate the conclusions of Nietzsche's early work on Greek philosophy, where the justification for them is presented in much greater detail. For a characterization of Nietzsche's Heraclitus, we must turn to Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, a study of the Presocratics Nietzsche left unpublished but to which he returned throughout the 1870s.^[39] This text is significant for a number of reasons.

[38] On this passage, see p. 194n. 56 below.

[39] The text seems to have been left unpublished primarily because it was to be included in the "historical" half of a larger "historical-theoretical" study, Das Philosophenbuch (The Philosopher's Book ), the second half of which was never completed but which was to include "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense." (See Grossoktavausgabe, 2d ed., vol. 10, Nachgelassene Werke [Leipzig: Naumann, 1903], which collects together all the texts, fragments, and plans for the proposed Philosopher's Book .) Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks was written in 1873 and based on a series of lectures first delivered in 1872 and repeated, with revisions, in 1873 and 1876. A fair copy of the text was made the next year, and minor corrections and additions were incorporated in 1879. For a discussion of this and related texts, see Breazeale's "Introduction" to Philosophy and Truth . Breazeale writes that Nietzsche "devoted great care to the preparation of this course of lectures" (liii), which were "clearly his personal favorite" (xviii). Breazeale goes on to de-scribe Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks as a "polished text" (liii n 4), "a relatively finished historical survey of the development of ancient philosophy" (xxii. In his "Nachwort" to the first volume of the Kritische Studienausgabe, Giorgio Colli calls the text Nietzsche's "central work" of the period immediately following The Birth of Tragedy (p. 916).

It provides Nietzsche's most sustained treatment of Heraclitus, clearly the text's protagonist. Not surprisingly, then, it is also a text in which the notion of becoming figures centrally.^[40] Moreover, far from displaying the reverence toward Schopenhauer and Kant one is supposed to find in Nietzsche's early work, the text is highly critical of these philosophers, with Heraclitus playing Nietzsche against Anaximander and Parmenides, whose interpretations of becoming and being are glossed with quotations from Schopenhauer and Kant. Indeed, instead of revealing a juvenile Nietzsche, this text shows him advancing positions and views that are central to his later work: naturalism and antidualism; a repudiation of "being" in favor of an "innocent becoming"; the characterization of becoming as a perpetual "artist's agon " or dice game; the promotion of an aesthetic versus a moral interpretation of the world; praise of an aphoristic and esoteric philosophical style; an empiricist and nominalist critique of the notions of substance and essence, and so on.

The text begins with a discussion of Thales. But this is only a prologue to the main drama, which stages a contest among the interpretations of becoming and being proposed by Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides. The problem of becoming first appears in the discussion of Anaximander, "the first philosophical author of the ancients" (4, P. 45), for whom "all becoming [is] an illegitimate emancipation from eternal being, a wrong for which destruction is the only penance" (4, P. 46).^[41] "Enigmatic proclamation of a true pessimist," Nietzsche

[40] In his introductory lecture for the course, Nietzsche claims: "This is the true. distinguishing mark of the philosophical drive: wonder concerning what is lying in front of everyone's nose. The most ordinary phenomenon is becoming, and with it Ionian philosophy begins. The problem reappears in an infinitely intensified form in the Eleatics. [ . . . ] All subsequent philosophies struggle against Eleaticism" (cited in Breazeale's "Introduction" to Philosophy and Truth, xliii–xliv).

[41] Nietzsche's interpretation is based on the only extant fragment of Anaximander, which Kirk and Raven translate into English as follows: "And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens, 'according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time'" (The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, ed. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957], 117). Though they tell us much about the interpreter himself, Nietzsche's interpretations of the Presocratics are surely a matter for debate. Even so, his reading, particularly of Heraclitus, accords with such canonical accounts as that of W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, The Earlier Presocratics and Pythagoreans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). It bears mentioning that Nietzsche's heir, Heidegger, alsorevisits the Presocratics in an attempt to reassess the foundations of European philosophy. Unlike Nietzsche's, however, Heidegger's analysis has less clearly defined protagonists and antagonists. See Heidegger's collection, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984).

declares and immediately likens Anaximander's doctrine to that of "[t]he only serious moralist of our century" (4, P. 46), Schopenhauer, whose Parerga Nietzsche quotes in support. On the next page, Anaximander's distinctions between being and becoming, the indefinite and the definite, are presented as parallels to Kant's distinction between the thing in itself and appearance: "This ultimate unity of the 'indefinite,' the womb of all things, can, it is true, be designated by human speech only as a negative, as something to which the existent world of becoming can give no predicate. We may look upon it as the equal of the Kantian Ding an sich " (4, P. 47).^[42]

Those who view Kant as a sober epistemologist will have trouble making sense of this strange affiliation of Kant with Anaximander. Yet recall that Nietzsche does not read Kant this way. Rather—and not implausibly—he sees Kant as one for whom epistemology and metaphysics are means to an end. Nietzsche perceives that, at bottom, what motivates Kant, Schopenhauer, and Anaximander is a metaphysicalmoral interpretation of the world . Thus, with the names "Schopenhauer" and "Kant" still resonating, Nietzsche remarks that:

Anaximander was no longer dealing with the question of the origins of this world in a purely physical way. Rather [ . . . ] he grasped with bold fingers the tangle of the profoundest problem in ethics. [ . . . ] From this world of injustice [ . . . ] Anaximander flees into a metaphysical fortress from which he leans out, letting his gaze sweep the horizon. (4, P. 48)

Thus far, one might still read this text in the way that The Birth of Tragedy is often read: as supporting a Kantian dualism and a Schopenhauerian pessimism. Yet the entrance of Heraclitus quickly disconfirms this reading. For Heraclitus appears bearing a new world-interpretation with which Nietzsche is clearly in sympathy:

[Heraclitus] denied the duality of totally diverse worlds—a position which Anaximander had been compelled to assume. He no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical one, a realm of definite qualities from an undefinable "indefinite." And after this first step, nothing could hold him back from a second, far bolder negation: he altogether denied being. For this one world which he retained [ . . . ] nowhere shows a tarrying, an indestruc-

[42] Note that, in this passage, becoming is contrasted with, rather than assimilated to, "the Kantian Ding an sich ."

tibility, a bulwark in the stream. Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus proclaimed: "I see nothing other than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your short-sightedness, not of the essence of things, if you believe you see land somewhere in the ocean of becoming and passing-away. You use names for things as though they rigidly, persistently endured; yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one you stepped into before." (5, pp. 51–52)

This passage tells us much about Nietzsche's Heraclitus and the view of becoming these two philosophers share. Unlike Anaximander (and Kant and Schopenhauer), Nietzsche's Heraclitus is an antidualist and antimetaphysician for whom there is only "one world," a world of "becoming" that is entirely physical and evident to those who are not swayed by the conceptual and linguistic reifications that convince the "shortsighted" of being and persistence.

This antidualism and critique of the concept of being also leads Heraclitus to deny the distinctions between substance and accident, essence and appearance. Just as Nietzsche himself later proclaims that "a 'thing' is the sum of its effects [Wirkungen ]" (WP 551), Nietzsche's Heraclitus declares that "the whole nature of reality [Wirklichkeit ] lies simply in its acts [Wirken ] and [ . . . ] for it there exists no other sort of being" (5, P. 53); "[t]he many perceivable qualities are neither eternal substances [ewige Wesenheiten ] nor phantasms of our senses [ . . . ] neither rigid autonomous being nor fleeting semblance flitting through human minds" (6, p. 58). Rejecting these oppositions, Nietzsche asserts that there is only the empirically evident world of becoming, a vast and shifting assemblage of effects, forms, appearances, and perspectives.

Heraclitus' world of becoming and appearance is characterized by Nietzsche in a network of images and figures that recur throughout the Nietzschean corpus: the images of the agon and the game, the figures of the artist and the child.^[43]

Ordinary people think they see something rigid, complete and permanent; in truth, however, light and dark, bitter and sweet are attached to each other and interlocked at any given moment like wrestlers of whom sometimes one, sometimes the other is on top. [ . . . ] The strife of opposites gives birth to all

[43] Preference for these figures and images, and for figurative, imagistic, or "intuitive" language in general, is not the only stylistic trait Nietzsche inherits from Heraclitus. He also shares a penchant for the terse, dense, and provocative aphorism that offends common sense but strikes "those with ears to hear." For Nietzsche's own praise of Heraclitus's style, see PTA 7, PP. 64–65. For an analysis of Heraclitus's style and mode of thought that bears an uncanny resemblance to Nietzsche's discussion of these issues, see Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:437–39. Cf. PTA 5, PP. 52–53.

that becomes; the definite qualities which look permanent to us express the momentary ascendancy of one partner. But this by no means signifies the end of the war; the contest endures to all eternity. (5, PP. 54–55)

In this world only the play of artists and children exhibits becoming and passing away, building and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence. And as artists and children play, so plays the ever-living fire, building up and destroying, in innocence. Such is the game that the aeon plays with itself. [ . . . I]t builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piling them up and trampling them down. From time to time it starts the game anew. A moment of satiety, and again it is seized by its need, as the artist is seized by the need to create. Not hybris but the ever-newly-awakened impulse to play calls new worlds into being. (7, P. 62)^[44]

Here, Nietzsche pauses to acknowledge that Schopenhauer, too, presents an image of becoming as an everlasting struggle. Yet, after quoting a representative passage from Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, he notes that "the basic tone of [Schopenhauer's] description is quite different from that which Heraclitus offers," because, for Schopenhauer, becoming is "a self-consuming, menacing and gloomy drive, a thoroughly frightful and by no means blessed phenomena" (5, P. 56).^[45] Here we find the crucial difference between the Anaximandrian-Kantian-Schopenhauerian and the Heraclitean—Nietzschean interpretations of becoming: the former is a moral interpretation that paints a "thoroughly gloomy" picture of guilt and penance, while the latter is an aesthetic interpretation that sees becoming as "blessed" and "innocent."^[46]

[44] This passage seems to allude to Heraclitus' fr. 52: "Time is a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is in the hands of a child" (Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, trans. Kathleen Freeman [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948], 28). Yet it more closely approximates an epic simile in Homer that unites the figures of agon and game: "[The Trojans] streamed over / in massed formation, with Apollo in front of them holding / the tremendous aegis, and wrecked the bastions of the Achaians / easily, as when a little boy piles sand by the sea-shore / when in his innocent play he makes sand towers to amuse him / and then, still playing, with hands and feet ruins them and wrecks them" (The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951], 319). In "On the Pathos of Truth," an 1872 "preface to an unwritten book," Nietzsche calls upon Diogenes Laertius's description of Heraclitus "watching the games of noisy children [ . . . ] pondering something never before pondered by a mortal on such an occasion, viz., the play of the great world-child, Zeus, and the eternal game of destruction and origination" (in Breazeale, ed. and trans., Philosophy and Truth, 64). Cf. BGE 94 and WP 797.

[45] Recall the 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche maintains that this book "tried laboriously to express by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and new valuations which were basically at odds with Kant's and Schopenhauer's spirit and taste!" (BT SC:6).

[46] Cf. TI "Errors" 7: "there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue with the concept of a 'moral world-order' to infect the innocence of becoming by means of 'punishment' and 'guilt'."

"'It is a game,'" Nietzsche's Heraclitus says. "'Don't take it so pathetically, and—above all—don't make morality of it!'" (7, P. 64): "Becoming is not a moral but an aesthetic phenomenon" (19, P. 113).^[47]

With the entrance of Parmenides, the Heraclitean interpretation of becoming is provided an even starker contrast. In these sections, Nietzsche casts aside the mode of explication and adopts a stridently critical tone. Moreover, the language and content of this critique are nearly identical to those found in a text written fifteen years later—the section of Twilight of the Idols entitled "'Reason' in Philosophy," in which Nietzsche criticizes the basic traits that have hitherto dominated the philosophical disposition. Indeed, in Nietzsche's Parmenides, we find the archetype of the philosopher, a condensation of Plato, Descartes, and Kant. Here we discover the true origin of that philosophical "hatred of the very idea of becoming" (TI "Reason" 1); for Parmenides is the first to proclaim "the doctrine of Being," a position that Nietzsche deems "un-Greek as no other in the two centuries of the Tragic Age" (PTA 9, p. 69). With "purest absolutely bloodless abstraction, unclouded by any reality" (9, P. 69), Parmenides declares:

That which truly is must be eternally present; one cannot say of it that "it was," or "it will be." What has being cannot have become. [ . . . ] It is the same with passing-away. Passing-away is just as impossible as becoming, as is all change, all decrease, all increase. In fact the only valid proposition that can be stated is "Everything of which you can say 'it has been' or 'it will be' is not; of what has being you can never say 'it is not.'" (10, p. 78)^[48]

Along with this denial of becoming, Nietzsche's Parmenides rejects the testimony of the senses—which deceive us into believing in becoming—and draws a fateful distinction between the mind and the body:

"Whatever you do, do not be guided by your dull eyes," is [Parmenides'] imperative, "nor by your resounding ears, nor by your tongue, but test all things

[47] Nietzsche attributes this view to Anaxagoras, who, however, is seen as following Heraclitus. See PTA 19, 112–13

[48] Cf. TI "Reason" 1: "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, their Egypticism. They think that they show their respect for a subject when they de-historicize it, sub specie aeterni —when they turn it into a mummy. All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honorable concept-idolators worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship. 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."

with the power of your thinking alone."^[49] Thus he accomplished the immensely significant first critique of man's apparatus for knowledge, a critique as yet inadequate but disastrous in its consequences. By wrenching apart the senses and the capacity for abstraction, in other words by splitting up reason as though it were composed of two quite separate capacities, he demolished the intellect itself, encouraging that wholly erroneous distinction between "mind" and "body" which, especially since Plato, lies upon philosophy like a curse. All sense perceptions, says Parmenides, yield but deceptions.[ . . . ] All the multiplicity and colorfulness of the world known to experience, the transformations of its qualities, the orderliness of its ups and downs, are mercilessly cast aside as mere semblance and delusion. (10, p. 79)^[50]

If Anaximander was criticized for "flee[ing] into a metaphysical fortress" (4, P. 48), Parmenides retreats even further and solicits from Nietzsche an even stronger reproach:

When one makes as total a judgment as does Parmenides about the whole of the world, one ceases to be a natural scientist [ein Naturforscher ], an investigator into any of the world's parts. One's sympathy toward phenomena atrophies; one even develops a hatred for phenomena including oneself, a hatred for being unable to get rid of the eternal deceitfulness of the senses. Henceforth truth shall live only in the palest, most abstracted generalities, in the empty husks of the most indefinite terms, as though in a house of cobwebs. And beside such "truth" now sits the philosopher, as bloodless as his abstractions, in the spun-out fabric of his formulas. A spider at least wants blood from his victims. The Parmenidean philosopher hates most of all the blood of his victims, the blood of empirical reality which was sacrificed and shed by him. (10, pp. 79–80)^[51]

Thus do we also find in Parmenides the origin of "the other idiosyncrasy of the philosophers," which "consists in confusing the last and the first": "They place that which comes at the end—unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all!—namely, the 'highest concepts,' which means

[49] See Parmenides, frr. 7–8.

[50] Cf. TI "Reason" 1: "Now [the philosophers] all believe, desperately even, in what has being. But since they never grasp it, they seek for reasons why it is kept from them. "There must be mere appearance, there must be some deception which prevents us from perceiving what has being: where is the deceiver?'—'We have found him,' they cry ecstatically; 'it is the senses! [ . . . ] Moral: let us free ourselves from the deception of the senses, from becoming, from history, from lies. [ . . . ] 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!'"

[51] Cf. TI "Reason" 2: "Today we possess science precisely to the extent that we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses [ . . . ] The rest is miscarriage and not-yet-science. [ . . . ]"; also see n. 50, above.

the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last smoke of evaporating reality, in the beginning, as the beginning" (TI "Reason" 4). Nietzsche's Parmenides

flee[s] from an over-abundant reality [ . . . ] into the rigor mortis of the coldest, emptiest concept of all, the concept of being. [ . . . ] Instead of being corrected and tested against reality (considering that they are in fact derived from it) the concepts, on the contrary, are supposed to measure and direct reality and, in case reality contradicts logic, to condemn the former. (PTA II, pp. 80–81; 12, p. 87)^[52]

To the two presented in Twilight, we might add a third "idiosyncrasy" that Nietzsche exposes elsewhere: "the demand for certainty."^[53] According to Nietzsche, it, too, has its source in Parmenides:

What astonishes us is the degree of schematism and abstraction (in a Greek!), above all, the terrible energetic striving for certainty [Strebens nach Gewißheit] in an epoch which otherwise thought mythically and whose imagination was highly mobile and fluid. "Grant me, you gods, but one certainty," runs Parmenides' prayer, "even if it be but a log's breadth on which to lie, on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that becomes, everything lush, colorful, blossoming, deceptive, everything that charms and is alive. Take all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor empty certainty." [ . . . ] Experience nowhere offered him being as he imagined it, but he concluded its existence from the fact that he was able to think it. (II, pp. 81–82)

It is Descartes, not Schopenhauer, who is the fruit of this Parmenidean seed.^[54] And Nietzsche takes pains to distinguish this form of ascetic world-denial from the mystical, ecstatic form found among "the Hindu

[52] Nietzsche's struggle against the philosophical tendency "to confuse the last and the first" helps to explain some of the puzzling language of PTA 11 and TL, both written in the same year. In these texts, Nietzsche appears to lapse into the skeptical, metaphysicalrealist view that words and concepts can never "touch upon absolute truth," "that knowing and being are the most opposite of all spheres" (PTA 11, 83). This language is surely misleading. Yet I think that what motivates these claims is simply the point that words and concepts are only pragmatic simplifications and reifications of the rich, sensual, world of becoming and that—contra the rationalist—the former are derived from the latter rather than the reverse. Thus, too, we find Nietzsche, both early and late, supporting the claims of "intuition" over those of "reason," his somewhat idiosyncratic terms for "sensuality" and "conceptuality," respectively. Cf., e.g., WP 488: "All our categories of reason are of sensual origin: derived from the empirical world"; and TI "Reason" 2: "[The senses] do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies. [ . . . ] 'Reason' is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses."

[53] See GS 2, 347; BGE 10; and the discussion of these passages above, in §1.6.2.

[54] Cf. W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 2, The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 20.

philosophers" (11, p. 81) of whom Schopenhauer was a disciple. Yet, despite important differences among the Hindu, Buddhist, Platonic, Christian, Cartesian, Kantian, and Schopenhauerian world-interpretations, Nietzsche sees in them a basic similarity: they are all forms of what he would later call "the ascetic ideal," that "hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself" ( GM III:28). This "ascetic ideal," this "moral interpretation of the world" in its various guises, Nietzsche asserts, "has hitherto dominated " not only "all philosophy" (III:24) but all of "[humanity's] existence on earth" (III:28). "Apart from [it], man, the human animal, had no meaning so far" (III:28). Consequently, "the death of God," which signals the eclipse of this world-interpretation, leads to the profound crisis of "nihilism." As diagnostician and physician of this condition, Nietzsche heralds a new interpretation. All but alone, he draws strength and inspiration from that world-interpretation foreclosed by the Parmenidean-ascetic: the Heraclitean view that "becoming is not a moral but an aesthetic phenomenon" (PTA 19, p. 113).

4.5—
Becoming and Nietzsche's Naturalism

We now have an answer to the question, "Who is Nietzsche's Heraclitus?" With this, we have also begun to answer the main question, "What is Nietzsche's 'becoming'?" We can further pursue this question by focusing on the traits of becoming outlined above. It is evident that neither Heraclitus nor Nietzsche takes the world of "becoming" to be a metaphysical, noumenal world. On the contrary, their notions of "becoming" are consistent with a thoroughgoing naturalism. Nietzsche's Heraclitus "denie[s] the duality of totally diverse worlds" and "no longer distinguishe[s] a physical world from a metaphysical one" (PTA 5, P. 51). The world of becoming that both philosophers take to be the only reality is simply the physical, natural world that we inhabit and with which we are familiar. As Nietzsche remarks in his lecture course on the Presocratics, "becoming" is "the most ordinary phenomenon"; it "[lies] in front of everyone's nose."^[55] Rather than discovering

[55] This passage is found in the introduction to Nietzsche's lectures on the Presocratics (KGW II/4, pp. 215–16), quoted in Breazeale's "Introduction" to Philosophy and Truth, xliv.

reality in the abstract realm of concepts, names, and mathematical or logical forms, Heraclitus and Nietzsche find it in "the present manycolored and changing world that presses upon us in all our experiences" (PTA 5, P. 52), in "[a]ll the multiplicity and colorfulness of the world known to experience, [with] all the changes of its qualities" (10, p. 79). That is, the world of becoming is the sensuous world, the world available to the senses, a world of myriad and ever-changing appearances.^[56] "Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change," Nietzsche writes, "they do not lie at all" (TI "Reason" 2).

Not the product of a speculative metaphysics, then, the notion of becoming is drawn from an empirical examination of the world around us. It simply marks the fact that, within the physical world, nothing is exempt from alteration; and those entities that appear stable differ only in their slower tempo of change or the degree to which it is apparent to the unaided senses (see WP 521, 552, 568, 580, and GS 112). What common sense takes to be a solid object, the physicist considers a more or less stable swarm of molecules. And while common sense has a pragmatic justification for treating this swarm as a single enduring entity, Nietzsche and Heraclitus remind us that this is a simplification. As an illustration, Heraclitus offers the image of the bow or lyre,^[57] to which W. K. C. Guthrie provides this helpful gloss:

Look at a strung bow lying on the ground or leaning against a wall. No movement is visible. To the eyes it appears a static object, completely at rest. But in fact a continuous tug-of-war is going on within it, as will become evident if the string is not strong enough or is allowed to perish. The bow will immediately take advantage, snap it and leap to straighten itself, thus showing that each had been putting forth effort all the time.^[58]

Such is the case with every natural entity—the only ones to which Nietzsche and Heraclitus grant existence. Every "thing" is but a tension of forces and materials that soon enough alter, becoming other. Tables,

[56] If Nietzsche later chides Heraclitus for doing an "injustice" to the senses ("he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity," TI "Reason" 2), it is only to remind him, and us, that it is not the senses themselves that are to blame but the falsification of their testimony by a reifying conceptual apparatus. Nietzsche and Heraclitus are not far apart, here. See the discussion of Nietzsche's empiricism above, in §§2.2.4–2.3.1, and Heraclitus's empiricism below, in §4.5, and in Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:429ff.

[57] See fr. 51: "They [ordinary people] do not grasp how by being at variance it [the Logos, cosmos, or natural order] agrees with itself, a backward-turning adjustment like that of the bow or lyre" (trans. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, 1:439).

[58] Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:440.

hands, cups, water, doorknobs, trees, stones, and all other natural things expand, contract, grow, decay, fuse, divide, solidify, melt, evaporate, and so on.^[59] And none of this is mysteriously unavailable to the scrupulous and patient inquirer.^[60]

Indeed this notion of becoming is the conclusion of a thoroughgoing empiricism that accepts the evident ubiquity of change in the universe without viewing it as issuing from, or tending toward, some being. We have already seen that both philosophers reject the notion that becoming's appearances and accidents are rooted in some underlying substratum. So, too, do they reject the supposition that being is the arche^[*] or telos of the process of becoming. Against the Milesians, Heraclitus rejects cosmogony in favor of a perpetual becoming ("[t]his world-order [ . . . ] none of the gods nor of men has made, but it was always and is and shall be");^[61] while, against Hegel and Kelvin, Nietzsche maintains that "[t]he world [ . . . ] becomes, it passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away" (WP 1066).^[62] For both Heraclitus and Nietzsche, the world is a perpetual agon that witnesses periodic victories but "endures in all eternity" (PTA 5, PP. 54–55).

This empiricism and naturalism of Nietzsche and his Heraclitus is directed against an idealist tradition that stretches from Parmenides and Plato through Christianity to Kant and Schopenhauer. If the idealist tradition travels Parmenides' "way of Truth," which leads it toward spirit, mind, thought, and being,^[63] Nietzsche and his Heraclitus tread

[59] See Heraclitus, fr. 126: "Cold things grow hot, hot things cold, moist dry, dry wet" (trans. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:445).

[60] See WP 688: "It is simply a matter of experience that change never ceases ."

[61] Fr. 30, trans. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1 :454. For a discussion of this rejection of cosmogony, see Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), 45, and History of Greek Philosophy, 1 :441. Like Nietzsche, Guthrie rejects interpretations that read Heraclitus as hypothesizing "alternate states of harmony and discord, unity and plurality," maintaining that, for Heraclitus, "tension is never resolved. Peace and war do not succeed each other in turn: always in the world there is both peace and war. Cessation of struggle would mean the disintegration of the cosmos" (p. 437). See also Guthrie's rejection of the attribution to Heraclitus of a notion of ecpyrosis (the periodic destruction of the world by fire) in History of Greek Philosophy, 1:454ff.

[62] See the rest of this note, as well as WP 708, 1062, 1064, and 1067. That Nietzsche maintained this idea throughout his career can be seen by comparing these passages to PTA 13, written more than a decade earlier, and the notes from 1873 presented by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 39ff.

[63] See Parmenides, frr. 2–8, and Presocratic Philosophers, ed. Kirk and Raven, 269–78. Though Kant carves out a limited domain for experience and natural science, his real concern, too, lies outside this domain: in the sphere of morality, the universal and necessary presuppositions of which are the products of pure reason "scrupulously cleansed ofeverything empirical" (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton [New York: Harper and Row, 1948], 56).

the opposite path, "the way of seeming,"^[64] which leads them back toward nature, body, sensation, and becoming. Contrary to Plato's claim that "[t]hat which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason is always in the process of becoming and perishing and never really is,"^[65] Nietzsche and his Heraclitus maintain that there is only the world of nature, life, history, becoming, and appearance and that "any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable" (TI "Reason" 6). If Parmenides and Plato discover "absolute reality" in mental entities that "remain always constant and invariable never admitting any alteration in any respect or in any sense,"^[66] Nietzsche and his Heraclitus, as we have seen, maintain that these mental entities are secondary to—"are in fact derived from"—the world of nature, experience, and becoming (PTA 12, p. 87).

4.6—
Becoming, Appearance, and Interpretation

4.6.1—
Beyond God and Being:
The Affiliation of Becoming and Appearance

This conception of becoming as perpetual alteration and movement is certainly the best-known and most obvious characterization of the notion as it appears in Heraclitus and Nietzsche. But there is also another facet to their conception of becoming. If we examine this aspect, we find that Nietzsche's becoming does not name the primal ontological ground that no epistemological perspective can grasp but rather is a feature of his "perspectivism" itself.

We have seen that the world according to Heraclitus and Nietzsche is a "becoming" in the sense that no part of it is exempt from change. A commitment to naturalism and empiricism leads both philosophers to this view. Yet we have also seen that Nietzsche is no traditional empiricist. He rejects the positivistic notion that there are "brute facts" and

[64] See Parmenides, frr. 8–19, and Presocratic Philosophers, ed. Kirk and Raven, 278–83. On "the way of seeming," see chapter 1, above.

[65] Plato, Timaeus 27d–28a, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 1161. Robert Bolton ("Plato's Distinction between Being and Becoming," Review of Metaphysics 29 [1975]: 67) writes that this passage is, "[b]y general agreement, the definitive statement of the distinction [between being and becoming in Plato's work]."

[66] Plato, Phaedo 78c–78d, in Collected Dialogues of Plato, 61.

instead espouses a holistic or hermeneutic view, according to which sense evidence is always relative to one or another background interpretation (see §2.3.1, above). Neither is Heraclitus a traditional empiricist. While acknowledging a preference for "[t]he things of which there is seeing and hearing and perception,"^[67] Heraclitus also warns that "eyes and ears" are "evil witnesses [ . . . ] for men if they have souls that do not understand their language."^[68] That is, for Heraclitus, as for Nietzsche, there is no simple perception; perception is always already interpretation.^[69]

This insight is tremendously important to Heraclitus, for one who neglects it might succumb to the illusion that simple sense perception directly reveals the way the world really is. In a number of the fragments, Heraclitus rejects this realist view: "The sea is the purest and most polluted water, drinkable and salutary for fishes, undrinkable and deadly to men" (fr. 61); "Pigs like mud [but men do not]" (fr. 13); "Donkeys prefer rubbish to gold, [men gold to rubbish]" (fr. 9); "cutting and burning [which are normally bad] call for a fee when done by a surgeon" (fr. 58).^[70] These observations about ordinary life aim to remind us that every description is relative to an interpretation and that every interpretation is rooted in a set of interests, desires, needs, capacities, and standpoints. Given the absurdity of declaring some one set of these to be absolutely true and right, we are to conclude that there is not one "true" description of the world but many.

[67] Fr. 55, Presocratic Philosophers, ed. Kirk and Raven, 189. Cf. Sextus Empiricus's presentation of Heraclitus's view: "in sleep, when the channels of perception are shut, our mind is sundered from its kinship with the surrounding. [ . . . ] But in the waking state it again peeps out through the channels of perception as through a kind of window, and meeting with the surrounding it puts on its power of reason" (quoted and discussed in Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 207–8). On this passage, also see Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:430.

[68] Fr. 107, trans. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 189.

[69] Cf. Heidegger: "What we 'first' hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking wagon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling" (Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York: Harper and Row, 1962], 207).

[70] Fr. 61, trans. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1 :445; frr. 13, 9, and 58, trans. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 190. Cf. Nelson Goodman's remark: "If I were asked what is the food for men, I should have to answer 'none.' For there are many foods. And if I am asked what is the way the world is, I must likewise answer, 'none,'" ("The Way the World Is," in Problems and Projects [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972], 31). Indeed, Goodman writes: "The pre-Socratics, I have long felt, made almost all the advances and mistakes in the history of philosophy" (Ways of Worldmaking [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978], 97). Later in the same text, he refers to Heraclitus in support of the notion that "worlds seem to depend on conflict for their existence"(119).

We have already seen this to be the upshot of Nietzsche's perspectivism (see chapter 3). But the Heraclitean source is important for our discussion of becoming. Terence Irwin has shown that, according to both Plato and Aristotle, Heraclitean becoming must be seen as more than simply the view that "everything undergoes constant local movement and qualitative alteration."^[71] In addition to this notion of becoming, which Irwin calls "self-change," Heraclitean becoming must also be taken to involve what Irwin calls "aspect-change," "things with compresent opposite properties," "especially the compresence resulting from dependence on different situations," for example, "the road up and down, the straight and crooked writing, the food which is good (for some people) and bad (for others)."^[72] Irwin's analysis follows that of Guthrie, who remarks that the two central Heraclitean doctrines, "everything is in continuous motion and change" and "harmony is of opposites,"^[73] are "only different ways of explaining the same truth."^[74]

But how is this the case? How are these seemingly different notions related? Self-change involves transformation over time, aspect-change need not. The former seems to describe the alteration of a particular object, the latter a change in the viewpoint from which it is considered.^[75] Despite these differences, what joins these two kinds of change is the rejection of being, in its many forms.^[76]

If self-change concerns "becoming" in the usual sense, aspect-change concerns what is usually termed "appearance," variation in the way an

[71] Terence Irwin, "Plato's Heracleiteanism," Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1977): 4. Like Irwin, Guthrie maintains that there is good reason to accept Plato's account of Heraclitus. For Guthrie (History of Greek Philosophy, r :436–37), Plato was "perhaps the first to appreciate the full boldness of [Heraclitus's] thought" and Plato "warrants confidence in anything that he has to say about this difficult thinker." This confidence is in part due to the fact that Plato and his contemporaries "possess[ed] either Heraclitus' book or at least a much more comprehensive collection of his sayings than we have" (p. 452n). I thank John Richardson for pointing me toward Irwin's essay.

[72] Irwin, "Plato's Heracleiteanism," 4, 5.

[73] Guthrie (History of Greek Philosophy, 1:435ff.) notes that the term "harmony" is "misleading" "because it carries psychological overtones which are biased in a Pythagorean direction." That is, we tend to take the term as naming a calm resolution of tension and struggle, which, for Heraclitus, is impossible. The Heraclitean doctrine is perhaps better described by Gilles Deleuze's phrase "the affirmation of difference." See, e.g., Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 172–73.

[74] Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 1:435.

[75] See Irwin, "Plato's Heracleiteanism," 4. We will quickly see that this opposition of object and subject, known and knower is problematized by the conception of becoming under discussion here.

[76] For Nietzsche's endorsement of Heraclitus' rejection of being, see PTA 5, 51–52, TI "Reason" 2 and EH "Books" BT:3, all three of which are quoted in §4.4, above.

object can seem or appear. But "becoming" and "appearance" are intimately related to one another. From its inception, the philosophical tradition has associated "becoming" and "appearance" as forms of alterity, of that which does not remain the same but constantly becomes-other. Thus, Parmenides arrived at his concept of Being through a rejection of both becoming and appearing (or seeming). This association was later taken up and canonized by Platonism and Christianity, which took the natural, empirical world as a derivative realm of mere becoming and mere appearance in relation to the meta-physical world of true being.^[77] It is not surprising, then, that Nietzsche's naturalism—that is, his rejection of ontological dualism and his revaluation of the natural world—comes to privilege becoming not only in the sense of self-change but also in the sense of aspect-change (i.e., his perspectivism).

Yet Nietzsche's rejection of being connects "becoming" and "appearance" in a deeper sense as well. In the metaphysical tradition, true being serves as origin, aim, essence, and substance for the rest of existence. Thus, the Platonic Form is both a template for empirical entities and that which renders intelligible these entities by distilling the essence from their various guises. The Form also provides an absolute standard by which to judge true and false claimants (who is the true statesman? the true lover? the true philosopher?) and thus establishes a hierarchy of the more or less real that measures each entity according to its distance from true being.^[78] So, too, for the Western tradition, has God been synonymous with Being itself: at once creator, providential director, essence, substance, and end of all existence. The Christian tradition, too, produces a hierarchy of entities, at the top of which stands "man," created "in the image of God," and at the bottom of which stands inanimate nature. Moreover, for modern rationalism, God is that which guarantees all knowledge (Descartes), sorts out better from worse and actual from merely possible worlds (Leibniz), exists as the sole substance, of which all else is expression or attribute (Spinoza),^[79] and serves as the ultimate unity and ground of all possible experience (Kant). In

[77] For Nietzsche's critique of philosophy's obsession with true being and its rejection of becoming, appearance, and the senses, see TI "Reason" 1. Note that Nietzsche's critique of the philosophical tradition excepts only Heraclitus (TI "Reason" 2).

[78] For an analysis of Plato along these lines, see Deleuze, "Plato and the Simulacrum," in Logic of Sense, 253–66, and Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 59–69.

[79] Of course, Spinoza is a special case, since, for him, "God is Nature" rather than some meta-physical entity. Nietzsche praises Spinoza for this, as do Nietzscheans such as Deleuze. Nonetheless, Spinoza still follows the metaphysical-theological tradition in us-ing "God" to name this essence and source of all existence. This idea is discussed further in §4.7.1, below.

short, true Being has always been that which guarantees the existence, unity, necessity, completeness, continuity, and hierarchy of all knowing and being.

Consequently, "the rejection of being" or "the death of God" (the two phrases are nearly synonymous)^[80] means a fragmentation of this unity and continuity, a withdrawal of this origin, a subversion of this hierarchy, a deviation of this teleology. Of the two tasks that are to follow God's death (see GS 109 and chapter 2, above), "the naturalization of humanity" means a rejection of the hierarchy that places human beings closest to God and establishes "a false order of rank in relation to animals and nature" (GS 115).^[81] "The de-deification of nature" means the rejection of any simple and absolute origin, the denial of providence and teleology, and a repudiation of the model-copy relationship and the associated distinctions between substance and accident, essence and appearance, identity and difference. For Nietzsche, following Heraclitus, "being is an empty fiction. The 'apparent' world is the only one" (cf. TI "World" 6). If being finds its ideal and sanction in God, "the death of God" inaugurates the reign of becoming and appearance. In place of the opposition of being (or essence or substance) and appearance, there remain only "degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance" (BGE 34). In short, the rejection of being amounts to a rejection of every transcendent grounding principle, any form of—what, following Derrida, we could call—" beingpresence": origin, aim, unity, essence, substance, and so on.^[82] Cast adrift from these anchors, the world becomes .

Thus, just as the two central Heraclitean doctrines—"everything is in continuous motion and change" and "harmony is of opposites"—are "only different ways of explaining the same truth," so, too, are the two Nietzschean doctrines, "becoming" and "perspectivism." The terms

[80] Compare PTA 11 with TI "Reason" 4. See also TI "Reason" 5, where Nietzsche writes that "every word we say and every sentence speak in [ . . . ] favor" of "the error concerning being" and concludes that "we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar."

[81] Cf. GM III: 25: "Alas, the faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past—he has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith, almost God ('child of God,' 'God-man')."

[82] For some representative passages, see GS 54, 109, 285, 357; TI "Errors" 7–8; WP 552, 556, 561, 567, 1062–67.

of this latter pair are not related to one another as object to subject, known to knower. Rather, they describe different facets of a world beyond being. Such a world "becomes" not only in the sense that, natural in its entirety, it is subject to incessant alteration over time. It "becomes" also insofar as "essence" has been dissolved into "appearance," the "world 'in itself'" into "a world of relations." "It has a differing aspect from every point," and thus "its being is essentially different from every point."^[83] Hence, any characterization of the world as a whole or any entity within it will be perpetually displaced by another—"and the sum of these is in every case quite incongruent " (WP 568).

4.6.2—
Becoming and the Contest of Interpretations

Let us pursue this further. To account for the ubiquity and perpetuity of change in the world, both Heraclitus and Nietzsche call upon the metaphor of war and struggle: "war is the father of all" (fr. 53),^[84] says the former; "[t]he world [ . . . ] is 'will to power' and nothing besides" (BGE 36), declares the latter, explaining that:

every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (—its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the parts of other bodies and ends by coming into an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they conspire together for power . And the process goes on. (WP 636)

"[T]he process goes on" because these unions are unstable, each part bent on power; and so "the contest endures in all eternity" (PTA 5, P. 55). This contest could not have had a simple beginning, because it requires at least two contestants and the difference and tension between them. And the projection of an end to this struggle Nietzsche views as merely the dream of those for whom this world of becoming ought to be other than it is (see WP 708).

[83] Cf. GS 54, 335; WP 556ff.; and WP 625 ("there is no 'essence-in-itself,' it is only relations that constitute an essence").

[84] Nietzsche quotes this fragment in GS 92 and celebrates war and warriors throughout his writing: see, e.g., HC ; GS 283, 285, 377; Z: 1 "On Reading and Writing," Z: 3 "On Old and New Tablets"; BGE 76; GM I: 5, I: 7, II: 9, II: 24, III: epigram, III: 10, III: 25; TI "Morality" 3, "Skirmishes" 24; EH "Wise" 7; and WP 1040.

Moreover, for Nietzsche and Heraclitus, there is no place outside this struggle:

While Heraclitus' imagination saw this restless motion of the universe, this "reality," with the eyes of a blissful spectator who is watching innumerable pairs of contestants wrestling in joyous combat and refereed by stern judges, he was overcome by an even greater idea: he could no longer see the contesting pairs and their referees as separate; the judges themselves seemed to be striving in the contest and the contestants seemed to be judging them. (PTA 6, P. 57)

That is, we who witness this becoming are ourselves a part of it; our interpretations are contestants in the game or agon . Rejecting the notion that the world simply reveals itself as it is, Nietzsche and Heraclitus maintain that the world always appears under the aegis of one or another interpretation. Yet, lacking both a fixed essence and a detached judge who could determine it, no one of these interpretations can ever be granted ultimate priority. While surely there are "momentary ascendanc[ies]" during which particular interpretations dominate, the contest continues without end. "A thing would be defined," Nietzsche writes, "once all creatures had asked 'what is that?' and had answered their question. Supposing one single creature, with its own relationships and perspectives for all things were missing, then the thing would not yet be 'defined'" (WP 556). Thus is any final characterization of a "thing"—and, indeed, of the world as a whole—forever contested and, hence, deferred.

4.6.3—
Becoming as Différance

We can summarize the discussion thus far by calling upon a notion the inspiration for which is both Heraclitean and Nietzschean: Jacques Derrida's conception of différance .^[85] Derrida provides this gloss:

The verb "to differ" [Fr. différer ; L. differre ] seems to differ from itself. On the one hand, it indicates difference as distinction, inequality, or discernibility; on the other, it expresses the interposition of delay, the interval of a spacing and temporalizing that puts off until "later" what is presently denied, the pos-

[85] See Jacques Derrida, "Différance," in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 148ff, and 154, where Nietzsche and Heraclitus are cited as having foreshadowed the notion of différance . On the Nietzschean inspiration, see also Derrida, "Implications," in Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 9–10.

sible that is presently impossible. Sometimes the different and sometimes the deferred correspond [in French] to the verb "to differ." [ . . . ] In the one case "to differ" signifies nonidentity; in the other case it signifies the order of the same . Yet there must be a common, although entirely differant [différante ], root within the sphere that relates the two movements of differing to one another. We provisionally give the name différance to this sameness which is not identical: by the silent writing of its a, it has the desired advantage of referring to differing, both as spacing/temporalizing and as the movement that structures every dissociation.^[86]

Derrida's neologism (or neographism) is perhaps a better name for the complex notion of "becoming" we have been discussing. It captures both senses of "becoming" we have found at work in Heraclitus and Nietzsche: becoming as "self-change" and as "aspect-change." As "self-change," différance designates difference within "the order of the same ": the one that, in time, becomes-other, postponing any definitive characterization. As "aspect-change," différance "signifies non-identity," "difference as distinction, inequality, or discernibility": the one that is simultaneously other—"the road up," which both is and is not "the road down." Furthermore, it serves to highlight several features not immediately evident in Nietzsche's and Heraclitus's notion but that we have seen are central to it. First, it discards the image of becoming as a fluid, primary, pre-formed plenum and instead figures it as an assemblage of differences, of forces in struggle, as "a 'productive,' conflictual movement which cannot be preceded by any identity, any unity, or any original simplicity."^[87] It thus serves to remind us that, if Nietzsche and Heraclitus at times picture becoming as a "river," it is one in which "different and different waters flow."^[88] Second, différance describes "an allergic or polemical otherness," "the 'active,' moving discord of different forces, and difference of forces," thus highlighting the agonistic quality we have seen to be so crucial in Heraclitus's and Nietzsche's notions of becoming.^[89] Third, it emphasizes that becoming is not something that happens to beings but rather constitutes the rejection of

[86] Derrida, "Différance," 129–30. Note that David B. Allison's translation of "Différance" includes a brief introduction (from which I quote above) that appeared in the original version of the essay, published in Théorie d'ensemble (Paris: Editions Seuil, 1968), but was omitted in the version reprinted in Marges de la philosophie (Margins of Philosophy ).

[87] Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 6.

[88] Heraclitus, fr. 12, trans. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 217.

[89] Jacques Derrida, "Différance," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 8, 18.

being, "the operation of differing which at one and the same time both fissures and retards [being-] presence, submitting it simultaneously to primordial division and delay."^[90] Finally, if Heraclitus's "becoming" has lost some of its force through its long service in the metaphysical vocabulary, Derrida's neographism restores this force and draws attention to what both Nietzsche and Derrida see as the decisive feature of our modernity (or postmodernity): the differing and deferring of being and presence that follows the "death of God."^[91]

4.7—
Chaos and Necessity

4.7.1—
From Chaos to Chaosmos

Nietzsche alternately describes this world of becoming or différance as a "chaos" [Chaos ]. No less than "becoming," this notion has been subject to a misunderstanding of its ontological status. Like "becoming," Nietzschean "chaos" has been taken to name a primordial ground, a world in itself that surges beneath the regular and ordered world of our experience and knowledge. Nietzschean "chaos" is thus construed in the traditional manner, as describing a lack of order, form, discernibility, stasis, intelligibility; and Nietzsche is read in the manner of Kant, as maintaining that, though the world in itself comes to us as a chaos (Kant speaks of a "manifold" or "mass" of sensations), we impose form upon it and thus make it intelligible.^[92] In our discussion of "becoming," we saw that Nietzsche severely criticizes this sort of Kantian dualism. This gives us prima facie evidence against a Kantian reading of Nietz-

[90] Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 88.

[91] Derrida ("Différance," trans. Allison, 135–36, 130) writes that différance is "the theme most proper to think out [ . . . ] what is most characteristic about our 'epoch'," that, in différance, we "see the juncture [ . . . ] of what has been most decisively inscribed in the thought of what is conveniently called our 'epoch.'" Indeed, we can see this conception of différance at work in contemporary art and science as well. For suggestions along these lines, see Umberto Eco, "The Poetics of the Open Work," in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 57ff.; Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 111, 136; and Alistair Moles, "Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence as Riemannian Cosmology," International Studies in Philosophy 21 (1989): 21–40.

[92] Heidegger reminds us of this in Nietzsche, 3:77. For this reading of Nietzsche on chaos, see Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 96–98; Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation" and "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos"; Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," 93; Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, 96–97, 160–61; and Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 107, 149, 152ff.

sche's notion of "chaos." And, indeed, a close reading of the passages in which this notion appears reveals that Nietzsche construes the notion otherwise.

Nietzsche defines his terms in use, and so, to understand his conception of "chaos," we need to examine how the term functions within the textual networks in which it, and associated terms, appear. In the published work, Nietzsche speaks of "chaos" most frequently and poignantly in The Gay Science . The most famous passage is the by now familiar one in which the project of "naturalizing humanity" and "dedeifying nature" is introduced. Having criticized a number of world-interpretations, and before proceeding to criticize others, Nietzsche writes, "[t]he total character of the world [ . . . ] 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" (GS 109).^[93] At first glance, one might well take this passage as an assertion of the Kantian thesis that none of our conceptions adequately comprehend the world as it really is, for this world is an ungraspable "chaos." Yet the appearance of the term elsewhere shows that this sort of paradoxical noumenon is not at all what Nietzsche has in mind.

Gay Science §277 asks that we "face [ . . . ] up to the beautiful chaos of existence and den[y] it all providential reason and goodness." As in §109, the notion of "chaos" is here contrasted with a conception of the world as divinely created and unfolding according to a grand plan. Instead, Nietzsche contends that "becoming" is "innocent," that it is not the product of divine intention and its movement does not have any particular direction or destination.^[94] The term "chaos" also appears in §322, where Nietzsche writes: "Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound. Whoever looks at himself as into vast space and carries galaxies within himself, also knows how irregular galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence."^[95] Here, Nietzsche all but repeats a few lines from §109: "Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as elegant as the

[93] The passage is quoted in full in section §2.3.2, above.

[94] Cf. GS 357, quoted in §1.2. This passage is also quoted in GM III:27. See also TI "Errors" 8; WP 340 and 1062.

[95] This notion of human beings as containing a "chaos" appears frequently in Nietzsche's writings of the 1880s. See, e.g., Z: Prologue 5; BGE 224–35; KSA 10:5[1]; WP 842 and, especially, WP 83: "'Without the Christian faith, ' Pascal thought, 'you, no less than nature and history, will become for yourselves un monstre et un chaos .' This prophecy wehave fulfilled . [ . . . ]" On perspectivism and "the chaos we are," see §3.3.3, above. On the human being as analogous to a solar system, see WP 676.

cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance into the galaxy raises doubts whether there are not far coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc." The later passage (§322) describes human beings as microcosms whose perspectival movements are analogous to the macrocosmic orbits of stars presented in the earlier passage (§109). The later passage also sheds considerable light on the notion of "chaos" presented in the earlier. Read together, these passages suggest that Nietzsche's "chaos" is not characterized by an absolute lack of order but by a set of "irregular," "contradictory" movements. That is, the "chaotic" universe is one that moves not teleologically but errantly; it follows no simple linear or cyclical path but a "labyrinthine" one. So, too, is the "chaotic" person a wanderer and experimenter. As Nietzsche puts it in the final section of Human, All Too Human:

He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on the earth—though not as a traveler to a final destination: for this destination does not exist. But he will watch and observe and keep his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world; for this reason he may not let his heart adhere too firmly to any individual thing; within him too there must be something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transience. (638)

Here we begin to see that "chaos" involves not only an errant or labyrinthine world-trajectory but also a perspectival or interpretive multiplicity. We find further evidence of this in another set of passages from The Gay Science that clearly resonate with those that make more explicit mention of "chaos." In §2, Nietzsche celebrates what he calls "this rerum concordia discors " (discordant concord of things),^[96] "this whole marvelous uncertainty and interpretive multiplicity of existence [Vieldeutigkeit der Daseins ]" and reproaches those who do not, or cannot bear to, see it as such. This is echoed in §373, where Nietzsche chides those who "wish to divest existence of its multiply interpretable character [seines vieldeutigen Charakters ]" in favor of a single mathe-

[96] A particularly Heraclitean formulation. Derrida ("Différance," trans. Allison, 154) is more explicit, referring his notion of différance to "the Heraclitean play of the hen diapheron heautoi, of the one differing from itself, of what is in difference with itself." Derrida alludes to Heraclitus's fr. 51 (trans. Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 28): "They do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre."

matical or mechanistic interpretation. The "chaos and labyrinth of existence" would thus seem to describe the errant and divergent movements of both world and world-interpretation.

This becomes clearer once we see that, like "becoming," this conception of "chaos" follows from the "death of God." If God guaranteed a single world-trajectory and world-interpretation, the "death of God" unleashes a series of "irregular," "contradictory" movements and opens the way for an "interpretive multiplicity." Gilles Deleuze summarizes this situation well and offers perhaps the most Nietzschean characterization of this "chaos." For Deleuze, Nietzsche is a posttheological Leibniz. If Leibniz's God creates an infinity of divergent, incompossible worlds but chooses to actualize only one—"the best"—on which all monadic perspectives converge,^[97] Nietzsche's atheological "perspectivism" and "becoming" deny the existence of any privileged world and worldview and instead affirm the coexistence of divergent, irreducible worlds and worldviews. For Deleuze, Nietzsche's "chaos" describes the complication of these divergent worlds and worldviews, their coexistence within "the same world."^[98] It does not describe some pre-cosmic jumble but a world of difference, the coexistence of irreducibly different and divergent worlds and worldviews. And, because this "chaos" is no longer opposed to a "cosmos" (to the cosmic ordering of the demiurge), because it simply describes the posttheological world, this "chaos," Deleuze suggests, is better termed a chaosmos .^[99]

[97] On God, the infinity of worlds, and the choice of the best, see Leibniz, The Monadology §53, and Theodicy §§225, 414–17. On the multiple monadic perspectives On the same world, see The Monadology §57; Discourse on Metaphysics §9; and Theodicy §357.

[98] In this setting, "the same world" is to be taken not as the point of convergence for all worldviews (Leibniz) but rather as the incongruous assemblage of all world-interpretations and their worlds (Nietzsche). If, for Nietzsche, "a 'thing' is the sum of its effects," the "world" is the sum of its interpretations, and this sum is not convergent but divergent, "incongruent " (WP 568). Cf. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking and Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), chap. 2; Richard Rorty, "Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy," in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xlvii; and §3.4.3, above.

[99] These suggestions are scattered throughout Deleuze's writings of the late 1960s. See, e.g., Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 172–76, 264, 260–66 and Difference and Repetition, 40–41, 46–50, 55–58, 66–69, 123–24, 280, 299. They reappear in his book on Leibniz, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 59–82. The term chaosmos is taken from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which Deleuze sees as an artistic manifestation of our posttheological condition. A similar assessment is offered by Eco ("Poetics of the Open Work," 54, 58), who writes that Joyce "deliberately seeks to offer an image of the ontological and existential situation of the contemporary world," with all its "openness," "multiplicity," "indeterminacy," and "discontinuity." I thank Daniel W. Smith for helpful discussion of these issues.

On Deleuze's view, Nietzsche is also a posttheological Spinoza.^[100] For Spinoza, all entities originate, and converge, in a single substance: God. All of nature expresses God's being; and, in turn, God's being contains all of nature. Thus, Spinoza can say: "Deus sive Natura [God or Nature]."^[101] Like Spinoza, Nietzsche is a naturalist and antidualist. He grants that there is nothing other than nature and that all entities and attributes are natural. Yet, for Nietzsche, nature can no longer be identified with God. After the "death of God," nature is no longer a point of convergence but a zone of divergence, no longer one, but multiple. Thus, Nietzsche reformulates Spinoza's equation: "Chaos sive Natura [Chaos or Nature]" (KSA 9:11[197]). Nature de-deified is "chaos."

This passage returns us to the one with which we began, Gay Science §109, which calls for a "de-deification of nature" and names this nature "chaos." Contrary to the neo-Kantian reading, we have seen that this notion of "chaos" does not describe an ungraspable metaphysical world. Rather, it describes the natural, physical world, the world we know—or rather, the world Nietzsche believes will be disclosed to us once we discard our ontotheological^[102] prejudices: a world of becoming or différance, a world without origin or end, the "true" character, essence, or being of which is incessantly differed and perpetually deferred.^[103]

4.7.2—
Necessity and Chance

A THROW OF THE DICE . . . WILL NEVER
. . . ABOLISH . . . CHANCE
Stéphane Mallarmé (1897)

We can further clarify this conception of "chaos" by examining the notion of "necessity" [Nothwendigkeit ] Nietzsche associates with it. The

[100] See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 40ff. Also see Richard Schacht, "The Nietzsche-Spinoza Problem: Spinoza as Precursor?" in Making Sense of Nietzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

[101] Ethics, in Works of Spinoza, vol. 2, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover), 188; cf. WP 1062.

[102] The term is borrowed from Heidegger (Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 54: "Western metaphysics [ . . . ] has eminently been both ontology and theology. [ . . . T]his means: metaphysics is ontotheology." On the identity of God and Being in Nietzsche, see §4.6.1, above. For more on this Heideggerian term, see my introduction, §0.3.

[103] Cf. WP 584 on "the properties that constitute [the world's] reality: change, becoming, multiplicity, opposition, contradiction, war." Also see WP 616: "The world with which we are concerned is false [ . . . ] it is 'in flux,' as something becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for—there is no 'truth.'"

latter term appears frequently in Nietzsche's presentations of his own cosmological view. To quote it once again, Gay Science §109 maintains that: "The total character of the world [ . . . ] is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, [etc.] 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 [my emphasis]." This language is echoed in two later passages. In Beyond Good and Evil §22, Nietzsche rejects the world-interpretation according to which "nature conforms to law" and proceeds to sketch his own picture of the world as "will to power." Such a world, he writes, "has a 'necessary' and 'calculable' course, not because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment." Similarly, the section of Twilight of the Idols called "The Four Great Errors" culminates with this statement of Nietzsche's own worldview:

One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole; there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or sentence our being, for that would mean judging, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole! That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a causa prima, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as "spirit"—that alone is the great liberation; with this alone is the innocence of becoming restored. The concept of "God" was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility in God: only thereby do we redeem the world. ("Errors" 8; cf. WP 552)

Finally, in two related notes from the Nachlaß, Nietzsche states:

[I]f becoming could resolve itself into being or nothingness [ . . . ] then [given infinite time] this state must have been reached. But it has not been reached: from which it follows [that it cannot and will not be reached]. (WP 1066)

I seek a conception of the world that takes this fact into account. Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated; which amounts to the same thing). [ . . . ] "Necessity" not in the shape of an overreaching, dominating total force, or that of a prime mover; even less as a necessary condition for something valuable. To this end, it is necessary to deny a total consciousness of becoming, a "God." [ . . . ] Fortunately such a summarizing power is missing (—a suffering and all-seeing God, a "total sensorium" and "cosmic spirit" would be the greatest objection to being). More strictly one must admit nothing that has being—because then becoming would lose its value and actually appear meaningless and superfluous. [ . . . ] Becoming is of equivalent value every moment; the sum of its val-

ues always remains the same; in other words, it has no value at all, for anything against which to measure it and in relation to which the word "value" could have any meaning, is lacking. The total value of the world cannot be evaluated . (WP 708)

Taken together, these passages present a number of overlapping ideas: becoming is innocent and without beginning, end, intention, or direction; it is lawless yet necessary and fateful; it is incapable of being judged or measured as a whole but is of equal value at every moment. What are we to make of this set of ideas and how do they cast light on the notions of "chaos" and "necessity"?

As with "becoming" and "chaos," Nietzsche's affirmation of "necessity" proceeds from the rejection of God and being. "Necessity" is set against divine "purpose" and human "free will," both of which require the posit of an extra-natural world of uncaused causes (see §3.3.2, above). For Nietzsche, becoming is "necessary" in the sense that it neither originates from nor is directed by the "purposes" and "intentions" of any transcendent being. Rather, its errant movements are solely the result of immanent conditions and forces. But this does not mean that the "necessity" attributed to becoming and chaos sanctions a determinism. Nietzsche sees the deterministic picture of the world as itself theological: a closed system, timeless, static, in equilibrium, governed by universal laws—"the great captious web of causality" behind which lies "God as some alleged spider of purpose" (GM III:9).^[104] Indeed, the deterministic world subordinates becoming to being, time to eternity: past and future are given in every moment, bound together in an eternal Present.^[105] Finally, behind determinism, there lurks that "demand for certainty" condemned by Nietzsche for its willed ignorance of the "whole marvelous uncertainty and interpretive multiplicity of existence" (GS 2).^[106]

[104] Cf. Z: 3 "Before Sunrise" on the "eternal spider" and "spider web of reason." Cf. Gaston Bachelard (The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Patrick A. Heelan [Boston: Beacon Press, 1984], 100): "Terrestrial phenomena are too obviously fluid and diverse to permit, without prior psychological preparation, the elaboration of an objective, deterministic physics. Determinism descended from heaven to earth."

[105] See Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, 11, 60, and Stephen H. Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos: Unpredictable Order in Dynamical Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 53–54. See also Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 162–68. Ilya Prigogine (From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences [New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1980]) describes the deterministic world of classical dynamics precisely as "a world of being," which, since the discovery of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century, has given way to a "world of becoming."

[106] See Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos, 51–55.

In place of both the theological notion of becoming as divinely constructed and purposive and the scientific picture of it as thoroughly calculable and predictable, Nietzsche maintains that becoming is a dice game.^[107] In the language of Zarathustra, the gods are dice players and the earth is their table.^[108] The natural world and everything in it, ourselves included, are combinations that have turned up in this game of chance. But this chance is not opposed to necessity. While the throw of the dice is an act of freedom, it is powerless to determine the resulting combination. Once the dice leave the hand, the rest is left to necessity. And, while, one can retrospectively determine the conditions and forces that led to a particular result, no prospective inference will enable one to determine the results of future throws, each of which will, once again, affirm both chance and necessity.^[109] "Those iron hands of necessity which shake the dice-box of chance play their game for an infinite length of time," Nietzsche writes; and "we ourselves shake the dice-box with iron hands, [ . . . ] we ourselves in our most intentional actions do no more than play the game of necessity" (D 130). Such a game denies transcendent purpose and control and instead affirms "divine accidents" (Z: 3 "Before Sunrise").^[110] It is this sort of nonrational, nonpurposive "necessity" that Nietzsche wants to ascribe to becom-

[107] See PTA 14, 91; D 130; Z: 3 "Before Sunrise," 16; WP 1066. See also Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 25ff.

[108] See Z: 3 "Before Sunrise" and "The Seven Seals." Cf. D 130.

[109] Chaos theory discovers a similar feature in physical systems. On the model presented by Prigogine and Stengers (Order out of Chaos, 177), Nietzsche's "throw of the dice" corresponds to a "bifurcation point," where "deterministic description breaks down." At such points, "fluctuations or random elements would play an important role, while between bifurcations the deterministic aspects would become dominant" (176; cf. 73 and Prigogine, From Being to Becoming, 106). "Both the deterministic character of the kinetic equations whereby the set of possible states and their respective stability can be calculated, and the random fluctuations 'choosing' between or among the states around bifurcation points are inextricably connected. This mixture of necessity and chance constitutes the history of the system" (Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, 170). On dice throws and bifurcations, see Prigogine, From Being to Becoming, 203, and Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, 162. Prigogine and Stengers (Order Out of Chaos, 111, 136) cite Nietzsche as a philosophical precursor to the move in physics from being to becoming, substance to relation, equivalence to difference, determinism to chance. Neither these authors nor I want to claim that Nietzsche is a chaos theorist avant la lettre . Rather, Nietzsche's attempt to provide a rigorously atheological conception of nature leads him to philosophically anticipate features of the world that resemble those later experimentally discovered by chaos physics.

[110] Nietzsche shares with Hume the notion that the world (human beings included) operates neither according to "chance" nor "necessity," in their strict senses. It does not operate according to pure "chance," because there appears to be some order and regularity in our experience; nor does it operate according to "necessity," whether transcendent orimmanent, because divine providence is indemonstrable or superfluous and induction can, at best, provide only probabilities.

ing.^[111] Becoming is seen as a series of dice throws, each of which is complete in itself ("justified at every moment") and has no further end beyond sparking an interest in new throws and different combinations.

This game of chance and necessity, this nonpurposive becoming, is what Nietzsche elsewhere calls "chaos." Thus, at one point, Zarathustra speaks of "that heavenly need that constrains even accidents to star dances" (Z: 3 "The Seven Seals"); while, at another point, echoing Gay Science §322, he says that "one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star" (Z: Prologue 5). That is, Nietzschean "chaos" is not some arbitrary jumble from which we, like the demiurge, create order. Rather, it is a redescription of the world we know and in which we exist, an image of what our world would look like were we to eliminate all the "shadows of God." Whether dubbed an "innocent becoming" or a "chaos," such a world is without origin, purpose, aim, unity, or total character. And it is precisely this that makes it a world of play, for there is nothing to halt this becoming and differing, no transcendent principle to direct or constrain it, no calculation that could totalize it once and for all.^[112]

[111] See PTA 19, 116: "But absolute free will can only be imagined as purposeless, roughly like a child's game or an artist's creative play impulse." See also HH 107: "Everything is necessity—thus says the new knowledge; and this knowledge itself is necessity. Everything is innocence: and knowledge is the path to insight into this innocence."

[112] Cf. Derrida ("Différance," trans. Allison, 135): "on the eve and aftermath of philosophy, [the concept of play] designates the unity of chance and necessity in an endless calculus."

Chapter Five—
Will to Power:
The De-Deification of Nature

The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its "intelligible character"—it would be "will to power" and nothing besides.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil §36

Supposing that this also is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection?—well, so much the better.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil §22

5.1—
The Problem of Will to Power

The doctrine of "will to power" is surely the most controversial in Nietzsche's philosophy. While, for the most part, it has been rescued from its association with unsavory political and ethical programs, the doctrine still poses a host of philosophical problems. Its centrality to Nietzsche's later thought is undeniable.^[1] But its import is far from clear. At times, it appears to be an ontological view ("the world is will to power—and nothing besides " [WP 1067; cf. BGE 36]); while, at other times, it appears in a more epistemological guise ("[t]ruth [ . . . ] is a word for the 'will to power'" [WP 552; cf. BGE 211]; "interpretation itself [ . . . is] a form of the will to power" [WP 556; cf. GM II:12]). The scope of the doctrine is also indeterminate: is it meant to characterize human psychology? animal life? organic activity? or nature as a whole? This raises

[1] For example, among the many dozen appearances of the phrase in the published work alone, one finds the following: "[w]here I found the living, there I found will to power" (Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"); "life itself is will to power " (BGE 13); "[t]he world viewed from inside [ . . . ] would be 'will to power' and nothing besides" (BGE 36); "the will to power [ . . . ] is the will of life" (GS 349); "in all events a will to power is operating" (GM II:12); "[l]ife itself is to my mind the instinct for growth, for durability, for an accumulation of forces, for power: where the will to power is lacking there is decline" (A 6).

a final question: is will to power a metaphysical doctrine (an a priori theory about ultimate reality) or an empirical one? If the former, it would seem to violate Nietzsche's rejection of metaphysics. If the latter, it would seem highly dubious and hence dispensable.^[2]

These questions have been posed repeatedly in the literature on Nietzsche; and nearly every permutation of answers has been given. For my part, I think that these questions are answered and these problems solved once we see will to power as a product of Nietzsche's naturalism and interpretive holism. Viewed in this light, will to power is indeed an empirical theory that follows from Nietzsche's thesis that "God is dead." On my account, will to power is Nietzsche's attempt to challenge the dominant scientific theories of the late nineteenth century (particularly mechanistic physics and evolutionary biology) and to formulate a new conception of nature from which all theological posits have been withdrawn. Among these residues of theology, Nietzsche maintains, are the firm distinctions between "subject" and "object," "knower" and "known," "epistemology" and "ontology." In place of these dualisms, will to power conceives all of nature as engaged in an active "interpretation" (in Nietzsche's extended sense) that produces a becoming no longer subordinate to God or being.

5.2—
Will to Power and Nietzsche's Naturalism

Will to power is not a metaphysical theory, if by "metaphysics" is meant some "transcendent" account of the world, a view "from outside." Nietzsche's criticism of such conceptions is most vehement in exactly those texts in which will to power plays a central role. Indeed, the doctrine is introduced precisely as an effort to view the world "from inside" (BGE 36). It is intended as an "interpretation" (BGE 22) of nature that competes with other such interpretations. That is, it is an empirical theory—a broad, hypothetical attempt to provide a unifying explanation for the observable features of the natural world.^[3] In this

[2] Maudemarie Clark (Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], chap. 7) poses this dilemma and reviews some of the critical literature on this issue. For an earlier analysis of various ways of interpreting will to power, see Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 204–7.

[3] Scientific theories are general, systematic schemes that attempt to account for empirical observations but are not reducible to them. They regularly have recourse to unobservable explanatory posits (e.g., forces, classes, quarks). To call on W. V. Quine's famous analogy, a theory is "like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. [ . . . ]But the total field is [ . . . ] underdetermined by its boundary conditions. [ . . . ] No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly, through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole" ("Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961], 44–45). Or see Norwood Russell Hanson (Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958], 109): "Philosophers sometimes regard physics as a kind of mathematical photography and its laws as formal pictures of regularities. But the physicist often seeks not a general description of what he observes, but a general pattern of phenomena within which what he observes will appear intelligible. [ . . . ] The great unifications of Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger and Heisenberg were pre-eminently discoveries of terse formulae from which explanations of diverse phenomena could be generated as a matter of course; they were not discoveries of undetected regularities."

sense, it is akin to scientific theories such as mechanism, thermodynamics, and evolutionary theory; and Nietzsche affirms it as such. Yet will to power is meant to challenge just these theories, which, according to Nietzsche, still manifest what he calls "shadows of God." Thus Nietzsche proposes will to power as the naturalistic theory par excellence, a rigorously antimetaphysical attempt to account for the multiplicity and perpetual becoming of the natural world without recourse to ontotheological posits.

We have seen that, for Nietzsche, nature encompasses all there is. The spiritual, the mental, and the divine no longer occupy a world apart but are natural or explicable in naturalistic terms. Moreover, on Nietzsche's view, nature is univocal, without ontological hierarchy.^[4] Thus he rejects any strict opposition between mind (or spirit) and body (see PTA 10, p. 79; Z: 1 "On the Despisers of the Body"; BGE 36; A 14), human and animal (see HC ; GS 115; A 14), organic and inorganic matter (see GS 109; BGE 36; WP 655, 676; KSA 9:11[70]). The rejection

[4] In BGE 36, Nietzsche asserts "the right to determine all efficient force univocally [eindeutig ] as—will to power ." (Cf. A 14: "every living being stands beside [man] on the same level of perfection.") Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], 304) has more fully developed this conception of "univocity," the notion that "[being] is said in a single same sense throughout all its forms" even if "[t]hat of which it is said [i.e., beings . . . ] differs." Deleuze sees Nietzsche as the last of three great thinkers of the univocity of being. In medieval philosophy, Duns Scotus asserted the heretical view that the ontological relationship of God to the rest of being is not analogical (Aquinas) or negative (Meister Eckhart) but univocal: distributed equally and neutrally, without hierarchy. In modern philosophy, this thesis is proclaimed by Spinoza, for whom God is immanent in all of nature, which, in turn, expresses or explicates God: "Deus sive Natura." Finally, Nietzsche accepts the univocal distribution of being asserted by Duns Scotus and Spinoza but eliminates God as the alleged source and point of convergence. Thus Nietzsche reformulates Spinoza's dictum: "Chaos sire Natura." See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 35–42, and The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 177–80, and §§4.6–4.7, above. Of course, this is not to say that, for Nietzsche, there is no such thing as hierarchy. It is only to say that Nietzschean hierarchy is one of power and relative value, not one of reality or being .

of these oppositions opens the way for a unified account of all natural phenomena. This is precisely the direction taken by modern science. Hence, mechanistic physics sees all material entities, regardless of kind, as governed by a limited number of forces and explains all physical movements and processes in terms of these. Modern chemistry follows suit. Rejecting vitalism, it maintains that all matter is explicable by the same set of physical and chemical principles and that living organisms differ not by the incorporation of some extra-natural substance but only by their different organization of natural material.^[5] Lastly, post-Darwinian biology dismisses creationism and essentialism, maintaining instead the continuity of "higher" with "lower" forms of life.^[6]

These scientific revolutions constitute major victories for naturalism in its struggle against metaphysics and theology; and Nietzsche allies himself with them on this count.

When I think of my philosophical genealogy, I feel myself connected with [ . . . ] the mechanistic movement (reduction of all moral and aesthetic questions to physiological ones, of all physiological ones to chemical ones, of all chemical ones to mechanical ones). (KSA 11:26[432])

We no longer derive man from "the spirit" or "the deity"; we have placed him back among the animals. [ . . . ] As regards the animals, Descartes was the first to have dared, with admirable boldness, to understand the animal as machine: the whole of our physiology endeavors to prove this claim. And we are consistent enough not to except man, as Descartes still did: our knowledge of man today goes just as far as we understand him mechanistically. (A 14; cf. BGE 230)

Yet Nietzsche is also a sharp critic of both mechanistic physics and evolutionary biology (see GS 109, 373; BGE 22; GM I:1, II:12; WP 618–58). What explains this equivocal attitude? It is that, for Nietzsche, these theories are preferable to metaphysical and theological positions, but they are still not naturalistic enough . While they appear to advocate a thoroughly materialist conception of the world and an immanent con-

[5] See Ernst Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 12.

[6] In a margin note, Darwin admonishes a progressivist author: "Never say higher or lower" (quoted in Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991], 62, and Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin [New York: Harmony, 1996], 137). Taking his cue from the naturalist advances of modern science, Nietzsche extends this rejection of essential oppositions ("[t]he fundamental faith of the metaphysicians" [BGE 22]) into the moral domain and attempts to construct a moral theory that is "beyond good and evil." See, e.g., GS 1, 4; BGE 2, 24; WP 124.

ception of natural change, Nietzsche argues that they maintain a number of ontotheological posits that must be eliminated for nature to be fully "de-deified" and for becoming to appear in all its "innocence."

5.2.1—
Mechanism and the "Shadows of God"

We can begin with mechanism. Nietzsche's objections to mechanistic physics proceed from his "rejection of being" (see §4.6.1, above). If mechanism sees the world as "matter in motion," Nietzsche argues that it has a false conception of "matter" and an inadequate conception of "motion." Mechanism views matter as composed of irreducible material atoms. Against this view, Nietzsche maintains that, like every atomism, "materialistic atomism" is the result of an ontological, psychological, and linguistic prejudice. It is founded on the privilege of being, the insistence that, somewhere, the earth "stands fast," "the belief in 'substance,' in 'matter,' in the earth-residuum" (BGE 12); and this privilege and insistence are inscribed in the very structure of our language:

Everywhere [language] sees a doer and a doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the "ego" [das »Ich «: the "I"], in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things—only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing." Everywhere "being" is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of "being" follows, and is derivative of, the concept of "ego." In the beginning there is that great calamity of error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity . Today we know that it is only a word. [ . . . ] I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. (TI "Reason" 5; cf. TI "Errors" 3; WP 488)

This dense passage—which moves swiftly from the grammatical "I" to "substance," "thinghood," "being," "free will" and "God"—contains, in aphoristic form, an argument widespread throughout Nietzsche's later work (see WS 11; BGE 12, 17; GM I:13; TI "Reason" 5; WP 624–25, 634–35). Nietzsche's view is that the grammatical subject, the idea of substance, and the posit of thinghood all rest on a conception of being as primary, prior to all becoming and activity. This conception is concomitant with the idea of free will, the alleged capacity of the subject to initiate proximal becomings while remaining outside the chain of becoming. And this idea of free will is but an incarnation of that ultimate, transcendent source of all becoming: God, Being itself.

Thus, the very posit of thinghood—and the separation of being from

becoming, doer from deed, entity from activity—is, on Nietzsche's view, the product of ontotheology. Insofar as its atomism is a form of thingontology, mechanism is darkened by a "shadow of God." Of course, the mechanistic worldview explicitly claims to do without such notions as "free will," advocating instead a purely deterministic system of cause and effect, action and reaction. Yet for it to become as naturalistic as it takes itself to be, Nietzsche believes that mechanism must forgo its thing-ontology in favor of an event- or force-ontology. Hence, against classical mechanics, he sides with Boscovich, who, rejecting the dualism of matter and force, asserts that force is primary and that material entities are but nodes in a field of force.^[7]

[T]he older atomism sought, besides the operating "power," that lump of matter in which it resides and out of which it operates. More rigorous minds [e.g., Boscovich],^[8] however, learned at last to get along without this "earth residuum." (BGE 17)^[9]

[T]here is no such substratum: there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything. (GM I 13)

If we eliminate these additions, no things remain over but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their "effect" upon the same. (WP 635)

But there are still other problems with the mechanistic worldview, as Nietzsche sees it. While it rejects the motive force of "free will," mech-

[7] Boscovich's conception of matter and force, proposed in 1769 but neglected for nearly a century, has become a central feature of contemporary physical theory (see Jonathan Powers, "Atomism," in The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers, ed. J. O. Urmson and Jonathan Rée [London: Unwin Hyman, 1989], 32, and J. D. Bernal, Science in History, vol. 2, The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1954], 676). Boscovich was rescued from obscurity when, in 1844, his view was advocated by the great theorist of electromagnetism, Michael Faraday (Experimental Researches in Electricity, vol. 2 [New York: Dover, 1965], 290): "[T]he atoms of Boscovich appear to me to have a great advantage over the usual notion," Faraday wrote. "His atoms, if I understand him aright, are mere centres of forces or powers, not particles of matter, in which the powers themselves reside. If, in the ordinary view of atoms, we call the particle of matter away from the powers a, and the system of forces in and around it m, then in Boscovich's theory a disappears, or is a mere mathematical point, whilst in the usual notion it is a little unchangeable, impenetrable piece of matter, and m is an atmosphere of force grouped around it." Cf. the passages from Nietzsche cited in the text, below.

[8] Cf. BGE 12: "Boscovich has taught us to abjure belief in the last part of the earth that 'stood fast'—belief in 'substance,' in 'matter,' in the earth-residuum and particleatom."

[9] Cf. BGE 36: "'Will,' of course, can affect only 'will'—and not 'matter'."

anism does not replace this with any more immanent or naturalistic principle that would explain "motion" or "becoming." It does not tell us what motivates one entity to affect another—except that this motion is itself the effect of a prior "cause" and so on, producing a regress that terminates with the only genuinely active force: God the Watchmaker who sets the world-mechanism in motion.^[10] Thus, according to Nietzsche, mechanism is superficial, reactive, passive, and theological: "superficial" because it only "describes" immanent motions without "explaining" them, without getting inside them (see BGE 14; WP 618; 628–32, 660, 688); "reactive" and "passive" because every immanent "action" is truly only a "reaction" (see GM I:1, II:12); and "theological" because the true principle of motion lies outside the system in a transcendent cause (see WP 1062, 1066).

The mechanistic view is ontotheological in another sense as well. It sees the world as essentially static—a system closed, reversible, and in equilibrium. It posits a universe in which, from any given state, all other states, past and future, could, theoretically, be calculated. For classical dynamics, as one writer recently put it, "[a]ll is given in one moment—the changing 'now' is just our subjective window for experiencing the eternally present one instant at a time."^[11] It is this theoretical vantage point, this God's-eye view of an eternal present, to which the mechanistic physicist aspires.^[12] From this vantage-point, time, becoming, and

[10] Cf. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers: "Why was natural motion conceived of in the image of a rationalized machine? [ . . . ] Why did the clock almost immediately become the very symbol of world order? In this last question lies perhaps some elements of an answer. A watch is a contrivance governed by a rationality that lies outside itself, by a plan that is blindly executed by its inner workings. The clock world is a metaphor suggestive of God the Watchmaker, the rational master of a robotlike nature. At the origin of modern science, a 'resonance' appears to have been set up between theological discourse and theoretical and experimental activity" (Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature [New York: Bantam Books, 1984], 46, see also 47–50). Elsewhere (Order out of Chaos, 6–7), they write: "Western thought has always oscillated between the world as an automaton and a theology in which God governs the universe. [ . . . ] In fact these visions are connected. An automaton needs an external god."

[11] Stephen H. Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos: Unpredictable Order in Dynamical Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 54.

[12] This idea was made famous by Pierre Laplace, who hypothesized that a being like us, but with far greater powers of calculation, could, beginning from any given state, determine any event in the universe, whether past and future. See Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, trans. F. W. Truscott and F.L. Emory (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1917), 4. Nietzsche remarks that this Laplacean aspiration and the mechanistic language of the "laws" of nature "savors of morality" (WP 630). They interpret the fact that something "always act[s . . . ] thus and thus as a result of obedience to a law or lawgiver, while it would be free to act otherwise were it not for the 'law'" (WP 632). That is, "laws

difference are reduced to the eternal present, being, and the equivalent, to "a sort of shifting and place-changing on the part of a 'being,' of something constant" (WP 631). And even if the thermodynamic revolution of the nineteenth century alters this picture by introducing time, irreversibility, and openness, it does so only to reintroduce stasis, indifference, and being as the telos of the system: entropic equilibrium.^[13]

5.2.2—
Beyond Mechanism:
Will to Power

Nietzsche aims to correct these defects and eliminate these residues of theology. Denying both free will and mechanistic determinism, he attempts to formulate a theory of motion, change, and becoming the principle of which is immanent, active, and explanatory. He begins, as we have seen, by rejecting the dualisms of doer and deed, matter and force, and proposes instead an ontology according to which "the deed is everything" (GM I 13) and there exist "only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta" (WP 635). In opposition to the passive and reactive character of mechanism, this ontology is fundamentally active; and the principle of its activity, motion, and becoming is not transcendent (as with the divine watchmaker or free will) but immanent:

In our science, where the concept of cause and effect is reduced to the relationship of equivalence, with the object of proving that the same quantum of force is present on both sides, the driving force is lacking: we observe only results, and we consider them equivalent in content and force. (WP 688)

The victorious concept of "force," by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner world must be ascribed to it, which I designate as "will to power." (WP 619)^[14]

[13] It is for this reason that Nietzsche rejects the conclusions of thermodynamics: "If, e.g., the mechanistic theory cannot avoid the consequence, drawn for it by William Thompson, of leading to a final state, then the mechanistic theory stands refuted" (WP 1066; cf. WP 639).

[14] Note that the Kaufmann/Hollingdale translation mistakenly renders Nietzsche's "an inner world [eine innere Welt ]" as "an inner will."

This "will to power" must not be thought of as a capacity that inheres in individual entities. For Nietzsche repeatedly criticizes both this conception of "things" and this conception of "the will":

Is "will to power" a kind of "will" or identical with the concept "will"? Is it the same thing as desiring? or commanding? Is it that "will" of which Schopenhauer said it was the "in itself of things"? My proposition is: that the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization, that this will does not exist at all [ . . . ] one has eliminated the character of the will by subtracting from it its content, its "whither?" (WP 692)

There is no will: there are only treaty drafts of will [Willens-Punktationen ] that are constantly increasing or losing their power. (WP 715; see also GS 127; BGE 16, 19; TI "World" 5, "Errors" 3; A 14; WP 46, 488, 668, 671, 765)

That is, in place of an ontology of atomic unities each of which contains "will" as an effective capacity, Nietzsche substitutes a holistic ontology of relatively stable power-complexes essentially bound to one another by lines of force (resistance, domination, submission, alliance, etc.). Hence, each of these complexes exists in an intricate web of tension with neighboring power-complexes; and "will"—"will to power"—is just a name for this state of tension, this straining "towards which" and "away from which " (BGE 19; cf. WP 636). Moreover, this struggle is just as much internal as external. Each power-complex strives to maintain its integrity, its dominance or control over its component powers, which constantly threaten to revolt or secede (see WP 492 and §3.3.3, above).

Change, then, is no longer a matter of "cause" and "effect," conceived on the classic billiard-ball model as a rigid, one-directional system of colliding atoms; rather, it is a matter of myriad macro- and microscopic struggles and the new configurations of power which result:

Two successive states, the one "cause," the other "effect": this is false. [ . . . ] It is a question of a struggle between two elements of unequal power: a new arrangement of forces is achieved according to the measure of power of each of them. The second condition is something fundamentally different from the first (not its effect): the essential thing is that the factions in struggle emerge with different quanta of power. (WP 633; cf. BGE 19; WP 631, 688–89)

Indeed, this change or becoming does not leave the original parties intact. Rejecting the conception of substance maintained by the mechanistic-atomistic worldview, Nietzsche asserts that change is not merely

the qualitative alteration of essentially enduring entities but the constant production of new entities:

There are no durable ultimate units, no atoms, no monads: here, too, "beings" are only introduced [hineingelegt] by us. [ . . . ] "Forms of domination"; the sphere of that which is dominated continually growing or periodically increasing and decreasing according to the favorability or unfavorability of circumstances. [ . . . ] "Value" is essentially the standpoint for the increase or decrease of these dominating centers ("multiplicities" in any case; but "units" are nowhere present in the nature of becoming)—a quantum of power, a becoming, in so far as none of it has the character of "being." (WP 715; cf. WP 488)

"Becoming," then, is the result of this pressure and tension of forces and powers. Just as the work of a system is a function of the differences in temperature, level, pressure, and potential of its component parts, the dynamic force of will to power is a function of the difference of powers and the tension between them.^[15] A generalized equivalence or equilibrium of forces, then, would signal an end to this power-struggle and, hence, an end to becoming. But Nietzsche denies this possibility ("the adiaphoristic state is missing," he writes, "though it is thinkable" [WP 634]) and views the very supposition as ontotheological, merely another attempt to subordinate becoming to being.^[16] His rejection of God and being requires the elimination of both an absolute origin and an absolute end to becoming (see §4.6.1, above). Dismissing the hypothesis of "a creative God" (WP 1062) and "a created world" (WP 1066), Nietzsche maintains "the temporal infinity of the world in the past." Given this premise,

[i]f the world could in any way become rigid, dry, dead, nothing, or if it could reach a state of equilibrium, or if it had any kind of goal that involved

[15] Cf. Prigogine and Stengers (Order out of Chaos, 111): "Nietzsche was one of those who detected the echo of creations and destructions that go far beyond mere conservation or conversion. Indeed, only difference, such as difference of temperature or potential energy, can produce results that are also differences. Energy conversion is merely the destruction of a difference, together with the creation of another difference. The power of nature is thus concealed by the use of equivalences."

[16] For the same reason, he sees equalizing measures on the social level (socialism, democracy, peace) to be disastrous and antinatural: "from the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions can never be other than exceptional conditions, since they constitute a partial restriction of the will of life, which is bent upon power, and are subordinate to its total goal as a single means: namely, as a means of creating greater units of power. A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power-complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general [ . . . ] would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness" (GM II:11).

duration, immutability, the once-and-for-all (in short, speaking metaphysically: if becoming could resolve itself into being or into nothingness), then this state must have been reached. But it has not been reached: from which it follows. (WP 1066; cf. HL 9; WP 639, 688, 1064)

With this, Nietzsche challenges both the mechanistic hypothesis of God the watchmaker and the thermodynamic hypothesis of thermal equilibrium or "heat death." If the nineteenth century saw the introduction of time, history, and becoming into a previously static scientific and philosophical worldview, Nietzsche, at the end of that century, seeks to eliminate teleology, the last bulwark of God, eternity, and being.^[17]

5.2.3—
Evolutionary Theory and the "Shadows of God"

No modern scientific theory did more to challenge the static, closed, deterministic, deistic view of the world than Darwin's evolutionary biology.^[18] The Darwinian revolution opposed the physical worldview of Descartes and Newton and biological worldview of Lyell and Agassiz. Against these, it asserted the primacy of time, becoming, chance, and struggle in nature and liberated this becoming from being, essence, and God. Rejecting the belief in a constant world, Darwin revealed a nature in incessant alteration and transformation.^[19] In place of the doctrines of creation and design prevalent among natural theologians and biologists alike, Darwin proposed the mechanisms of random variation and natural selection and candidly described a nature that is, by moral standards, "capricious, cruel, arbitrary, wasteful, [and] careless."^[20] Op-

[17] In doing so, he philosophically anticipates the experimental discoveries of the "Brussels School," which has reinterpreted the second law of thermodynamics to include spontaneous transformations from disorder to order, from simplicity and equivalence to complexity and difference. See, e.g., Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, passim . Also see p. 211n. 109.

[18] See Mayr, One Long Argument, 35–67.

[19] This summary presentation draws heavily on Stephen Jay Gould's and Ernst Mayr's superb accounts of the essential features of Darwin's revolution. See Gould, "In Praise of Charles Darwin," in Darwin's Legacy, ed. Charles L. Hamrum (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), and Mayr, One Long Argument, chaps. 4–5. While I find them particularly compelling, these reconstructions of Darwinism are not uncontroversial. For criticisms, see, e.g., Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 169–79, and Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 229–312.

[20] D. L. Hull, quoted in Mayr, One Long Argument, 14. Nietzsche uses remarkably similar language in BGE 9 and 22 to combat the design theories of the Stoics and mechanists. On Darwin's arguments against creation and design, see Gould, "In Praise of CharlesDarwin," 5–6, and Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).

posing philosophical and biological essentialisms, Darwin discovered that there are no essential disjunctions between species and showed that every species is itself only a statistical abstraction over a population of irreducibly unique individuals, a variation without which evolution would be impossible.^[21] Moreover, Darwin refused to grant any divine exception to human beings, viewing them as material through and through and continuous with the rest of nature.^[22] Biological evolution also seemed to contradict the trajectory of thermodynamics. If the latter hypothesized a solar system becoming steadily more uniform and disordered, the former revealed a world in which difference and complexity increase, rather than decrease, over time.^[23]

The Darwinian revolution thus effected a profound de-deification of nature and naturalization of humanity—a fact occasionally acknowledged by Nietzsche (see HL 9; GS 357; GM III:25; A 14). Yet Nietzsche seems to have known Darwin primarily through what Stephen Jay Gould has recently called "Darwin's spin doctors," who, under the guise of disseminating Darwinism, continued to insinuate ontotheological posits into the theory of natural selection.^[24] In his quest to eliminate

[21] See Mayr, One Long Argument, 39–42, and Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 160–66. We have seen, in §2.2.4, that Nietzsche, too, argues against essentialism along these nominalist lines. Indeed, Mayr (One Long Argument, 41) presents an argument concerning the linguistic basis of essentialism that reads like a paraphrase of passages in TL and TI: "Essentialism's influence was great in part because its principle is anchored in our language, in our use of a single noun in the singular to designate highly variable phenomena of our environment, such as mountain, home, water, horse, or honesty. Even though there is a great variety in kinds of mountain and kinds of home, and even though the kinds do not stand in direct relation to one another (as do the members of a species), the simple noun defines the class of objects."

[22] See Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 21–27, and "In Praise of Charles Darwin," 6.

[23] See Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage, 1972.), 18, and Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, 127–28.

[24] Gould, Full House, 19. Gould argues that, in both the popular and the scholarly literature, the evolutionary story continues to be "spun" in this manner and that we still need to "complete Darwin's revolution" (see Full House, chap. 2). Nietzsche's critique thus remains as relevant today as it was more than a century ago. In his recent book on philosophy and evolutionary theory, Daniel Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 181–83, 46167) explicitly acknowledges the significance of Nietzsche's Darwinian critique of "Darwinism." Yet his presentation of Nietzsche's position is both superficial and patronizing. Moreover, Dennett dedicates a substantial portion of this book to a critique of Gould (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 2.29–312), who is seen as fortifying Darwin's theory with superfluous metaphysical posits. I do not find this in Gould. Indeed, I read Gould as sharingNietzsche's commitment to the thorough elimination, from evolutionary theory, of all the "shadows of God."

the "shadows of God," Nietzsche subjects such "Darwinism" to a naturalizing critique.^[25]

This critique appears throughout Nietzsche's corpus—from the 1873 essay, "On Truth and Lies," to the sections and notes of 1888 entitled "Anti-Darwin" (TI "Skirmishes" 14; WP 647, 684–85). Recurrent in these texts is an argument against a notion of evolutionary progress that takes human beings to be the goal and pinnacle of nature. In "On Truth and Lies," Nietzsche remarks that the pride of humanity—the human intellect—is an evolutionary variation no better, and in many ways worse, than the "sharp teeth of beasts of prey" and that human existence will surely turn out to be but a "shadowy and transient," "aimless and arbitrary" moment in geological time (TL, pp. 79–80).^[26] Evolutionary progressivism and anthropocentrism, Nietzsche suggests elsewhere, are merely secular translations of biblical creationism—attempts to shift the ontotheological weight from the origin to the end of history:

Formerly, one sought the feeling of the grandeur of man by pointing to his divine origin: this has now become a forbidden way, for at its portal stands the ape, together with other gruesome beasts, grinning knowingly as if to say: no further in this direction! One therefore now tries the opposite direction: the way mankind is going shall serve as proof of his grandeur and kinship with God. Alas this, too, is in vain! [ . . . ] However high mankind may have evolved—and perhaps at the end it will stand even lower than at the beginning!—it cannot pass over into a higher order, as little as the ant and the earwig can at the end of its "earthly course" rise up to kinship with God and eternal life. (D 49)

We have become more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from "the spirit" or "the deity"; we have placed him back among the animals. We consider him the strongest animal because he is the most cunning: his intellectuality [Geistigkeit ] is a consequence of this. On the other hand, we oppose the vanity that would raise its head again here too—as if man had been the great hidden purpose of the evolution of the animals. Man is by no means

[25] "Darwinism," here refers to the view of the "spin doctors," not to Darwin's view itself, with which Nietzsche, albeit unbeknownst to Nietzsche himself, is in very substantial agreement.

[26] Cf. Gould, Full House, 18: "If we are but a tiny twig on the floridly arborescent bush of life, and if our twig branched off just a geological moment ago, then perhaps we are not a predictable result of an inherently progressive process (the vaunted trend to progress in life's history); perhaps we are, whatever our glories or accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never rise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions."

the crown of creation: every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection . . . And even this is saying too much: relatively speaking, man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, the one who has strayed the most dangerously from its instincts. (A 14)^[27]

Despite Darwin's antiprogressivism, evolutionary theorists continued to see the phenomenon of evolutionary "adaptation" as progressive. According to a view promoted by Herbert Spencer, one of Nietzsche's prime targets (see GM II: 12), natural selection gradually promotes an increasingly better fit between organisms and their environment. But such "adaptationism" projects into the evolutionary process a false teleology, amounting to a revival of the "argument from design" that Darwin's theory explicitly opposed.^[28] Thus, Gould writes:

Evolutionary biologists have too often slipped into a seductively appealing mode of argument about the phenomenon of adaptation. We tend to view every structure as designed for a definite purpose, thus building (in our imagination) a world of perfect design not much different from that concocted by eighteenth-century natural theologians who "proved" God's existence by the perfect architecture of organisms. [ . . . ] But [the] current utility [of traits] does not imply that they were built directly by natural selection for the purpose they now serve. [ . . . ] We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. [ . . . ] The primary flexibility of evolution may arise from nonadaptive by-products that occasionally permit organisms to strike out in new and unpredictable directions. What "play" would evolution have if each structure were built for a restricted purpose and could be used for nothing else? How could humans learn to write if our brain had evolved for hunting, social cohesion, or whatever and could not transcend the adaptive boundaries of its original purpose? [ . . . ] Selection works for the moment. It cannot sense what may be of use ten million years hence in a distant descendant. [ . . . ] Future utility is an important consideration in evolution, but it cannot be the explanation for current preservation. Future utilities can only be the fortuitous effects of other direct reasons for immediate favor. (The confusion of current utility with reasons for past historical origin is a logical trap that has plagued evolutionary thinking from the start.)^[29]

[27] Cf. HL 9; GM III: 25; WP 90, 401, 684–85. Also see Gould, Full House, for an extended argument against the notion of evolutionary progressivism and anthropocentrism.

[28] Thus Darwin wrote in his Autobiography: "The old argument from design in nature, as given by Paley . . . fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of the bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows" (quoted in Mayr, One Long Argument, 57).

[29] Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 155–56, 170. This argument runs throughout Gould's work. The most sustained version is presented in Gould and Richard Lewontin, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B205 (1979): 581–98.

Nietzsche makes a strikingly similar point in §12 of the Genealogy 's second essay, which bears citing again in this context:

[T]he cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adjustment through which any previous "meaning" and "purpose" are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. However well one has understood the utility of a physiological organ [ . . . ], this means nothing regarding its origin: however uncomfortable and disagreeable this may sound to older ears—for one had always believed that to understand the demonstrable purpose, the utility of a thing, a form, or an institution, was also to understand the reason why it originated—the eye being made for seeing, the hand made for grasping. [ . . . P]urposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function; and the entire history of a "thing," an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous 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 thus 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 the 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.^[30]

In place of the steady upward climb imagined by the progressivists and adaptationists, Gould and Nietzsche view the trajectory of evolution as an unpredictable, ateleological movement. "Adaptation" and "success" are local and contingent; and subsequent forms can claim only temporary victory in a perpetual and shifting agon rather than global advance on "the ladder of progress."

Neither the longevity of an organism nor its complexity or later appearance are any evidence of progress or superiority. Gould points out that, however simple, "bacteria, by any reasonable criterion, were in

[30] For an earlier critique of progressivism and adaptationism as manifested in the Hegelian dialectic, see HL 8–9.

the beginning, are now, and ever shall be the most successful organisms on earth"^[31] and that the relatively late and rare appearance of complex organisms such as Homo sapiens is no sign of an inherent tendency to complexity but only a consequence of life's diversification in the only direction available to it.^[32] As Nietzsche puts it:

[M]an as a species does not represent any progress compared to 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 one another. The richest and most complex forms—for the expression "higher type" means no more than this—perish more easily: only the lowest preserve an apparent indestructibility. The former are achieved fairly rarely and maintain their superiority with difficulty. (WP 684)

In short, criteria of progress or excellence are criteria of value; and such criteria are not found or given in the nature of things but must be made and defended . Once we give up the notion that a teleology is inherent in the evolutionary process, criteria other than preservation, survival, and adaptation become available for assessing excellence.^[33] Thus Nietzsche remarks: "Greatness ought not to depend on success"; "the goal of humanity cannot lie in [ . . .  the] end [of history], but only in its highest exemplars" (HL 9, p. 111).^[34] Given the central role Darwin's theory assigns to chance,^[35] we can liken evolution to a dice game. On this model, Nietzsche suggests, excellence need not be assigned to statistical averages or probabilities but to those rare "lucky throws" [Glückswürfen ].^[36] "The brief spell of beauty, of genius," he writes, "is sui generis: such things are not inherited" (WP 684; cf. 685).

Mankind does not represent a development toward something better or stronger or higher in the sense accepted today. "Progress" is merely a modern idea, that is, a false idea. The European of today is vastly inferior to the European of the Renaissance: further development is altogether not accord-

[31] Gould, Full House, 38, see also 175–216.

[32] Ibid., 167–75.

[33] See Nietzsche's 1873 notes on history (in The Portable Nietzsche, 39ff.), and HL 9; D 106, 108; GM I:17, II:12; TI "Skirmishes" 44; A 14; WP 647–48, 684–85.

[34] See GM I:9, where Nietzsche's irony hints that the "success" of "slave," "mob," "herd," or "democratic" ideals is no indication of their superiority. Also see Nietzsche's various remarks to the effect that "one always has to defend the strong against the weak" (WP 685; cf. WP 864, GM: III:14).

[35] See Mayr, One Long Argument, 48–49; Gould, "In Praise of Charles Darwin," 5; and Monod, Chance and Necessity .

[36] See GM II:16: "From now on, man is included among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws in the dice game of Heraclitus' 'great child,' be he called Zeus or chance." See also GM III:14; A 3–4; WP 684–85, 864.

ing to any necessity in the direction of elevation, enhancement, or strength. In another sense, success in individual cases is constantly encountered in the most widely different places and cultures: here we really do find a higher type, which is, in relation to mankind as a whole, a kind of overman. Such lucky strokes [Glücksfälle ] of great success have always been possible and will perhaps always be possible. (A 4; cf. WP 881)

5.2.4—
Beyond the "Struggle for Existence":
Will to Power

This argument forms part of a wider polemic against views that assert the primacy of preservation and adaptation in the natural world. Nietzsche contends that organisms do not, first and foremost, struggle to live, to survive, to preserve themselves. Such a conception is both too reactive and too teleological: it locates the impetus for natural becoming in a reactive attempt to adapt to environing conditions and takes the aim of this adaptation to be the preservation of existence for as long as possible (see BGE 13; GM II: 12; WP 70, 647, 681, 684). Nietzsche writes:

Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an 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 . In short, here as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles!—one of which is the instinct of self-preservation. (BGE 13; cf. Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"; WP 650, 688)

This view is repeated and elaborated in the fifth book of the Gay Science:

The wish to preserve oneself is the 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. [ . . . O]ur modern natural sciences have become so thoroughly entangled in this [ . . . ] dogma [concerning the instinct of self-preservation] (most recently and worst of all Darwinism with its incomprehensibly one-sided doctrine of the "struggle for existence").^[37] [ . . . But] in nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the life-will. The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power—in

[37] The famous title and subject of On the Origin of Species, chap. 3.

accordance with the will to power which is the will of life. (GS 349; cf. TL §2; Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"; BGE 262; GM II:11; TI "Skirmishes" 14, 44)

There is an apparent equivocation, in these passages, about the nature of "will to power." On the face of it, will to power would seem to be the drive to acquire power; yet both passages assert that it essentially concerns the expenditure ("discharge," "sacrifice," "overflow and squandering") of power, "even to the point of absurdity." Furthermore, having criticized one "superfluous teleological principle," the instinct of self-preservation, Nietzsche seems to substitute another, the desire for power. Lastly, this desire (for power) would seem to signify a fundamental lack (of power), that is, a fundamental indigence and distress, which, however, here and elsewhere, Nietzsche repeatedly denies is the basic condition of nature.^[38]

These difficulties rest on a teleological interpretation of will to power and disappear as soon as we begin to understand Nietzsche's doctrine otherwise. If the fundamental condition of life is one of superabundance and exuberance rather than indigence and distress, power is not primarily something an organism wants or needs but something an organism is or has and must exercise . Will to power, then, is not a teleological principle but a dynamic force, like a stretched spring or a dammed river.^[39] The "willing" of will to power, Nietzsche writes, "is not 'desiring,' striving, demanding"; rather, it is "[t]hat state of tension by virtue of which a force seeks to discharge itself" (WP 668).^[40]

If Nietzsche's language is puzzling, his basic hypothesis is fairly straightforward. It is one later taken up and developed by the French

[38] This rejection of indigence and utility, and the assertion of superabundance and exuberance as the primum mobile of life, are basic themes in Nietzsche's work from beginning to end. See, e.g., BT passim and BT SC:1, SC:4, SC:5; TL, pp. 90–91 (on the indigent scientific vs. the free artistic intellect); Z: Prologue 1, 4, Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"; GS 370; BGE 260, 262; GM I (on master vs. slave morality); TI "Skirmishes" 8–9, "Ancients" 4–5; EH "Books" BT:2; WP 797, 802, 843, 864, 1050.

[39] For various metaphors of power as superabundance, see GS 285, 370; Z Prologue 1, Z: 1 "On the Gift-Giving Virtue," Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"; BGE 260, 262; TI "Skirmishes" 8–9, 44, "Ancients" 3; A 1; EH "Books" BT:2; WP 576, 802, 846, 852, 1022.

[40] Thus, in GM II: 17–18, Nietzsche calls will to power "the instinct for freedom " that must "discharge and vent itself." TI "Ancients" 3 describes it as an "inner explosive [ . . . ]," a "tremendous inner tension." In Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming," will to power is "the unexhausted procreative will of life," and life is "that which must always overcome itself ." Resonating with these passages is BT SC: 5, which glorifies the "amoral artist-god [ . . . ] who, creating worlds, frees himself from the distress of fullness and overfullness ."

Nietzschean Georges Bataille: namely, that the dynamic force of nature (that which propels growth, sexuality, procreation, struggle, and death) and of culture^[41] (production, form-giving, creativity, and play) is the superabundance of energy in the biosphere and the compulsion to expend it.^[42] As Bataille puts it, "it is not necessity but its contrary, 'luxury,' that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems ."^[43] For both Bataille and Nietzsche, the source and archetype of this expenditure is the sun and its prodigality:

Solar energy is the source of life's exuberant development. The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy—wealth—without any return. The sun gives without receiving. [ . . . ] Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe. But, first, living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it. It then radiates or squanders it, but before devoting an appreciable share to this radiation it makes maximum use of it for growth. Only the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander.^[44]

In the natural world, growth constitutes a temporary accumulation of energy; but this accumulation eventually ceases, often giving way to procreation, a luxurious expenditure through which life is given to an-

[41] This distinction between "nature" and "culture" does not mark an opposition between two fundamentally different domains but only a conventional division of the same domain: Nature writ large. Nietzsche's point is, precisely, that will to power operates throughout both "nature" and "culture."

[42] See Georges Bataille, "The Notion of Expenditure," in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), and The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1, Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1988). Nietzsche, too, attempts to view "[t]he organic functions translated back to the basic will, the will to power" (WP 658); cf. Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"; BGE 36; WP 651–57, 680, 688.

[43] Bataille, Accursed Share, 12.

[44] Ibid., 28–29. Cf. Zarathustra, which opens with praise of the sun, that "overrich star," that "cup that wants to overflow, that the water may flow from it golden and carry everywhere the reflection of [its] delight" (Z: Prologue 1). Later in the Prologue, Zarathustra echoes this passage, proclaiming: "I love him whose soul squanders itself, who wants no thanks and returns none: for he always gives away and does not want to preserve himself" (4). See also the section on "The Gift-Giving Virtue"—"the highest virtue," which, like gold, "is uncommon and useless and gleaming and gentle in its splendor; it always gives of itself" (Z: 1 "On the Gift-Giving Virtue"). For further discussion of the gift-giving theme in Nietzsche's work and suggestions concerning its relationship to Bataille's conception of "general economy," see Gary Shapiro, Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 13–51, and Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche's French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (New York: Routledge, 1995), 82–101.

other.^[45] So, too, is it within the domain of "culture." Nietzsche notes that peoples are acquisitive and conservative until they reach such a point of power and abundance that they burst the bounds of their moralities and ranks, producing a flood of individualities and new systems of value (BGE 2.62.).^[46] If law and justice temporarily stem this tide, Nietzsche insists that,

from the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions can never be other than exceptional conditions, since they constitute a partial restriction of the will of life, which is bent upon power, and are subordinate to its total goal as a single means: namely, as a means of creating greater units of power. A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power-complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general [ . . . ,] would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness. (GM II: 11; cf. BGE 259; GM II: 12; and WP 728)

In short, while provisional limits and restrictions can be imposed upon the impulse to expenditure, this accumulation can only ever be in the service of a more magnificent squandering. Ultimately, the movement of expenditure can only be channeled, not thwarted.^[47] Denied outward discharge, the will to power turns inward (GM II:16). And even the ascetic who attempts to negate life and will to power implicitly affirms them, for asceticism, Nietzsche famously argues, is merely a perverse will of life against life itself, "a will to nothingness " that, nevertheless, "remains a will! " (GM III:28; cf. GM III:10–13; TI "Morality").

The affirmation of life, then, requires an affirmation of will to power as the will to expenditure, the drive to discharge strength and exude energy. According to both Nietzsche and Bataille, human history and anthropology reveal the extent and variety of forums developed for the satisfaction of this drive. Festivals, spectacles, games, athletic and aesthetic contests, orgies, feasts, sacrifices, wars, monumental construction, gambling, nonreproductive sex, and sumptuous gifts all attest to this impulse to dissipate energy and discharge strength at the cost of preser-

[45] See Bataille, Accursed Share, 33–35; and Nietzsche, Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"; TI "Ancients" 4; WP 655–58, 680.

[46] Cf. WP 933: "A culture of the exception, the experiment, the danger, the nuance as a consequence of a great abundance of powers, this is the tendency of every aristocratic culture. Only when a culture has an excess of powers at its disposal can it also constitute a hothouse of luxury cultivation" (modified on the basis of the original, KSA 12:9[139]).

[47] See Bataille, Accursed Share, 21, 25.

vation and the utility of resources.^[48] Yet, as we have seen, will to power is not only concerned with the expenditure and dissipation of strength. It is also taken up with "growth and expansion," the acquisition of strength and power in the service of an even more grandiose expenditure. Hence, it favors neither total dissipation of power nor complete destruction of the object on which power is exercised. Such results will only negate, rather than affirm, the will of life. In contrast, Nietzsche sees will to power as exemplified by the Greek agon . These contests are not "fights of annihilation" (HC, p. 35), which manifest what, following Hesiod, Nietzsche calls "the evil Eris": struggles motivated only by ressentiment and the desire to destroy.^[49] Rather, they affirm Hesiod's "good Eris," fostering an ongoing forum for the release of strength, the testing of claims to power, and the drive for competitive distinction.^[50] Because "will to power can manifest itself only against resistances," every contestant "seeks that which resists it" (WP 656). Competing forces will be worthy opponents only if their respective strengths and directions are more or less similar. The exemplary contestant derives no satisfaction from competing against an inferior power, nor does he or she wish to dominate the field absolutely. Such situations undermine the contest; and the proper response to these situations, Nietzsche suggests, is "ostracism," the banishment of these over-bearing contestants (see HC, p. 36). For the good contestant "resist[s] any ultimate peace," and, instead, "will[s] the eternal recurrence of war and peace" (GS 285).

The agon may well result in the acquisition of strength and the feeling of power that accompanies it. Yet, again, this condition is not its aim: will to power is ateleological.^[51] It desires not a final state but the perpetuation of the contest. Paradoxically, power can be acquired only through expenditure (think, for instance, of athletic training); and its acquisition leads once again to this desire to expend. Bataille illustrates this well with his privileged manifestation of the will to expenditure, the

[48] See Bataille, "Notion of Expenditure," 118–23, Accursed Share, passim; and Nietzsche, HC; HL 9; GM II:6–7; TI "Ancients" 3–5.

[49] The notion of ressentiment appears nowhere in "Homer's Contest." But I think Nietzsche's characterization of "the evil Eris" in this text has much in common with his description of the ressentiment that characterizes the slave's will to power in the Genealogy of Morals, Essay I.

[50] See HC, p. 35, and Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 1–50.

[51] One is reminded of a claim repeated throughout Nietzsche's corpus: "every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment" (BGE 22). Cf. HL 1, p. 66; BT SC: 5; WP 55, 634, 708. Also cf. Bataille ("Notion of Expenditure," 118): activities of expenditure "have no end beyond themselves."

ritual of potlatch practiced by a number of Native American tribes of the Northwest Coast.^[52] "Potlatch," Bataille explains,

is, like commerce, a means of circulating wealth, but it excludes bargaining. More often than not it is the solemn giving of considerable riches, offered by a chief to his rival for the purpose of humiliating, challenging and obligating him. The recipient has to erase the humiliation and take up the challenge; he must satisfy the obligation that was contracted by accepting. He can only reply, a short time later, by means of a new potlatch, more generous than the first: He must pay back with interest.^[53]

Bataille remarks that "[t]here would be no potlatch if, in a general sense, the ultimate problem concerned the acquisition and not the dissipation of useful wealth."^[54] Yet, it gives rise to a paradox:

We need to give away, lose or destroy. But the gift would be senseless (and so we would never decide to give) if it did not take on the meaning of an acquisition. Hence giving must become acquiring a power . Gift-giving has the virtue of a surpassing of the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given, the subject appropriates the surpassing: He regards his virtue, that which he has had the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now possesses. He enriches himself with a contempt for riches, and what he proves to be miserly of is in fact his generosity.^[55]

[I]t turns out that the giver has only apparently lost. Not only does he have the power over the recipient that the gift has bestowed on him, but the recipient is obligated to nullify that power by repaying the gift. The rivalry even entails the return of a greater gift: In order to get even the giver must not only redeem himself, but he must also impose the "power of the gift" on his rival in turn. In a sense the presents are repaid with interest . Thus the gift is the opposite of what it seemed to be: To give is obviously to lose, but the loss apparently brings a profit to the one who sustains it.^[56]

Bataille maintains, however, that this acquisitive interpretation of potlatch is misleading. Acquisition is only a moment in the endless cycle of

[52] Though the term "potlatch" properly describes the practice of a particular group of peoples, Bataille (Accursed Share, 67) notes that "[e]thnographers now employ this term to designate institutions functioning on a similar principle; they find traces of it in all societies." Indeed, he writes, "a good many of our behaviors are reducible to the laws of potlatch; they have the same significance as it does" (69). For his anthropological data, Bataille draws heavily on Marcel Mauss's extremely influential "Essay on the Gift" (1923–24), itself based on the work of Davy, Boas, Swanton, and Malinowski. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 37.

[53] Bataille, Accursed Share, 67–68; cf. "Notion of Expenditure," 121.

[54] Bataille, Accursed Share, 68.

[55] Ibid., 69.

[56] Ibid., 70.

potlatch: every gift prompts, in response, an even greater gift, a more glorious expenditure. One does not give in order to acquire; acquisition is merely an effect of one's giving.^[57] "[I]f it is ultimately a source of profit," Bataille writes, "the principle of [potlatch] is nevertheless determined by a resolute squandering of resources that in theory could have been acquired."^[58] Moreover, in this endless cycle of gift-giving, what is genuinely acquired is not things but rank, esteem, value, glory. And this rank is determined, principally, not by what one has, but by what one is able to risk, expend, put in play: "the players can never retire from the game, their fortunes made; they remain at the mercy of provocation."^[59] As soon as one retires from the game, one's prestige becomes a thing of the past.

The example of "potlatch," of agonistic giving, may appear to be an anthropological curiosity. Yet Bataille sees in it something characteristic not only of human activity but of natural life as a whole: the burden of excess energy and the need to expend it. So, too, does Nietzsche see in his privileged metaphor of the agon not a rarefied cultural practice but something characteristic of natural processes generally. Bataille's "potlatch" and Nietzsche's agon are exemplary instances of will to power, intended to help us see that "power" is not primarily about acquisition, not primarily something a being wants or can have for its own, but something that circulates through living beings and that propels the myriad movements of organic life.

5.2.5—
Beyond Mechanism and Vitalism:
Nietzsche's Materialism

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

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

[58] Bataille, Accursed Share, 70.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5.3—
Will to Power and Interpretation

5.3.1—
Will to Power as Interpretation

Opposing Schopenhauer's "will to live" and Darwin's "struggle for existence," Nietzsche calls this fundamental activity of things "will to power." Yet it goes by another name, as well: "interpretation." Throughout his later work, Nietzsche closely links these two notions. "The will to power interprets, " he writes in a note from 1885–86, "interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something" (WP 643). This view is elaborated in the Genealogy of Morals, where Nietzsche remarks that interpretation "essentially " involves "forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, [and] falsifying" (III:24).^[67] In the Genealogy 's "Second Essay," the connection between "interpretation" and "will to power" is drawn more explicitly and the two terms become nearly synonymous: "[W]hatever exists," he writes, is essentially involved in processes of "subduing, [ . . . ] becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation." There is "interpretation" whenever something is "taken over, transformed and redirected by some power superior to it" and "will to power " whenever something has "become master of something less powerful and imposed on it the character of a function." The section concludes that "the essence of life, will to power" is revealed in those "spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions" (BGE 12).

Earlier, we saw that Nietzsche's notion of "interpretation" extends well beyond its ordinary domain (see §3.2). Indeed, its scope is precisely as broad as that of will to power. Thus, just as "all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment" (BGE 36), so, too, "all events in the organic world" are said to involve "interpretation" (GM II:12). "The organic process constantly presupposes interpreting, " Nietzsche writes elsewhere; thus, for example, "it is a question of interpretation when an organ is constructed" (WP 643;

[67] This language resonates with that of another passage, which asserts that, as will to power, "life operates essentially, that is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction, and simply cannot be thought of at all without this character" (GM II:11). See also BGE 259: "'Exploitation' does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life." See also Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming."

cf. GM II:12). And because, consistent with his thoroughgoing naturalism, Nietzsche sees fit to extend will to power over inanimate nature,^[68] we could view even inorganic events and entities (e.g., chemical reactions and bonds) as "interpretations" in Nietzsche's extended sense.

This will strike many as a bizarre and idiosyncratic move. Yet I take it to be a polemical strategy intended to make a serious naturalistic point. Just as Nietzsche asserts that the "soul is only a word for something about the body" (Z: 1 "On the Despisers of the Body")^[69] and that "thinking is merely a relation of [ . . . ] drives to each other" (BGE 36), he asks us to see "interpretation"—one of the "highest" intellectual operations—as simply one manifestation of a process found throughout the natural world. Thus, if the interpretation of texts involves the selection, incorporation, assimilation, weighting, ordering, and elaboration (or, in Nietzsche's more polemical formulation: "forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, [and] falsifying" [GM III:24]) of textual material in the interest of intellectual mastery and the production of meaning, so, too, do breathing and eating, for example, consist in the exploitation, incorporation, and assimilation of a select portion of the natural world in the service of preservation, growth, enhancement, and power. Indeed, Nietzsche suggests that "'the spirit' is relatively most similar to a stomach" (BGE 230).^[70] He elaborates:

That commanding something which the people call "spirit" wants to be master in and around its own house and wants to feel that it is master; it has the will from multiplicity to simplicity, a will that ties up, tames, and is domineering and truly masterful. Its needs and capacities are so far the same as those which physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The spirit's power to appropriate the foreign stands revealed in its inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, and to overlook or repulse whatever is totally contradictory—just as it involuntarily emphasizes certain features and lines in what is foreign, in every piece of the "external world," retouching and falsifying the whole to suit itself. Its intent in all this is to incorporate new "experiences," to file new things in old files—growth, in a word—or, more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power.

[68] Thus, to take the two passages cited above, BGE 36 concludes that "all efficient force" ought to be determined as "will to power, " and GM II:12 concludes that "in all events a will to power is operating."

[69] In BGE 12, Nietzsche deems "the soul" a "social structure of the drives and affects." On this issue, see §3.3.3, above.

[70] Cf. Z: 3 "On Old and New Tablets" (§16): "For verily, my brothers, the spirit is a stomach."

This will to "appropriate," "assimilate," "simplify," "overlook," "emphasize," "retouch," "falsify," and "incorporate" Nietzsche here calls "will to power."^[71] Elsewhere he calls it "interpretation." Indeed, this allows us to make sense of the initially puzzling idea that "the general renunciation of all interpretation (of forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, falsifying, and whatever else is of the essence of interpreting) [ . . . ] expresses, broadly speaking, as much ascetic virtue as any denial of sensuality" (GM III:24). If the essence of life and nature is will to power, and if will to power essentially involves interpretation (in the broad sense), then "the general renunciation of all interpretation" would signify an ascetic rejection of life and nature. Conversely, if will to power is the naturalistic theory par excellence, and if will to power essentially involves interpretation, the naturalist is led to assert the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation.

5.3.2—
Beyond Epistemology and Ontology

This identification of will to power with interpretation and our exposition of Nietzsche's broad conception of interpretation allow us to answer the last of our initial questions: is will to power an epistemological or an ontological doctrine? The answer is that it is both, or neither: both, because it offers an account of knowing and being; neither, because it collapses the rigorous distinctions between subject and object, knower and known, upon which epistemology and ontology are traditionally founded.

To make sense of this we need to return to the gastronomic metaphor presented above. For Nietzsche, "knowing" is "interpreting" (that is, "taking possession of things," "equalization and ordering," "simplification," "adjustment," "schematizing," "forming, shaping, and reshaping" "for the purpose of intelligibility and calculation").^[72] And this cognitive apprehension or interpretation is simply a kind of in-gestion or in-corporation, which forms "the basic will" not only of the body but also of the "spirit"—for "'the spirit' is relatively most similar to a stomach" (BGE 229–30).^[73] On this model, then, the "knowing subject" is

[71] He does so even more explicitly in passages that employ nearly identical language, e.g., BGE 259; GM II: 11; and WP 511.

[72] A list of predicates for "knowledge" drawn from WP 503, 500, 515, and 656, the earliest written in 1884, the latest in 1888.

[73] Elsewhere, Nietzsche remarks that the cognitive process "is the same as the process of incorporation of appropriated material in the amoeba" (WP 501), that "[t]his wholeprocess corresponds exactly to that external, mechanical process (which is its symbol) by which the protoplasm makes what it appropriates equal to itself and fits it into its own forms and files" (WP 510).

no more detached from the "objects" it apprehends than the body is detached from the solids, liquids, and gases it ingests. That which ingests (the knower, the interpreter, the consumer) is not different in kind from that which is ingested (other natural material), for the latter is also a consumer and interpreter (in the extended sense) in its own right. Thus, the designations subject and object, knower and known, interpreter and interpreted, eater and eaten are relative and perspectival, since, from one point of view all matter is the former, while from another it is the latter. "[A]ll existence" is "essentially an interpreting existence" (GS 374), Nietzsche writes; and all knowing is a form of "interpreting." That is, what things are is determined by interpretation (both by cognitive and noncognitive forms of appropriation and assimilation); and what things do is interpret (including that rarefied form we call "knowing" or "cognition").

In short, for Nietzsche, the natural world is fundamentally interpretive. There is no world other than the natural and nothing outside the interpretive web that constitutes this natural world. If "epistemology" names the attempt to conceive of the knowing subject as prior to interpretation, the attempt to found a prior science, to view the world "from the outside," then will to power (which resolutely views the world "from inside") is anti-epistemological. In Richard Rorty's formulation, it is "hermeneutical," because it substitutes for the epistemological dualism of subject and object the web of "interpretation," which encompasses and articulates both subjects and objects.^[74] There is only this web of interpretation; which is to say, there is only will to power: "This world is will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!" (WP 1067).

5.3.3—
Will to Power as an Interpretation

This assertion of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation can only mean that "will to power" is itself an interpretation. And Nietz-

[74] See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), part 3, and "Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation," in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On the notion of subject and object as interpretive constructs, see chapter 3 and WP 481; BGE 34; and WP 556, which are quoted at the end of §3.3.4 above.

sche affirms it as such: "Supposing that this ['will to power'] also is only interpretation—" he writes, "and you will be eager enough to make this objection?—well, so much the better" (BGE 22). Nietzsche is not a dogmatic metaphysician for whom will to power could be a transcendent Truth; nor is he a positivist for whom will to power could be founded on indubitable "facts." Indeed, in the closing sections of the Genealogy, he argues that dogmatic metaphysics and positivism are secret allies, because both are motivated by the same "unconditional will to truth" that demands "the renunciation of all interpretation" (GM III: 24). For Nietzsche, however, such renunciation is impossible and the very attempt at it antinatural.

How, then, can Nietzsche avoid vicious circularity and legitimate his claim that will to power is the best available world-interpretation? This problem of circularity confronts every philosophy that abjures foundationalism.^[75] But the circle will appear vicious only to the foundationalist who assumes that there must be some way of exiting it. For the holist, there is no such exit. But this does not mean that the holist lacks a platform for critique, for the proposal of positive views, and for the determination of value. What it does mean is that critique can only take place from within, that it must draw its resources from that which it criticizes.^[76] That is why Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics and theology takes the form not of a definitive refutation but of elaborate fallibilistic genealogies,^[77] which provide deflationary psychological, philological, and historical redescriptions that draw attention to the ascetic ideal's pudenda origo (D 42; WP 254), its shameful origins and ends. Nietzsche's positive conceptions are justified in the same manner: by ap-

[75] See, e.g., the problem of the hermeneutic circle in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), §§2, 32, 63; in Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 280ff, and Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 162; in Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 63–64; and in W. V. Quine, "Epistemology Naturalized," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 75–76.

[76] To call on Quine's analogy ("Natural Kinds," in Ontological Relativity, 127), drawn from Neurath, we are at sail in "a boat which [ . . . ] we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it" (cf. Word and Object [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960], 3). Or, to use Derrida's analogy (Of Grammatology, 139), drawn from Lévi-Strauss, we are "bricoleurs" who can only "build [ . . . new] castles with debris."

[77] Thus, in the preface to the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes, "[W]hat have I to do with refutations!—but, as becomes a positive spirit, to replace the improbable with the more probable, possibly one error with another" (4).

peal to something within the tradition that allows it to be deconstructed and then reconstructed otherwise. In chapter 1, we saw that Nietzsche's endorsement of art (or the aesthetic) as the naturalistic discourse par excellence is premised upon a genealogy of European thought, specifically upon a radical extension of the naturalistic tendency implicit in its latest, scientific, moment. And, in the present chapter, we have seen that will to power is proposed as an effort finally to rid contemporary scientific accounts of "the shadows of God." Will to power, then, is justified not transcendently but immanently—by recourse to a tradition, an interpretation, a story that it takes over and recasts.

As such, Nietzsche's project bears some resemblance to that of the other great nineteenth-century German holist, Hegel. Both Nietzsche and Hegel reject foundationalism and traditional epistemology in favor of a holistic, historicist account of the succession of interpretations that constitute the European intellectual tradition, a tradition which, for both philosophers, can only be altered via an immanent critique.^[78] Yet, for Nietzsche, the Hegelian project remains ontotheological in its teleological trajectory toward "absolute knowledge," the dream of an end to becoming, multiplicity, struggle, and contingency, the desire for a final interpretation. The "death of God" proclaimed in Hegel's Glauben und Wissen is only a religious death, because it is followed by a philosophical resurrection.^[79] For Nietzsche, "the death of God" means a rejection

[78] Hence, Jacques Derrida ("Positions," in Positions, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 44) writes that his Nietzschean conception of différance operates "at a point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel." See also "The Original Discussion of 'Différance,'" in Derrida and Differance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1982), 95. For Derrida, as for Deleuze (Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], 8ff., 147ff.), the contemporary debate is not between antifoundationalism and foundationalism but between the Hegelian and Nietzschean forms of antifoundationalism.

[79] See Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 190–91, and Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §808. In this sense, even if, with Robert C. Solomon ("The Secret of Hegel [Kierkegaard's Complaint]: A Study in Hegel's Philosophy of Religion," in From Hegel to Existentialism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987]), we grant Hegel's "atheistic humanism," Hegel remains a closet theologian insofar as his "humanism" maintains "the shadows of God." For Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, this is the significance of Nietzsche's doctrine of the Übermensch: that humanism remains theological and that not only God, but man, too, must be overcome. "No we do not love humanity," Nietzsche writes (GS 377); "[m]an is something that shall be overcome" (Z: Prologue 3). See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 147–94, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 124–32; and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970), 303–87.

not only of God but also of his epistemological and ontological "shadows," that is, of all transcendent interpretations and posits. It means not an elevation toward spirit but the reassertion of nature and embodiment, not "dusk" but "midnight," "daybreak," or "noon," not peace and rest but struggle and becoming, not "the end of history" but "the end of an error," not "experience" but a return to the "innocence" of Heraclitus's child.

With the doctrine of "will to power," Nietzsche reasserts Heraclitus's claim that "war is the father of all." He affirms the irreducible multiplicity and conflict of "interpretations" and thus the perpetual becoming (or différance ) of the interpretive field. Before and after theology, will to power places us in the space of "the pagan," to adopt Jean-François Lyotard's term for our postmodern condition: a condition defined by the perpetual agon of multiple and irreducible discourses in the absence of a God or metadiscourse that could resolve disputes once and for all.^[80] And Nietzsche places the doctrine of will to power in this very space, a space it does not govern but in which it, too, can only be a move in the game. Will to power, too, "is no matter of fact, no 'text,' but [ . . . an] interpretation [ . . . ]; and somebody might come along who, with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation, could read out of the same 'nature,' and with regard to the same phenomena," something altogether different (BGE 22). Nietzsche acknowledges this and responds "so much the better," because this supposition ensures the continuation of the agon . For the moment and in our current situation, Nietzsche is satisfied that his interpretations are victorious. But this satisfaction is that of victory, not of peace; and it is hoped that the peace be short rather than long (Z: 1 "On War and Warriors"; cf. HC, p. 38, and GS 285). Since the agon that is nature, life, and history "abominates the rule of one" (HC, p. 37), Nietzsche "looks for" (EH "Wise" 7), indeed "craves" (BT SC:1), new enemies, new struggles, and new contests.

[80] See Jean-François Lyotard, "Lessons in Paganism," in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), and Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).