Nietzsche's Anthropic Circle

The central claim of George J. Stack's Nietzsche's Anthropic Circle is that Nietzsche becomes trapped in a vicious or “anthropic” circle insofar as he makes exaggerated, and even metaphysical, claims concerning the universality of will to power—claims that exceed the interpretational or perspectival framework that he himself considers to delimit all thinking. This criticism is of central importance, for it suggests that Nietzsche either invalidates his hypothesis of the will to power or undermines his theory of perspectivism. An additional claim of Stack's is that in conceiving of will to power as affirmation, with joy occurring at a deeper level than woe or suffering, Nietzsche presents a metaphysics of affirmation.In addressing the first issue, Stack rightly reads Nietzsche's perspectivism as treating all claims about the world as the perspective of an author and as statements based in “human analogy” (55). The issue for Stack concerns Nietzsche's legitimacy in making any claims that value one view of the world over another, or some metaphors over others. Stack begins with the “aesthetic metaphysics” of the earlier works, which attribute to the artist-philosopher a better—by implication, more truthful—connection with nature than others and the ability to give a form to this that transmits its truth—for example, through music or philosophy. Stack is right to suggest that some of Nietzsche's claims seem to exaggerate the abilities of the artist-philosopher. For example, Nietzsche's discussion of the relationship between naked nature, the playwright, the satyr, and the spectator seems to suggest that something true of naked nature can be directly transmitted in some way (BT 10). However, any understanding of this relationship must take Nietzsche's theory of the metaphoricity of all language into account, especially as the nature being translated is “naked,” in the sense of possessing a necessity prior to the attribution of laws. Stack also argues that Nietzsche's aesthetic metaphysics is largely rejected in Human, All Too Human through the application of a “scientific spirit” (3), which respects the “small truths” of science, while also realizing that a better perspective requires a discerning analysis of scientific theory (27).However, Stack finds that Nietzsche is soon frustrated with the completeness of the fictionalization he imposes, and on which his notion of language as metaphor is based, and that in his later work he therefore introduces a “trans-phenomenal” context that transgresses the boundaries of his epistemological skepticism (35). For Stack, Nietzsche should have been content with a “radical phenomenalism,” taking a circumspect view of the phenomenal world, rather than locating a “process theory of nature” (37) behind appearance, a theory that is later named “will to power.”Nonetheless, while Stack finds that at “crucial points” Nietzsche is unable to resist making claims that slip into “ontological assertions” concerning will to power, he does not accept that in making such claims Nietzsche is arguing that will to power is “in agreement with reality” (93, 95). Thus, Nietzsche is not supposed to claim that will to power is an essential force or substance, despite his use of universalizing rhetoric (101, 206). Rather, Stack claims, Nietzsche produces an “exoteric fable” of will to power (109–10), intentionally evoking a mythmaking mechanism as an alternative way to approach concepts that arise from a still present metaphysical drive, and notwithstanding his own skepticism concerning metaphysical claims. Stack appears to find it acceptable that Nietzsche adopts a form of pragmatism, whereby general claims can be made as long as they concede that they are mythmaking, while also relying on current scientific theories. However, he wonders why Nietzsche persists in making statements which seem to exceed these limits, and argues that proceeding with the hypothetical scientific method would have been a better course. Stack approves of such an approach as antirealist (114), with will to power understood as a useful concept for explaining events as well as for undermining commonsense materialism (118), and as a form of “instrumentalism” that posits not only practical scientific-like constructs, but also fictions that are useful for life (119). Stack even argues that Nietzsche posits the Übermensch to assist humanity in this instrumentalism, and thus give direction to human thinking without an overstated “supra-historical tendency” invoking eternal truths (159) or “transhistorical states of being and thought,” which he associates with some of Nietzsche's claims about will to power, eternal return, and Dionysus (160). He suggests that the Übermensch should rather be understood primarily as embodying a capacity to set boundaries for thought which are true to the earth.Stack also suggests that the “hypothesis of a plurality” in will to power is an attempt to overcome nihilism by means of a new myth that, while going beyond science, is compatible with a contemporary scientific point of view (166). He also argues that the notion of human beings striving to enhance power is a “viable psychological hypothesis” that “stands apart from the myth of a universal will to power” (172). In suggesting that the notion of mythmaking is needed to mitigate the universalization of the psychological phenomena of power-enhancing behavior, then, he restates his “anthropic circle” criticism. However, it is questionable whether the mythmaking model is required. The interpretation of will to power as a psychological phenomenon that Nietzsche applies as a universal form of explanation analogously to life and to the earth seems true to many of his statements, but qualifying such claims with the notion of mythmaking does not seem credible. For Nietzsche, there is no alternative but to make such an analogy; we cannot adopt a trans-perspectival position to make such claims. All universal claims are therefore already qualified as analogies.Stack finds the striving for more power to be related to an underlying drive to dominate that can become “spiritualized” into higher forms (173). This orientation is found to occur at the level of the body as a “deeper conatus” (“deeper” compared with that of conscious willing), located in the continuous flow of forces in the world. This raises the question of how we can consider sovereignty to be primary in such a completely relational world of flux, in which thinking seems to be responsive rather than autonomous, and in which what is most one's own seems to be a unique history of generally ill-judged, preferred interpretations, moving forward at each moment. Perhaps this flawed conatus can be seen to be pointing to something like Heidegger's Being, Levinas's Other, or Nietzsche's Dionysus, all of which would emphasize a non-moralizing form of will to power related to the “innocence of becoming,” or what Stack calls a “will to freedom” (177).Stack argues for a psychology founded on such a model of will to power (182), which could encourage thinking that is authentically grounded in innocence. For him, however, this psychology would complement a cosmology that treats will to power as a mythical world conception, creating a new basis for culture in a “cosmic” fable that Stack describes as an “amalgam of philosophical, artistic, and scientific perspectives” (187). In this context, the will to power myth is found to be a pragmatic “quasi-scientific, quasi-metaphysical mask concealing a Dionysian chaos” (202). While this seems to be a plausible humanization of Schopenhauer's will, it also appears as something of an Apolline veiling of the Dionysian, a veiling criticized by Nietzsche, for whom the Dionysian chaos of earth and life is without transcendental underpinning and necessarily impacts on all thinking.Stack's will to freedom designates an inspired and inspiring engagement with the world of becoming, presented by Nietzsche in full rhetorical flow, which attempts to persuade us to sustain a faith in “the awesome phenomenon of life itself” (207). To exert a will to freedom in a meaningful way, it is necessary to be free from the constraints of the metaphysical and religious denial of the value of life, an undercurrent in modern thought which undermines any attempts to be true to the earth. Stack claims that by emphasizing “objective nihilism” (205) and an overt awareness of the limits of knowledge Nietzsche ultimately avoided making metaphysical claims, but nonetheless charges Nietzsche with misusing rhetoric in exhorting us to acknowledge the world of will to power.Against Stack, however, it can be argued that even here Nietzsche is not asking us to affirm the world of will to power as a metaphysical totality and thus to exceed perspectivism. Rather, he asks us to actively aspire to develop an affirmative ethical stance, or ethos, in which will to power occurs as ethical evaluation. Here we stray from Stack's world of science and myth in an attempt to develop a primarily ethical interpretation of human will to power, albeit one that might, nonetheless, provide a response to Stack's concerns. For Nietzsche's world of will to power can be understood as underpinned in two ways: by Dionysian raw nature, considered as chaotic becoming, which, as necessity, must be affirmed if one is to be true to the earth; and by an intellectual process of enhancing power through increasing levels of affirmation called “spiritualization,” taken to the point where will to power becomes justice and is associated with the “kind and gentle ruler,” Dionysus (BT 10). With this model of the Dionysian, we are able to go beyond the debate concerning the metaphysical status of will to power, in order to recognize the role that the resistance posed to our will to power has on our ethical evaluation (cf. BGE 295). It can be argued that the process of developing justice relies on the agonistic relationship produced by the resistance of others to the imposition of our perspective. And this notion of possible resistance and, thus, of recipients of justice, can be applied to all possible others: considered both as elements of raw nature and as existents who are also seeking to enhance their power by relying on the circumspect resistance of others. In this sense, Stack's will to freedom would entail a liberation from injustice based in a continual attempt to share and affirm a more broadly based conception of existence, achieved through an interaction with others that is primarily ethical.The questions that Stack raises are important for Nietzsche studies. The argument that Nietzsche's claims concerning will to power contravene his own perspectivism has the potential to undermine his philosophy. Yet, in this regard, it can be argued that Nietzsche is not making ontological claims, but rather trying to achieve an ethical goal—namely, convincing us of the worth of his basic insight that we should be true to the earth while also creating a just, interpreted world for others and a future beyond our own finitude. Throwing the dice is the metaphor Nietzsche chooses for such thinking, for at each moment we attempt to counterbalance the ineffability of the temporal flow of existence without veiling it, and in doing so to be both true to the immediacy of our world and to promote eternity. For Nietzsche, the inability to find transcendent or immanent meaning is tragic, but this is what we are required to affirm in all interhuman engagements, along with the ineffable immediacy of raw nature. By thinking through the optics of the Dionysian, Nietzsche's world of will to power can be considered not as an illegitimate metaphysical or mythical claim, but as an ethical affectivity that liberates humanity and provides it with its dynamic force

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