Nietzsche as Metaphysician

Nietzsche as Metaphysician is a sequel of sorts to Justin Remhof’s Nietzsche’s Constructivism (Routledge, 2018). In the earlier book Remhof argues that Nietzsche is a constructivist about material objects: he holds that all objects constitutively depend on human practices. In other work Remhof has argued that Nietzsche is a panpsychist (“Nietzsche as Panpsychist,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32.5 [2024]: 1074–96) and explored the question of whether Nietzsche is an object monist (“Nietzsche on Monism about Objects,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 56.4 [2018]: 469–87). Nietzsche as Metaphysician ascends to the meta level to argue, against a dominant trend in the scholarship, that it is legitimate to attribute first-order metaphysical views to Nietzsche.Remhof’s strategy for undermining the nonmetaphysical reading of Nietzsche is to show that Nietzsche finds nothing specially problematic about the kinds of questions metaphysicians ask (chapter 2), the kinds of answers they give (chapter 4), the methods they employ (chapter 5), or the subject matters they investigate (chapter 6). He also lays out criteria for an inquiry to count as metaphysical (chapter 3), in part to combat overly narrow conceptions of metaphysics (e.g., as “two-world” metaphysics) that lead scholars to deny that Nietzsche is a metaphysician.Remhof’s book is provocative, rich, clearly written, and tightly argued. I find myself in broad agreement with Remhof when he writes, “In all honesty, I think Nietzsche is easily a metaphysician” (3). For the skeptics, though, I believe Remhof has made a strong case that it is legitimate and fruitful to mine Nietzsche’s corpus for metaphysical arguments and insights. I cannot possibly do justice to all of the issues covered in Remhof’s book in the space of this review, so I settle for highlighting and raising questions and challenges to the discussions that I found most intriguing. Before I begin, though, full disclosure: I am not a Nietzsche scholar. While I am broadly familiar with Nietzsche’s corpus, I am not in a position to weigh in on any nitty-gritty interpretive disputes. Instead, I approach Remhof’s book from the perspective of someone committed, as Remhof is, to putting “Continental” figures into productive conversation with “analytic” metaphysics.After an agenda-setting first chapter, in chapter 2 Remhof considers and rejects three accounts on which Nietzsche holds that the questions metaphysicians ask are unanswerable. According to metaphysical indifferentism, metaphysical questions are unanswerable because they are meaningless. According to neo-pragmatism, they are unanswerable because metaphysical discourse presupposes a mistaken, representational view of language. According to transcendental naturalism, the fact that our epistemic faculties are the product of contingent evolutionary forces serves as a defeater for metaphysical claims. Remhof argues that for Nietzsche, as for Kant, our metaphysical concepts refer because they are partly constitutive of their objects, though Nietzsche parts ways with Kant in holding that all concepts are empirical. For Nietzsche, on this reading, metaphysics is legitimate insofar as it is immanent—that is, insofar as it is limited to empirical properties that can be encountered in experience. On this immanent conception of metaphysics, we are justified in taking stands on existence questions (against metaphysical indifferentism), metaphysical claims are truth-evaluable (against neo-pragmatism), and evolutionary debunking arguments against the reference of our metaphysical concepts fail (against transcendental naturalism).Chapter 3 lays out Remhof’s conception of metaphysics. For a discourse to count as metaphysical it must meet three criteria. First, metaphysics must be distinguished from science. Crucially, Nietzsche can satisfy this criterion even if he is, as is widely held, some kind of naturalist for whom philosophy is continuous, in both methodology and subject matter, with the natural sciences. Second, metaphysics seeks to provide sound arguments for conclusions about the nature of reality. Third, for an inquiry to count as metaphysical it must be responsive to what Remhof calls the “metaphysician’s playbook,” which contains the kinds of questions, forms of argument, historical precedents, and theoretical assumptions that make up the practice and conversational context of metaphysics (60).In chapter 4 Remhof demonstrates that Nietzsche’s philosophy satisfies these three criteria. First, he argues that Nietzsche is engaged in the metaphysics of science. This project is distinct from science insofar as it studies the presuppositions of scientific theories, for example by giving accounts of lawhood, kindhood, causation, and the relation of psychology to theorizing in the natural sciences. Second, Remhof shows that Nietzsche is in the business of making existential claims that are accountable to experience. Third, Remhof argues that Nietzsche is responsive to the metaphysician’s playbook by citing continuities of methodology (inference to the best explanation, Occam’s Razor) and subject matter (force, personal identity) with metaphysics naturalistically conceived.In chapter 5 Remhof argues that Nietzsche employs two methods that at first glance seem incompatible with naturalism: appeals to intuition and a priori justification. First, he argues that the affective reactions Nietzsche seeks to elicit in his readers function like intuitions understood as presentational states, which can provide justification and effect belief changes in readers based on their drives. He gives two examples. The first is the madman passage at GS 125, which is supposed to awaken an affective reaction of disorientation in atheists that motivates them to abandon the “shadows of God” that still shape their worldview. The second is the description of nobility in GM I; Remhof argues that Nietzsche intends the noble value system to be intuitively appealing to his reader. Second, Remhof argues that Nietzsche justifies metaphysical conclusions a priori on a “conceptual account” of a priori justification. His main example of this kind of a priori justification is Nietzsche’s rejection of the notion of the causa sui as a contradiction in terms.In chapter 6 Remhof argues that metaphysical subject matters (e.g., becoming) are intertwined with nonmetaphysical subject matters that are uncontroversially central to Nietzsche’s philosophical project: nihilism, life, perspective, amor fati, and eternal recurrence. Chapter 7 concludes by summarizing the case for the metaphysical reading.Let me now turn to some criticisms. My first criticism is that Remhof misidentifies Heidegger as a proponent of the nonmetaphysical reading. Curiously, Remhof cites Tsarina Doyle in support of this attribution; on the very same page he cites, however, Doyle says that her interpretation agrees with Heidegger’s in interpreting Nietzsche metaphysically and in taking the will to power to be central to his metaphysics. On Heidegger’s reading, far from being nonmetaphysical, Nietzsche’s thought is the culmination of the history of metaphysics. The “history of being” for Heidegger has passed through various epochs: being has been interpreted in terms of physis (ancient Greece), createdness (the Middle Ages), representability to a subject (modernity), and finally “standing reserve” or resources for our manipulation and control (the technological era). Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power represents the end point of a disastrous tendency toward understanding being in terms of its relation to the subject culminating in the horrors of the technological age. Remhof’s misattribution of a nonmetaphysical reading to Heidegger doesn’t matter so much for his overall project, but it is worth noting since Heidegger and Remhof agree in understanding Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power metaphysically. For example, on Remhof’s interpretation of BGE 36 Nietzsche extends his analysis of human behavior in terms of the will to power to an account of reality as fundamentally constituted by bundles of forces striving to exert influence over their environment. Similarly, Heidegger writes that for Nietzsche “will to power is the basic character of beings as such” (Nietzsche, vols. 3–4, trans. J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, F. A. Capuzzi, ed. D. F. Krell [Harper & Row, 1987], 193). Presumably Remhof and Heidegger would part ways after this point, but the claim that Nietzsche is a metaphysician is nonetheless common ground between them.My second challenge cuts closer to the heart of Remhof’s project. Remhof describes himself as offering a metametaphysical interpretation of Nietzsche (3, 11–12, et passim). That is, rather than arguing that Nietzsche holds particular first-order metaphysical views, he is exploring Nietzsche’s attitude toward metaphysics itself—in particular, whether Nietzsche thinks there’s anything specially problematic about metaphysical inquiry. Given that Remhof describes his interpretation as metametaphysical, I was surprised to find little discussion of the recent literature in metametaphysics, in particular the debate between meta-ontological realists and meta-ontological deflationists. Meta-ontological realists like Theodore Sider hold that ontological disputes (i.e., disputes over what exists) are substantive. Meta-ontological deflationists, on the other hand, hold that ontological disputes are somehow nonsubstantive, perhaps by being merely verbal or otherwise shallow. Examples of meta-ontological deflationism include Eli Hirsch’s quantifier variance and Amie Thomasson’s easy ontology. On Hirsch’s view, certain ontological disputes (e.g., between mereological nihilists and universalists) are merely verbal because the disputants’ claims can be seen as employing different meanings for the existential quantifier. On Thomasson’s view ontological questions are shallow because they are easily answered by consideration of the application conditions of our concepts. My worry is that, by omitting discussion of this metametaphysical debate, Remhof might be making things too easy for himself.To see why, note that Thomasson’s and Hirsch’s views count as metaphysical according to the three criteria Remhof lays out in chapter 3. Remhof explicitly says that quantifier variance meets the second criterion (64), and that it meets the other two criteria is obvious; and Thomasson is included with Quine, Lewis, Sider, and Barnes as contemporary thinkers who should count as metaphysicians on any reasonable conception of metaphysics (56). But now suppose an interpreter comes along who argues that Nietzsche is an easy ontologist à la Thomasson. That is, this interpreter holds that for Nietzsche ontological questions are easily answered by reflection on the application conditions of our concepts. For example, the debate between mereological nihilism and restricted composition is easily settled in favor of the latter view, since the application conditions of our concept table, for instance, prescribe that we can infer “a table exists” from “there are some simples arranged tablewise.” There are two things to note about this interpretation. First, it doesn’t sound all that far off from Remhof’s own interpretation of Nietzsche as a constructivist and proponent of immanent metaphysics. Second, there’s a clear sense in which it is an antimetaphysical position. Indeed, when Remhof lays out the three ways in which metaphysical questions could be taken to be unanswerable in chapter 2, he doesn’t discuss a fourth sense in which they could be defective: not by being, say, meaningless, but by being shallow. I don’t know if any nonmetaphysical reader of Nietzsche has had anything like this in mind. But I would be interested to hear where Remhof thinks Nietzsche fits into the contemporary debate between meta-ontological realists and deflationists, especially since one figure Remhof sees as a fellow traveler in Nietzsche’s constructivism about material objects—Nelson Goodman—has recently been read as holding a position in this meta-level debate (Shamik Dasgupta, “Realism and the Absence of Value,” Philosophical Review 127.3 [2018]: 279–322).My last two challenges concern Remhof’s discussion of metaphysical methods in chapter 5. First, recall that Remhof argues that Nietzsche seeks to elicit intuitions in his readers, where intuitions are understood as affective responses grounded in drives, and that he sees these intuitions as doing justificatory work. I have two comments here. First, Remhof writes that the view that “intuitive states are typically presentational states manifest in affective reactions . . . appears unique to Nietzsche, given that intuitions are often considered beliefs, dispositions to believe, or sui generis propositional attitudes, none of which involve affective states. . . . [A]ffective reactions are psychological states involving feelings like shock and awe” (109). Remhof is mistaken in claiming that this view is unique to Nietzsche. The view that affective reactions are presentational states is widely held in the phenomenological tradition. For example, Husserl and Max Scheler both hold that emotions like love and hate are intentional states through which values are given. To give metaphysical examples, Heidegger holds that anxiety and profound boredom reveal something about the ontological structures of Dasein and the world, and Sartre holds that nausea and boredom are revelatory of being-in-itself. Second, the whole discussion of intuition strikes me as a little bit of a red herring in the context of a defense of the metaphysical reading, since neither of Remhof’s examples (the madman in GS 125 and the discussion of nobility in GM I) concern metaphysical topics. It would be interesting to hear whether for Nietzsche intuitions can do distinctively metaphysical work. Perhaps Remhof’s case could be bolstered here by mentioning not only the evaluative “shadows of God” (such as egalitarianism) whose grip on modern atheists is supposed to be loosened by the death of God but also the various cosmological “shadows of God” (concerning, for example, order and teleology) Nietzsche diagnoses in the surrounding sections of GS.Finally, Remhof’s discussion of a priori justification struck me as another place where he might be uncharitable to his opponent who reads Nietzsche as a non- or antimetaphysical thinker. Remhof argues that Nietzsche provides a priori justification for metaphysical theses, when apriority is understood along the lines of Kant’s conception of analyticity (124). He claims that demonstrating that Nietzsche employs a priori justification in this sense is “enough to contest the standard naturalist and empiricist reading of his view of justification” (127–28). This strikes me as an overstatement. Consider that Hume—a naturalist, empiricist, and enemy of metaphysics if there ever was one—allows for this minimal conception of apriority (in the guise of relations of ideas). Perhaps nonmetaphysical readers like Clark and Dudrick and Leiter overstate their case in claiming that Nietzsche altogether rejects a priori justification, but I think they can grant that it’s compatible with Nietzsche’s naturalism, empiricism, and hostility to metaphysics that “all bachelors are unmarried” can be justified a priori. Admittedly, Remhof’s main example of a priori justification in Nietzsche—the rejection of the notion of the causa sui—has more metaphysical weight to it than this classic example of analyticity. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the philosophically interesting question about a priori justification in metaphysics concerns the synthetic a priori, which Nietzsche rejects (127). As in my challenge above regarding meta-ontological deflationism, this strikes me as a place where Remhof is making things a little too easy for himself.These challenges and requests for clarification should not be taken to detract from the many insights Remhof’s book has to offer, only some of which I have been able to canvass. I think Remhof has established without a reasonable doubt that mining Nietzsche’s works for metaphysical views, including weird ones, is both legitimate and philosophically fruitful, and I look forward to more work of this style in the future

Epistemology · Metaphysics · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism