Nietzsche Pursued: Toward a Philosophy of the Future

Richard Schacht’s Nietzsche Pursued is, in a certain sense, the companion volume to his previous book Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2023). The latter furnishes much of the background to the overall argument and approach in Nietzsche Pursued, which itself still works through the question what Nietzsche’s kind of philosophy really is and, perhaps more importantly, what its philosophical potential is. In the previous volume, Schacht argues that Nietzsche adopts a specific kind of naturalism that views life as much as philosophy in terms of interpretive processes. In his new book, he begins to consider some of the implications of this position for what we might describe as a Nietzschean philosophy of the future.In nine chapters, two of which are addenda, Schacht covers much ground centered on the main themes of Nietzsche’s philosophical project. Each chapter, based on previously published material, is written in an easily accessible style and with a clear argument, avoiding the overwrought technical jargon that occasionally characterizes scholarship on both the analytic and Continental sides. Sparsely annotated, each chapter is also followed by textbook-like “anchor points,” that is, a short list of passages from Nietzsche’s published writings and notebooks that are most relevant for any given chapter. As such, the book is a good entry point into Nietzsche, as long as readers are aware of Schacht’s overall position within Nietzsche studies, broadly speaking: His voluminous Nietzsche (Routledge, 1983) has done more than most to reintroduce Nietzsche into the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy, but his account of Nietzsche’s philosophy occupies a position that stands askew of the prevalent analytic readings of Nietzsche as a moral psychologist with metaethical import, while his approach also does not really fit the bill of Continental and phenomenological readings. Schacht, to be sure, does not deny the central relevance of psychology for Nietzsche’s philosophical endeavor, but there is fundamentally more to it than psychology, and more than moral psychology.Schacht’s distance from some of the main trends of current Nietzsche studies might not be such a bad thing, of course, since it is high time to relegate the fruitless distinction between analytic and Continental readings to the dustbin of history. This is also an unusually personal book. In his long acknowledgments at the end, Schacht tells the story of why he became interested in Nietzsche, and in Hegel: At a time when philosophy as a professional academic discipline was divided between analytic and Continental camps, and when the historical perspective of Anglo-American philosophy departments was limited by the embarrassingly myopic account of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (George Allen they are just, well, philosophers. In a certain sense, Schacht’s approach is refreshingly untimely, given the current state of Nietzsche scholarship, precisely because he seeks simply to read Nietzsche on Nietzsche’s own terms, seeing where this might lead us. He has little interest in using Nietzsche to defend, or reject, a current philosophical position, and he also sidesteps some of the central debates that stand in the background of many analytic readings, such as whether or not Nietzsche was an anti-realist about values, or whether he adopted some form of value monism, and so on. As admirable as this approach might be, it also comes with some problems.The seven main chapters of the book cover impressive ground, as we might expect from someone like Schacht: naturalism, the conception of the human, perspectivism, morality, political philosophy, metaphysics, music, and Nietzsche’s understanding of evolution. There are two specific themes I will leave unaddressed: music and Nietzsche’s presumed Lamarckism. In the first case I am happy to admit that I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about Nietzsche and music. Reviewers have to accept their limitations. In the second case, my disagreement with Schacht’s position is so fundamental that it would require a response that would exceed the reasonable length of any review article. In short, Schacht assumes that Nietzsche’s understanding of evolution is largely indebted to Lamarck’s account of inherited characteristics and that this is where Nietzsche ran into a dead end. I think that this is simply wrong on both historical and philosophical grounds, but an explanation here would necessitate a deep dive into the complex trajectories of the nineteenth-century life sciences, and into Nietzsche’s own readings in this area. Again in short, reducing nineteenth-century evolutionary debates to either “Lamarckism” or “Darwinism” is catchy but misses the actual complexity of the life sciences.Schacht’s argument, however, is not concerned with such historical points and instead hinges on his account of Nietzsche’s naturalism. I am broadly in agreement that this naturalism is not of a reductionist kind that unduly pretends to replace philosophy with something that looks more like a fairly crude empirical science. Nietzsche’s naturalism, Schacht rightly notes, is “science-linked but neither science-bound nor science-modeled,” evolving in “partnership” with the natural sciences of the nineteenth century without trying to emulate them (3). What he describes here in the first chapter as a decidedly “post-scientistic naturalism” sets the stage for what is to come and therefore deserves some further discussion. First of all, such naturalism is quite modest, perhaps to the point of being minimalist: There is only one kind of reality, and this reality is of a physical and biological kind. I also agree with the second general point of Schacht’s characterization of Nietzsche’s conception of reality: This reality, whatever else it might be, is above all “emergently naturalistic” (15), that is, it is characterized by a dynamic of development, change, and becoming:There are good reasons to conclude from Nietzsche’s own texts, published and unpublished, but also from his own readings in the nineteenth-century natural sciences and philosophy, that something like this is indeed his understanding of reality. The problem, however, is that I am less convinced that Schacht’s overall argument is always able to keep this particular version of naturalism in view. The latter clearly entails what we might call a kind of one-world metaphysics, and there is no doubt that Nietzsche fundamentally rejects any two-world metaphysics. Schacht, however, occasionally slides into a two-world metaphysics, albeit unwittingly so.If reality is of a physical and biological kind, why does Schacht attribute to Nietzsche the view that reality cannot fully be described by the natural sciences (26–27), even though we have to admit that (i) the natural sciences are generally unable to describe their own premises naturalistically without making assumptions of a metaphysical kind, and even though (ii) philosophy might be able to explain why the natural sciences have to rely on metaphysical background assumptions? Schacht, however, does not simply argue that even a minimalist kind of naturalism will eventually run into metaphysical questions when it seeks to grasp a reality of which it is a constitutive part. Rather, he suggests that, somehow, there is more to that reality than meets the eye, and therefore more than might be explained naturalistically. This introduces a kind of two-world metaphysics through the backdoor.This problem becomes a little clearer when Schacht discusses perspectivism. In order to save Nietzsche, quite rightly, from the charge of some kind of radical relativism, or skepticism, he foregrounds that our perspectives on the world generate meaning within specific contexts, that is, we interpret the world in specific ways, and if those interpretations are successful, broadly speaking, a specific perspective gains priority over others, both for us as individuals and in our social interactions with others. The upshot of this position, however, is that we are caught in a phenomenalism of our own perspectives (92), and it seems unsatisfying to say simply that we, or Nietzsche, can provide a naturalistic account of why we are stuck in this phenomenalism without explaining how we can say anything philosophically about the kind of reality of which we, and our phenomenalism, are constitutive parts. This seems not so different from the shorthand version of a Kantian two-world metaphysics of phenomena and noumena, which Schacht explicitly seeks to deny, especially in his chapter on Nietzsche’s metaphysics.Much of this problem, I think, derives from Schacht’s insistence on the primacy of “interpretation,” very broadly speaking: Life is a kind of interpretive process that generates meaning in the world. Interpretation, though, always entails that something is being interpreted, or that something gives rise to a specific interpretation, and whatever that might be, it is different from how we interpret this something, even though it also is part of our interpretation, which taken together is one of the reasons why we can come to different interpretive perspectives that evolve over time. Although he never says so, Schacht’s naturalism effectively entails a sort of existential Fundamentalhermeneutik à la Hans-Georg Gadamer that ultimately threatens to undercut his naturalism. What does it mean, for instance, that a given biological process or function “interprets” the world in this way or that? What I think Schacht wants to get at is the idea that any such interpretive process is a manifestation of normativity in the sense that the one reality of which we are a constitutive part, biologically and physically, places normative constraints on our agency in this reality, even though these normative constraints also enable our agency and, this is important for Nietzsche, change over time. Schacht’s conception of life as “interpretation,” thus, works a little like what philosophers of biology would describe as niche construction, but Schacht’s insistence on “interpretation” sells his argument short and can easily lead to misunderstanding.Schacht is correct in holding that, by and large, Nietzsche’s philosophical project is concerned with the “genealogy of our humanity” (33), the development, or becoming, of what we call human, as it is tied up with valuing and internalizing values, but for Schacht this is also simply a process of “interpreting” (57), as he makes clear in his close reading of GM (44–75). The attempt to become who we already are, on this account, does not really translate us back into nature, as Nietzsche demanded in GS and BGE. Rather, it implies “becoming some transfigured version of what one previously was” (65), and such a “transformation” includes “the developmental supersession of the merely natural” (171). Nietzsche’s naturalism, then, seems to be no naturalism at all.What this transfigured version of the human might be is not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is that in Schacht’s account Nietzsche’s project of genealogy cannot be reduced to its critical import (123), since transfiguration entails a positive dimension. Even though Schacht has to admit that “Nietzsche does not even try to say with any precision and clarity either what he would have everyone do, or how he would have them do it,” he attributes to Nietzsche a “constructive post-moralistic philosophy of moral matters” (125). A similar claim appears in Schacht’s discussion of Nietzsche’s conception of politics, or rather political thinking: The latter is devoid of a substantive set of normative demands, also because the political world of human agency, not unlike our social world at large, is just too complex for any single normative order (172). Nevertheless, Nietzsche remains drawn to political thought, since the latter, like morality, is a realm of constructive transfiguration.Nietzsche’s politics, like his views of morality, are a contentious issue, of course, and Schacht’s approach, open and abstract, allows him to avoid the standard set of ridiculous conclusions about blond beasts, race, and authoritarian domination that are still often attributed to Nietzsche. That is a good thing, no doubt. But his emphasis on Nietzsche’s constructive contribution also tends to underplay Nietzsche’s real strengths for a philosophy of the future. For Schacht, the latter do not consist in the critical potential of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy. Rather, the task of genealogy is to make “new sense” of already existing ethical customs (Moralen), thus overcoming our focus on a law-governed Moral in some sort of vaguely Kantian, or Christian, sense of the term. The upshot of making new sense of ethical customs is a sort of Aristotelian focus on “human flourishing” and the perfectionist realization of some kind of higher humanity, an “enhancement of human life” (171).Dwelling quite a bit on the difference between Moralen, in the sense of ethical customs, and Moral, in the sense of a systematic normative order of morality, Schacht’s interpretive kind of naturalism, if it can really be seen as a naturalism, leads him to a conclusion that is as important as its implications are left unsaid: Ethical customs we take to be normatively binding, and also changing over time, constitute a “cluster of human phenomena” that are “part and parcel of human reality . . ., and all have cultural, sociological, psychological, and even physiological sources and dimensions” (135). On this account, morality, in a constructive sense, can simply be dissolved into different and changing “forms of human life” that are “real” for us, but that are not related, it seems, to anything “biological” (137, 139), even though they are still somehow part of a reality that Schacht seems to understand as purely biological and physical, but also not.The problem with this account is not that it could not really explain, along the lines of naturalism, how something can become normatively binding in the first place, say, a specific form of life. It could. The real problem lies elsewhere—it reintroduces the kind of relativism Schacht seeks to avoid elsewhere throughout his book. Any ethical custom could become normatively binding, and any value is as good as any other, so that the positive upshot of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is simply that we can happily construct new ethical customs, whatever they might be. I am not sure that this is Nietzsche’s position, and even if we grant that it is, not all that much seems to follow from it for a Nietzschean philosophy of the future. The strength of Nietzsche’s genealogy rather remains its potential as a powerful critique that homes in on precisely the interaction among the “cultural, sociological, psychological, and even physiological sources,” as Schacht himself notes, that make certain values over time more normatively binding than others. The real strength of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is not the construction of the new, even though he thought so himself, but it is the critique of existing forms of life. We might not always wish to take philosophers at their own word.Despite some of my skepticism, one of the major achievements of Nietzsche Pursued is the way in which Schacht brings Hegel back into the conversation, both with regard to Nietzsche’s critique of morality and with regard to his metaphysics. There is more Hegel in Nietzsche, or perhaps there is greater proximity between Hegel and Nietzsche, than we sometimes might care to admit. Schacht’s claim, for instance, that “a Nietzschean kind of constructive post-moralistic philosophy of moral matters” (125), however cumbersome this sounds, is close to Hegel’s discussion of Sittlichkeit is entirely convincing (149). Likewise, Schacht’s detailed reading of the will to power along the lines of a Hegelian metaphysics that seeks to philosophically grasp becoming (234–50) takes the metaphysical questions that Nietzsche seeks to address with the concept will to power more seriously than many standard analytic readings that either regard the will to power as a sort of embarrassment or reduce the latter to some kind of psychological process. The much-repeated claim that Nietzsche himself did not take the will to power all too seriously, since it mainly surfaces in his notebooks, is simply wrong, given the crucial importance of BGE 36. Schacht, in other words, is absolutely right about the central importance of the will to power, and it would have been interesting to establish his quasi-Hegelian account of the will to power as the backbone of his conception of Nietzsche’s naturalism. Of course, as Schacht knows all too well, it is always advantageous to sanitize Nietzsche by simply disregarding that he asks metaphysical questions not compatible with the prevalent analytic reduction of his philosophical project to moral psychology and metaethics. That would give us a Nietzsche, however, who is not quite Nietzsche, and Schacht is right about this.