Nietzsche the Naturalist?
Was Nietzsche a naturalist impressed by the new scientific discoveries of his day, a transcendental philosopher working out some variant of the Kantian picture, a straightforward metaphysician, or perhaps some unholy mixture of all of the above?
John Richardson's, Nietzsche's New Darwinism takes the naturalistic line - perhaps a surprise to those who have read the more metaphysically oriented Nietzsche's System - and Jessica Berry reviews it here
A taster for those looking forward to the Nietzsche Workshop, to take place next year, at which I'm sure these issues will be looming large.
John Richardson's, Nietzsche's New Darwinism takes the naturalistic line - perhaps a surprise to those who have read the more metaphysically oriented Nietzsche's System - and Jessica Berry reviews it here
A taster for those looking forward to the Nietzsche Workshop, to take place next year, at which I'm sure these issues will be looming large.
posted by Joel at 10:14 am
3 Comments:
>>> Was Nietzsche a naturalist impressed by the new scientific discoveries of his day, [or] a transcendental philosopher working out some variant of the Kantian picture[?]
I must admit, given that this question is posted on a site devoted to 'Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism', it somewhat troubles me that you seem to think these are mutually exclusive alternatives. The question is surely anachronistic at best (perhaps reflecting a certain Strawsonian bias in the way in which the entire TP&N project is being conceived?). After all, were not virtually all transcendental (Kantian or neo-Kantian) philosophers in Nietzsche's day "naturalists" in the sense indicated (i.e. that they thought it vitally important to take into philosophical account the deliverances of the best sciences of the day -- not least because those deliverances seemed to threaten the very fundaments of the critical philosophy: viz., the putatively synthetic apriori status of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics)?
If the first phase of your project is supposed to be devoted to "map[ping] the range of developments that recognisably [...] adhere to [the] central tenets of transcendental philosophy", it seems to me that you'd do well to avoid presuming from the outset that those "central tenets" are made up of the bits which Strawson happened to single out as worthy of philosophical attention -- in which case, you might well run the risk (inter alia) of missing the (historically rather important!) fact that the development of transcendental philosophy between Kant and Heidegger was inextricably bound up with developments in the sciences. Might not what Kant and later transcendental philosophers have to say about the sciences turn out to be rather important for a project devoted to exploring the (historical and systematic) Auseinandersetzung between naturalism and transcendentalism?
Moreover, why is there to be no historical treatment of *naturalism*? Is the assumption that there is some more or less invariant position called "naturalism" which has survived basically unaltered since Hume? But surely, if naturalism is defined as the view that philosophy must begin with the deliverances of the best sciences available (rather than in some anterior, extra-scientific "first philosophy"), not only will the history of naturalism will be a varied as the history of the sciences, but that history would have to include a good many *transcendental" philosophers -- beginning, exemplarily even, with Kant himself (who, in this sense of the term at least, is even more of a "naturalist" than Hume).
All of this to say: isn't there some risk that by beginning with certain (perhaps unstated but implicitly agreed upon) presuppositions about what "transcendentalism" and "naturalism" amount to (by assuming, for example, that if a philosopher is "impressed by the new scientific discoveries of his day" he is *eo ipso* a "naturalist", and therefore *can't be* a transcendental philosopher), you might end up with a rather anachronistic -- even ahistorical -- picture, even when mapping out the first (ostensibly "historical") phase of your project?
Probably you've already thought these things through at length and will be able to dispel my worries, but I thought it worth flagging them just in case. I'll look forward to any replies.
Damian
It is unclear to me why you think that the project has a Strawsonian bias, since (I don't think) Strawson has been mentioned at any event or in any post thus far. I wonder in what way you believe this bias to be manifesting itself? Perhaps in the assumption that transcendental philosophy has at least something to do with spelling out the a priori conditions of the possibility of experience? This is certainly an assumption of mine (although perhaps not all the tpn contributors), but it is hardly distinctively Strawsonian. It comes down to us straight from Kant.
Nor do I assume that transcendental and naturalistic positions are mutually exclusive. Indeed, on the original post to which you comment I explicitly suggested that Nietzsche may be both (the 'unholy' remark may have been a little strong, but in fact was directed more to the thought that Nietzsche might be both a transcendental philosopher and a straightforward metaphysician). Having said this, there is just no question that a significant number of philosophers who think of themselves as within the post-Kantian transcendental tradition take themselves to be opposing something which may (rightly or wrongly) be termed 'naturalism'. One natural point of divergence between transcendental and naturalistic points of view would be the attitude towards a priori knowledge.
There's an obvious difference between 'taking account' of contemporary science and basing philosophical claims on those sciences. This is perhaps most clear in the case of Husserl who, famously, considered it a mistake to ground philosophical claims on scientific investigation but who nevertheless can be thought of as 'taking account' of the sciences, in particular Gestalt psychology. Which clarifies (if it needed to) that by my original comment I in no way meant that being impressed by the sciences qualifies one as a naturalist. Such a view is absurd. The point rather, is that if you are a naturalist you will be impressed by the sciences. This is perhaps a truism and as such was made in an off-hand manner.
The query about the lack of investigation into the history of naturalism is well taken. In defence I think we just point out that we are not working with unlimited resources! Perhaps a future project will be able to devote to that topic the time it deserves. It is partly for this reason that the project was set up with the express intention of attempting to understand whether or not the transcendental orientation has lessons to teach contemporary naturalism. There will, of course, be events devoted to the question of how we should best conceive naturalism. But these will occur in the second and third years of the project.
Joel,
OK, admittedly it was somewhat unfair of me to seize upon your comment in that way, and (fairly obviously) I was doing so only in order to find a point of entry from which I could voice some reservations I have about the way in which the project seems to have been conceived. I should perhaps emphasize, however, that I do so not for the sake of being argumentative, but rather precisely because I think that this is (potentially) such a promising project. Indeed, it is because I am convinced that transcendental philosophy (on some construal thereof) harbours the resources for posing some fundamental challenges to contemporary naturalism that I am concerned to see the full extent of those resources being represented and mobilised. My worry is that this will not happen if (1) the basic and fundamental problem-situation of the project remains too vague and/or too narrowly conceived and (2) the first phase of the project (that is, the mapping of the history of transcendental philosophy) limits itself to going over already well-trodden territory (i.e. simply inviting a few more papers to add to the already mountainous literature on the likes of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger) while totally ignoring those many figures in the post-Kantian transcendental tradition(s) whose work – precisely because it engages closely with the natural sciences (and is thus able to challenge naturalists on territory to which they would like to claim as their own) – might harbour some of the most powerful and consequential such resources.
The Strawsonian bias I allude to is, I admit, not explicitly stated on the website (although it is, I think, implicit in much of what has been said), and was probably largely gleaned from the TP&N Director’s mission statement (which doesn’t seem to appear on the website, but appeared on a different website some months ago), but it basically has to do with how the problem-situation to which transcendental philosophy constitutes a response has been characterised: in a nutshell, as a question of how to be critical/post-metaphysical while avoiding the sceptical relativism supposedly entailed by any version of “unadorned naturalism” (that is, any naturalism not somehow undergirded by universal and necessary “transcendental constraints” of some kind). While I of course don’t think that the idea that transcendental philosophy has to do with spelling out the a priori conditions of the possibility of experience is anything “distinctively Strawsonian”, there are of course any number of ways in which this task (and the problem-situation to which is constitutes a response) might (and has) be(en) construed, and my suspicion is simply that the way in which it is being so construed here -- that is, solely, it seems, in terms of “transcendental (read: anti-sceptical) arguments” – far from descending to us “straight from Kant”, is in fact heavily inflected by a certain historically circumscribed and thematically selective reception of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Now, were it not the case that I am strongly convinced that said reception of Kant (and of transcendental philosophy in general) – a reception, which (inter alia) totally disregards the natural-scientific context and import of Kantian/transcendental thought -- is peculiarly ill-suited as a means of arriving at the stated goal of this project (that is, “to understand the nature of transcendental philosophy with the intention of assessing whether it leaves contemporary philosophical naturalism with a cogent case to answer”), the mere fact of it being selective and historically conditioned would not be such an issue (it is not as if I think we have any choice about whether or not to be selective!). My worry is only that, if one is not entirely clear about what is precisely at stake in the confrontation between transcendental and naturalist philosophy at the outset -- or if, for example, one simply assumes that it must necessarily boil down to an issue over the possibility of uncovering minimally necessary and universal transcendental constraints which even a covertly sceptical naturalism is bound to accept (if only because they are so minimal as to be platitudinous and thus explanatorily redundant) – one runs the risk of mis-staging the confrontation in such a way that nothing of real consequence really transpires. In this regard, might it not prove to be a mistake to wait until the final year of the project before explicitly addressing the question of what naturalism is? Wouldn’t it make more sense to come to a very clear idea (and explicit statement) of precisely what the target is (i.e. that naturalism to which you ultimately want to present with “a case to answer”) in order to provide a clear and substantive focus for your historical and thematic investigations into the nature and resources of transcendental philosophy?
There’s (always) much more to be said, of course, but I’ll leave it at that for now – just by way of trying to shed some light on what provoked my earlier (probably somewhat over-confrontational) comments.
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