Recently, I looked into Brian Leiter’s leading (leitende) opus, Nietzsche on Morality (the not-so–rare First Edition, from Routledge in 2012). I had the most laudable of motives: I didn’t want to be like Brian, who is wont to trash people (including me) without bothering to read them. After a few pages, however, I closed the book again. Here, in five posts, are the reasons. There are a lot of them; the book is a compendium of strategies for converting historical figures into analytical philosophers.
A few pages in comes a discussion of Nietzsche’s “naturalism” (pp. 3-11). It’s an important discussion to Leiter because Nietzsche’s “naturalism” is what Leiter hopes to deploy against his (and, it would seem, civilization’s) main enemies, the “postmodernists.” This identification of an enemy is the first step in the Leiter Conversion: “O my analytical confrères” (it fairly shouts) “Nietzsche is your brother—he hates whom you hate!” The relevant enemy is hateful indeed: a set of vile and dangerous nincompoops who claim that no text conveys anything objective, that all we have are interpretations.
On Leiter’s view, postmodern interpretations of Nietzsche deny two things: that (a) humans have a nature and (b) we can know facts about that nature. Foucault, the arch-postmodernist, attributes denials of (a) and (b) to Nietzsche; Leiter is out to show he accepts them (p. 2).
One of these claims is ontological and the other epistemological, but Leiter runs them together in that anyone who accepts either is assumed to accept the other: “that the genealogical object has no ‘essence’ suggests an anachronistic affinity with postmodern skepticism about facts and objectivity” (p. 167). Why would the denial of essences “suggest” skepticism? What connection between denying essence and embracing skepticism allows this “inference”?
Leiter seems to be skating here across a conflation of two very different claims, but he is not. He is skating across no fewer than four very different questions: (1) whether we can know human nature; (2) whether we can know facts about human nature; (3) whether there is human nature; and (4) whether there are facts about human nature. The relations among these claims are tangled. There can be facts about human nature if there is no such thing as human nature, such as the fact that it doesn’t exist. If it exists and we know that, we know at least one fact about it and so there are some such facts; but the idea that we can know facts about human nature without knowing human nature itself is as old as Plato (the ti esti question). Conversely, if essences are known intuitively, as Plato sometimes thought, we can have an intuition of human nature without knowing facts about human nature (the intuition will then be ineffable: Symposium 211). So some of these claims are logically independent of others, and some are not.
I won’t go into the whole thicket, which Leiter doesn’t even appear to see. His Foucault runs the the four claims together as well, denying them all. But Leiter’s evidence for the denials differs from case to case. The denial of (3) is supported by quoting “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” on essences (p. 2). So far so good: Foucault indeed does not think there is a human nature, and also (4) does not think there are “deep facts” about human nature, unless perhaps we count its non-existence as a “deep fact” about it. But when Leiter ties Foucault to (1) and (2), he does so with a quote, not from Foucault himself, but with one from Dreyfus and Rabinow (p. 2). Suspicions awake: can’t he find Foucault himself saying this?
When I wrote he chapters on Foucault for my book Philosophy and Freedom (Indiana 2000) I couldn’t. What I did find was Foucault saying that his archeological project must “correctly describe the discourses it treats” (Archeology of Knowledge p. 29) and that he himself is a “positivist” with respect to truth (op. cit. p. 125-127; also see pp. 31, 46; for further discussion and more passages see my whole discussion of Foucault and truth at my Philosophy and Freedom pp. 133-136). So Foucault thinks there are facts, and that we can know them; he just doesn’t think there are essences or “deep facts” about them; in the latter case, he denies, not the factuality of “deep facts,” but their depth.
Indeed, the view that we can’t know any facts would render Foucault’s entire project—in both its archeological and its genealogical phases—massively incoherent. For that project is openly polemical—as “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” shows, Foucault thinks traditional historians are wrong. They have distorted history by interpreting it in light of overarching ideas such as “historical epochs.” If all Foucault can offer against them is one more interpretation, he cannot carry the day; everyone is right.
To be sure, Foucault denies that there is such a thing as human nature, and he also denies that there are deep facts about that nature,, since he doesn’t believe in “depth.” But he certainly thinks that people exist, and that we can know facts about them (such as that they are determined by the discourses in which they participate). So if we change (2) and (4) above by substituting “people” for “human nature,” Foucault accepts them. His claim, then, is that people exist, but that what they are changes too often and radically to be a stable and coherent “nature.” His fundamental point is ontological, not epistemological—and certainly not skeptical. (The same, by the way, applies to Derrida. If Plato did not write the Phaedrus, for example, what is the point of Derrida’s deconstruction of it?)
As I argue in Philosophy and Freedom, the “epistemologizing” of the conflict between postmodernism and modernism was a highly unfortunate move, for though it rendered refutation easy, it rendered debate impossible: how can you argue with someone who denies the possibility of truth and reference? The way is open so all sorts of insouciant chicanery, including the creation of straw men. In Leiter’s case, however, the straw has a purpose. For Leiter’s ultimate goal, as we will see, appears to have nothing to do with postmodernism.