Rule #1 for Leiter transformations—for turning some wild and crazy figure from the history of philosophy into someone logical and mild-mannered enough to be acceptable in today’s well-purged philosophy departments—was: claim that your guy and contemporary philosophers have a common enemy, even if you have to invent that enemy.
Now we turn to rule # 2: dress your guy up in the formal structures of Cold War philosophy. Most philosophers, when you say “formal structure,” think of logic. But, as Scare argues, logic merely structures philosophy’s surface; it has no ontological bite and is more of an intellectual veneer than a structure. The underlying formal structure really used by Cold War philosophers—the one that applies across the board, whatever else they are doing, and which unlike modus ponens and its empty ilk actually gets certain things done—is rational choice. As many scholars have noted, Cold War “rationality” just means choosing for the highest utility among alternatives ranked according to transitivity and completeness (see Scare for bibliographical details). It’s pretty hard to apply logic to Nietzsche and make him look good. But what about Cold War rationality? Leiter’s effort, though doomed, is noble.
Understanding what is meant by the claim that Nietzsche was a naturalist requires, Leiter claims, telling us what sort of naturalist Nietzsche was. One way to do this, the simplest and most direct, would be to find the places where Nietzsche talks about naturalism and expound them. But Leiter doesn’t do this; instead, he offers us a whole taxonomy of naturalisms—I counted eight. Nietzsche, I think, counted none; as far as I know, he never discusses the typology of naturalism. I won’t go into all of Leiter’s types and subtypes; the main distinction is between M-naturalism, which holds that philosophy should be “continuous” either with the methodology of the sciences (which means emulating scientific method) or with their results (which should be “supported” by “the best science”: p. 3), and “S-naturalism,” which is “substantive, i.e. holds either that “the only things that exist are natural (or perhaps simply physical) things,” or “semantic,” holding that “suitable philosophical analysis of any concept must show it to be amenable to empirical inquiry” (p. 5). So we are up to four varieties of “naturalism.”
I’ll stop there. Leiter’s question is: where does Nietzsche fit? On p. 5, he is both an “historical S-naturalist,” in that he rejects any explanatory role for God in an account of the world, and a “speculative M-naturalist” in that he “takes over from science the idea that natural phenomena have deterministic causes.” The adjectives here are cryptic, but meanings can be worked out. “Historical” just appears to mean that Nietzsche, like Hume, is now an historical figure—like Lincoln, he belongs to the ages. “Speculative” appears to mean that Nietzsche, also like Hume, develops a theory of human nature that is “modeled” on science in that it takes over from science the view that “natural phenomena have deterministic causes;” beyond that (and there is an awful lot beyond that) Nietzsche’s views appear to be produced by some sort of “speculation.” The determinism means that the general theory of human nature provides a basis for explaining (in words quoted, still on p 5, from Barry Stroud) “everything in human affairs.”
So much for cryptic; let us move on to problematic. Just why Nietzsche’s M-naturalism should be called “speculative” is not explained. If “speculative” means “goes beyond sensory experience,” as it used to, then the empiricism Leiter attributes to Nietzsche (e.g. on p. 71) poses problems. A more puzzling problem is the identification of determinism as a method. “Natural phenomena have deterministic causes” is not the description of a method, but a single statement which can (and does) serve science as a principle by which scientific methods get elaborated. Misidentifying it as a method is no idle tomfoolery; it makes Nietzsche look more “scientific” than he is. If I say I have adopted the “Brady method” for playing football, it sounds like I have a lot more in common with the great Patriot than if I admit that I have adopted only the principle that the aim of the offense is to get the ball across the goal line. (I will come back to Nietzsche and science.)
On p. 8, Nietzsche also turns out to be a results M-naturalist in that he draws on actual scientific results, “particularly in physiology.” Of course, lots of non-naturalists, from Aristotle to Aquinas to Alasdair MacIntyre to Charles Taylor, do the same. So why “drawing on” scientific results should make you a naturalist is unclear, as is how you can draw on them and still remain “speculative.” We certainly have here a remarkably relaxed criterion for naturalism.
That Nietzsche is a naturalist is hardly news. Leiter’s contribution, in his own eyes apparently, is to determine exactly what type of naturalist Nietzsche was. The discussion has slightly misfired in that out of eight (or so) categories of naturalism Leiter identifies, Nietzsche lands in three. It’s a bit like ordering half the menu in a restaurant. But people do do that, if the menu is cryptic enough.
More to the point: why this involved and confusing discussion of types of naturalism in the first place? Nietzsche himself never talks that way as far as I know (and as far as Leiter documents); it is an external matrix applied to his thought. Why? Why not just say that Nietzsche’s naturalism has three components: his denial of an explanatory role for supernatural entities, his recurrent use of physiological results, and his emulation of the main presupposition of science? What is the point this complex and confusing discussion in a supposedly “student friendly” (p. xi) book?
This is where Rule # 2 comes in. Leiter’s discussion of naturalism makes wild-and-crazy Nietzsche look, not only canny, but (sort of) rational in a Cold War way. First, if you have eight (or so) classes of naturalism, and Nietzsche exhibits three of them, he is nicely (if a bit widely) boxed in: pinned, we may say, in a lepidopteral sort of way, like Max Otto during the Otto Affair (see Scare, Chapters One and Two). Second, who put Nietzsche in there? Was it Nietzsche himself, who after all is responsible for his own views? Then it might look, at first blush, as if Nietzsche arrived at his version of naturalism via a choice among eight (or so) different versions of it. It might, if you are used to Cold War philosophers operating that way.
There are of course enormous problems with claiming that Nietzsche arrived at his naturalism via a rational choice among alternative forms of it—problems we will see later—and Leiter doesn’t openly claim that he did. What he has done with this strange discussion is set things up to make that an easy inference for the student. But who knows? It may not be Nietzsche that Leiter is trying to adapt to Cold War philosophy. Maybe it is Leiter himself: maybe he wants us to think that it was he, not Nietzsche, who has laid out the alternatives and then placed Nietzsche in among them—that it is he, not Nietzsche, who is “rational” by the standards of Cold War philosophy. Or maybe Leiter just assumes, unconsciously even, that this is just the way to do good philosophy. There are by now so many articles and books that operate like this—they lay out some alternatives, consider their pros and cons, and then choose among them—that Leiter just assumes that’s the way to proceed. In any case, we readers of Leiter, young and old, are beginning to understand Nietzsche, because we know where he is on our Cold War grid.