Sorry for the interlude—I was traveling and ill. The illness did not come from reading Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche book. I think.
Having attempted to digest the eightfold (or so) intellectual diverticulum presented by Leiter’s discussion of Nietzsche’s naturalism, I found I was still only on p. 11 and tried to move on. But there was much more in this section for those who want to learn how to make someone who died in Germany in 1900 look like a contemporary American analytical philosopher. And for me there were three more Leiter Rules
First, it turns out that Nietzsche’s own basic project has nothing to do with his naturalism. That project, Leiter said, is Nietzsche’s philosophical attempt at “value-creation,” i.e. at the “revaluation of all values.” Value creation’s profound concern for human greatness (not a notable feature of naturalism) “animates all [Nietzsche’s] writings” (p. 27); and the much-belabored naturalism is merely an instrument in its service (pp. 11, 26, 283). But value-creation, Leiter avers, has no “continuity” at all with Nietzsche’s naturalism (p. 11). So Leiter dismisses it: “most of Nietzsche’s writings are devoted, in fact, to the M-naturalistic project” (p. 11).
We now have one philosophical project (value-creation) that “animates all” of Nietzsche’s’s writings; and another (naturalism) which, though extensively treated in those writings, is explicitly said to be merely an instrument in its service. On which do we focus? The instrument! It’s as if a book on Quine’s philosophy focused on his many technical writings in logic, dismissing the philosophical overview in whose service they stand. So we get Leiter Rule #3: Dismiss any aims and concerns of your guy that do not align with those of analytical philosophers—even as you openly admit how important they were to Nietzsche himself.
Dismissing value creation is in the service of yet another Leiter Rule, # 4: Make your guy as close to a scientist as you can. We saw in an earlier post that Nietzsche’s “emulation” of scientific method (which is not really an emulation, and not of a method), is phrased by Leiter in terms of Nietzsche’s “continuity” with science. Leiter supports this continuity-with-science thesis with four quotes in which Nietzsche praises scientific method. The first and most important of these is not from the main text Leiter’s book deals with—On the Genealogy of Morality—but from the preceding book in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, Beyond Good and Evil. But in addition to the fact that Leiter had to get it from another book—not fatal of course, but grounds for worry—there are, he notes, some “striking” things about this passage.
Yes, and one striking omission from Leiter’s discussion of it. The quotation is long and I won’t reproduce it here; it’s on p. 6 (having already been as far as p. 11, I was clearly losing ground). Suffice it that the quote discusses the “discipline” of science, and Leiter claims it shows Nietzsche’s allegiance to scientific method. But what does Nietzsche mean by “science?”
Leiter then, on p. 7, supports his view of this passage with three more quotes, of which the first and most problematic is from The Antichrist § 59. (I note in passing that The Antichrist, like Beyond Good and Evil, is not On the Genealogy of Morality.) As Leiter has it, the quote says that “[S]cientific methods… one must say it ten times, are what is essential…” But alas (for Leiter!) the Colli-Montanari German text, which is the only German text referenced in his bibliography (p. 306) does not contain the word “scientific;” it refers only to “methods.” Same for the Kaufmann translation, which Leiter claims to have used. Uh-oh.
Perhaps some reference to the context of science is established elsewhere in the passage, unquoted by Leiter but enough to justify (though not to excuse) the mutilation of the actual quote? No: the whole passage is about the ancient Greeks, who as far as I know had not discovered the modern scientific method (they didn’t do many experiments and didn’t have a clear conception of empirical “method”). Later in the passage, Nietzsche in fact lists the ancient “methods” that, in the twilight of Christianity, have been reconquered by moderns—and what are they? “The free gaze on reality, the cautious hand, patience, and the entire probity (Rechtschaffenheit) of knowledge.” Cognitive virtues, all of them—but why call them “scientific”? They could have come from Heidegger—and the later one at that.
The other two quotes on p. 7 do valorize “scientific method—” but again, what does Nietzsche mean by that? It is, ahem, surprising that in his discussion of Nietzsche’s continuity with science, and in contrast to his elaborate discussion of the meaning of “continuity” in this context, Leiter doesn’t ask what Nietzsche means by “science.”
To be sure, Leiter notes—many pages later—that the English-language obsession with natural science is not conveyed by Wissenschaft, the German term (p. 36), and at one point (p. 41) he notes that Nietzsche characterizes science as “knowledge for the sake of knowledge,” which is part of the German meaning, but is hardly the whole of it. Wissenschaft, in German, etymologically means “an organization of knowledge;” the Oxford Living Dictionaries define it as “The systematic pursuit of knowledge, learning, and scholarship (especially as contrasted with its application).” So in German, things like jurisprudence, (Rechtswissenchaft) and the study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) count as sciences. Neither of them, of course, makes a presupposition of determinism: they are all about people who are responsible for their actions. So continuity with Wissenschaft does not guarantee naturalism in Leiter’s sense.
A discussion of Wissenschaft as part of the discussion of naturalism would thus weaken Leiter’s claim of Nietzsche’s continuity with science, even as that claim was advanced. So Leiter discusses it later and obliquely, when he comes to Nietzsche’s concern with classical philology in Chapter Two (pp. 35-38). This discussion trades upon the general view of Wissenschaft mentioned above, as it must—philology is hardly an empirical science as Anglophones understand the term (it make virtually no use of mathematics, for example). But it does not relate Nietzsche’s views on the “science” of classical philology to his views on Wissenschaft in general.
What is at stake in this is Leiter’s “continuity with science” thesis. Since his discussion of that in Chapter One makes no reference ot the German term, it sounds by default as if Nietzsche were continuous with science as Anglophones understand it–with natural science. In fact, wissenschaftliche method turns out for Nietzsche to mean nothing more than building up an organized body of knowledge from empirical evidence, doing so carefully and with “free gaze,” i.e. with a willingness to see reality as it really is. All the quotes that Leiter adduces for Nietzsche’s praise of scientific methodology are thus to be read in the context of Nietzsche’s home language—and Nietzsche’s continuity with science is not as contemporary as it sounds in Leiter’s discussion. Indeed, it is downright vapid. And we get a fifth Leiter Rule: When the meanings of your guy’s words in the original language to not coincide with the meanings of the terms by which they are conventionally translated into English, ignore them—or discuss them somewhere else.