My encounters with Leiter’s Nietzsche had led, not to Nietzsche, but to a set of rules for turning Nietzsche into someone analytically acceptable. But what, according to Leiter, did analytical philosophers find acceptable? What sort of people are they, if we judge by Leiter’s rules for pleasing them?
First of all, they are deeply concerned with their enemies (Rule # 1): Nietzsche had to be rescued from Foucault and his evil “postmodern” henchmen. Your enemies, O analytical philosophers, are Nietzsche’s enemies, and mine as well—so we are all friends!
Second, they know little about those enemies. Though some of the henchmen Leiter tilts against are real enough, Leiter’s Foucault is largely a fabrication, and anyone who has read a bit of what Foucault says about his own project should know it.
Third, they are incurious: what would it take not to notice that Leiter’s “continuity with science” thesis Chapter One is buttressed by a convoluted discussion of “continuity” but none of “science” until the next chapter, which quietly contradicts what is presupposed in this one? Leiter doesn’t bother to cover his tracks.
Not only are these people incurious, but they are dismissive of any project not their own (Rule # 3); like to ape scientists (# 4); and adhere to philosophical strictures established to fight a war that ended thirty years ago (# 2).
Not a very pleasant picture—and hardly, of course, an accurate one. The analytical philosophers that I have come to know in my career no more resemble this than they resemble pterodactyls.
But there was one final twist, and one final perfidy.
The twist had to do with Foucault—the real one—and naturalism. As Scare shows, “naturalism” has a heavy history in American philosophy. During during the McCarthy Era it came to be used as a euphemism for “atheism,” and in that sense, Nietzsche is obviously a naturalist: he denies the existence of God. But “naturalism” also meant turning to nature rather than to culture for your explanations of human affairs: it was consciously designed to bring philosophy under the umbrella of natural science. The survival value of this during the early Cold War is evident.
Leiter, of course, knows nothing of that history. Having anti-postmodernist fish to fry, he wants “naturalism” to mean “belief in human nature.” But human nature plays a small role in his subsequent discussion, because what Nietzsche actually appeals to in his explanations, according to Leiter, is not human nature but various “type facts” about human nature: “It is type-facts, in turn, that figure in the explanation of human actions and beliefs (including beliefs about morality)”—p. 8.
There is one human nature, but there are many type-facts about it. Leiter, quoting himself, refers them to “a fixed psycho-physical constitution” (p. 8). But what is this “fixity?” Do type-facts about you last your whole life? No quote from Nietzsche in this section says so. Do they change historically? Again, Nietzsche—Leiter’s Nietzsche, anyway—is silent.
Suppose that they do, and that the nature of a type-fact can be explored via the way people talk about themselves and other things. Then type-facts would act very much, for Foucault, as do the discourses in which a person has been “subjectivated” (Scare p. 8) explain the behavior of that person. Like type-facts, indeed, Foucaldian discourses are relatively stable forms which determine, and so explain, peoples’ behavior. The main difference would appear to be that for Foucault these determining forms are not natural, but cultural. That’s quite a difference—but also very far from the epistemological chasm that Leiter has dug between Nietzsche and Foucault.
At this point, I decided to stop reading. But the final perfidy awaited. Leiter’s Chapter Two recounts “the profound intellectual influences on the young Nietzsche, influence that shaped his naturalism” (p 35). Nietzsche’s philosophy, we learn, arose from his youthful, enthusiastic, and uncritical reading of the Presocratics; the Sophists; Schopenhauer; and the German Materialists. Nietzsche, it appears, loved them all—presumably because of the relevant type-facts about him.
But Nietzsche was clearly not a universally uncritical reader; he was pretty critical, and early on, of the Bible, and later of manifold philosophers and historians. So why take it that a spate of uncritical reading in Nietzsche’s early years explains his views?
It helps, here, to remember that Leiter’s book is intended for young people: it is to be “student-friendly” (p. xi). This absolves Leiter of numerous tedious things we would expect to find in a book intended to convince scholars—things like careful reading of Foucault, engagement with secondary literature not in English, historically informed discussions of naturalism, and linguistically informed discussions of terms like Wissenschaft. But it raises another question: what sort of a friend to students is our friend Leiter?
One who gives the young readers of his book the impression that enthusiastic, uncritical reading was crucial to the development of a major philosopher. One who thus, tacitly, recommends that kind of reading to students. Including, of course, the very students who read Leiter’s book! He apparently wants students to read him uncritically and enthusiastically, abjure the evil “postmodernists,” and dedicate themselves to Leiter’s caricature of analytical philosophy. And in this way Leiter will endear himself to those analysts (or would if there were any like that) and develop an uncritical following among philosophy majors. He will have a much more influential, and so agreeable, career than if he had made his arguments rigorously and presented complete discussions of the evidence.
So now I really did stop reading. Though Leiter’s book has some merits as popularizing Maudemarie Clark’s account of Nietzsche’s “theory” of truth—views with which I am in some, though limited, sympathy—isn’t really about Nietzsche at all. Like so much of what Leiter does, it’s really about—the Life of Brian.