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The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Volume 47, Issue 1, Spring 2016,

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 Nietzsche’s Will to Power

Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity

Christian J. Emden

Abstract: The “will to power” remains one of Nietzsche’s most controversial

philosophical concepts. In this article I argue that the will to power ties in directly
with Nietzsche’s naturalistic discussion of normativity. The link between the
will to power and normativity cannot be explained, however, along the lines of a
psychological reading of Nietzsche’s naturalism; rather, Nietzsche’s naturalism
is rooted in contemporary biological discussions. Biology comes first, psychol-
ogy second. With the notion of a will to power Nietzsche seeks to describe the
linkages between the natural and normative in a way that falls neither into the
trap of physicalist reductionism, nor into the trap of idealist metaphysics: how
can we obtain an understanding of the emergence of normativity without appeal-
ing to normativity as a standard separate from the agency, affects, conceptual
commitments, and also cells and organs, that make us natural beings?

Keywords: will to power, naturalism, normativity, biology, evolution

1. Psychology or Biology?

T here can be little doubt that the “will to power” remains one of Nietzsche’s
most controversial philosophical concepts. Leaving aside its colorful and
controversial political history in the first half of the twentieth century, the will to
power poses considerable problems for any serious reconstruction of Nietzsche’s
project. This is particularly the case for analytic reconstructions, which view
Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism largely through the lens of metaethical
concerns that are themselves grounded in a psychological reading of will, affect,
value, or ressentiment.1 The will to power, though, defies interpretations that are
schooled in contemporary philosophy of mind, or cognitive psychology. Even
analytic philosophers generally well-disposed toward the questions Nietzsche’s
project raises with regard to the foundation and reach of moral judgment, such as
Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Bernard Williams, tend to be baffled by
the will to power.2 If Nietzsche’s philosophical thought continues to be relevant,
and if his naturalism gives rise to questions about the nature of normativity,

JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2016

Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

30
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   31

moral and otherwise, it seems at first sight that we will do well to discount the
will to power as purely metaphysical speculation. At worst, the will to power
might be a questionable rhetorical misstep on Nietzsche’s part with nefarious
political connotations. Either way, as two recent commentators sympathetic to
Nietzsche’s project noted, the will to power “raises suspicions about Nietzsche
as a serious philosopher.”3
In contrast, I will argue that such conclusions are neither correct nor con-
vincing. Rather, the will to power ties in directly with Nietzsche’s naturalistic
discussion of normativity. The link between the will to power and normativity,
however, cannot be explained along the lines of a predominantly psychological
reading of Nietzsche’s naturalism; it very much depends on the way in which
Nietzsche conceives of the will to power as referring to biology. The wider
implication of this argument, which will have to pay attention to the historical and
epistemic contexts of Nietzsche’s thought during the 1880s, is that Nietzsche’s
naturalism is not primarily oriented toward the cognitive psychology of our moral
and epistemological commitments, but it is rooted in contemporary biological
discussions. Biology comes first, psychology second.
One of the reasons why analytic reconstructions of Nietzsche’s thought
struggle with the will to power is that the theoretical background commitments
of such reconstructions, their historical groundedness in either philosophy of
mind or ordinary language philosophy, invariably favor “will” over “power.”
The philosophical problem that comes to the fore in the will to power is, on this
account, the problem of the will, and of willing as an intentional mental state;
the question of power tends to be relegated to the background and reduced to
a more numinous “feeling of power.”4 What is crucial to Nietzsche’s will to
power, as it were, is how the will plays out among the seemingly commonsensi-
cal concepts of ordinary language that describe the experiential realm of human
psychology.5 Power, on the other hand, if it is not seen as a political category,
appears too vague a concept, too multilayered, to be successfully integrated
into an analytic approach necessarily guided by imagined ideals of “clarity,”
“rigor,” and “truth.”6
At first sight, a psychological reading of the will to power seems justified on
the basis that Nietzsche himself, after all, emphasized in Human, All Too Human
the “advantages of psychological observation,” and from here it is a small step
to viewing the will to power as the centerpiece of what, in GS, he described as
“the doctrine of the feeling of power” (HH 35 and GS 13). As a consequence, a
range of recent commentators have stressed the “preeminence of psychology”
in Nietzsche’s philosophical project as a whole and predominantly focused on
“the psychology of the will to power.”7 On the one hand, such a psychological
reading allows for a neat bridge between current concerns in analytic philosophy
and Nietzsche’s philosophical project, which now can be not only discussed
with regard to philosophy of mind and metaethics, but also integrated into more
32   Christian J. Emden

recent attempts to experimentally verify the claims of normative e­ thics.8 On

the other hand, however, it seems that such an approach—because of its appeal
to a particular kind of conceptual clarity—is often seduced to take Nietzsche’s
assertions prima facie and ignores the way in which Nietzsche, in virtually
every case, binds psychology to biology. What is at stake, then, in the psycho-
logical reading of Nietzsche’s project is a historical misunderstanding: when
Nietzsche speaks of psychology, he refers not to cognitive psychology but to
the psychological sciences of the nineteenth century, before Freud and before
behaviorism; these psychological sciences, through their experimental setup
in the contemporary research laboratories of, say, Hermann von Helmholtz or
Wilhelm Wundt, are invariably linked to the body, that is, to physiology. When
Nietzsche, in The Anti-Christ, notes that “when we discount the nervous system
and the senses, the ‘mortal shroud,’ we miscount,” he underscores that psychol-
ogy needs to be seen as a science of the body (A 14).
Not surprisingly, perhaps, by the mid-1880s, the will to power explicitly
becomes a fundamentally biological problem. In Beyond Good and Evil,
Nietzsche suggests that in the will to power “all the organic functions (self-­
regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism) are still syntheti-
cally bound together,” so that the will to power, as it becomes superficially
manifest in our drives, really describes “[t]he world seen from inside.” We might,
in our daily lives, not really pay much attention to cells and cytoplasm and instead
read the world through the “reality” of our “desires and passions” as a seemingly
commonsensical explanatory model readily available to us. But what is always
at stake for Nietzsche, however, is the “reality of our drives” that bridge the gap,
as it were, between our everyday world and its embeddedness in the body, in
our messy physiology, and in matter (BGE 36). Drives, in other words, are not
simply expressions of our volitional existence, but they always already possess
a physiological and, thus, biological facticity. Speaking of a “will” to power,
on the other hand, as Nietzsche himself had to admit, always entailed a “false
reification” (KGW VIII/1: 1[62]).9 Nietzsche, one might say, takes an increas-
ingly Spinozist stance: our commonsensical emphasis on feeling and willing,
together with the hopes that we place in human autonomy, are fictions, albeit
necessary ones, and we tend to forget, for good reason, the causes of our volitions
and actions.10 This complicates the very nature of the relationship between the
factual and the normative. On the one hand, the normative world of our desires
and passions, affects as much as epistemic values, is already factual because it
is relevant to us inasmuch as we cannot escape the reality of our bodily drives;
“thinking is only a relation between these drives” (BGE 36). On the other hand,
the biological facticity of our drives is already normative precisely because it is
relevant to us in the sense that it cannot be discounted. The factual has a norma-
tive force in the same way that this normative force gains facticity because it is
normatively binding on us—even at those moments when we are not aware of it.
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   33

Nietzsche’s question what it means to “translate humanity back into nature”

(BGE 230), thus, immediately raises the problem of normativity.11 He explicitly
formulates this question in GS and BGE and even a cursory glance at his mature
writings quickly reveals that translating humanity back into nature—Nietzsche’s
central naturalistic project—is also inherently linked to the “will to power,”
which gains momentum in his thought at the same time as his commitments to
a biologically rooted philosophical naturalism become more obvious.12 If he
adopts a specific version of philosophical naturalism, it will be inevitable to
consider how the will to power fits into his ostensibly naturalistic commitments
with regard to the question of normativity: how can we obtain an understanding
of the emergence of normativity without appealing to normativity as a standard
separate from the agency, affects, conceptual commitments, and also cells and
organs, that make us natural beings?
The will to power, I will argue, plays a central role in answering this question,
which also has consequences for Nietzsche’s ethical position. In short, with the
notion of a will to power he seeks to describe the linkages between the natural
and normative in a way that falls neither into the trap of physicalist reductionism,
nor into the trap of idealist metaphysics. Whether he is ultimately successful
might be a different matter. But it is noteworthy that, under the influence of
the contemporary life sciences, his arguments during the 1880s increasingly
move into a direction that, most recently, has also become manifest in attempts
to rethink philosophical naturalism by paying attention to the myriad ways in
which our normative practices are always enmeshed in, and cannot fully be
separated from, their contextual circumstances, their evolutionary history, and
the agency of others.13
When Nietzsche—for instance, in HH—points out that his philosophical
project aims at “knowledge of the preconditions of culture” (HH 25), these pre-
conditions are not simply of a psychological kind, but they are already the result
of the way in which we “interact with nature” (KGW III/4: 19[134]).14 Such
interaction is certainly suggestive of a dynamic process, some kind of agency,
and Nietzsche, once again, adopts a cautiously Spinozist stance. Affects, for
instance, are not discrete mental states of the cognitivist kind, but they have to
be understood as “affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is
increased or diminished, helped or hindered.”15 While the analytic discussion of
affect might accept that emotions have some sort of physiological underpinning,
affect is generally detached from biology even when emotions are presented
as natural kinds.16 Although Nietzsche would certainly deny that the will to
power constitutes a natural kind in the narrow sense of the term, nature, and
in particular bodies in nature, play a crucial role for his conception of power.
Much like Spinoza, Nietzsche thus views power in terms of potentia, that is, as
a striving beyond specific goals that determines any being’s ability to exist, its
robustness and evolvability.17
34   Christian J. Emden

2. Naturalizing the Will to Power

There are certainly many different ways in which we can approach the problem
of the will to power. As already mentioned, it is, first of all, entirely possible
to simply disregard the concept. Brian Leiter has taken this approach when he
noted, for instance, that a biological reading of the will to power is an “absurd”
attempt to outdo Darwin’s theory of evolution—even though the model of evolu-
tion Leiter seems to have in mind is the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolutionary
thought that emerges only at the beginning of the twentieth century, years after
Nietzsche’s untimely death. The will to power, seen from this perspective, is
simply “silly,” nothing but “crackpot metaphysical speculation.”18 As a con-
sequence, some commentators have sought to exclude the notion of a will to
power from a broadly speaking naturalistic reading of Nietzsche’s philosophical
project. There are several reasons for this.19 It is possible to argue, for instance,
that the will to power is merely a rhetorical device. Nietzsche, in other words,
was not quite serious about all this. One might also point to the fact that a more
detailed discussion of the will to power takes place mostly in his notebooks, not
intended for publication, while the concept itself is mentioned far less often in his
published writings than commonly assumed. Moreover, one can argue that the
will to power is self-contradictory for a very straightforward reason: Nietzsche
cannot seriously reject metaphysics and at the same time introduce what appears
to be a metaphysical concept par excellence. From whichever perspective we
look at the will to power, it seems that the latter remains a “wild-eyed specula-
tion not untypical in nineteenth-century German metaphysics, which simply
does not merit serious attention.”20
Leaving aside that such counterfactual clichés about nineteenth-century
German philosophy continue to belong to the bread and butter of mainstream
analytic philosophy, it is indeed possible to present a coherent metaphysical
account of the will to power, even though it is doubtful that this approach will
yield much useful guidance. Martin Heidegger, in his lectures from 1936 and
1937, famously presented Nietzsche as the last of the metaphysicians and explic-
itly rejected any “biologistic,” that is, “Darwinist,” reading of the will to power.21
Heidegger’s position, however, also clearly shows the pitfalls of a metaphysi-
cal account of the will to power: its conceptual emptiness allows for political
implications far removed from Nietzsche’s own concerns.
Instead of relating the will to power to organic life, Heidegger defined the
former as “the Being and essence of beings,” furthermore suggesting that there
is no real distinction to be made between “power” and “the will.”22 Power,
growth, and expansion—Heidegger suggested at a moment when he had already
entered into an ambivalent relationship with the Nazi party—might be constitu-
tive of life, but life, surprisingly perhaps, should not be understood in any bio-
logical way.23 Given the often quite völkisch overtones of Heidegger’s lectures
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   35

between 1935 and the early 1940s, we need to wonder, though, whether that
really makes much of a difference—at least for those who happened to be at the
receiving end of an increasingly hermetic philosophical justification of the Volk.
There is, however, also a deeper and, in some sense, more dangerous reason for
Heidegger’s attempt to resist a biological interpretation: biology, after all, was
merely a science, while philosophy represented the very idea that stood behind
all the sciences and, historically, preceded scientific knowledge. Nietzsche, he
claimed, did not fully understand the role philosophy had to play.24 The task
of any “metaphysics of Dasein” was the realization of a “metapolitics for ‘the’
historical Volk.”25 The will to power was a metaphysical principle with politi-
cal implications—implications that, for Heidegger during the mid-1930s, were
existentially grounded in Dasein and thus had little to do with our biological
makeup. But even if we were to grant Heidegger the benefit of the doubt and
simply ignored his entanglement with the Nazi party, his own account is not
able to give any serious reasons why the will to power should be constitutive of
life. He merely posits that it belongs to Dasein, which in the larger scheme of
things does not mean very much.
The third approach to the will to power is, broadly speaking, of a psycho-
logical kind and reflects the wider reading of Nietzsche’s project among many
analytic philosophers. But in contrast to the dominant trend to view the will to
power along the lines of a naturalized moral psychology, Maudemarie Clark
and David Dudrick sought to detach such a psychological reading of the will to
power from the orthodox assumption that Nietzsche’s project is a naturalistic
one, strictly speaking. Not unlike Heidegger, this led them to criticize the attempt
to link the will to power to biology and organic life. Rejecting the premises of
Nietzsche’s naturalism, they emphasized that the will to power, as it becomes
manifest in willing and affect, constituted an expression of human autonomy.26
What Nietzsche conceives of as “a study of the forms and development of the
will to power,” they argue, “is not a natural science.”27 Worried, again like
Heidegger, that naturalism would dissolve philosophy into the natural sciences,
they stipulated that the will to power is “what constitutes the human soul.” In
contrast to Heidegger, however, this conclusion implies that “soul . . . is not a
naturalistic entity, but neither is it a metaphysical one. It is a normative entity,
which exists only in and through the space of reasons.”28
Clark and Dudrick’s reference in this passage to Wilfrid Sellars’s “logical
space of reasons”—which presents the justification of our claims about the
world as an essentially contextual “linguistic affair,” enriching epistemic facts
with a whole range of non-epistemic things, experiences, motives and forms of
human agency—certainly seems to suggest that the will to power is, above all
else, a mental state, perhaps even a cognitive one that we can reflect upon.29
Since people, on this account, tend to act for reasons, whatever these reasons
might be, the will to power entails an inherently normative dimension. At the
36   Christian J. Emden

same time, however, Clark and Dudrick ignore the naturalistic slant of Sellars’s
perspective, even though this kind of naturalism is rooted not in biology but in
the philosophy of mind. In contrast, Nietzsche’s naturalism seeks to naturalize
the conditions under which the space of reasons is possible in the first place.
Most problematically, Clark and Dudrick divide nature and normativity—a
step that Sellars, despite his focus on a logical space of reasons, would not
have taken. The will to power, and thus the soul, is what makes us, presumably
autonomous humans, different from animals, as they claim.30 It is certainly the
case that norms are not natural kinds of a physicalist sort—already because we
are able to reflect on these norms, but also because we would otherwise fall
into the trap of a naturalistic fallacy.31 It is inevitable to ask, nevertheless, how
such norms, and our ability to reflect on them, could have come about in the
first place. Clark and Dudrick are right in assuming that the will to power is
of a normative kind, but their rejection of a naturalistic reading of Nietzsche’s
project, grounded in the worry that philosophy might become a natural science,
prevents them from considering the sources of the will to power’s normativity.32
Normativity is certainly a constitutive part of the space of reasons, but the sources
of normativity cannot be found in the space of reasons alone.
One of the reasons why the three approaches outlined above tend to underplay
the important role the will to power plays in Nietzsche’s thought with regard to
the emergence of normative claims about the world is a particular understand-
ing of what “naturalism” is supposed to mean: philosophical naturalism is here
equated with scientific realism. Philosophical naturalism and scientific realism
certainly share the assumption that, by and large, the natural sciences provide
the best possible account of what is out there and of how what is out there is
able to make normative demands on us. The crucial difference, however, is
that scientific realism tends to postulate a mind-independent reality of natural
kinds.33 This reality is approximated by the theories and models of the natu-
ral sciences, with truth, or alternatively evidence, serving as a non-epistemic
standard against which to measure such approximation.34 As such, scientific
realism is predominantly concerned with the status of models and theories.35
Naturalism, on the other hand, is able to shift the attention to the scientific prac-
tices and procedures that render such theories and models possible in the first
place. For scientific realism, the development of theories and models is marked
by internal logical consistency, which allows for the prediction of novelties,
whereas the focus on practices and agency that has recently been emphasized in
the debate about philosophical naturalism holds that contingency and context,
material circumstances and subjective attitudes play an equally important role in
the formation of our theories and models about the world. Normativity appears
here as contextually bound patterns in our language, models, and practices,
which themselves cannot be readily and easily distinguished from each other
and from their contexts. Nietzsche himself suggested as much when he noted
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   37

repeatedly, from HH to Twilight of the Idols, that the “procedures of science”

are more important than its outcomes and that, therefore, scientific practices
need to be seen as embedded in reality, unlike formal methods and models that
falsely promise a view from outside this reality (HH 11 and 635; TI “‘Reason’
in Philosophy” 3).
Leiter’s self-proclaimed naturalistic reading of Nietzsche is effectively
grounded in a scientific realism that is not fully compatible with Nietzsche’s
actual position. From this perspective it makes little sense, indeed, to take the
will to power seriously, and this is the reason why Leiter, among others, has to
disregard the concept tout court. After all, the will to power is neither a natural
kind, nor can it be, strictly speaking, the property of any thing, so that tracking the
truth of the will to power, as an explanatory model, seems a futile undertaking. On
the other hand, Heidegger, as much as Clark and Dudrick, also view naturalism
along the lines of scientific realism, but instead of endorsing the latter’s impli-
cations, as Leiter does, they assume that it simply goes too far. The implication
here is that philosophical naturalism qua scientific realism would ultimately
also have to deliver a physicalist account of normativity and truth, thus falling
into the trap of the fallacy, or simply the category mistake, of deriving norms
from facts or into the trap of what Sellars attacked as the “myth of the given.”36
There is no need, however, for philosophical naturalism to include a myth of
the given, or to entail physicalist reductionism for that matter. Instead, and to
some extent building on a particular interpretation of Sellars, we would do well
to overcome a conception of naturalism that is largely defined by the fallacy of
reducing norms to facts or by the attempt to turn epistemology into psychol-
ogy.37 Scientific realism, in a sense, is what John McDowell once called “bald
naturalism”; it is no real naturalism at all, since it is unable to naturalize its own
preconditions, including its underlying conception of normativity.38 This is a
crucial point, since Nietzsche’s concept of a will to power, despite its seem-
ingly metaphysical ramifications, tries to achieve precisely that: naturalizing
the preconditions of naturalism.

3. “Darwinism,” Cell Theory, and Morphology

In order to get a better grasp of the biological underpinnings of the will to power
it is necessary to revisit Nietzsche’s relationship to Darwinism and the contem-
porary life sciences. Although it is often claimed that Nietzsche adopted an anti-
Darwinist or anti-Darwinian stance, there is no real indication that this is actually
the case. His understanding of the life sciences is neither of a naturphiloso-
phisch kind, nor does his understanding of evolution mirror historical forms of
Lamarckism.39 There are, of course, many occasions, especially in his notebooks,
when he explicitly seems to criticize Darwinism. But this criticism is less directed
38   Christian J. Emden

against Darwin, or against evolution by natural s­ election and adaptation, than

against the use of Darwin by philosophers.40 Herbert Spencer and Nietzsche’s
erstwhile friend Paul Rée are prominent examples of this. The way in which they
had left Darwin behind by presenting altruism and the common good as intrinsic
values that govern the evolution of the human species toward moral progress ran
counter to the critical import of evolutionary thought.41 The Darwinist philoso-
phers, not the biologists, projected traditional ideas about moral progress onto
evolutionary processes, paying much attention to the stabilizing effects of selec-
tion and adaptation but relegating variation into the background. To Nietzsche,
this seemed the crucial mistake of the Darwinists, which was not warranted by
evolutionary biology itself. His remark, in Ecce Homo, that he does not wish
for the will to power to be confused with Darwinism (EH “Why I Write Such
Good Books” 1) thus hints more at a frustration with the popularized image of
Darwin among contemporary intellectuals in both England and Germany than
at an anti-Darwinian stance.
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and adaptation certainly
influenced, and also constrained, the development of evolutionary biology in the
second half of the nineteenth century and it is not entirely coextensive with what
is popularly referred to as Darwinism. Moreover, not all evolutionary biology
in the nineteenth century is, strictly speaking, Darwinian: natural selection, for
instance, has an intricate relationship to the field of animal morphology, while
cell theory, or August Weismann’s theory of germ plasma, were as crucial to the
development of evolutionary biology in terms of an institutionalized research
paradigm as was Darwin’s theory of natural selection.42 Darwin, in other words,
was just Darwin, and it is a common misunderstanding to view the life sciences
of the nineteenth century through the lens of the neo-Darwinian synthesis of
evolution which developed only in the period between 1905 and 1918.43
The predominant emphasis on selection and adaptation as driving the develop-
ment of organisms, which takes center stage in the modern synthesis of evolu-
tionary thought, and which more recently has been criticized as a constraint on
evolutionary thought, is certainly a prominent feature of the reception of Darwin
among nineteenth-century philosophers.44 Darwin has little difficulty explaining
selection and adaptation, but his crucial problem, as it were, is variation among
organisms and biological traits, which introduces an element of contingency into
evolutionary history.45 Variation, for instance, was more closely related to the
emergence of biological novelty than either selection or adaptation.46 Not only
Darwin himself, however, recognized that some features of evolution seemingly
resisted explanation by natural selection and adaptation, but other nineteenth-
century biologists, who unequivocally endorsed Darwin’s framework, pointed to
limitations. Weismann’s work in the field of cell theory, in particular his research
on germ plasma, suggested that there was no inheritance of acquired character-
istics.47 He regarded his position merely as fine-tuning Darwin’s framework,
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   39

however, shifting the attention from species, individuals, and biological traits to
cells and molecules, whereas Karl Semper, for instance, clearly followed Darwin
and argued that the latter’s understanding of evolution was entirely compatible
with the tradition of animal morphology, which traditionally did not rely on
natural selection as a central explanatory model.48
Darwin, in short, was as relevant to Nietzsche as animal morphology and
cell theory, and Nietzsche’s approach to the life sciences, broadly speaking,
reflected their disunity throughout the nineteenth century. Despite such disunity,
and the pluralism of theoretical models that came along with it, most biologists
faced a common set of problems that could not readily be solved with either the
experimental and observational knowledge available or within existing theo-
retical frameworks. Why evolution should occur in the first place belonged to
this set of problems as much as the question how to explain the wide variation
of biological traits, especially in those cases when these very different traits
evolved from the same undifferentiated set of cells.
After Nietzsche had already immersed himself for almost two decades in some
of the debates that stood at the forefront of the life sciences after 1800, it seems
as though he sought to situate his own philosophical project in close proximity
to the discourse of animal morphology (KGW VII/3: 36[19]). While the latter
aimed at delivering a coherent account of the development and diversity of life
forms, Nietzsche’s philosophical project during the 1880s aimed at providing
a similarly descriptive account of the evolution of normative order. Observing
“the development of the will to power” required something akin to “morphol-
ogy,” as he suggested in Beyond Good and Evil (BGE 23). When Nietzsche,
in the same passage, thus claimed that, “from now on, psychology is again the
path to the fundamental problems,” he immediately clarified how psychology
was to be understood in this context: what was at stake was a “genuine physio-
psychology,” that is, a morphology of our normative commitments and values,
which are always already linked to the material world since they become manifest
in the body. Again, this reference to morphology should not be taken to imply that
Nietzsche distanced himself from Darwin’s theory of evolution. Even Darwin
himself had to take into account morphology, which he described, after all, as
“the most interesting department of natural history.”49
Nietzsche’s references to organs, functions, and development, throughout
the 1880s, render it more than obvious that he understood the emergence of
values as bound to natural processes. But the irreducibly metaphorical quality
of his language also highlights that this naturalism has as its point of reference
an uncertain and fluid conception of nature that undergoes changes every time
we, as natural agents, intervene in a world of which we are already part:
It is we, the thinking-sensing ones, who really and continually make
something that is not yet there: the whole perpetually growing world
40   Christian J. Emden

of valuations, colours, weights, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and

negations. This poem that we have invented is constantly internalized,
drilled, translated into flesh and reality, indeed, into the commonplace,
by the so-called practical human beings (our actors). (GS 301)
Normative commitments are not natural kinds but rather the outcome of the way
in which human agents engage within the world. This becomes more apparent
if we consider that Nietzsche presented the “entire life of drives as the organi-
zation and outgrowth” of the “will to power” (BGE 36). To “trace all organic
functions back to this will to power,” as he notes in the same passage, does
not entail that all organic functions can be reduced to the will to power in a
physicalist sort of way. Rather, Nietzsche, here as elsewhere, is quite attentive
to the metaphysical language he employs. Tracing life back to the will to power
remains a thought experiment, and in the above passage he tellingly puts his
final mention of the will to power in quotation marks: “The world seen from
inside [. . .] would be just this ‘will to power’ and nothing else.” Arguing that
the will to power was the central feature of life in terms of growth and expansion
was a mere description in the same way as the neo-Kantian philosopher Otto
Liebmann had argued that evolutionary theories did not explain processes in
nature but merely described them.50 Nietzsche’s own remark, for instance, that
“life is not a means to something; it is the expression of the forms into which
power grows [Wachsthumsformen der Macht]” (KGW VIII/2: 9[13]) is nothing
but a shorthand description for processes that withdraw from neat conceptual
analysis because we, as observers, cannot step outside life.51 We live, in Gilles
Deleuze’s equally colorful terms, on a “plane of immanence” in which the human
being as a natural being “is never separable from its relations with the world”
and always “engaged in a process of actualization following the plane that gives
it its particular reality.”52 Describing such as process of actualization, the will
to power is, of course, always a deficient concept.53
Living things, from eukaryotic cells and amoebae to human agents, were
clearly subject to all kinds of forces, while also interacting with their respective
environments, for instance, by consuming matter and transforming matter into
energy, by exerting a growing influence over their environments, or simply by
reproducing. In late 1886 or early 1887, Nietzsche specifically began to draw on
the language of cell theory: “consciousness” and “logic” were manifestations of
those biological processes that could be observed to occur in “plasma,” that is,
protoplasma. Seeking to conceptually grasp the very idea of “life,” he wrote in
his notebooks: “The forces in history can undoubtedly be recognized, once they
are stripped of all moral and religious teleology. They have to be those forces,
which also take effect in the entire phenomenon of organic being” (KGW VIII/1:
7[9]). Nietzsche, in short, aims here at a model of life that expresses a continuity
across organic nature: the forces that mark historical development do not rep-
resent an unfolding of consciousness, a story of moral progress, or some sort of
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   41

quasi-Hegelian cunning of reason, but since we are, as natural beings, subject to

these forces that we partially shape through own our practical engagement within
the niches that make up our world, cultural history is always already natural
history—a history of the emergence, and of the self-overcoming, of normative
commitments under specific conditions. Stipulating that these forces constituted
a “will to power in the organic process,” Nietzsche continued to describe the
latter under “the imperative: growing,” and, as he wrote on another occasion, the
will to power consisted in the “acquirement and incorporation [Einverleibung]”
of the world (KGW VIII/2: 9[151]).
Such acquirement and incorporation are at the heart of cellular processes,
which are normative in a biological sort of way: as was already known in the
second half of the nineteenth century, under specific circumstances—within
a specific niche and with certain nutrients—cellular processes will develop in
a limited number of ways. The plasticity that cells exhibit is limited within a
specific context, even though a wide range of variations are inherently possible
as long as those variations are not lethal to the cell but contribute to its robust-
ness under specific selective conditions. The developmental plasticity of cells
is neither entirely predetermined, nor completely random, but it appears to be
responsive to the dynamic niche of the organism as a whole.54
At first sight, Nietzsche’s increasing emphasis on growth over self-­
preservation seems to mark a departure from Darwin. Since growth, under-
stood as the expansion of power, could be successful only if the preservation
of living organisms was successful, processes in the organic world always
exceeded mere self-preservation. In GS, he already complained that the much-
quoted “struggle for survival is only an exception,” whereas “abundance,”
“growth,” and “expansion” should be understood as the proper hallmarks of
living things (GS 349). Without any knowledge of the possibility of random
genetic mutations, or genetic drift, it would have seemed from the perspective
of nineteenth-century cell theory that selection and adaptation would not lead
to novel biological traits if the environment within which selection and adap-
tation occurred remained relatively stable. The existence of variations within
the same environment, however, clearly showed that there were evolutionary
processes that could not be captured by natural selection, as Darwin himself
had to admit, and that produced novelty beyond the preservation of the status
quo.55 It is against this background that Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil,
warned in his usual hyperbolic manner:
Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-
preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living
thing wants to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power—: self-
preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of
this.—In short, here as elsewhere, watch out for superfluous teleological
principles!—such as the drive for preservation. (BGE 13)
42   Christian J. Emden

Nietzsche, in this passage, clearly took aim at a common misunderstanding that

was part of the popular philosophical reception of Darwinism—a reception that
often did not pay much attention to the intricate details of Darwin’s own account,
which always emphasized that the processes under observation were far from
straightforward. What Nietzsche, quite rightly, criticized was the assumption
that natural selection and adaptation, in a quasi-teleological manner, were geared
toward nothing but the continuation of a species’s status quo. Although Darwin
himself equated “natural selection” with “preservation,” the situation was more
complicated.56 The preservation of advantageous biological traits provided for
the “accumulation of successive slightly favourable variations,” which made it
possible that “species have changed, and are still slowly changing.”57 Beyond
the assumption that changing external conditions would lead to new kinds of
variations, Darwin was less clear, however, about why variations are possible in
the first place.58 Cell theory provided a better preliminary answer to this problem
than an evolutionary model that often focused on fully developed organisms.

4. Biology and Agency

It should be obvious by now that Nietzsche’s conception of “life” is at its core

of a biological kind.59 The problem of normativity, the emergence of normative
commitments, could not seriously escape biology. Indeed, by the mid-1880s he
noted that the will to power became manifest “in the functions of the organic”
(KGW VII/2: 26[273]); the “transformations of the will to power, its forms
[Ausgestaltungen], its specializations” had to be described “in parallel to mor-
phological development” (KGW VIII/1: 1[57]).
The biological framework within which Nietzsche, on these occasions, dis-
cusses the will to power inevitably once again raises the question of the will to
power’s relationship to natural selection. John Richardson, for instance, argued
that the will to power describes a process that is produced by natural selec-
tion. Despite Nietzsche’s use of the term “will,” the will to power should not
be understood as a vitalist principle that attributes intentionality to nature.60
While I agree with Richardson’s conclusion that Nietzsche took Darwin more
seriously than generally acknowledged, it seems, though, that the will to power
does not occur after natural selection has taken place; rather, Nietzsche’s will
to power seeks to come to terms with what makes selection possible in the first
place, that is, in modern parlance, he is concerned with evolvability.61 Seen from
this perspective, it makes sense that he should view selection and adaptation
as secondary manifestations of more complex developmental processes. When
he suggested, for example, that “adaptation” was “just a reactivity,” that is, the
way in which organisms responded to changes in their environment, adaptation
had to be seen as a “second-rate activity” (GM II:12). In contrast, “life” in terms
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   43

of “will to power” was a summary expression for “spontaneous, aggressive,

expansive, re-interpreting, re-directing and formative powers” that allowed for
adaptation to occur in the first place (GM II:12).
It was in Maximilian Drossbach’s Über die scheinbaren und die wirklichen
Ursachen des Geschehens (1884) that Nietzsche was able to find a fully devel-
oped notion of power that closely resembled his own position as it emerged
during the mid-1880s.62 Drawing on a broad range of contemporary scientific
disciplines, from physics to physiology, Drossbach noted in his discussion of
reciprocal forces in nature: “We only have a proper understanding of force if we
recognize it as the striving for expansion [Streben nach Entfaltung].” Nietzsche
underlined the last three words, commenting in the margins of his copy of
Drossbach’s book: “‘will to power,’ is what I say.”63
For Nietzsche, the crucial point of Drossbach’s account was twofold. First,
the latter’s emphasis on Entfaltung allowed Nietzsche to depart from Spinoza’s
somewhat more mechanistic conception of potentia, which assumed that each
thing only “endeavours to persevere in its being.”64 What mattered to Nietzsche,
however, was that Entfaltung changed the very nature of any thing’s being.
Second, Drossbach’s observation allowed him also to depart from the vitalist
rhetoric of German Romantic Naturphilosophie: organisms did not develop
according to some kind of intrinsic force.65 Development in nature was driven,
above anything else, by the interaction among organisms and cells, and among
organisms, cells, and their respective environments: “Natural beings [Wesen]
develop their power by acting upon others and by meeting the agency of ­others.
Reciprocal agency [Wechselwirkung] is the means for effective expansion, and
the more complete the form of reciprocal agency, the more fully they [i.e., ­natural
beings] develop.”66 The dynamically complex and multilayered interactions
among individual organisms, which put single cells, entire organisms and their
respective environments into a feedback loop, renders development and growth
possible. What is at stake, then, in the will to power, if viewed from a biologi-
cal perspective, is that the evolvability of organisms is inherently linked to the
phenomenon of niche construction.67
To be sure, Drossbach’s talk of “reciprocal agency,” as much as Nietzsche’s
interest in biological agency as the backbone of the will to power, should not be
misunderstood to imply a cognitive or even intentional dimension of agency.68
Within the analytic tradition, however, agency is, first and foremost, a problem
that relates to human actions as they are governed by intentions, conflict with
the idea of a free will, or constitute rational forms of self-governing behavior.69
Even strongly naturalistic accounts of such agency seek to square the idea of a
free will with the reality of natural laws that, in one way or another, are bound
to act as constraints on our seemingly autonomous agency as human beings.70
It would be fundamentally flawed to assume that this conception of agency is
what either Drossbach or Nietzsche, or any of the following nineteenth-century
44   Christian J. Emden

biologists, had in mind. It is important to underline this point to avoid any

­misunderstanding: agency, on the cellular and molecular level, does not at all
imply any kind of intentionality and it does not entail teleology. In contrast,
analytic reconstructions of Nietzsche’s will to power, especially if they proceed
along psychological lines, often fail to appreciate that the assumption of agency
which underlies the concept of the will to power is not primarily concerned with a
theory of action within which the question of freedom of the will makes sense.71
Rather, in Nietzsche’s immediate context, agency might be best understood in
terms of self-organization and self-regulation.72
Such biological agency remains normative in that it leads to outcomes
that are binding for the organism’s further development and its own agency
within the world, but the normativity at stake does not pertain to any property
that cells and molecules might have but to their interactions within a specific
niche. What matters, moreover, is that such agency is always reciprocal, that
is, it takes place within a specific context and therefore lacks autonomy. From
Drossbach’s perspective, this meant that “natural beings are not bound by laws
which prescribe a certain linear development.” Rather, organisms “enter upon
that path which is possible under a given set of circumstances.”73 Development
in nature, driven by a dynamic reciprocal agency among organisms and their
environments, was inherently open but also bottlenecked: not everything was
possible. Development in nature, in other words, was still path-dependent, that
is, normatively attuned to its own past.
Beyond Drossbach, Nietzsche’s emphasis on life as an expansion of power
was also rooted in William Henry Rolph’s Biologische Probleme (1882). Like
Nietzsche, Rolph did not reject Darwin’s theory, but he rather asked whether
natural selection and the preservation of species could be the bottom line of
evolutionary processes.74 Rolph provided Nietzsche with a crucial metaphor that
echoed Drossbach’s emphasis on Entfaltung. Arguing that Darwin’s “struggle
for existence” and Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” falsely implied that evolu-
tion had reached its climax in human beings, he presented a more dynamic model:
the “struggle for life [Kampf um’s Leben]” had to be replaced with a “struggle
for the multiplication of life [Kampf um Lebensvermehrung].”75
For Rolph, the expansion of life occurred on the same level of living things
as Darwin’s natural selection, that is, on the level of fairly complex organ-
isms, such as insects and humans. Nietzsche, though, linked Rolph’s and
Drossbach’s observations to another group of sources that shifted his attention
from entire organisms to molecular and cellular processes: Julius Robert Mayer’s
Die Mechanik der Wärme (1867), Carl von Nägeli’s Mechanisch-physiologische
Abstammungslehre (1884), Gustav von Bunge’s Vitalismus und Mechanismus
(1886), and Wilhelm Roux’s Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus (1881).76
These authors represent, more so perhaps than Rolph, the new experimental cul-
ture that dominated the laboratories at the leading German research universities.
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   45

Even though Nietzsche was often critical of Mayer’s materialism, the latter’s
theory of heat tied in rather neatly with his reading of Rolph and Drossbach. In
a sense, it provided what Nietzsche regarded as the mathematical verification of
the assumption that life was characterized by an expansion which wasted energy
beyond what was necessary for the simple preservation of organisms: “The
chemical process is always larger than its useful effect,” and Mayer proceeded
to calculate the energy wasted by steam engines, cannons, and the metabolism
of mammals, which Nietzsche, in his notebooks of mid-1881, quoted verbatim
and with approval (KGW V/2: 11[24]).77
Preservation was not the norm in nature and it was questionable whether all
processes that could be observed in living things could be explained according
to the preservation of species. Although Nägeli accepted natural selection, he
argued that natural selection and adaptation were dependent on molecular pro-
cesses below the level of complete organisms.78 In particular, natural selection
could not successfully explain why life should have emerged in the first place,
and he introduced the idea of molecular forces that were present in “idioplasma,”
or germ plasma.79 Nägeli, however, also claimed that external environmental
factors played no role in evolution. On the one hand, Entwicklungsmechanik
thus introduced a new kind of vitalism into biological thought that seemed
unwarranted from Darwin’s perspective. On the other, Nägeli, as much as Roux,
reopened the debate about the emergence of life—a problem that Nietzsche found
most vexing, both biologically and philosophically.80 In mid-1884, he noted,
for instance: “The development of organic life leads to the distinct possibility
that the intellect has grown from very small beginnings, has thus become: the
sense organs have demonstrably developed, previously there were no ‘senses.’
The question is, what must have always been there: e.g. which characteristics
does the embryo possess so that eventually thinking emerges in the course of
its development?—” (KGW VII/2: 26[80]). Nietzsche is clearly baffled by the
step from molecular processes and clumps of cells to thinking organisms that
can converse about the finer details of, say, Kant’s categorical imperative or
the American tax code.
The history of cell theory, as much as anything in the history of nineteenth-
century biology, is a history of incomplete knowledge and speculation.81
Fundamental uncertainties persisted, and in 1868 Darwin conceded that “the
cellular theory is not fully established.”82 Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s secondhand
knowledge of cell theory and morphology shaped his attempt to see the will to
power not merely as a metaphysical idea but as describing something biological.
A crucial link between the contemporary life sciences and Nietzsche’s philo-
sophical naturalism was provided by yet another, more inconspicuous source:
the work of Basel physiologist Gustav von Bunge. In a public lecture on vital-
ism and materialism—two particularly fashionable themes at the time—Bunge
sought to distance himself from the physicalist reductionism he observed in the
46   Christian J. Emden

life sciences without, however, returning to naturphilosophisch vitalism. This

position was grounded in a specific biological problem: the “active functions
of cells.”83 Contemporary physiological and biological research, Bunge pointed
out, ironically highlighted that whatever happened within and among cells could
not be sufficiently explained according to a mechanical model of causation that
was itself derived from fields unrelated to cell theory.84 The “agency [Activität]”
that cells exhibited lacked the linear kind of causal development that should
characterize mechanisms.85 At the same time, such agency should not be miscon-
strued as some kind of mysterious life force about which nothing could be said;
the natural sciences, thus far, simply lacked the necessary conceptual precision:
The most simple cell, the formless, microscopically small blob of proto-
plasma without structure—it still exhibits all the constitutive functions
of life: nutrition, growth, reproduction, movement, irritability—indeed,
even functions which at the very least resemble the sensorium, the intel-
lectual life of higher animals. . . . In the smallest cell—there we can already
find all the puzzles of life, and in investigating the smallest cell—there
we already reach the limits of our means thus far.86
“Agency,” it thus seemed to Bunge, was the only way to describe the processes
of “life” within the cell.87
Finally, Nietzsche’s reading of Roux suggested to him a tentative philo-
sophical answer to the problem of emerging life forms that was quite com-
patible with his understanding of Darwin.88 On a molecular level, organic
processes display an “overcompensation”: they always use more energy than
necessary, which allows for the “self-regulation” of the parts that make up
individual organisms.89 As Nietzsche put it: “The struggle within [organic]
tissue becomes a regulative principle: the principle of the functional self-
formation of the most useful proportions” among cells (KGW VII/1: 7[190]).
Self-regulation and overcompensation, for Roux, were thus “the basic char-
acteristics and necessary preconditions of life,” that is, they are what makes
selection, adaptation, and variation possible in the first place.90 This focus on
molecular processes entailed a specific understanding of what constituted an
organism: the relative unity of the organism as a stable object of research was
dissolved into a field of interacting forces and overlapping force fields that
first of all rendered the organization of molecules and cells possible.91 The
emergence of life was not the consequence of the specific properties of cells
and molecules, but it was the result of the interaction among these cells and
molecules. Since cells and molecules were always part of wider structures,
organisms and their niches, they were always already in a state of reciprocal
agency. This is also the reason why Nietzsche ultimately came to conclude
that “there is no will: there are punctuations of the will, which continuously
grow or lose their power” (KGW VIII/2: 11[73]).
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   47

How can Nietzsche assume, however, that the will to power is a normative
force? First of all, and regardless as to whether we view power as a psycho-
logical or a biological phenomenon, it is concerned with the overcoming of
resistance, with the “growth and expansion” of life (GS 349). The will to power
does not explain why something happens, but it merely describes how anything
happens, since the “things” that exist merely do so in virtue of their effects on
other “things,” and all we can do is to describe these effects (KGW VIII/1: 2[85]
and 2[89]). As the process of such effects, the will to power “can only become
manifest against resistances” (KGW VIII/2: 9[151]).92
The normative dimension of the will to power in terms of reciprocal agency
becomes more obvious once we relate the will to power to our own agency as
natural beings. Such agency can certainly be understood as being engaged in
the process of overcoming resistance: “Everything that happens intentionally
can be reduced to the intention of expanding power” (KGW VIII/1: 2[88]).
Nietzsche does not appeal here, however, to the will to power as a teleological
principle, but he merely points out that overcoming resistance is constitutive
of our agency as natural beings; overcoming resistance, as it were, is not
optional, but we are always already engaged in it. If overcoming resistance
is constitutive of all human agency, it gains normative force and emerges as
a standard against which to measure whether our actions contribute to life.
This, to be sure, is a normative force we cannot escape.93 What we regard,
in a shorthand manner, as the intentions and aims of our agency as natural
beings are “merely an expression for an organization of spheres of power
[Ordnung von Machtsphären] and their interaction” (KGW VIII/2: 9[91]).
As a normative force, the will to power thus occurs below the human condi-
tion, that is, overcoming resistance in the realm of human agency supervenes
upon a biological kind of overcoming resistance, and Nietzsche, once again,
returns to cell theory:
The will to power can only become manifest against resistances; it seeks
that which resists,—this the primary tendency of protoplasma when it
sends out pseudopodia and feels around for something. Acquisition and
incorporation are above all a willing to overcome [Überwältigenwollen],
a shaping, appropriating and reorganizing, until finally that which has
been overcome is merged into the power of the agent and has expanded
the latter. (KGW VIII/2: 9[151])94
The overcoming of resistance is constitutive of our existence as natural beings
consisting of molecules, cells, organs, and such like. Unsurprisingly, Nietzsche
noted in a shorthand manner: “The organic functions, seen as an organization of
the will to power” (KGW VIII/1: 6[26]). It is on this account that he can claim
that whatever we regard as natural, at least whatever we regard as organic life,
entails a constitutive normative force.
48   Christian J. Emden

5. The Politics of Naturalism

If human beings are natural beings, any normative claims about reality that such
beings make, and any norms that govern these claims themselves, are necessar-
ily embedded in material as much as conceptual interactions with reality. It is
through such engagements within the world that normative claims ultimately
acquire and sustain their binding force. Or, as Joseph Rouse remarked, the
emergence of normativity depends on “patterns of practical/perceptual intra-
action within the world”; it is the emergence of such patterns “that continually
reshapes the situations in which agents live and understand themselves.”95 What
such a practical, as much as perceptual and conceptual, engagement within the
world discloses are “not objects or laws independent of us and our concerns,
but phenomena that we are part of.”96
Nietzsche’s will to power seeks to describe such patterns by directly linking
the way in which we hold normative claims about the world to the way in which
these claims are always entangled with our embeddedness within the world as
natural beings that have bodies, that are marked by a specific physiological
makeup and specific biological conditions, even though we are aware of these
conditions only because of the normative patterns they give rise to. This becomes
nowhere more obvious than in Nietzsche’s discussion of the emergence of moral
commitments in On the Genealogy of Morality:
“A thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something
which continues to hurt stays in the memory”—that is a proposition from
the oldest (and unfortunately the longest-lived) psychology on earth. [. . .]
When man decided he had to make a memory for himself, it never hap-
pened without blood, torments and sacrifices: the most horrifying sacri-
fices and forfeits (the sacrifice of the first born belongs here), the most
disgusting mutilations (for example, castration), the cruellest rituals of all
religious cults (and all religions are, at their most fundamental, systems of
cruelty) all this has its origin in that particular instinct which discovered
that pain was the most powerful aid to mnemonics. [. . .] With the aid
of such images and procedures, man was eventually able to retain five
or six “I-don’t-want-to’s” in his memory, in connection with which a
promise had been made, in order to enjoy the advantages of society—and
there you are! With the aid of this sort of memory, people finally came
to “reason”! (GM I:3)
Moral norms could assert themselves successfully, Nietzsche believed, only if
the physical inscriptions of violence at their source have been physiologically
internalized to such an extent that they are eventually forgotten, while at the same
time being passed on from one generation to the next. The emergence of a social
normative order was less dependent on willing, feeling, or even self-control,
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   49

than on what Walter Bagehot, himself drawing on Thomas H. Huxley, called

“hereditary drill,” that is, the shaping of “the organically and psychologically
elementary foundations” of the will, as another one of Nietzsche’s sources, the
philosopher Johann Julius Baumann, put it.97
Seen from this perspective, the normative commitments we live by, including
those that we should better abandon, are dynamically shaped by what we might
regard as cumulative interactions within specific environmental niches—niches
that are marked by biology as much as by what we regard as cultural.98 It is this
dynamic interaction that renders our normative commitments fairly flexible
over longer periods in time. This dynamic interaction—marked by our practi-
cal engagement within the world—creates a space of possibilities within which
specific normative commitments, of both an epistemic and a moral kind, can
take hold, while others are abandoned or cannot even come into existence. In this
respect, the emergence of our normative commitments is always characterized,
for Nietzsche, by the “law of necessary ‘self-overcoming’” (GM III:27). This
can very well be understood along the lines of an evolutionary process, in which
the stabilizing effects of selection and adaptation are counterbalanced by forms
of variation that are themselves the outcome of the contingent circumstances
within any given niche.
Although Nietzsche, in the above quotation, describes the reflexive emer-
gence of normative commitments in largely negative terms since his goal, after
all, is a critique of traditional moral commonplaces that are seen as universally
valid, there is no reason to assume that future, normatively binding ethical
commitments would not follow a similar route. After all, Nietzsche’s sovereign
individual, as the outcome of a “long history” of normative commitments is also
the one that has “freed itself from the morality of custom.” It could only do so,
however, because it is, for the time being, the “ripest fruit” of this naturecultural
evolution (GM II:1 and 2).99 Within this context, Nietzsche’s concept of the will
to power seeks to describe the dynamic interactions that we, as natural beings
and organisms, are subject to within the specific niches that we live in. The
will to power thus, was Nietzsche’s “attempt at an interpretation of all events
[Geschehen]” (KGW VII/3: 40[50])—an attempt, or Versuch, nevertheless, that
is, an experimental arrangement that seeks to open a perspective on what it means
to be human and what it means to translate this humanity back into nature. Since
we have simply no categories, or privileged epistemic access, that would allow
us to successfully separate the true world from the world of appearances, the
world as it just is from a world in which we believe in our own autonomy, the
question whether the world is constructed by us or simply given to us cannot be
decided (KGW VIII/3: 14[103] and BGE 15). This is the ontological dilemma
the will to power seeks to address.
It would be a grave mistake to argue that the will to power entails any concrete
and substantive ethical commitments; inasmuch as it is constitutive of life it lacks
50   Christian J. Emden

any content and merely allows for the possibility that our drives and practices
can be realized.100 That the cells of human beings produce certain proteins does
not justify any specific moral claims. That these proteins exist, however, leads to
specific cell structures that, down the line, produce feet with which we can follow
up on the moral commitments we subscribe to and save a drowning child. In the
same way, the will to power merely allows for the overcoming of resistance—
whatever this resistance might be in any given context. It might therefore be
useful to imagine the will to power as serving as a “scaffolding” for other, often
seemingly unrelated, forms of agency and their interaction that could not take
place without such a scaffolding.101 It is through the will to power as a scaffold-
ing that, to use William Wimsatt’s expression, such other forms of agency can
become “entrenched,” such as our willingness to occasionally act in altruistic
ways or, quite the opposite, to act in our own interests. Even though scaffolding
and entrenchment go hand in hand, the normative space of possibilities created
through scaffolding remains, from an ethical perspective, value neutral. As a
scaffolding, in other words, the will to power, as much as the natural history of
our normative order, knows no difference between altruistic selflessness and
what we regard as its very opposite: “Hatred, delight in the misfortunes of others,
the lust to rob and rule, and whatever else is called evil: all belong to the amazing
economy of the preservation of the species, an economy which is certainly costly,
wasteful, and on the whole most foolish—but still proven to have preserved
our race so far” (GS 1). Within this economy of nature there is no distinction
between different kinds of moral values to be found. Even that which we tend
to describe in morally negative terms remains crucial for our history as natural
beings: “In truth [. . .] the evil drives are just as expedient, species-preserving,
and indispensable as the good ones—they just have a different function” (GS 4).
The naturalism of Nietzsche’s will to power still holds that moral goodness, in
one way or another, remains part of the space of possibilities that is nature. He
does not deny that so-called good actions have evolutionary functions. It is just
the case that so-called evil actions also have functions.
Such an account of the will to power certainly raises a number of questions
with regard to Nietzsche’s metaethical claims and political commitments. While
it is not possible to address these questions here in sufficient detail, it certainly
seems to be the case that at least Nietzsche’s own preference for the “noble”
individual as a cultural, or social, manifestation of the will to power—marked as
this individual is by a “pathos of distance” (BGE 257–58)—seems to contradict
the conclusion that the economy of nature knows no distinction between different
kinds of moral values. Nietzsche, after all, opts for what is often described as a
form of aristocratic radicalism, favoring Pericles, Cesare Borgia, and Napoleon
Bonaparte over the politicians of a liberal democratic order.102 Isn’t it the case,
then, that Nietzsche’s will to power entails a fundamentally illiberal dimension
as soon as it leaves behind the realm of cells and drives? Does the ethics of
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   51

naturalism merely represent a philosophically more sophisticated version of

plain social Darwinism?103
Nietzsche’s obvious emphasis on the aggressiveness of “noble” political
actors in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, and the way in which
he values “action” over mere “reaction,” is suggestive of an ethical and political
stance fundamentally opposed to a normative order of justice that safeguards
the continued existence of any polity. Instead of practical altruism and moral
empathy, he prefers, quite explicitly, “a different set of emotions, which, to my
mind, are of much greater biological value [. . .] and therefore are really the ones
which should be valued, highly valued by science: namely the active emotions
such as lust for power and possessions and the like” (GM II:11). Political actors
who follow these emotions—Cesare Borgia being perhaps a particularly neat
example of this species—appear in many ways closer to nature and biological
life than those who favor, in an ascetically Kantian vein, the grounding of justice
in a transcendental norm, such as the moral law, as the real manifestation of
autonomy.104 Nietzsche’s naturalistic account of normativity, in other words, is
clearly directed against transcendental justifications of normative political order.
The question is, however, which specific characteristic Nietzsche values
in political actors like Pericles or Cesare Borgia and whether he is intent on
throwing out any notion of justice and normativity in political life. His tenta-
tive description of the noble individual he imagines answers the first part of
this question, which ultimately leads him to adopt a specific understanding of
justice, or rather: of the function of legal order: “the aggressive person, as the
stronger, more courageous, nobler man, has always had a clearer eye, a better
conscience on his side” (GM II:11). As Nietzsche’s own emphasis renders obvi-
ous, the crucial point is not the aggressiveness of noble individuals, but it is rather
their ability to see things as they are. Their better conscience is a consequence
of the fact that they can happily dispense with a notion of justice that does not
reflect the complex motivations of human agency and that, as a result, instills
an experience of ressentiment that invariably leads to violence. What Nietzsche
attacks in these passages of On the Genealogy of Morality is what Max Weber,
only a few decades later, described as the dangers of an “ethic of conviction”
which gives primacy to ultimate ends and thus disregards the means of political
action and their consequences.105 A morality that cannot be fulfilled because of
the “biological problem” of what it means to be human, and therefore to be a
natural being, is bound “to sanctify revenge with the term justice”—a tendency
that Nietzsche, quite explicitly, discovers “amongst anarchists and anti-Semites
today” (GM II:11).106
It is against the background of the inextricable link between conviction and
violence, justice and revenge, that Nietzsche distances himself from transcen-
dental justifications of justice that cannot directly be grounded in the biologi-
cal life we lead, without giving up, however, on the normative order of law.
52   Christian J. Emden

His controversial, and highly polemical, remark that any “talk of ‘just’ and
‘unjust’ as such is meaningless,” and that “an act of injury, violence, exploita-
tion or destruction cannot be ‘unjust’ as such,” does not deny the evolutionary
function that our appeals to justice and law possess; it merely points out that,
from a biological perspective, “life functions essentially in an injurious, vio-
lent, exploitative and destructive manner, or at least these are its fundamental
processes and it cannot be thought of without these characteristics” (GM II:11).
Biological organisms do incorporate and consume their environment and other
organisms, and they often do behave in parasitic ways, exploiting the traits
of other organisms. The social history of normative order, and thus also the
manifestation of the will to power in this normative order, compensates such
unbridled aggression and exploitation, however, through “the setting up of a
legal system” by “the higher authorities,” that is, by those that initially are
able to assert their power of others and that enter the scene in the figure of the
philosopher-lawgiver (GM II:11 and BGE 61). It is this order of law that coun-
terbalances the destabilizing Hobbesian scenario of violence and revenge and
outlines “what counts as permissible in their eyes, as just, and what counts as
forbidden, unjust” (GM II:11).
In Nietzsche’s counterfactual narrative, which itself functions as a thought
experiment, this order of law appears increasingly detached from power, offering
“an evermore impersonal interpretation” of human agency.107 The power of the
polity rests in no small part on its ability to both punish and, at the very same time,
protect those who have transgressed the existing legal order, thus forcing its mem-
bers “to reach a settlement amongst themselves” (GM II:9 and 10). But because
the normatively binding order of law appears to be detached from power, it offers
a transcendental point of reference, a seemingly external standard of normativity
that forgets its own origins in the assertion of power and therefore also denies life:
“A system of law conceived as sovereign and general, [. . .] as a means against fight-
ing in general, [. . .] this would be a principle hostile to life, an attempt to assassinate
the future of man, a sign of fatigue and a secret path to nothingness” (GM II:11).
In contrast to the illusion of justice and legal order as detached from human
agency—an agency that is both enabled and constrained by our existence as
natural beings—Nietzsche emphasizes that the normative order of law, even
though it seems to be directed against the actualization of the will to power, is
in fact itself a manifestation of the will to power: “[V]iewed from the highest
biological point of view, states of legality can never be anything but exceptional
states, since they are partial restrictions of the true will to life, which is bent
upon power, and are subordinate to its ultimate goal as a single means: namely,
as a means of creating bigger units of power” (GM II:11). From this point of
view, the normative order, for instance, of the modern state is a manifestation
of the will to power, precisely because its limitations on specific aspects of
the will to power allow for both the robustness of the polity and its openness
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   53

toward the future as a space of possibilities that is constrained by its own past
as much as by contingent circumstances and biological preconditions. The will
to power’s evolvability, in other words, rests on the self-overcoming of those
manifestations that would lead to its destruction in the same way, as it were, that
variations among biological traits contribute to the robustness of the organism
only if they are not lethal. What renders Nietzsche’s noble individuals as noble,
then, is not their aggressiveness but their “clearer eye” for the nexus between
law and power, between normative order and the will to power.108
The upshot of Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism is a political realism, or
rather: the ethics of naturalism entails such a political realism, which recognizes
that the normativity of human agency cannot be located outside what it means
to be human.109 As such, the will to power makes a much wider and more philo-
sophically ambitious claim than is generally granted by recent analytic recon-
structions of Nietzsche’s moral psychology. Our reflexive actions and practices
within the world, the reflexive production of assertions about the world and the
commitments we subscribe to, are constitutive of our being part of this world. In
the same way we cannot step outside nature or life, we also cannot step outside
normativity, and Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power seeks to deliver an
inside view of this, our, condition. Normativity, on this account, does not con-
stitute an external and universal standard, but it comes to the fore in conceptual
change as much as in changing practices.110 It is in this respect that we need to
carefully read those remarks that are suggestive of a kind of human autonomy
that constructed the world we live in: “As a matter of fact,” Nietzsche writes,
for instance, “the existing world, which is relevant for us, is made by us—by us,
that is, by all organic beings—it is the product of the organic process, which as
such appears to be productive and formative, generating values” (KGW VII/2:
26[203]). In a neo-Kantian vein, Nietzsche points out that the world is made by
us because we are part of the world that we have made, not in a metaphysical,
but in a concretely biological sense. It is only because we have this biology, and
not any other biology, that we are able to hold practical normative commitments
that, given our current circumstances, we regard as binding, or not. With a dif-
ferent biology, we might subscribe to different commitments, but these would
be as normative as the ones we currently hold.

Rice University
emden@rice.edu

Notes
1. See, for example, the contributions in Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter and Neil
Sinhababu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Nietzsche’s writings are quoted according to
the following translations and editions: The Anti-Christ: A Curse of Christianity, in The Anti-Christ,
54   Christian J. Emden

Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans.
Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–67; Beyond Good and Evil,
trans. Judith Norman, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002); Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, in Ridley and Norman, The
Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, 69–151; On the Genealogy of
Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994); The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001); Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino
Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975–); Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, founded by
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, ed. Volker Gerhardt, Norbert Miller, Wolfgang Müller-
Lauter, and Karl Pestalozzi (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–); Twilight of the Idols, or How to
Philosophize with a Hammer, in Ridley and Norman, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the
Idols, and Other Writings, 153–229.
2. For a concise account of Nietzsche’s reception in analytic discussions of morality, see
David Owen and Simon Robertson, “Nietzsche’s Influence on Analytic Philosophy,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. Ken Gemes and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), 185–206.
3. Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick, The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 138.
4. See, for instance, Peter Poellner, “Aestheticist Ethics,” in Nietzsche, Naturalism, and
Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), 52–80, 52–54.
5. See, for instance, Brian Leiter, “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will,” in Nietzsche on Freedom
and Autonomy, ed. Ken Gemes and Simon May (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 107–26.
6. See Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2003), 1:xiii.
7. Jacob Golomb, “Will to Power: Does It Lead to the ‘Coldest of All Cold Monsters’?,” in
Gemes and Richardson, Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 525–50, 530, and Poellner, “Aestheticist
Ethics,” 79. See also, most prominently, Robert B. Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First
Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of
Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 103–47.
8. Along these lines, see Joshua Knobe and Brian Leiter, “The Case for Nietzschean Moral
Psychology,” in Leiter and Sinhababu, Nietzsche and Morality, 83–109.
9. See also KGW VIII/1: 1[57].
10. See Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. G. H. R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 106–12 (Part I, Appendix).
11. See also GS 109.
12. For a concise account of the slow appearance of the will to power in Nietzsche’s thought,
see Volker Gerhardt, Vom Willen zur Macht: Anthropologie und Metaphysik der Macht am
exemplarischen Fall Friedrich Nietzsches (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 167–202.
13. See, for instance, Joseph Rouse’s Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and
the Scientific Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) and How Scientific Practices
Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Huw Price, Naturalism without Mirrors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Alva Noë’s
Varieties of Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) and Action in Perception
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
14. Nietzsche, in this respect, would agree with Noë’s conclusion (Action in Perception, 10)
that whatever we attribute to the psychology of perception really depends on our “exercise of
sensorimotor knowledge,” that is, it depends on the way in which we engage within the world
through our bodies that are part of this world.
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   55

15. Spinoza, Ethics, 164 (Part III, Definition 3).

16. See, for instance, Peter Goldie, “Emotion, Feeling, and Knowledge of the World,” in
Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, ed. Robert C. Solomon
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 91–106; Louis Charland, “The Natural Kind Status of
Emotions,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (2002): 511–37; and Annette Baier,
“What Emotions Are About,” Philosophical Perspectives 4 (1990): 1–29.
17. See, for instance, Spinoza, Ethics, 83 (Part II, Proposition 11). Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza:
Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 125,
described this aptly in terms of the “capacities for affecting and being affected.”
18. Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 545–48, and Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge,
2002), 252.
19. For different variants of these reasons, see in particular Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche
on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 212–27; Christopher
Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 156 and 160; and Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 138–46.
20. Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 104.
21. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. David Farrell Krell, Joan
Stambaugh, and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1979–87), 1:60–61 and 3:39–48.
22. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:61 and 63.
23. Commentators sympathetic to Heidegger have suggested that there are specific historical
and political reasons why he sought to avoid a biologistic reading of the will to power. See
Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2003), 289–90, and Robert Bernasconi, “Heidegger’s Alleged Change
to the Nazi Concepts of Race,” in Appropriating Heidegger, ed. James E. Faulconer and Mark A.
Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 50–67.
24. See Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II-VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), ed. Peter Trawny,
in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 94 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 33 (§ 90), 41 (§116), and 50 (§132).
25. Heidegger, Überlegungen II-VI, 124 (§54); see also 116 (§32).
26. See Clark and Dudrick, Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, 138–39 and 211–44.
27. Clark and Dudrick, Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, 139.
28. Clark and Dudrick, Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil; see also 141–210.
29. Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Richard Rorty and Robert
Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 63 and 76.
30. Clark and Dudrick, Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, 139.
31. See Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image,” in In the Space of Reasons:
Selected Essays, ed. Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007), 369–408, 369–72, and G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, 2nd ed. rev., ed. and
introduction by Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 61–69 (I. 10).
32. See Clark and Dudrick, Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, 154.
33. See Stathis Psillos, Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth (London: Routledge,
1999), xix–xx.
34. See, for instance, the accounts in Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation, 2nd ed.
(London: Routledge, 2004), and Sherrilyn Roush, Tracking Truth: Knowledge, Evidence, and
Science (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005).
35. See, for instance, Psillos, Scientific Realism, 110–38.
36. That the naturalistic fallacy might not be a logical fallacy but merely a mistake has been
stressed by Bernard Williams, “The Linguistic Turn,” in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy,
foreword by Jonathan Lear (London: Routledge, 2011), 133–45, 134–36. On Sellars’s attack on
the “myth of the given,” see esp. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 13–88.
56   Christian J. Emden

37. For an example of the transformation of philosophy into cognitive psychology, see Willard
Van Orman Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 69–90.
38. See John McDowell, Mind and World, with a new introduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996), 72–73.
39. For the view that Nietzsche adopted an anti-Darwinian stance, or denied central tenets
of evolution, see Dirk R. Johnson, “One Hundred Twenty-Two Years Later: Reassessing the
Nietzsche-Darwin Relationship,” and Catherine Wilson, “Darwin and Nietzsche: Selection,
Evolution, and Morality,” both in Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44 (2013): 342–53 and 354–70.
See also Dirk R. Johnson, Nietzsche’s Anti-Darwinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), and Robin Small, Nietzsche and Rée: A Star Friendship (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005),
181–98. For Nietzsche’s view of evolution as naturphilosophisch and Lamarckian, see Gregory
Moore’s “Nietzsche and Evolutionary Theory,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-
Pearson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 517–31, and Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21–55. Nietzsche’s presumed anti-Darwinian position was
first stressed by Claire Richter, Nietzsche et les théories biologiques contemporaines (Paris:
Mercure de France, 1911), 233–34, who sought to transform Nietzsche into an adherent of
Lamarck.
40. On the ambivalence of Nietzsche’s relationship to Darwin and Darwinism, see Andreas
Urs Sommer, “Nietzsche mit und gegen Darwin in den Schriften von 1888,” Nietzscheforschung
17 (2010): 31–44; Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche contra Darwin,” in Viroid Life: Perspectives
on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), 85–122; and Werner
Stegmaier, “Darwin, Darwinismus, Nietzsche: Zum Problem der Evolution,” Nietzsche-Studien
16 (1987): 264–87.
41. See, for instance, Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics (London: Williams & Norgate,
1879), 201–18 (§§ 75–81), and Paul Rée, The Origin of Moral Sensations, in Basic Writings, ed.
and trans. Robin Small (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 153–57.
42. The encounter between Mendelian genetics and Darwin’s theory of natural selection is one
example for such a new pluralism of explanatory models in evolutionary biology. See Jean Gayon,
Darwinism’s Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection, trans.
Matthew Cobb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 253–317.
43. For Weismann’s endorsement of Darwin, see his lecture Ueber die Berechtigung der
Darwin’schen Theorie (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1868).
44. On the constraining effects of the modern evolutionary synthesis and the need to widen
the latter’s perspective, see, for instance, Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller, “Elements of
an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis,” in Evolution: The Extended Synthesis, ed. Pigliucci and
Müller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 3–18; Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart,
The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2005), 28–32; and Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 3–20.
45. See Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), 131–70
and 206.
46. See, for instance, John Beatty, “Reconsidering the Importance of Chance Variation,” in
Pigliucci and Müller, Evolution, 21–44.
47. Weismann concluded this in Ueber die Vererbung: Ein Vortrag (Jena: Fischer, 1883).
48. See Karl Semper, Die natürlichen Existenzbedingungen der Thiere (Leipzig: Brockhaus,
1880), 1:1–2, 20, 23, and 27.
49. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 434. For the full discussion of morphology and
embryology, see 434–50.
50. See Otto Liebmann, “Platonismus und Darwinismus,” Philosophische Monatshefte 9
(1874): 441–72, 465.
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   57

51. See KGW VIII/3: 18[13]: the “doctrine of being, of things, of all kinds of fixed entities is
a hundred times easier that the doctrine of becoming, of development.”
52. Deleuze, Spinoza, 124–25, and “Immanence: A Life,” in Pure Immanence: An Essay on
A Life, introduction by John Rajchman, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 31.
53. See also Nadeem J. Z. Hussain’s “The Role of Life in the Genealogy,” in The Cambridge
Critical Companion to Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Simon May (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 142–69, 153.
54. For more modern accounts of developmental plasticity, see Mary Jane West-Eberhard,
“Developmental Plasticity and the Origin of Species Differences,” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 102, suppl. 1 (2005): 6543–49, and Trevor D. Price, Anna Qvarnström, and
Darren E. Irwin, “The Role of Phenotypic Plasticity in Driving Genetic Evolution,” Proceedings
of the Royal Society, B: Biological Sciences 270 (2003): 1433–40.
55. See Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 168.
56. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 127; see also 36, 61, 81, 93–95, 109, 172, and 467.
57. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 480.
58. Darwin’s problem has returned in recent biological thinking. See Mary Jane West-
Eberhard, “Toward a Modern Revival of Darwin’s Theory of Evolutionary Novelty,” Philosophy
of Science 75 (2008): 899–908.
59. See Barbara Stiegler, Nietzsche et la biologie (Paris: P.U.F., 2001), 7–8.
60. See John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), 59–65. This does not mean, however, that the will to power is unrelated to biology, as
Maudemarie Clark, “On Nietzsche’s Darwinism,” International Studies in Philosophy 39 (2007):
117–34, suggests.
61. In the current context, evolvability refers to how an organism produces heritable
phenotypic variation, which goes beyond mere genetic information, and whether an organism’s
capacity to produce such heritable phenotypic variation does itself evolve. See Kirschner and
Gerhart, Plausibility of Life, 220–25; Joanna Masel and Meredith V. Trotter, “Robustness and
Evolvability,” Trends in Genetics 26 (2010): 406–14; and Massimo Pigliucci, “Is Evolvability
Evolvable?,” Nature Reviews Genetics 9 (2008): 75–82.
62. Rüdiger W. Schmidt, “Nietzsches Drossbach-Lektüre: Bemerkungen zum Ursprung des
literarischen Projekts ‘Der Wille zur Macht,’” Nietzsche-Studien 17 (1988): 465–77, has already
pointed to the crucial importance of Drossbach for Nietzsche’s later work.
63. Maximilian Drossbach, Über die scheinbaren und die wirklichen Ursachen des Geschehens
in der Welt (Halle/Saale: Pfeffer, 1884), 45. See the comment in Nietzsche’s copy: Anna Amalia
Bibliothek, Weimar, Germany, Sig. C 252.
64. Spinoza, Ethics, 171 (Part III, Proposition 7).
65. This also separates Nietzsche from those who seek to adopt his thought within the context
of the so-called new materialism, such as Elizabeth Grosz, “Matter, Life, and Other Variations,”
Philosophy Today 55, SPEP suppl. (2011): 17–27.
66. Drossbach, Über die scheinbaren und die wirklichen Ursachen des Geschehens, 45.
67. See John Odling-Smee and Kevin N. Laland, “Ecological Inheritance and Cultural
Inheritance: What Are They, and How Do They Differ?,” Biological Theory 6 (2011): 220–30;
Kevin N. Laland, John Odling-Smee, and Sean Myles, “How Culture Shaped the Human Genome:
Bringing Genetics and the Human Sciences Together,” Nature Review Genetics 11 (2010):
137–48; and John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman, Niche Construction:
The Neglected Process in Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 36–115.
68. For a balanced discussion of agency as a model in the biological sciences, see Robert A.
Wilson, Genes and the Agents of Life: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences Biology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 70–95.
69. This tradition is perhaps best described by Donald Davidson, “Agency,” in Essays on
Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 43–62; Roderick M. Chisholm,
Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976), 53–87; and Christine
58   Christian J. Emden

M. Korsgaard, The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reasons and Moral Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
70. See, for instance, John Bishop, Natural Agency: An Essay on the Causal Theory of Action
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
71. See, however, from different perspectives, Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 81–104, and
Maudemarie Clark, “Nietzsche on Free Will, Causality, and Responsibility,” in Nietzsche on Ethics
and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 75–96. Despite these discussions, Nietzsche
is obvious in his account of free will as an illusion. See BGE 21 and TI “The Four Great Errors” 7.
72. Nietzsche’s and Drossbach’s conceptions of agency share much common ground
with more recent concerns in the biological sciences. See Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart, and
Tim Mitchison, “Molecular ‘Vitalism,’” Cell 100 (2000): 79–88.
73. Drossbach, Über die scheinbaren und die wirklichen Ursachen des Geschehens, 46.
74. See William Henry Rolph, Biologische Probleme, zugleich als Versuch zur Entwicklung
einer rationellen Ethik, 2nd ed. enl. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1884), 4–20 and 71–120.
75. Rolph, Biologische Probleme, 97.
76. Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche contra Darwin,” 93, points into the same direction. See also
the discussion in Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, “The Organism as Inner Struggle: Wilhelm Roux’s
Influence on Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions
of His Philosophy, trans. David J. Parent, foreword by Richard Schacht (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1999), 161–81.
77. Julius Robert Mayer, “Die organische Bewegung in ihrem Zusammenhange mit dem
Stoffwechsel,” in Die Mechanik der Wärme in gesammelten Schriften (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1867),
13–126, 102 and 116–18.
78. For the critique of Darwin, see Carl von Nägeli, Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der
Abstammungslehre (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1884), 284–337.
79. See Nägeli, Mechanisch-physiologische, 102–39.
80. Nietzsche purchased Wilhelm Roux’s Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus: Ein Beitrag
zur Vervollständigung der mechanischen Zweckmässigkeitslehre (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1881)
shortly after its publication in 1881. His notebook entries of the time clearly show that read Roux
several times between 1881 and 1884.
81. See Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela
Gisburg, introduction by Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers (New York: Fordham University Press,
2008), 25–56, and William Bechtel, Discovering Cell Mechanisms: The Creation of Modern Cell
Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 68–72.
82. Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (London: John
Murray, 1868), 2:374.
83. Gustav von Bunge, Vitalismus und Mechanismus (Leipzig: Vogel, 1886), 7.
84. For a similar, more recent, critique of mechanism, see Lenny Moss, “Is the Philosophy
of Mechanism Philosophy Enough?,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and
Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012): 164–72.
85. Bunge, Vitalismus und Mechanismus, 6 and 11–12.
86. Bunge, Vitalismus und Mechanismus, 13 and 17. The last sentence is emphasized in the
original.
87. See Bunge, Vitalismus und Mechanismus, 12.
88. For Roux’s relationship to Darwin, see the illuminating remark in Der Kampf der Theile
im Organismus, 220. Not only did Roux send a copy of his book to Darwin, but—in a letter to his
friend George John Romanes—Darwin proclaimed that “[a]s far as I can imperfectly judge, it is
the most important book on Evolution which has appeared for some time.” See Charles Darwin,
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter (London: John
Murray, 1887), 3:244.
 Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity   59

89. See Roux, Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus, 216–23.

90. Roux, Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus, 226. My reading differs here somewhat from
that of Müller-Lauter, “Organism as Inner Struggle,” 174–82, which concludes that Nietzsche
derives from Roux primarily the idea of a “command structure” among cells. On the importance of
“organization” for Nietzsche’s thought during the 1880s, see Ciano Aydin, “Nietzsche on Reality
as Will to Power: Toward an ‘Organization-Struggle’ Model,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 33
(2007): 25–48, 29–35.
91. See along similar lines Günter Abel, Nietzsche: Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die
ewige Wiederkehr, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 112–20.
92. See also Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 103–47.
93. See the discussion in Paul Katsafanas’s “Deriving Ethics from Action: A Nietzschean View
of Constitutivism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (2011): 620–60, 626–51, and
Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 47–67.
94. Pseudopodia are projections of eukaryotic cells. Nietzsche could find similar examples in
Roux’s Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus, but on this occasion he seems to draw on a passage
in Emanuel Herrmann, “Das Gesetz der Vermehrung der Kraft,” in Cultur und Natur: Studien
im Gebiete der Wirthschaft (Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein für Deutsche Literatur, 1887), 78–130,
81–87.
95. Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter, 20 and 227. The term “intra-action,” which Rouse
takes from Karen Barad, “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism
without Contradiction,” in Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, ed. Lynn Hankinson
Nelson and Jack Nelson (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 161–94, signifies that the boundaries between
us and the world of which we are part are porous, shifting, and can only serve, at best, as a
heuristic device.
96. Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter, 331.
97. Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics: Or, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles
of “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political Society (New York: Applebaum, 1873), 6;
Thomas Henry Huxley, Lessons in Elementary Physiology (London: Macmillan & Co., 1866), 286
(XI, § 26); and Johann Julius Baumann, Handbuch der Moral nebst Abriß der Rechtsphilosophie
(Leipzig: Hirzel, 1879), 16 (§§ 8–9).
98. See Gillian Barker and John Odling-Smee, “Integrating Ecology and Evolution: Niche
Construction and Ecological Engineering,” in Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the
Biological and Social Sciences, ed. Gillian Barker, Eric Desjardins, and Trevor Pearce (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2014), 187–212, 192–95, and John Odling-Smee, “Niche Construction in Evolution,
Ecosystems and Developmental Biology,” in Mapping the Future of Biology: Evolving Concepts
and Theories, ed. Anouk Barberousse, Michel Morange, and Thomas Pradeu (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2009), 69–91.
99. I am using the term “natureculture” here more loosely than Donna Harraway. See her
The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press, 2003).
100. See, along similar lines, John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 21–28.
101. See William C. Wimsatt and James R. Griesemer, “Reproducing Entrenchments to
Scaffold Culture: The Central Role of Development in Cultural Evolution,” in Integrating
Evolution and Development: From Theory to Practice, ed. Roger Sansome and Robert N.
Brandon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 228–323, and William C. Wimsatt, “Generative
Entrenchment and the Developmental Systems Approach to Evolutionary Processes,” in Cycles
of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, ed. Susan Oyama, Russell D. Gray,
and Paul E. Griffiths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 219–37. For a fuller overview of
60   Christian J. Emden

scaffolding, see the contributions in Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition,
ed. Linnda R. Caporeal, James R. Griesemer, and William C. Wimsatt (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2013).
102. The complications that Nietzsche’s position gives rise to are outlined in Don Dombowsky,
Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Fredrick Appel,
Nietzsche contra Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Bruce Detweiler,
Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990).
103. This is Daniel C. Dennett’s position in his extraordinarily glib account of the nineteenth-
century debate about the consequences of Darwin. See his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution
and the Meaning of Life (London: Penguin, 1995), 461–67.
104. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans.
Mary J. Gregor, introduction by Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
133–271, 162–66 (A 51–58).
105. See Max Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” in Political Writings, ed. Peter
Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 309–69, 364.
106. While there is little doubt that, as a child of bourgeois nineteenth-century European
culture, Nietzsche himself held anti-Jewish prejudices that mellowed with his growing distance
to Richard Wagner’s influence on his conception of culture, it seems problematic to view
his philosophical enterprise entirely through the lens of such prejudices. See, however, most
recently, Robert C. Holub, Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), who reads Nietzsche’s repeated and quite harsh
criticism of contemporary German anti-Semitism as evidence for Nietzsche’s own anti-Semitism.
107. The evolutionary function of the emergence of a legal system that Nietzsche describes
on this occasion mirrors his much earlier account of language and truth in the unpublished essay
“On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (1872/73), in which normatively binding forms of
conceptual language overcome the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes by introducing the
possibility of agreement. For Hobbes, see Leviathan, with Selected Variants from the Latin Edition
of 1668, ed. and introduction by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 74–78 (I. xiii)
and 106–10 (I. xvii).
108. Seen from this perspective, justice constitutes a manifestation of the will to power. See
also Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche contra Rousseau: A Study of Nietzsche’s Moral and Political
Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 229.
109. See Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2008), 6–17.
110. Wilfrid Sellars already pointed to this with regard to scientific knowledge: the production
of such knowledge depends on a change in the normatively binding meaning of whatever is under
observation. See his “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities,” Minnesota
Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2 (1957): 225–308, 228.