Nietzsche’s Naturalized Aestheticism

I. Introduction

In recent years, a divide has emerged in Nietzsche studies between Alexander Nehamas’

reading of Nietzsche as an aestheticist who eschews the dogmatism implicit in the scientific

project1 and Brian Leiter’s reading of Nietzsche as a hard-nosed naturalist whose project is

continuous with work in the natural sciences.2 According to Leiter, the aestheticist reading

Nehamas defends rests on two fundamental pillars that oppose the naturalist reading: (1) the

world, like a literary text, “is essentially indeterminate, so that both admit of a plurality of

conflicting interpretations,” and (2) “the world and its occupants have features that we ordinarily

associate with literary texts and characters.”3

In criticizing the aestheticist reading, Leiter argues, contrary to the first pillar, that

Nietzsche’s talk of interpreting the world like a text does not imply a plurality of conflicting

interpretations. Trained in the rigors of nineteenth-century philology,4 Nietzsche believes that

interpreting texts, and so the world, means interpreting them correctly, and rather than allowing

for a plurality of conflicting interpretations, Nietzsche rejects a host of non-naturalistic

interpretations for having failed to recognize the “eternal basic text of homo natura” (BGE 230).

Contrary to the second pillar, Leiter argues that interpreting the basic text of homo natura

correctly means interpreting man as a natural organism. For these reasons, Leiter claims that

“Nietzsche identifies his methodology and basic assumptions in essentially naturalistic—not

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1 Nehamas (1985).
2 Leiter (2002).
3 Leiter (1992, 277).
4 Leiter (1992, 277).
aestheticist—terms”5 and so concludes that Nietzsche’s naturalistic program is “distinctly

unaesthetic.”6

In this paper, I argue that the divide between an aestheticist and a naturalistic Nietzsche

is a false one. I do so not only by showing how Nietzsche links the concept of an aesthetic

justification of life to a naturalized, non-metaphysical conception of the human being and the

world, but also by arguing that Nietzsche turns to the natural sciences of his day to justify an

ontology that can be linked to the two pillars of the aestheticist reading. I pursue these claims by

highlighting the fact that versions of these two pillars can be found in Nietzsche’s 1873

interpretation of Heraclitus’ philosophy in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. On the one

hand, Nietzsche’s Heraclitus sees the world according to the aesthetic category of play (a version

of the second pillar), rather than the moral categories of good and evil. On the other hand,

Nietzsche’s Heraclitus understands the world as one in which everything exists and is what it is

only in relation to something else, and so the fundamental entities of the world, considered in

themselves, are essentially indeterminate (a version of the first pillar). Although he merely

describes Heraclitus’ views in Philosophy in the Tragic Age, Nietzsche eventually appropriates this

Heraclitean ontology in his later works by turning to the natural sciences for support. Since

Nietzsche appeals to the natural sciences to justify key features of an aesthetic worldview, there

is reason to think of Nietzsche’s project in terms of what I call a naturalized aestheticism.

I begin by highlighting the presence of the two pillars of the aestheticist reading in

Nietzsche’s interpretation of Heraclitus in Philosophy in the Tragic Age. I then show how Nietzsche,

in his early lectures on pre-Platonic philosophy, supports this Heraclitean vision of the world

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5 Leiter (1992, 276).
6 Leiter (1992, 279).

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through recent discoveries in the natural sciences and how he eventually makes this scientifically-

justified view his own in Human, All Too Human. After noting that Nietzsche continues to appeal

to natural scientists like Roger Boscovich to justify this Heraclitean understanding of the world

in his post-Zarathustra writings, I contrast the naturalized aestheticism I attribute to Nietzsche

with aspects of both Nehamas’ and Leiter’s readings. Whereas I deny Nehamas’ view that

perspectivism prevents Nietzsche from being committed to any belief that is objectively true, I

reject Leiter’s claim that Nietzsche’s naturalism entails a commitment to essences that explain a

wide variety of phenomena. I conclude with some remarks about how the real opposition

surrounding Nietzsche’s project is not between aestheticism and naturalism, but rather between

a naturalized aestheticism that Nietzsche endorses and a metaphysical-moral understanding of

the world that Nietzsche rejects.

II. The Two Pillars of Aestheticism in Nietzsche’s Early Writings

I preface my discussion of Nietzsche’s aestheticism by briefly touching on one feature of

Nehamas’ reading I oppose. Specifically, Nehamas has construed Nietzsche’s perspectivism as a

doctrine that militates against a dogmatism that, for Nehamas, consists in presenting one’s views

not simply as one’s own, but “as views and values that should be accepted by everyone on

account of their rational, objective, and unconditional authority.”7 Nietzsche, however, is

committed to a specific view of the world he takes to be objectively true throughout his

writings,8 and this, I argue, comes to be the view that supports both pillars of the aestheticist

reading.

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7 Nehamas (1985, 4).
8 My reading of Nietzsche conflicts with the developmental interpretation proposed by Clark (1990) in three
respects: (1) In contrast to Clark’s attempt to read Nietzsche’s later philosophy through the neo-Kantian framework
of “On Truth and Lying,” which assumes the existence of a thing-in-itself, I read Nietzsche’s later philosophy
through the alternative, Heraclitean framework presented in Philosophy in the Tragic Age, which denies the existence of

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 That Nietzsche is committed to a specific worldview is evidenced in his earliest works.

This is made obvious by the title of his early, unpublished essay, “The Dionysian Worldview”

(KSA 1, pp. 551ff.). This was one of five essays and lectures that formed the basis for

Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, and the influence of the essay

can be found in the structure of The Birth of Tragedy itself. This is because The Birth of Tragedy is

structured around a narrative of the birth, death, and rebirth of tragedy that goes hand in hand

with the birth, death, and rebirth of a Dionysian or tragic worldview. In the first ten sections,

Nietzsche argues that tragedy emerged as a life-affirming response to a pessimistic vision of the

world expressed in the myth of Silenus, one that advocates the negation of life given the

ineluctability of human suffering (BT 3). In sections ten through fifteen, Nietzsche argues that

tragedy died at the hands of Socrates because he introduced an altogether different, optimistic

understanding of human existence and nature (BT 12). In the final sections of the work,

Nietzsche hopes for a rebirth of tragedy in the operas of Richard Wagner as a response to the

philosophical insights of Kant and Schopenhauer. According to Nietzsche, these philosophers

have not only put an end to Socratic optimism, they have rediscovered Silenic or Dionysian

wisdom in the form of concepts (BT 19).

Implicit in the structure of The Birth of Tragedy is the idea that genuine poetry flourishes

within a specific worldview. Once this worldview is destroyed genuine art or tragedy perishes

with it and bastardized art forms take its place. In ancient Greece, art was eventually forced to

serve the demands of Socrates’ optimistic philosophy (BT 14). Whereas the task of philosophy
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a thing-in-itself; (2) In contrast to Clark, who holds that Nietzsche eventually overcomes the idea that most of our
beliefs falsify reality with his later rejection of the thing-in-itself, I hold that Nietzsche continues to think that most
of our beliefs falsify reality because he rejects the thing-in-itself in favor of a relational ontology as early as 1873; (3)
In contrast to Clark, who reads Nietzsche as rejecting metaphysics but remaining committed to a commonsense-
cum-scientific account of reality, I present a Nietzsche who appeals to science to reject both metaphysical and
commonsense things as falsifications of reality.

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and art in an optimistic worldview is to overcome suffering and heal the so-called wound of

existence through knowledge (BT 18), the task of art within a pessimistic worldview is to justify

and affirm existence by transfiguring suffering into “an aesthetic phenomenon” (BT 5). In

particular, Nietzsche argues that the purpose of Dionysian art is to transfigure the ugly and

disharmonic elements of existence into “an artistic game” that expresses the “playful

construction and destruction of the individual world as the overflow of primordial delight” (BT

24).

Nietzsche compares the artistic understanding of the world to Heraclitus’ depiction of a

child who “places stones here and there and builds sand hills only to overthrow them again” (BT

24). Nietzsche’s reference to Heraclitus is crucial because it links The Birth of Tragedy to

Nietzsche’s further reflections on ancient Greek philosophy in his unpublished work, Philosophy

in the Tragic Age, a “companion piece” to The Birth of Tragedy (KSB 4, 298). At the center of

Philosophy in the Tragic Age is a lengthy exposition of Heraclitus’ philosophy and Parmenides’

response to it, and in Nietzsche’s exposition of Heraclitus’ philosophy we encounter evidence

for versions of both pillars of the aestheticist reading. Not only does Nietzsche compare

Heraclitus’ understanding of the world to an artistic game of playful construction and

destruction (second pillar), he also attributes to Heraclitus the view that everything in the world

is constituted by its relations to other things and so the fundamental entities of the world,

considered in themselves, are essentially indeterminate (first pillar).

In Philosophy in the Tragic Age, Nietzsche associates the philosophy of Heraclitus with the

worldview of the “aesthetic man.” What this aesthetic individual understands is that “in this

world only play, play as artists and children engage in it, exhibits coming-to-be and passing away,

structuring and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence” (PTA 7).

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Similar to The Birth of Tragedy, the key aesthetic concept Nietzsche employs in his description of

Heraclitus’ philosophy is “play.” In Philosophy in the Tragic Age, Nietzsche opposes this aesthetic

vision of the world to a moral vision of the world. Whereas the moral vision of the world, which

Nietzsche associates with both Anaximander and Schopenhauer, condemns coming-to-be and

passing-away as a grand injustice (PTA 4), Heraclitus sees this process as a playful, artistic game

and affirms it as such (PTA 7).

The aesthetic vision of the world Nietzsche attributes to Heraclitus in Philosophy in the

Tragic Age is also a naturalized vision of the world. That is, Nietzsche’s Heraclitus presents an

naturalized ontology bereft of any transcendent, metaphysical entities,9 and the implicit argument

of the opening sections of Philosophy in the Tragic Age is that if the natural world is to be affirmed,

one must abandon any commitment to a second, metaphysical world that can be used to

condemn the natural world as inadequate. In terms of Nietzsche’s development, the lesson is

that a complete affirmation of the natural world requires the abandonment of Schopenhauer’s

dualistic ontology found in The Birth of Tragedy.

In presenting this naturalistic account of the world, Nietzsche situates Heraclitus’

ontology between Anaximander’s “indefinite,” which Nietzsche compares to the Kantian thing-

in-itself and functions as the from-which everything comes to be and the to-which everything

returns (PTA 3), and Parmenides’ “invention” or discovery of “being,” an entity completely

distinct from the sensible world of change and known by reason alone (PTA 10). According to

Nietzsche, Heraclitus not only denied any distinction between a physical and a metaphysical

world, he took a bolder step in denying being altogether (PTA 5). In other words, Nietzsche’s

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9 As a point of clarification, I understand ontology to be an account of what there fundamentally is, and I
understand the term broadly so that there can be an ontology that eliminates “beings.” I follow Nietzsche in using
the term metaphysics in the classical sense as the study of entities that transcend the physical or natural world.

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Heraclitus not only eliminated the metaphysical source of all becoming, he also denied the

existence of anything in the empirical world that is self-identical, endowed with intrinsic

properties,10 and capable of independent existence (PTA 5).

In contrast to both Anaximander and Parmenides, Nietzsche’s Heraclitus declares that

he sees nothing other than becoming (PTA 5). Although Nietzsche’s talk of Heraclitean

becoming immediately suggests a thesis about constant change, the doctrine can also be

understood as a view about the relational structure of reality, and here we encounter the second

pillar of the aestheticist reading, namely, the view that the fundamental entities of the world,

considered in themselves, are essentially indeterminate. For Nietzsche’s Heraclitus, the world is

not constituted by independently existing things with intrinsic properties (things-in-themselves),

but rather by opposing elements that exist and are what they are only in relation to each other.

In Heraclitean language, the world is composed of opposites that are necessarily united. In

Nietzsche’s terminology, “everything which coexists in space and time has but a relative

existence, that each thing exists through and for another like it, which is to say through and for

an equally relative one” (PTA 5). This, Nietzsche tells us, “is a truth of the greatest immediate

self-evidence for everyone” and that anyone who reflects on this truth must move on to the

conclusion that “the nature of reality [Wirklichkeit] lies simply in its acts [Wirken] and that for it

there exists no other sort of being” (PTA 5).

Thus, Heraclitus’ doctrine of becoming, at least as Nietzsche presents it, is just as much

about relations or relative being as it is about change and stability. Nevertheless, it is still unclear

what such a view has to do with both constant change and the claim that the fundamental

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By intrinsic properties, I simply mean the properties a thing has in virtue of itself, and by “in virtue of itself,” I
10

mean those properties an object has independently of its relations to other things.

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entities of the world are essentially indeterminate. Such an ontology is related to a thesis of

constant change—and so the more common understanding of becoming—because the kind of

relations that hold at this level are dynamic relations, such that each entity in the relationship is

necessarily affecting or being affected by the other entity or entities in the relationship. The

world is essentially indeterminate because the fundamental entities that populate this world—

Nietzsche variously refers to them as acts, forces, motions, powers, etc.—have no intrinsic

properties and so no determinate character in themselves, i.e., independently of their relations.

Instead, they take on a determinate character only insofar as they relate to something else.

However, the thing to which they relate is also bereft of a determinate character in itself. Thus, if

we want to know what something is like in-itself, i.e., independently of all its relations, we find

that there is no answer, for such a thing not only lacks intrinsic properties that would otherwise

endow it with a determinate nature, it does not exist at all.

Before linking this view to Nietzsche’s naturalism in the next section, I want to address,

albeit briefly, one potential objection to the reading I present here. In finding roughly the same

view in Nietzsche’s later Nachlass, Peter Poellner has argued that this view is incoherent because

“relations require relata” and there can only be relata “if they have some non-extrinsic

properties.”11 Although Poellner suggests a strategy to overcome this potential incoherence, the

charge of incoherence actually speaks in favor of attributing such a view to Nietzsche’s

Heraclitus on textual grounds. This is because Nietzsche openly acknowledges that Heraclitus’

relational ontology resists conceptualization and creates a disjunction between the laws of

thought and the way the world is. Not only does the ontology of Nietzsche’s Heraclitus violate

Aristotle’s formulation of the principle of non-contradiction (PTA 5), Nietzsche also details the
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11 Poellner (2013, 692).

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way in which Parmenides employs logical principles to reject, on a priori grounds, Heraclitus’

ontology (PTA 10).

Although some might worry about attributing such a view to Nietzsche on philosophical

grounds,12 Nietzsche offers a powerful response to these criticisms. Specifically, Poellner’s

criticism falls within the Parmenidean tradition of using a priori reasoning and so logical

principles to place restrictions on the kind of ontology one can endorse. Nietzsche responds to

this tradition by arguing that such criticisms presuppose a necessary isomorphism between

thought and being (PTA 11). So although we may not be able to think a world in which relations

do not supervene on pre-existing relata, Nietzsche argues that there is no good reason to believe

that the limitations of our thinking must also be the limitations of reality. So if our best empirical

theories nowhere attest to the existence of non-relational entities (things-in-themselves), we

should not be compelled to posit their existence simply on the grounds that a world bereft of

such entities is unintelligible to us. If empirical observation only reveals relations without any

pre-existing relata, Nietzsche thinks we should simply reject the isomorphism between thinking

and being or the medieval adequatio intellectus ad rem and accept a view of reality in which relata are

not ontologically prior to their relations.

III. The Natural Sciences and Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Worldview

Based on Nietzsche’s early writings alone, it might seem that there is enough evidence to

support a modified version of the aestheticist reading. First, Nietzsche speaks of a tragic or

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12The worry is that Nietzsche is violating logical consistency, and because science is committed to logical
consistency, Nietzsche cannot appeal to science to reject it. As I argue elsewhere, Nietzsche is not violating logical
consistency even though he is rejecting Aristotle’s formulation of the principle of non-contradiction. This is because
Aristotle formulates the principle in ontological terms, and so Aristotle is defending the view that logical principles
govern the structure of the world. On my view, Nietzsche can reject the Aristotelian-Parmenidean idea that logical
principles govern the structure of the world and do so in a way that is logically consistent. For more on this, see my
[publication redacted for the purposes of anonymity].

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Dionysian worldview that he associates with poetry. Second, Nietzsche speaks of the way in

which tragic poetry allows us to understand the world as an artistic game of creation and

destruction. Third, Nietzsche associates this aesthetic worldview with Heraclitus, the philosopher

of the tragic age of the Greeks. Finally, the relational ontology Nietzsche attributes to Heraclitus

holds that all determinacy is relational determinacy and so the fundamental entities of the world,

considered in themselves, have no determinate nature. If this is right, two questions emerge:

First, does Nietzsche remain committed to this Heraclitean view in his later writings? Second,

can Nietzsche’s Heracliteanism be reconciled with the naturalism Leiter’s interpretation

emphasizes? In this section, I give reasons for answering both questions affirmatively.

The brief story I tell begins with Nietzsche’s reading in the natural sciences around the

time he was working on Philosophy in the Tragic Age.13 As Karl Schlechta and Anni Anders have

documented, the results of this reading begin to appear in his lectures, held between 1872 and

1876, on pre-Platonic philosophers.14 Specifically, there are seven different points in these

lectures in which Nietzsche appeals to the natural sciences of his day, and this occurs twice in

Nietzsche’s discussion of Heraclitus’ philosophy. Most notably, Nietzsche claims that the main

proposition of the natural sciences is the Heraclitean view that “all things flow” (PPP, p. 60). He

substantiates this claim by appealing to the work of Karl Ernst von Bär and Hermann Ludwig

von Helmholtz. Whereas Bär shows that the perception of change is relative to both pulse rates

and our perceptual capacities (PPP, p. 60f.), Nietzsche appeals to Helmholtz to show that

becoming never ceases at the infinitely small or infinitely large. Just as there is no end to our

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13 See Nietzsche’s letter to von Gersdorff from 5 April 1873, in which he links his writings on the pre-Socratics to
his interest in studying contemporary research in math, chemistry, and mechanics (KSB 4, 301). For a list of books
on the natural sciences that Nietzsche borrowed from the library in Basel from 1870-74, see Mittasch (1952, 35).
14 Schlechta and Anders (1962, 60-72).

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quest to find the ultimate particle that is the ground for larger objects, our cosmos, which

includes the rotation of the planets and their relative position to the sun, will eventually perish.

All of this, according to Nietzsche, was “the intuitive perception of Heraclitus; there is no thing

of which we may say, ‘it is.’ He rejects Being. He knows only Becoming, the flowing” (PPP, p.

62).

The next step in linking this Heraclitean or aesthetic worldview to the natural sciences

requires a turn to Nietzsche’s 1878 Human, All Too Human. In German scholarship, it has been

argued that Nietzsche’s early reflections on pre-Socratic philosophy provide the necessary

background for understanding the distinction between the metaphysical and historical

philosophies Nietzsche introduces in the first aphorism of Human, All Too Human.15 Nietzsche

introduces this distinction by raising a question he claims was originally posed some two

thousand years ago: “how can something come from its opposite?” Whereas metaphysical

philosophy denies that things can indeed come from their opposites, historical philosophy

denies that there is anything such as absolute opposites. Although the aphorism barely makes

clear why this is such an important issue, Nietzsche clearly sides with historical philosophy

against metaphysical philosophy and claims that historical philosophy cannot be separated from

the natural sciences (HH 1).

Using the argument of Philosophy in the Tragic Age, one can claim that the problem of

opposites in the first aphorism of Human, All Too Human is largely the problem of becoming or

how something can come to be from its opposite that Anaximander introduced into Greek

philosophy,16 and whereas the metaphysical solution to this problem can be traced to

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15 Glatzeder (2000) and Heller (1972).
16 See Glatzeder (2000, 87ff.).

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Parmenides’ rejection of the unity of opposites and associated with his doctrine of being, the

historical solution can be linked to Heraclitus’ unity of opposites and his related doctrine of

becoming. Connecting the beginning of Human, All Too Human to problems in ancient

philosophy is further supported by Nietzsche’s 1888 reworking of the first aphorism. There,

Nietzsche explicitly claims that he is offering, in contrast to the metaphysical philosophy of the

past, the “youngest and most radical philosophy there has ever been, an actual philosophy of

becoming, which certainly does not believe in an ‘in itself’ and consequently denies any rights of

citizenship to the concept of ‘being’ as well as ‘appearance’” (KSA 14, p. 119).17 In other words,

this reworking of the aphorism indicates that the historical philosophy of the first aphorism is a

philosophy of Heraclitean becoming, whereas the metaphysical philosophy, which Nietzsche

rejects, can be associated with Parmenides’ concept of being.

Additional evidence for attributing to Nietzsche a commitment to Heraclitean becoming

in Human, All Too Human can also be found in the second aphorism, where Nietzsche speaks of

the “family failing of philosophers.” Nietzsche argues that philosophers have failed to recognize

that “there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths,” and the reason why there

are no eternal facts is that “everything has become” (HH 2). In the sixteenth aphorism,

Nietzsche puts forth a similar claim. Whereas philosophers have debated whether the world of

appearances is caused by the thing-in-itself or whether it is completely divorced from the thing-

in-itself, Nietzsche points out that both camps overlook the possibility that the world we

experience “has gradually become” and “is still fully in the course of becoming” (HH 16).

Based on these aphorisms, one might argue that Nietzsche is thinking of becoming in

terms of the denial of eternal or sempiternal entities only, and therefore Nietzsche does not
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17 My translation.!

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appeal to the doctrine of becoming to deny common sense things of limited duration. The fact

that Nietzsche wants to deny the existence of such entities, however, is made evident in the

nineteenth aphorism of Human, All Too Human. There, Nietzsche rejects the view that numbers

can be applied to reality on the grounds that there are no individual things, and he justifies this

view by claiming that, “the whole procedure of science has pursued the task of resolving

everything thing-like (material) in motions” (HH 19).

These aphorisms indicate that Nietzsche is seeking to justify an ontology of force or

motion that does away with both metaphysical and commonsense things by appealing to recent

developments in the natural sciences. Although he does not explicitly state in Human, All Too

Human why he thinks the natural sciences are resolving all matter into force or motion, we know

Nietzsche had read F. A. Lange’s The History of Materialism as early as 1866 (KSB 2, 517) and he

returned to various editions of the work a number of times throughout his career.18 This is

important because Lange argues that whereas early modern science can be understood as a

revival of Democritean atomism,19 recent developments in modern science have slowly resolved

all matter into relations of force.20

In subsequent editions of the work, Lange identifies Roger Boscovich as playing a

central role in the process.21 Although he read and commented in his notes on Boscovich’s

Theory of Natural Philosophy as early as 1873,22 Nietzsche does not explicitly refer to Boscovich

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18 See Brobjer (2008, 32-37).
19 Lange (1866, 282 and 358).
20 Lange (1866, 373 and 1950, 379).
21 See Lange (1950, Vol. II, 364) for the reference to Boscovich in the 1877 edition. Boscovich’s name does not

appear in the 1866 edition of Lange’s work. Nietzsche, however, came to Boscovich prior to reading subsequent
editions of Lange’s work via his reading of Gustav T. Fechner (Schlechta and Anders 1962, 128).
22 For more on Nietzsche’s early engagement with Boscovich, see Ansell-Pearson (2000).

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until an 1881 Nachlass fragment (KSA 10, 15[21]) and then again in an 1882 letter addressed to

Heinrich von Köselitz. There, Nietzsche writes:

If anything has been well refuted, it is the prejudice of “matter”; and indeed not by an

idealist but by a mathematician—by Boscovich. He and Copernicus are the two greatest

opponents of appearances to the eye. Since him, there is no longer any matter—except as a

popular simplification. He has thought the atomistic theory through to its end. Gravity is

most certainly not a ‘property of matter,’ simply because there is no matter. Gravity is,

just like vis inertiae, certainly an appearance of force (simply because there is nothing else

other than force!). (KSB 6, 213)23

Nietzsche’s remarks are crucial for understanding key elements of his naturalism. First,

Boscovich and Copernicus are opponents of appearances to the eye. However, their opposition

to such appearances does not mean they have abandoned empirical observation. Instead, they

have used empirical observation to replace commonsense descriptions of the world with a

scientific description of the world based on more controlled and acute observations. Second,

Boscovich has eliminated matter from the modern scientific picture, and he has done so by

replacing matter with force, thereby transitioning from a mechanistic worldview to a dynamic

worldview.24 Finally, Nietzsche’s remarks here indicate that despite his apparent skepticism

about science and his emphasis on the perspectival nature of knowledge, he is nevertheless a

realist about force. Thus, in an 1882 fragment, Nietzsche remarks that, “everything is force”

(KSA 10, 1[3]).

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23 Also see KSA 11, 26[432].
24 See KSA 11, 26[420] for an explicit association of Boscovich with a dynamic worldview.

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 Nietzsche’s coupling of Boscovich with Copernicus is also significant because we can

associate the contents of the aforementioned letter with his remarks in the twelfth section of

Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche again references the two figures together:

While Copernicus convinced us to believe, contrary to all our senses, that the earth does

not stand still, Boscovich taught us to renounce belief in the last bit of earth that did

‘stand still,’ the belief in ‘matter,’ in the ‘material,’ in the residual piece of earth and

clump of an atom: it was the greatest triumph over the senses that the world had ever

known. (BGE 12)

According to Nietzsche, Boscovich has taught us that the particle atom of early modern

atomism is a remnant of the “manifest” image. Proper observation of the world shows that

nothing “stands fast,” and what is true of the atom is also true of the soul (BGE 12). In both

cases, there are no things that stand behind or exist in addition to forces, drives, and activities;

instead, as Nietzsche repeats in section seventeen of Beyond Good and Evil and the first essay of

On the Genealogy of Morality, reality consists solely of processes, activities, drives, wills, effects, and

deeds, and it is only owing to the seduction of language and logic that reality appears otherwise

(BGE 17 and GM I 13). In the language of Philosophy in the Tragic Age, Nietzsche is making the

Heraclitean point that “the nature of reality [Wirklichkeit] lies simply in its acts [Wirken] and that

for it there exists no other sort of being” (PTA 5).

Nietzsche’s remarks in the section “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” from Twilight of the Idols

confirm that he remains committed to the general position he attributes to Heraclitus in

Philosophy in the Tragic Age throughout his productive career. The general position is that refined

sense observation attests to a world of becoming or relative being, and this world of relative

being is again said to conflict with the basic structures of language and thought. In Twilight of the

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Idols, Nietzsche argues that “insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change,

they do not lie” (TI “Reason” 2). However, we falsify the “testimony of the senses” by

projecting concepts such as unity, identity, permanence, substance, and cause onto the data

provided by the senses and, in so doing, create a world of “beings” or “things” (TI “Reason” 5).

In other words, it is in conceptualizing the data of the senses that we construct a commonsense

world of independently existing things, but as Nietzsche emphasizes, these things are nowhere

found in the reality physics describes.

At this point, it should be clear that Nietzsche incorporates significant elements of

Heraclitus’ ontology into his own philosophical project and, in so doing, seeks to justify such an

ontology by appealing to the results of the natural sciences of his day. At the same time,

Nietzsche continues, even in his latest works, to link Heraclitus’ philosophy to both the tragic

and the Dionysian and so the aesthetic worldview he articulated in his earliest works. Although

he boasts to be the “first tragic philosopher,” Nietzsche nevertheless acknowledges in Ecce Homo

that much of his “Dionysian philosophy” may be traced back to Heraclitus: “The affirmation of

passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy; saying Yes to

opposition and war; becoming, along with the radical repudiation of the very concept of being—all

this is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date” (EH “Books”

BT:3). Given that Nietzsche remains committed to a Heraclitean ontology that can be linked to

both the naturalist and aestheticist aspects of his project from Philosophy in the Tragic Age to his

final publications, there is sufficient textual support for thinking of Nietzsche’s project in terms

of a naturalized aestheticism.

IV. Revisiting Nehamas’ Aestheticist Reading

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 In response to what has been argued above, it might seem that Nehamas could simply

accept as an addendum to his project the claim that Nietzsche appeals to the natural sciences of

his day to justify key pillars of the aestheticist reading. Indeed, Nehamas explicitly links the

relational ontology he finds in the late Nachlass to Nietzsche’s early reflections on Heraclitus in

Philosophy in the Tragic Age.25 The problem is that although he attributes to Nietzsche a relational

ontology that renders the world indeterminate, Nehamas also argues that Nietzsche does not

offer this relational ontology as “an alternative to the metaphysics of substance and accident.”

Instead, Nehamas’ Nietzsche believes that “our linguistic categories are compatible with

different versions of the ontological structure of the world.”26 Thus, the world is indeterminate

not because a relational ontology is true, but because no ontology whatsoever is true.

Nehamas’ position here is consistent with his understanding of Nietzsche’s

perspectivism. As noted above, Nehamas understands perspectivism in such a way that

Nietzsche resists presenting any view, including perspectivism itself, as something everyone

should accept. Nietzsche’s views are simply his views, and he employs a variety of styles to

remind his reader of that.27 This reading, however, fails to explain why Nietzsche would then

appeal to a physicist like Boscovich in Beyond Good and Evil to justify the claim that nothing

stands fast (BGE 12). If Nietzsche is presenting what are just his views, why does he appeal to

the authority of a natural scientist to justify them? Indeed, one of the shortcomings of Nehamas’

interpretation is the absence of any significant discussion of Nietzsche’s reading in the natural

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25 Nehamas (1985, 75).
26 Nehamas (1985, 96).
27 Nehamas (1985, 4f.).

! 17!
sciences, something already well documented in the secondary literature prior to the publication

of Nehamas’ book.28

Given these issues, there is reason, first, to question the legitimacy of Nehamas’ reading

of Nietzsche’s perspectivism and, second, to see if Nietzsche’s perspectivism can be reconciled

with the tragic or aesthetic worldview I have traced back to Nietzsche’s earliest writings and

linked to his interests in the natural sciences. To recall, the picture the natural sciences of

Nietzsche’s day provide is a world of interrelated forces that have no determinate character in

themselves. Because he implicitly appeals to this understanding of the world to reject things-in-

themselves, Nietzsche’s perspectivism can neither be a truth relativism nor be the claim that

perspectives are mere points of view on a world of independently existing things.29 Instead, his

perspectivism must be compatible with the view that everything exists and is what it is only in

relation to something else.

Although his early essay, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” presents a

Nietzsche still committed to some version of Kant’s thing-in-itself, a modified version of the

argument put forth in the essay can nevertheless be used to generate an account of both

perception and conceptualization that helps makes sense of his later perspectivism in a way that

is compatible with the Heraclitean ontology sketched above. The modification that occurs in his

later writings is that perception does not occur when some pre-existing, unknowable thing-in-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
28See Mittasch (1952) and Schlechta and Anders (1962).
29See Gemes (2013) on the various interpretations of Nietzsche’s perspectivism in Anglo-American scholarship.
The best textual support for the truth-relativist reading (see Danto (1965)) is Nietzsche’s claim that there are no
facts, only interpretations (WP 481; KSA 12, 7[60]). The best textual support for the point-of-view reading (see
Leiter (1994)), is GM III 12. In contrast to the former view, I read WP 481 not as a claim about truth relativism, but
further support for Nietzsche’s view that things are what they are only in relation to other things. In contrast to
Leiter’s reading, I note that, even in GM III 12, Nietzsche says that “interpreting forces” are necessary for a seeing
to become a “seeing something,” and so the passage does not provide unambiguous evidence for Nietzsche’s
commitment to commonsense things, which Leiter’s reading of perspectivism presupposes.

! 18!
itself stimulates nerves to produce basic sensations. Instead, perception is just a case of forces or

powers affecting each other. The interactions of these forces generate the colors, sounds, smells,

tastes, etc., that form the basic elements of our commonsense worlds. Thus, sense perception is

not a matter of generating ideas that copy or resemble mind-independent properties. Instead,

sense perception is a process that creates, albeit subconsciously, the various qualities we

perceive. This, I take it, is part of the reason why Nietzsche insists in his early essay that each

one of us, whether we know it or not, is an “artistically creating subject” (TL 1).

This account of perception can be called perspectival because different perceivers

generate different qualitative sensations, and so the basic elements of each perceiver’s world are

relative to each perceiver. Although this is most obvious in reflecting on the way in which

different species perceive the world differently, it is also likely that minor differences in sense

organs among humans create qualitatively different experiences of what seems to be one and the

same thing. So just as he claims in “On Truth and Lying” that “insects or birds perceive quite a

different world from that of human beings” (TL 1), Nietzsche asserts in a late Nachlass fragment

that “it is obvious that every creature different from us senses different qualities and

consequently lives in a different world from that in which we live” (WP 565; KSA 12, 6[14]).

However, these different worlds are not appearances of a true world of things-in-themselves,

such that some appearances are true insofar as they correspond to the way the world really is and

false insofar as they do not. As Nietzsche claims even in “On Truth and Lying,” there is no

criterion that allows us to distinguish between appearances in this way (TL 1). Because there is

no real world of sensible qualities beyond sense experience, there is no appearance-reality

distinction at this level, and therefore our senses, insofar as they report how the world appears to

each perceiver, do not lie at all (TI “Reason” 2).

! 19!
 Although perspectives are also created through selective attention to basic sensations

and the associations that occur when the mind bundles sensations together, the imposition of

concepts onto the data provided by the senses is the most important feature of perspective

formation. In “On Truth and Lying,” this is a matter of employing empirical concepts to group

together what are actually dissimilar things under a single concept (TL 1). Although this sort of

imposition is part of what Nietzsche means by the claim that concepts falsify the “testimony of

the senses” (TI “Reason” 2), it is only part of the story. For the mature Nietzsche, it is the

imposition of concepts such as unity, identity, permanence, substance, and cause onto sensations

that generate the commonsense things that are then classified through empirical concepts.30 It is

here that the most serious falsification takes place. This is because we are not merely applying

different classification systems to individual objects, but we are creating, or so Nietzsche

contends, the very objects that we then classify, even though we are unaware of this creative

process.

With this account of perspectivism in hand, it is now possible to make sense of

Nietzsche’s remarks about perspectivism at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil. As Nehamas

emphasizes, a central idea of Nietzsche’s philosophy is that “untruth is a condition of life” (BGE

4),31 and Nietzsche associates perspectives with both falsification and life (BGE 34). Similar to

Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche’s argument here is that falsification occurs when we project

fundamental concepts such as unity and identity onto the data provided by the senses (BGE 4).

Nevertheless, Nietzsche argues that we could not live without this “constant falsification,” so

that “renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life” (BGE 4).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30 Nietzsche borrows the term “perspective” from Teichmüller (1882), and Teichmüller argues that knowing
subjects create commonsense things by projecting such categories onto sensations.
31 See Nehamas (1985, ch. 2).

! 20!
Falsification is necessary because we cannot live according to the scientific account of reality, a

point Nietzsche repeatedly makes in Human, All Too Human (HH 31-34). Instead, we are

compelled to construct perspectives not only of order, meaning, and value, but also of relatively

stable, unified things and selves so that we can live and flourish. This, then, is why Nietzsche

claims that perspective is “the basic condition of all life” (BGE Preface).

This framework also provides some insight into Nietzsche’s critique of dogmatism in the

preface of Beyond Good and Evil and helps us understand how Nietzsche’s call for a philosophy of

the future might relate to his aestheticism. For Nietzsche, a dogmatist is one who mistakenly

believes that the life-world he or she has constructed is something found in nature (BGE 9) and

is therefore true for everyone (BGE 43). In this sense, dogmatists are “actors and self-deceivers”

(BGE 9) because they fail to understand that they are “artistically creating subject[s]” (TL 1). In

contrast, Nietzsche’s philosopher of the future understands that we create the order and value

that constitute our respective perspectives or life-worlds, and it is the task of the future

philosopher to consciously create a perspective that reflects the conditions and values of his or

her existence (BGE 9, 211). In this sense, the philosophy of the future will be a conscious, rather

than an unconscious, memoir (BGE 6), and this conscious memoir will create both a life-world

and a self. In so doing, this future philosopher will not only “give style” to her character (GS

290), but also, as Nehamas’ reading emphasizes, transfigure her life and the world into aesthetic

phenomena (BT 5).

V. Revisiting Leiter’s Naturalist Reading

Just as I only support a modified version of Nehamas’ aestheticist reading, I can only

appropriate a modified version of Leiter’s naturalist reading. For Leiter, Nietzsche is a naturalist

who seeks to explain phenomena in terms of certain intrinsic or essential features of a thing.

! 21!
Because I see Nietzsche’s naturalism as justifying an ontology that does away with intrinsic or

essential features of a thing,32 my reading conflicts with the kind of naturalism Leiter ascribes to

Nietzsche. Indeed, Leiter explicitly rejects the view I propose: “the mistake of most of the anti-

metaphysical readings of Nietzsche is to conflate Nietzsche’s opposition to non-empirical or

non-naturalistic claims (which he does, indeed repudiate) with an opposition to any and all

claims about a thing’s essence or nature.”33

According to Leiter, Nietzsche qua naturalist seeks “to discover the deep, hidden facts

about human nature which explain who we are and what we believe,”34 and he does so by

offering explanations “modeled on science in the sense that they seek to reveal the causal

determinants of these phenomena, typically in the various physiological and psychological facts

about persons.”35 More specifically, Leiter claims that Nietzsche relies on a doctrine of types,

where the psycho-physical constitution or “type-facts” of a person explain the particular kind of

person one is, and the most important type-fact for Nietzsche is the will to power.36

The will to power is crucial for Leiter’s account because it plays a significant role in his

defense of the claim that Nietzsche’s naturalism does not entail the rejection of essentialism.

Specifically, Leiter refers to three passages in which Nietzsche speaks of essences to support his

view. In two of these passages, Nietzsche explicitly refers to the will to power (BGE 259 and

GM II 12). In the final passage, there is no explicit reference to the will to power, but the

dynamics of power implicitly inform the discussion (GM I 13). This is because Nietzsche not

only speaks in the passage of forces, wills, drives, and effects expressing themselves as such, he
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
32 Although Nietzsche speaks of essential properties, i.e., those properties that define what a thing is, the discussion
should be about intrinsic properties, i.e., those properties a thing has independently of its relation to other things.
33 Leiter (2002, 26).
34 Leiter (2002, 2).
35 Leiter (2002, 8).
36 Leiter (2002, 8).

! 22!
also differentiates organisms according to their relative strength or power, and this latter

distinction is the basis for the type-facts Leiter places at the center of Nietzsche’s naturalistic

explanations (GM I 13).

These passages indicate that the question as to whether Nietzsche endorses a form of

essentialism, as Leiter claims, or whether his naturalism justifies an anti-essentialism or an anti-

intrinsicalism, as I claim, hangs on whether Nietzsche thinks the will to power is some sort of

fact—and so part of Nietzsche’s naturalist program of following the methods and results of the

natural sciences—or some sort of interpretation—and so part of a philosophy of the future that

can be closely linked to Nietzsche’s aestheticism.37 In what follows, I argue that Nietzsche does

speak of the will to power as an intrinsic fact or feature of reality that he uses to explain a wide

range of phenomena, including the kinds of perspectives that different organisms create, but

ultimately this “fact” of the will to power is a conscious interpretation of nature and a projection

of Nietzsche’s life-affirming values.38

The position I am taking here may sound as if I have just retreated to the very view

Nehamas defends. Specifically, by arguing that the will to power is an interpretation, not a fact, it

might seem that the ontology Nietzsche endorses in his later writings is therefore not something

he takes to be objectively true. Such an inference, however, assumes that the will to power is

equivalent to the relational ontology I have traced from Nietzsche’s early writings through his

work in Human, All Too Human, Beyond Good and Evil, and Twilight of the Idols. I resist such an
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
37 However, it should be noted that the will to power is clearly part of Nietzsche’s naturalistic program insofar as his
naturalism is simply opposed to metaphysical explanations. Indeed, one could argue that Nietzsche interprets the
world as will to power so as to eliminate the need for metaphysical principles in explaining natural phenomena.!
38 I hold this view for both the ontological and psychological versions of the doctrine. See Clark (1983) for an

account of this distinction and the claim that the ontological version is a self-conscious myth. Although I am
sympathetic with Clark on this latter point, Nietzsche nevertheless believes that we can have what might be called
perspectival knowledge of what we create (BGE 211) and so this reading of the ontological version of the will to
power does not render it epistemically vacuous.!

! 23!
equation, however, because I understand the will to power to be something that, to use the

language of an oft-cited Nachlass fragment, “completes” the dynamic worldview Nietzsche

inherits from the natural sciences (WP 619; KSA 11, 36[31]). In this sense, the will to power is

something more than the relational ontology of force that the natural sciences justify. To be

sure, Nietzsche intends the will to power to be continuous with the natural sciences and

empirical observation, both because it is said to complete the victorious concept of force and

because it could be falsified if some event could not be explained in terms of the will to power.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche seems to think that whenever we begin to explain, rather than merely

describe,39 we necessarily enter into the realm of interpretation. Thus, the will to power—

Nietzsche’s primary explanans—seems to be an interpretation that transcends the limits of what

we can know through scientific investigations.

Before turning to text that supports such a reading, I want to make a brief remark about

why Nietzsche would feel the need to “complete” the worldview he inherits from the natural

sciences. One of the problems with the relational ontology sketched above is that it results in

two forms of skepticism. The first form of skepticism has already been noted. Because it

presents a world of relations without pre-existing relata, such an ontology creates a disjunction

between the way we think and speak and the way the world is. When we think about relations,

we feel compelled to believe that, as Poellner argues, relations must supervene on pre-existing

relata. Because, on Nietzsche’s view, there are no things-in-themselves, we cannot properly think

such a world. In this way, the world is much like an irrational number. That is, we understand

just enough of it to know that our minds cannot fully grasp it.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39 See GS 112 for Nietzsche’s distinction between description and explanation.

! 24!
 The second form of skepticism is explanatory. According to Nietzsche, knowledge

requires the reduction of the unfamiliar to the familiar such that the former is explained in terms

of the latter (GS 355).40 The problem, however, is that science has done just the opposite by

resolving the familiar or the known into the unfamiliar or unknown. That is, science has taken

the everyday world we think we know so well and reduced it to relations of force that are,

according to Schopenhauer, inexplicable qualitates occulta (WWR I 15). For this reason, Nietzsche

claims that “science is preparing a sovereign ignorance, a feeling that there is no such thing as

‘knowing,’ that it was a kind of arrogance to dream of it, more, that we no longer have the least

notion that warrants our considering ‘knowledge’ even a possibility—that ‘knowing’ itself is a

contradictory idea” (WP 608; KSA 12, 5[14]).

Thus, if there is going to be knowledge of the world such that we can form an adequate

mental representation of it and then use this understanding of the world to explain a wide variety

of phenomena, the process of the natural sciences needs to be reversed. That is, nature has to be

understood in human terms, and we have to explain otherwise unfamiliar phenomena from what

is familiar to humans, rather than trying to explain what is familiar to humans in terms of

something absolutely unfamiliar. On my reading, the will to power makes such explanations

possible. Thus, Nietzsche starts with the “victorious concept ‘force’” he inherits from the natural

sciences, and he humanizes this world—employing “man as an analogy”—by ascribing an “inner

will” to it, which he designates as “‘will to power” (WP 619; KSA 11, 36[31]). In Beyond Good and

Evil, this process of ascribing features of human psychology to the world is most explicit in

section 36, where Nietzsche moves from an analysis of his inner world of “desires and passions”

to asserting the right “to determine all efficient force univocally as—the will to power.” This,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
40 See Poellner (1995, 38).

! 25!
Nietzsche tells us, is “the world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according

to its ‘intelligible character’” (BGE 36).

The idea is that the path of the natural sciences makes it impossible to provide

explanations based on fundamental facts, and if we are still interested in seeking these kinds of

explanations, we need to transcend the limits of the natural sciences and anthropomorphize

nature for the sake of what Nietzsche calls “knowledge”. This, I take it, is what Nietzsche means

when he claims that the “will to knowledge” rests on a more fundamental “will to ignorance”

and that “science at its best seeks most to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably

constructed and suitably falsified world” (BGE 24). That is, if science is going to overcome the

aforementioned skepticisms and achieve a “knowledge” that includes an explanatory account of

phenomena, it must begin by consciously anthropomorphizing a nature that is otherwise bereft of

the various “aesthetic anthropomorphisms” that make it intelligible to us (GS 109).

At this point, some might contend, pace Nietzsche, that a non-falsifying and non-

anthropomorphizing science is indeed capable of providing explanations by appealing to laws of

nature. This, however, is precisely what Nietzsche rejects in sections 14 and 22 of Beyond Good

and Evil.41 Although physics might provide an accurate description of a world in terms of

interrelated forces and even identify persistent regularities or patterns, it does not, according to

Nietzsche, discover laws that can then explain the regular patterns of an ever-changing world.

Instead, Nietzsche argues that these laws are themselves anthropomorphic projections (GS 109;

WP 631; KSA 12, 2[139]) and so mechanistic physics is “only an interpretation and exegesis of

the world (to suit us […])” (BGE 14). Moreover, Nietzsche claims that the nomological

explanation of the natural world is an interpretation that reveals the democratic instincts of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
41 Also see WP 629 (KSA 12, 7[14]).

! 26!
interpreters. The idea is that democracy implies equality, and the nomological interpretation of

nature entails that all entities are equal before the law. Because of the anthropomorphic nature

of nomological explanations, Nietzsche, who is animated by a different set of instincts and

concerns, assumes the right to interpret the same text of nature in terms of the equally

anthropomorphic principle of the will to power, an interpretation which acknowledges an order

of rank in nature itself. Although some might object that this too is a mere interpretation,

Nietzsche famously remarks that this would be so much the better (BGE 22).

This remark suggests that Nietzsche is fully aware that understanding the world as will to

power both anthropomorphizes and simplifies the scientific world of force and so the

explanations he offers in terms of the will to power are based on an interpretation, not a

discovered fact. Further support for this reading comes from Nietzsche’s repeated remarks in

the Nachlass that he is offering, in Beyond Good and Evil, an “interpretation, not explanation” (WP

604; KSA 12, 2[82]).42 Because of this, one can understand the will to power as an inference to the

best interpretation. However, what is “best” here is not an interpretation that gets the facts

maximally right, for there are no ultimate explanatory facts, but rather one that most enhances

and promotes life (BGE 4), and the will to power does this by explaining natural phenomena in a

way that eliminates any reference to a metaphysical world.

So the idea is that when Nietzsche talks about essences and explaining phenomena from

essences, he is (almost) always referring to the will to power, and since the will to power is an

interpretation, not a discovered fact, Nietzsche’s talk of essences and explanation from essences

goes beyond the naturalistic (even scientistic) program executed in Human, All Too Human and is

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
42 Also see KSA 12, 1[121] and 2[82].

! 27!
instead part of the philosophy of the future adumbrated in Beyond Good and Evil.43 In this sense,

the will to power is part of Nietzsche’s project of legislating values (BGE 211) and so part of

Nietzsche’s attempt to create the world in his own image (BGE 9). Thus, readers such as Leiter

and even John Richardson44 are right to find in Nietzsche an attempt to provide a systematic

explanation of phenomena in the way scientists and philosophers have traditionally sought to do.

However, Nietzsche’s attempt to explain various phenomena such as Christian morality in terms

of the will to power depends on an interpretation that transcends the limits of scientific

discovery and ventures into a life-affirming program of artistic creation that consciously

interprets the world from a human perspective.

VI. Concluding Remarks on Nietzsche’s Naturalized Aestheticism

In a way, my efforts here can be understood as a subtle plea to avoid the temptation to

rehash contemporary debates between the likes of Richard Rorty and Daniel Dennett in

interpreting Nietzsche’s project.45 Whereas Nehamas defends a literary-minded, postmodern

Nietzsche of the Rortyean sort, Leiter responds by placing Nietzsche in a naturalist camp

spearheaded by the likes of Dennett. In contrast, I have argued that there are a number of ways

in which Nietzsche’s naturalism can be reconciled with his aestheticism if we reject certain

features of Nehamas’ and Leiter’s respective readings, and so Nietzsche’s interest in the natural

sciences and offering naturalistic explanations should not be opposed to an aesthetic worldview

and his corresponding interest in the redemptive powers of art. Although there may be concerns

about my own renderings of Nietzsche’s ontological and epistemological views, the purpose of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
43 Nevertheless, the explanatory program of Beyond Good and Evil is still naturalistic in the sense that Nietzsche seeks
to explain various phenomena without recourse to non-natural or metaphysical entities. This, I take it, is the
naturalism expressed in BGE 230.!
44 Richardson (1996, 3) presents Nietzsche as engaged in the very traditional project of providing systematic

explanations from essences, and the will to power plays a key role in his account.
45 See, for instance, Dennett (2000).!

! 28!
this paper has been to show that we can begin to think of Nietzsche’s project in terms of a

naturalized aestheticism, one that uses the results of the natural sciences to replace a

metaphysical-moral understanding of the world with a dynamic conception of the natural world

that makes possible and even demands an aesthetic affirmation of existence.

REFERENCES

Works by Nietzsche:

Reference Editions of Nietzsche’s Works:

KSA: Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studien Ausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari,

15 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. (Cited by volume and then fragment number).

KSB: Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, 8

vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986. (Cited by volume and then letter number).

Translations of and Abbreviations for Nietzsche’s Works:

BGE: Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966 (1886). (Cited by

section number)

BT: The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966

(1872). (Cited by section number)

EH: Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1989 (1888). (Cited by

abbreviated section title and section number).

GM: On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1968 (1887). (Cited

by essay and then section number).

GS: The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974 (1882, 1887). (Cited by

section number)

! 29!
HH: Human All-too-Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986

(1878–9). (Cited by section number).

PPP: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, trans. G. Whitlock. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001

(1872-1876). (Cited by page number).

PTA: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. M. Cowan. Washington, D.C.: Gateway, 1962

(1873). (Cited by section number).

TI: Twilight of the Idols. In Portable Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufmann, 463-563. New York: Viking

Press, 1954. (Cited by abbreviated section title and number).

TL: “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. R.

Geuss, 141-153. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 (1873). (Cited by section

number).

WP: The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968

(1883-1888). (Cited by section number with corresponding reference to KSA).

Works by Other Authors:

Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 2000. “Nietzsche’s Brave New World of Force: On Nietzsche’s 1873

‘Time Atom Theory’ Fragment and the Matter of Boscovich’s Influence on Nietzsche.”

Journal of Nietzsche Studies 20: 5-33.

Boscovich, Roger Joseph. 1922. A Theory of Natural Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court Publishing.

Brobjer, Thomas. 2008. Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press.

Clark, Maudemarie. 1983. “Nietzsche’s Doctrines of the Will to Power.” Nietzsche Studien 12:

458-468.

------. 1990. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

! 30!
Danto, Arthur. 1965. Nietzsche as Philosopher. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dennett, Daniel. 2000. “Postmodernism and Truth.” The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress

of Philosophy 8: 93-103.

Gemes, Ken. 2013. “Life’s Perspectives.” In The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. K. Gemes and

J. Richardson, 553-576. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Glatzeder, Britta M. 2000. Perspektiven der Wünschbarkeit: Nietzsches frühe Metaphysikkritik. Berlin:

Philo.

Heller, Peter. 1972. Von den ersten und letzten Dingen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Lange, F. A. 1866. Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart. Iserlohn: J.

Baedeker.

------. 1950 (trans. of the 2nd edition (1873)). The History of Materialism. Trans. Ernest Chester

Thomas. New York: The Humanities Press.

Leiter, Brian. 1992. “Nietzsche and Aestheticism.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 30(2): 275-

290.

------. 1994. “Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals.” In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality:

Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, ed. R. Schacht, 334-357. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

------. 2002. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge.

Mittasch, Alwin. 1952. Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph. Stuttgart: A. Kröner.

Nehamas, Alexander. 1985. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Poellner, Peter. 1995. Nietzsche and Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

! 31!
------. 2013. “Nietzsche’s Metaphysical Sketches: Causality and Will to Power.” In The Oxford

Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. K. Gemes and J. Richardson, 675-700. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Richardson, John. 1996. Nietzsche’s System. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schlechta, Karl and Anni Anders. 1962. Friedrich Nietzsche: Von den vorborgenen Anfängen seines

Philosophierens. Stuttgart: Frommann.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation. Vol. I (1818) and Vol. II (1844).

Trans. E. J. F. Payne. New York: Dover. (Cited by the abbreviation WWR followed by

volume and section number).

Teichmüller, Gustav. 1882. Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt. Breslau: W. Koebner.

! 32!