Ansell-Pearson - Review Hill

Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought
(review)
Ansell-Pearson, Keith, 1960-
The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 29, Spring 2005, pp. 54-71
(Article)
Published by Penn State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nie.2005.0001
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nie/summary/v029/29.1ansell-pearson.html
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050 Book Review (54-80) 3/21/05 12:13 PM Page 54
Book Reviews
R. Kevin Hill, Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003; 0–19-925583–0.
KEITH ANSELL PEARSON
In this study, R. Kevin Hill makes a major and important contribution to Nietzsche studies. It is
among the finest studies of his philosophy published in recent years, and provides the most thor-
ough and incisive demonstration to date of the Kantian context of Nietzsche’s philosophical devel-
opment, without a proper understanding of which key aspects of his thinking are largely
unintelligible. Hill’s study is part of an emerging trend in Nietzsche studies in the English-speaking
world, away from fashionable and, in many ways, philosophically illiterate “postmodern” readings
of Nietzsche (this illiteracy is not peculiar to postmodern readings in my view), and focusing more
on the philosophical context of his development and preoccupations, with special attention being
devoted to Nietzsche’s neo-Kantian sources and influences.1 Hill’s study is superior to any other so
far published because of the depth of his reading of Kant (all three critiques are treated here in judi-
cious and illuminating terms with special attention devoted to the third critique) and the probing
and thorough manner in which he shows the connections between Nietzsche’s philosophical pre-
occupations throughout his intellectual output and Kant’s critical philosophy.
Like many commentators today, especially those from the United States, Hill feels compelled
to open his study by addressing the “postmodern Nietzsche.” He appears to align his “Nietzsche”
with the cause of analytic naturalism, but as the book unfolds he is careful to distinguish
Nietzsche’s Kantian-inspired naturalism from this more contemporary brand. It is unfortunate,
however, that, like other contemporary commentators on Nietzsche, Hill falls to the temptation of
opening his study with some thoughts on the postmodern. He has an understandable concern over
the philosophical illiteracy this has fostered in our appreciation of Nietzsche. The postmodern
appears to be associated by him, as with others who wish to protect Nietzsche from its vacuities,
with something called “continental philosophy” and with “deconstruction” (and the respective
“evils” they have brought in their wake). One may wish to make specific objections against
deconstruction, but to think that a sweeping and generalized attack is equivalent to making a
serious contribution to philosophical thinking is to delude oneself and insulate oneself from the
need to carry out a serious engagement with it. What we commonly find in this kind of dismissal
are little more than unspecific allusions to so-called deconstructionist motifs, such as the
“deconstruction” of truth, reality, and the subject (Hill makes two distinctly peculiar and “off”
remarks along these lines on pages 121 and 163). It would be more impressive if writers would
deal with specific texts, specific arguments, and specific thinkers, as opposed to engaging with
what are little more than phantasms and conducting “readings” that amount to violent acts of mis-
reading. It also needs to be pointed out, though it is somewhat alarming that it needs to be, that it
is core “continental” readings that have insisted upon the relevance of Kant for a full appreciation
of Nietzsche, and this a long time before philosophers of an analytical persuasion started to get
interested in Kant and in the Kantian aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking. I need mention only the
readings developed by Deleuze and Heidegger. Kant figures heavily in their respective and
differing interpretations of Nietzsche, and both were authors of independent studies of Kant. Hill’s
remarks are a blatant distortion of a more complex reality. Unfortunately, it would seem that this
is how many analytically minded philosophers who write on Nietzsche like to do their philosophy.
Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 29, 2005

Copyright ©2005 The Friedrich Nietzsche Society.
54
Book Reviews 55
I wish to focus critical attention on some of the details of Hill’s reading of Nietzsche and Kant.
For some time now, commentators have speculated on the extent of Nietzsche’s acquaintance with
and knowledge of Kant. Was his reading of Kant merely superficial? Was it essentially second-
hand, gleaned from such sources as Lange’s History of Materialism and Kuno Fischer’s volumes
on Kant in his history of philosophy? There has been some limited commentary on Nietzsche’s
dissertation outline of 1867–68 on the organic and teleology since Kant, which seems to show that
he had a direct knowledge of, and conducted his own original encounter with, Kant.2 In addition,
several major studies have sought to deal with the vexed issue of the role of the thing-in-itself in
Kant’s thought, going back to studies in the 1970s,3 and encompassing the issue of the “falsification-
thesis,” notably as treated by Maudemarie Clark in her influential study of 1990, Nietzsche on Truth
and Philosophy.4 George Stack made a major contribution with his study Lange and Nietzsche,
published in 1983, while more recently Michael S. Green has sought to provide insight into the
context and development of Nietzsche’s thinking by tracing the influence on it of Afrikan Spir’s text
of 1873, Thought and Reality.5 Also surprising is the extent to which our understanding of
Nietzsche’s relation to Schopenhauer still remains so philosophically limited and perfunctory. Hill
has a subtle and sophisticated appreciation of Kant and Schopenhauer, and he is one of the few
commentators to grasp the fundamentally Kantian and not Schopenhauerean nature of Nietzsche’s
early thinking. His reading of The Birth of Tragedy clearly demonstrates this, I believe, and in the
face of the equivocations of Nietzsche’s text. Nietzsche, from the beginning, remains more faithful
to Kant’s critical project than Schopenhauer did. He has an independent reading of Kant, initially
mediated by Lange but then going beyond Lange’s own position. It is clear that the later Nietzsche
is seeking to break out of the confines of Kant’s critical philosophy—he does not accept the
transcendental ideality of space and time, he accords a primary role to evolution in his own critical
thinking on our categorial schemas and on the problem of representation, he outlines an ontology
of will to power, etc.—but none of these make proper sense unless they are understood in the
context of his reading of Kant and neo-Kantian literature. As the author himself puts it, “For
Nietzsche, as for Hegel, Kant is the philosopher with whom one must come to terms” (6)—a point
long ago insisted upon by the likes of Heidegger and Deleuze.
Hill’s study is divided into two main parts. Part 1, “The First Reading: Judgement (1868–
1874),” focuses on the early Nietzsche and the impact and influence on his early work of Kant’s
third critique published in 1790, The Critique of Judgement (CJ), and it provides a set of thought-
provoking insights into The Birth of Tragedy (BT) and the unpublished essay “On Truth and Lies
in a Nonmoral Sense” of 1873. In addition, it offers an introduction to the principal features and
tasks of CJ, Nietzsche’s doctoral dissertation outline, and his early critique of Schopenhauer of
1868, the significance of which is only now beginning to be fully appreciated in the critical
literature.6 In Part Two, “The Second Reading: Reason (1880–1889),” the focus shifts to
examining Nietzsche’s wrestling with Kantian topics and problems in his later and mature work,
such as the nature of space and time, the questions of metaphysics, the nature of the subject,
and so on. It is here that the author provides an instructive and incisive account of Nietzsche’s
reading of Kant’s transcendental deduction and the paralogisms, something I have not seen carried
out at this length and with this degree of penetration in any other study. The book concludes with
a chapter on “The critique of morality,” which attempts a reading of the three essays of the
Genealogy of Morality (OGM) against the backdrop of Kant’s moral philosophy, notably the
second critique, The Critique of Practical Reason. I shall limit myself to two aspects of his
reading, first, his reading of the early Nietzsche in the context of Nietzsche’s reception of, and
engagement, with the third critique, and, second, with one aspect of the second part of his study,
namely, the question of representation as it bears on the topic of the thing-in-itself and the
falsification-thesis. There are many important aspects of the author’s reading I shall have to
neglect or bypass.
56 Book Reviews
The Early Nietzsche and Kant
The author begins with the contention that Nietzsche’s reading of the CJ “was a crucial influence
on BT” (39). He acknowledges that it has been known for some time that Nietzsche read the CJ in
1867–68. However, because he read it so early and rarely refers to it in his later texts, the extent of
its influence on his thinking has not been sufficiently appreciated. He notes some important points
about CJ and its reception, such as that the structure of this text is often ignored. Both in pedagogy
and in philosophical readings, the major second part of Kant’s text on teleology is frequently ignored
or marginalized, which is a trend that has continued in contemporary readings, be they analytic or
continental.7 The second part can be read as a contribution to the “philosophy of biology.” It has
been devalued because it is seen to be informed and guided by a theological motivation that has been
rendered redundant by Darwin’s revolution and the triumph of Darwinism. The author is right to
stress that this is a very misguided and poor judgment of the text. In addition, and something he
does not note, it conceals the fact that Kant’s thinking on biology came to play a crucial and pro-
ductive role in nineteenth-century biology, especially in Germany, and remains highly pertinent
today for questions concerning self-organization and autopoiesis.8 Nietzsche’s early reception of
Kant is distinguished by the fact that it operates in the territory of this neglected second part of the
third critique, with a focus on questions of purposiveness, self-organization, the mechanical origins
of life, and with the Darwinian revolution casting a shadow over Nietzsche’s reception of, and
wrestling with, Kant. Hill insists, correctly in my view, that the unity of Kant’s third critique is cru-
cial to comprehending “its meaning and place within the Critical system as a whole” (40).
Furthermore, he contends that Nietzsche’s reception of the text was “conditioned by a sense of its
unity” (ibid.). His purpose in developing his reading has been clearly and precisely thought through:
“Nietzsche came to the third Critique out of an attempt to resolve difficulties in the metaphysics and
epistemology of biology. But I believe that he left the reading with a new aesthetics closely linked
to that metaphysics and epistemology” (ibid.).
Hill provides a succinct but highly instructive account of the third critique, offering an account
of why Kant wrote it, the role it was designed to play in the critical system, and so on. I cannot follow
this reading here. The main point to be extracted is this: the third critique is not simply or even
primarily a work of aesthetics but one on judgment, on its scope and limits, with the specific focus
being on the nature and pertinence of reflective judgments, of which aesthetic and teleological
judgments form the sole species. The contrast, as is well known, is with determinative judgments in
which a particular is subsumed under a universal that is already given. In a reflective judgment, by
contrast, a particular is given, but a universal has to be found for it, and to do this judgment proposes
to itself a principle of reflection, notably the finality or purposiveness of nature (whether in the
domain of the aesthetic or that of teleology). An example of the first kind of judgment would be
judging a distance, in which a particular thing is made to conform to a concept (such as that “this
chair is ten feet away from me”). An example of the latter kind of judgment would be estimating a
work of art and declaring it to be “great” (it might be supposed that in making such a judgment we
already have to hand a universal concept, such as “greatness,” that we then automatically or
mechanically apply to a particular work of art, but Kant shows that this is not the case; to say that a
novel is 450 pages long is to apply a determinative judgment, but to say that the same novel is great
is to make a different kind of judgment altogether). In CJ, Kant’s focus is on aesthetic judgments,
which concern the beautiful and the sublime, and teleological judgments, which concern living
organisms and where an organism is to be conceived not simply as an organized being but as one
capable of self-organization.9 Whereas determinative judgments possess an objective validity (for
transcendental subjects), those of the reflective type or mode possess only an intersubjective validity.
The author argues that Kant had good reasons for thinking that reflective judgment required its own
“critique,” which is the task he set himself in the third critique, and the claim that there is a structural
similarity between aesthetic and teleological claims to “knowledge” is plausible (67).
Book Reviews 57
The importance of reflective judgment for inquiring into Nietzsche’s thinking will be readily
apparent to anyone familiar with the “philosophy of as-if” expounded in the neo-Kantian work of
Hans Vaihinger. Reflective judgment calls our attention to the “as-if” status of much of our think-
ing, such as “we can think as if nature was designed for our aesthetic pleasure and enjoyment,” or
“we can think as if nature reveals features of non-mechanical self-organization,” etc. We are not in
these cases making any constitutive claims; rather, they are regulative claims to knowledge that
guide us in our attempt to develop a unity in our knowledge of nature and to make claims about the
functional articulation of organisms. It is worth citing Hill at length, in which he provides what I
believe is a near-perfect summary of Kant’s presentation of the question concerning teleology:
Kant does, on occasion, express scepticism about the competence of mechanics to provide
adequate explanations for biological phenomena. However, his claim that there will never
be a “Newton (of a) blade of grass” . . . rests not on an unwarranted pessimism about the
future development of physiology, biochemistry, and molecular biology. Rather, he is claim-
ing that there could never be a reduction of functional claims about body organs to any con-
junction of claims in physics or chemistry. This is so even if the latter should prove competent
at providing complete explanations on their own terms . . . functional claims involve a tacit
reference to normativity. One cannot say what something is for without saying what it is
supposed to do. For Kant, normative claims cannot have content independent of the pref-
erences and intentions of agents. There is no fact about what is supposed to happen if there
are no agents with preferences; if there were no agents, then there would only be what hap-
pens, not what is supposed to happen . . . the moral order, like the natural order, is con-
structed from elements immanent to the subject; it is crucial to Kant’s anthropocentrism,
his “modernism,” to have divested the world of intrinsic purposes, things that are just sup-
posed to happen without reference to our purposes and our freedom to determine them.
(68–69)
The argument is not that intentions must have a moral significance, but rather that we have no other
concept of function available to us than that of something being put to use in an intentional manner
(using a hammer, for example). For example, when we “conceptualize a lung as a respiratory organ
we must think in terms of what respiration is for,” and this “requires that we adopt intentionalistic
concepts, however bracketed” (69). Kant’s critical point is that we need to know and determine what
we are doing when we use such language and his argument is that functional claims are made on
the order of reflective judgments: “I must simply bear in mind that I am only making a report on
what, in the face of this object, I can’t help but think. Such claims will not be about the object directly,
and will enjoy the same epistemic status that aesthetic judgments enjoy: merely intersubjective valid-
ity (70).
Now, if no attempt is being made to link God and biology, in which the latter would disclose evi-
dence in support of the former, where does this leave Kant’s position in the wake of Darwin? Hill
argues that here matters are much more complex than is commonly supposed (70). The assertion
that functional claims, properly made, do not provide evidence of a designing God means that “God”
cannot be supplanted with some new explanatory posit. This is the danger courted by Darwinism
when it speaks of a “blind watchmaker” in place of physico-theology. Kant’s response, Hill notes,
would be to say that this is to make a reflective judgment about evolution, namely, that although
organisms are not designed we interpret them as if “selection” was designing their fitness. It is impor-
tant to appreciate the precise nature of the argument: Hill is not saying that Darwinism in no way
changes how Kant’s position should be received, but rather that “it need not affect his central claim
that teleological judgement is essential to biology and that teleological judgements are reflective
judgements” (71).10
A set of quite specific questions can now be asked concerning Nietzsche’s reading of CJ: Why
did he decide to read it when he did and what expectations did he bring to it? What was he looking
58 Book Reviews
for? What did he find in it? And how did his reading of the third critique shape his views in BT and
the associated essays and materials of this period? While Nietzsche’s interest in the conditions of a
healthy culture, his reading of the Greeks, and his appreciation of Wagner are matters that have been
subjected to elaborate analysis, the “core philosophical questions in metaphysics, epistemology,
ethics, and aesthetics” that “continued to press on him as he developed his responses to these and
other issues” have not been effectively examined (74). It is Hill’s view that Nietzsche read Kant in
an effort to resolve a set of problems that were thrown up by his encounters with Schopenhauer
(1865) and Lange (1866), notably the problem of teleology and the significance of the Darwinian
revolution for wrestling with it. According to the author, Kant’s notion of reflective judgment could
instructively address the difficulties Nietzsche faced. The effect of encountering Lange was to
encourage Nietzsche to embark on a reading of Kant independent of Schopenhauer. Specifically it
encouraged him not to accept Schopenhauer’s “dogmatic philosophizing about things-in-them-
selves.” As Hill rightly notes, devastating criticisms of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics appear in
Nietzsche’s Nachlass around the same time he reads CJ.11 The key insight into Nietzsche’s philo-
sophical development from this point onward is the following:
The third Critique . . . made available to Nietzsche a new, non-Schopenhaurian way to do

transcendent metaphysics without transgressing Kantian constraints on determinative
judgements. As we saw, reflective judging enables the individual legitimately to commit to
claims, including transcendent metaphysical claims, which, though intersubjectively
acceptable, are nonetheless not objectively valid. Such claims are ultimately rooted in our
aesthetic sensitivity, for the very faculty that enables us to be sensitive to artistic value in
objects also enables us to make reflective judgements regarding the functional structure of
organisms and the hierarchical structure of the natural world. Kant’s transcendental prin-
ciple of judgement, that we must judge the world to display an elegance satisfying our cog-
nitive interests, is the beginning of the early Nietzsche’s conception of the world as a work
of art. The embedded claims of reflective judgement are themselves the product of our aes-
thetic sensitivity. (74)
Nietzsche’s early reading of Kant gave him the philosophical licence to develop his edifying myth
of the Dionysian world-artist. According to Hill, Nietzsche’s myth owes more to Kant and his notion
of a divine transcendent understanding that projects an empirical world than it does to
Schopenhauer’s atheistic cosmology of a mindless will that objectifies itself in individuated phe-
nomena. Where Nietzsche departs from both is with the attempt to “justify” the world as an aes-
thetic phenomenon: “What has escaped most readers of BT is that the key to grasping how the world
is justified lies in realizing that the phenomenon is not for us. This suggests that the “theodicy” theme
in BT may be meant quite literally. If so, the later Nietzsche’s talk of the death of God may not have
been so much an axiom for him as a lived experience” (75).
The question of teleology is an extraordinarily complex one. Kant’s treatment of it in CJ, as the
author so admirably demonstrates in this study devoted to Nietzsche, is one of the most subtle and
sophisticated treatments to be found in philosophical literature. According to his reading, Nietzsche
could not accept Schopenhauer’s quasi-teleological conception of the world as will as this unindi-
viduated and undifferentiated will is timeless and outside evolution. Lange’s account of Darwin’s
theory of natural selection made all the difference and rendered in his eyes Schopenhauer’s use of
metaphysics to explain life superfluous. However, Nietzsche, he argues, was unwilling to completely
embrace a Darwinian rejection of teleology. Part of the reason for this was his appreciation of a
Kantian-inspired point: mechanistic explanation of biological phenomena is caught up in repre-
sentation, that is, “mind-dependent appearances” (83).
As is well known, Spinoza based a great deal of his thinking on a dismissal of final causes, and
conceived events taking place in the world in terms of a strict necessity. For Spinoza, final causes
Book Reviews 59
are nothing more than human fictions and inventions, while the construal of nature in accordance
with a purposive design merely satisfies the superstitious (human, all too human) need to find mean-
ing in nature. However, as Schopenhauer points out, Spinoza’s position ultimately amounts to dog-
matism and has little that is empirical to support it. This is why he accuses Spinoza of being
completely ignorant of nature! (World as Will and Representation II, chapter 26). For Schopenhauer
the issue of teleology cannot be avoided and he sees no convincing reason why it cannot be inves-
tigated free of the prejudices of either physico-theology (the idea that there is a transcendent designer
or creator) or anthropo-teleology, which are the two forms censored by Spinoza. Lange’s approach
to the issue is to draw our attention to the fact that all forms of teleology until now have been anthro-
pomorphic, that is, based on the assumption that nature proceeds in a way that is similar to human
purposiveness (seeking and desiring a goal and drawing up a plan to realize it). What the human
mind cannot tolerate is the idea that nature proceeds outside the order of design. However, for Lange
this in itself is not sufficient for rejecting teleology tout court. It simply means that the issue can-
not be conceived in terms of a “humanly calculating intelligence.”12 He thus argues that there is a
teleology that is compatible, even identical, with Darwinism.13
Nietzsche would seem to ally himself in his work with the Spinozist tendency of modern thought.
The following note from the Nachlass of 1884 could be said to provide clear evidence of this. In it,
Nietzsche speaks of his “philosophical genealogy” by telling us that he feels he is related to the
“anti-teleological, Spinozistic movement” of his age and to the “mechanistic movement,” in which
all moral and aesthetic questions are traced back to physiological ones, all physiological ones to
chemical ones, and all chemical ones to mechanical ones, but with the difference that he does not
believe in “matter.” And, he concludes, he seeks to conduct “philosophy not as dogma, but as a pro-
visional regulative program of research” (KSA 11, 26 [432]). However, we know that his attitude
toward a strictly mechanistic explanation is an ambivalent one. On the one hand, he approves of it
since in his eyes it wins an important victory over teleological explanations that rely on final causes
(he is insistent, for example, that in the domain of human actions the intention in no way explains
the action). In addition, he never abandons his commitment to the view that the purposive has its
origins in the unpurposive (this is a position he embraces in his early reflections on teleology since
Kant).14 On the other hand, however, he holds that the mechanistic way of thinking largely serves
the human need and desire for calculability.15 Its raison d’être, therefore, is essentially practical and
it gives up any proper understanding, which lies beyond its scope.
In the mid to late-1860s, Hill shows, Nietzsche was largely working out his own independent
position. Lange’s attempted reconciliation of Darwinism and teleology only appears in the later edi-
tions of his book, so it would not have been available to Nietzsche in the 1860s. It is clear, then, that
in the mid-1860s Nietzsche turned to Kant in an effort to clarify his question concerning teleology.
His aim was to do so without transgressing the constraints Kant had placed on metaphysics. Hill
subjects Nietzsche’s dissertation outline on the organic since Kant to a careful reading, noting the
presence of Darwinism on Nietzsche’s notes (for example, the centrality accorded to the insight that
the living can arise out of the mechanical) and also the importance of Goethe’s work in morphol-
ogy. The influence of Goethe suggests to him that Nietzsche’s thought is not only contemporary
with strands of early neo-Kantianism but also wishes to form “nostalgic relations with German
Idealism. . . . Nietzsche will end up identifying what he calls ‘the life force’ with Kant’s intuitive
understanding posited by reflective judgement” (91). The attraction of Goethe’s work on the meta-
morphoses of plants to Nietzsche was its insight into the basic patterns of nature as mutable forces
expressing themselves in a rich diversity of circumstances over time. There is no unfolding of a telos
for Goethe, but rather an attempt to explain organic forms out of effective causes, thus indicating a
process that is immanent and nonintentional. The inadequacy of this account for Nietzsche resides
in the failure to appreciate the mind-dependence of organic form itself. Nietzsche reaches the posi-
tion that all claims of natural science have only an intersubjective validity, that is, the validity of a
reflective judgment. This is true of physics as well as biology because all natural science relies on
60 Book Reviews
representational concepts. As he puts it in 1868, and as cited by Hill: “Therein belong force, mat-
ter, individual, law organism, atom, final cause. These are not constitutive but only reflective judge-
ments” (92). The later Nietzsche will continue to wrestle with this problem, it does not disappear
from his work. As Hill observes, Nietzsche has carried out “an astonishing expansion of what Kant
had originally licensed. . . . Nietzsche is reducing the entire sphere of human cognitive activity, apart
from mathematics, to an enterprise of producing merely intersubjective valid expressions of intel-
lectual capacity” (93).
This early encounter with Kant would leave Nietzsche, I believe, with a philosophical problem
that continued to inform his deepest thinking on questions of life and evolution well into the 1880s.
In his dissertation outline, Nietzsche notes that “[w]e grasp about a living thing nothing but forms,”
but the “eternally becoming is life.” The problem with the intellect is that it is “too dull” to recog-
nize the main feature of life, which is “continuing change.” In order for something to be judged to
be knowable, the intellect must reduce it to a form. But, Nietzsche writes, “In truth there can be no
form, because in each point sits infinity.” Furthermore, “[a] concept similar to form is the concept
of the individual. Organisms are called unities, goal-centres. But unities exist only for the intellect.
Each individual has an infinity of living individuals within itself. It is only a coarse perception, per-
haps taken from the human body.” He concludes: “All ‘forms’ can be thrown out, but life!”16 Echoes
of the problematic he is dealing with here can be found throughout Nietzsche’s mature work and
can be found succinctly expressed in Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) section 36 and its delineation
of a “pre-form” (Vorform) of life. Although Nietzsche rejects Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the
will to life, this does not mean he thinks outside the problematic Schopenhauer has opened up. He
continues to be preoccupied with the problem of thinking the world from inside. Hill goes wrong,
in my view, when he construes this problem of the inside as a problem of phenomenology, that is,
as a problem of what it is like to be alive (93–94). This is mistaken because Nietzsche’s philosoph-
ical concern is not so much with the question of what life is or feels “like” but with whether a strictly
or solely mechanistic approach to the evolution of “life” is adequate. The contest staged in Nietzsche
is not between biology and phenomenology but between different biologies. Of course, we may feel
a life force pulsating within us under special circumstances or through singular experiences, but this
does not mean that an attention to the “vital” aspects of life, such as the complexity of genesis and
growth and the actual tendencies of evolution itself (differentiation and individuation, for example),
is reducible to phenomenological experience or that the issue of a life force is equivalent to the ques-
tion of “what it is like to be alive.”
Hill astutely notes that the key problem remains that of individuation. The notion of the “thing-
in-itself” might designate the problem, but it does so badly, since it is outside the order of duration
and evolution. Nietzsche articulates his objection to the thing-in-itself precisely on this basis in sec-
tion16 of the first volume of Human, All Too Human. Nietzsche, Hill argues, could not accept a
“bootstrap” account of the emergence of mind or mentality. How can the phenomenal world be
effected if not by something other than itself, say by something we can refer to as a level of pre-
empirical or sub-phenomenal complexity? In the notes of 1870–71, we find Nietzsche positing a
“primordial intellect” (Urintellekt). It is something of this that gets named as the will to power in
the later work. Hill argues that Nietzsche sets aside both Schopenhauer’s rendition of an unindi-
viduated thing-in-itself and the individuated experience of the human subject. Space, time, and
causality cannot be deduced from “our pitiful human consciousness”; at the same time, the
Urintellekt cannot be modeled on conscious cognition (with its folkish prejudices). According to
Hill, Nietzsche’s solution is to borrow from Kant’s notion of a supersensible intuition in which a
primordial unity (Ur-Eine of BT) projects a world of appearance for itself to observe (what he will
call in BT the “rapturous vision” and “pleasurable illusion”). In short, Nietzsche transforms the will
into the Dionysian world-artist in which the tragic artist is also a projection of the primordial unity,
engaging in activity similar to the metaphysical activity in which the world itself engages. Human
beings are not the sources or originators of the phenomenal world but simply are episodes within it
Book Reviews 61
(101). Nietzsche’s resolution of this philosophical problematic is Kantian with the difference being
that he does not “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (the moral solution) but rather
denies knowledge to make room for art. For both Kant and Nietzsche, the supersensible is accessed
via the aesthetic and art. Nietzsche departs from Kant in separating art from any question of moral
elevation and historical progression.
I agree with Hill that reading Nietzsche in the context of his encounter with Kant and the prob-
lematic of the third critique can best illuminate the nature of the problems he is wrestling with. The
fundamental problem is the one originally opened up and given articulation by Kant: “Consciousness
and experience for Kant are not mysterious brute facts, but things that need to be assembled from
preconscious materials” (100). This is itself already a philosophical functionalism and philosophi-
cal naturalism. A break in Nietzsche’s thinking is clearly announced in 1878 with the publication
of Human, All Too Human. Nietzsche, Hill argues, now goes with the empirical realism of Kant and
contra the seductions of reflective judgment.17 Reflective judgment contains too much wishful think-
ing, something sterner is required, and we find Nietzsche in the texts of his middle period coming
to embrace scientific inquiry and an ontogeny of concepts as the more useful guide to the phenom-
enal world and our representation of it. The reflective mode of judgment is ultimately and, as
Nietzsche came to appreciate, arbitrary, even whimsical, being little more than a sign of our “cog-
nitive incapacity and cowardice” (116). One is free either to utilize it or not utilize it: “In the end,
the difference between Kant and the later Nietzsche rested not on evidence, but on a difference of
moral attitude. Or if one finds the language of morality objectionable here, one could say: it was,
finally a matter of taste” (116). Perhaps once could add to this the matter of the “intellectual con-
science” and Nietzsche’s growing attachment to it. He would not stop wrestling with the problems
he staged for himself in the 1860s; and we also know that he would not rest content with the reso-
lutions effected in the texts of the middle period. The work of the mid- to late 1880s represents a
return to the problematic of “life” staged in the early materials. Here we find Nietzsche compelled
to outline an experimental ontology—the doctrine of the will to power—and doing so in terms of
the “conscience of method.”
The Later Nietzsche and Kant
Hill begins the second part of his study with the claim that Nietzsche’s “frequently mentioned “nat-
uralism“—and frequently presented in inadequate philosophical terms, I would add—“only comes
into focus if we regard it as a commitment to the transcendental reality (properly understood) of
space and time” (119). The claim, then, is that Nietzsche’s own account of cognition and meta-
physics develops out of an attempt to retain Kant’s account of cognition while rejecting the tran-
scendental ideality of space and time. The question is whether this is a plausible appreciation of
what Nietzsche is doing and one that can demonstrate the coherent nature of his thinking. And what
is “transcendental realism,” properly understood? The problem is that we cannot naively attribute
such a position to Nietzsche. If transcendental realism means claiming that our cognitive categories
correspond to how things actually are, in contrast to transcendental idealism, which claims that our
intuitions and categories enjoy a transcendental ideality and empirical reality that is valid only for
us—and similarly constituted beings—and with respect to a realm of objective appearance, then
clearly Nietzsche is not a transcendental realist (the category of the “thing” is for him completely
suspect on account of it being wrapped up in the evolved operations of our mind). Instead, Nietzsche
embarks upon an evolutionary account of categories and concepts, providing what is lacking in Kant,
namely, a genesis of the intellect.
Support for reading him as transcendental realist can be found in a note from 1872–73 where
Nietzsche suggests, in a manner that is close to what is known as the “Trendelenburg alternative,”
that although the forms of the intellect have arisen gradually out of matter, it is plausible that these
62 Book Reviews
forms are adequate to the truth (cited p. 126). Hill argues, however, that Nietzsche’s specific contri-
bution to the insight found in both Schopenhauer and Lange that the intellect has evolved over time
is to “Darwinize” such an insight. But then, why call this naturalization of the intellect “transcen-
dental realism”? Nietzsche is insistent that no attempt must be made to hypostatize the transcenden-
tal (see BGE 59). It is clear that Nietzsche does indeed adopt an evolutionary approach to the intellect.
He takes our categories to be “true” only in the sense that they are conditions of life for us. Thus,
Euclidean space is a conditional truth. As the author notes, “The specific character our forms of intu-
ition possess is due to their selective advantage over equally possible competitors. Had rival intel-
lects appeared, they would have perished, leaving the field to nature’s favoured Euclideans” (126).18
The issue becomes complicated when it is appreciated that Nietzsche holds that we continually fal-
sify the world through our formal intuitions and categorial schemas. Once the full extent of Nietzsche’s
complete rejection of the thing-in-itself is appreciated, the question arises: Just what is being falsi-
fied? This problem is well known from Maudemarie Clark’s probing of it in Nietzsche on Truth and
Philosophy. However, a number of recent commentators have argued that her solution to the prob-
lem has a fanciful aspect to it.19 So does Hill fare any better in making sense of Nietzsche?
Let me unpack some of the details of his argument. The right contrast to make, he suggests, is not
between the world as we know it and the world as it really is, but between the world as it appears in
uncorrected experience and the world as it appears in scientifically corrected experience, or between
the illusions generated by our evolved transcendental-psychological mechanisms and the description
of nature to be found in our best empirical theories. But then he appreciates that matters are compli-
cated by the fact that Nietzsche remains highly critical of science in his late writings, something insuf-
ficiently appreciated in the Clark reading. Science does not escape the problem of representation. Hill
proposes that the choice on offer, however, is not between science and metaphysics, or even between
science and a postmetaphysical Nietzschean cosmology, but rather between one scientific theory and
another, better theory, let us say between Newtonian mechanism and the Boscovichian dynamism
favored by Nietzsche (BGE 12). This suggests to Hill that Nietzsche must be a naturalist. He insists,
however, that this naturalism is not of the sort favored by analytic philosophy, in which nature is iden-
tified with what can be posited by the best empirical theories available to us (physics, for example);
rather, it is what Kant designated as transcendental realism with the important qualification that this
is not a realism that provides us with access to any thing-in-itself. It means rather that there are two
spaces and times, one pair being produced by the human intellect, the other denoting the space and
time within which the human intellect is embedded.20 Although this may well be the correct descrip-
tion of Nietzsche’s position, it still leaves unaddressed a key question: If the empiricism of science
remains caught up in representation, if there is a need to provide a genesis of the intellect, then how
can we posit the (transcendental) reality of space and time in non-naive terms that do not revert back
to a precritical metaphysics? Unless we develop a proper grasp of this issue, we will continue to
ascribe to Nietzsche an incoherent falsification-thesis and fail to understand the precise character of
his critique of science. Like Hill, I believe Nietzsche’s position is not an incoherent one (although it
is poorly understood). The task is to attempt to determine the manner in which science remains caught
in the problem of representation and the extent to which it can break free from it.
Hill argues that Nietzsche agrees with Kant that the mind imposes a spatial form on sensation, such
that, for example, space appears to be Euclidean for us. Where he diverges from Kant is in his refusal
to identify this space and time with the space and time of nature. This does not commit Nietzsche to
upholding a knowledge of nature as it is in itself. But how can anything be said to be transcendentally
real since the concept is an incoherent and empty one? He suggests that Nietzsche’s development of
a transcendental realism—with the proviso that this entails no commitment to the thing-in-itself—
can already be found implicit in Kant’s argument in The Critique of Pure Reason. All we have to do
is to acknowledge that natural science posits all kinds of entities, events, and processes “which are
‘empirical’ but unobservable for reasons relating to contingent limitations on our cognitive capaci-
ties” (136). Thus, for Kant, “quarks and genes would be ‘empirically real and transcendentally ideal’
Book Reviews 63
despite being unobservable” (37). There is a certain sloppiness in the argument on this point since
what is at stake is the coherence of transcendental realism and the issue of representation that is so
pertinent to Nietzsche (no one doubts that empirical realism and transcendental idealism are perfectly
compatible and that to posit both is to uphold a coherent position). The author goes on to suggest that
in Nietzsche, the space and time of nature are “empirically real but unobservable posits not unlike
atoms . . . based on the empirical evidence we possess, we can suppose that there are imperceptible
quarks . . . that the space of nature is non-Euclidean” (137). But this is to downplay the problem
Nietzsche has with the empirical, namely, its link with representation. Nietzsche’s question would be:
What elements of our representation (what processes of thinking) are at work in the construction of
atoms and quarks and how does this shape our cognitive mapping of nature?
In the end Nietzsche’s position, the author argues, bears a striking resemblance to Berkeley’s: to
be is to be perceived. However, the scope of the perceived needs to be expanded so as to encompass
both the perceivable and that which is not presently perceived (137). Ultimately, then, we can credit
Nietzsche with subscribing to the view that nothing that our best empirical theories enable us to
posit goes unobserved (138). How does this bear on the problem whether the world is completely
mind-dependent and the coherence of positing mind-independent objects? Hill is insistent that
Nietzsche completely rejects the notion of the thing-in-itself and that it never reemerges in his think-
ing through some philosophical back door, as it were. He writes:
. . . there is no obstacle to Nietzsche regarding the entire natural world as mind-dependent.

Nietzsche’s persistent claims to the effect that we falsify the world because our cognitive
capacities have evolved under conditions which select for expedient falsification, are com-
pletely independent of his metaphysical claims that the world is mind-dependent, or that
the very idea of a mind-independent world is incoherent. The distinction between the fal-
sified and the not-falsified world should be made within the sphere of the mind-dependent.
The sphere of the mind-independent is empty. (137)
While this is a sophisticated negotiation with the intricate character of Nietzsche’s possible posi-
tion, it still fails to address adequately the problematic of representation. A citation from Nietzsche
should serve to make the problem clear:
The thing itself, to say it again, the concept of thing: just a reflection of the belief in the I
as cause. . . . And even your atom, my dear mechanicians and physicists, how much error,
how much rudimentary psychology still remains in your atom! Not to speak of the “the
thing in itself,” the horrendum pudendum of the metaphysicians! The error of confusing the
mind as cause with reality! And made the measure of reality! And called God! (Twilight of
the Idols, “The Four Great Errors,” section 3)
Section 21 of BGE makes it clear that although Nietzsche holds the notion of a thing-in-itself to be
a piece of metaphysical trickery and a seduction of language, he does not believe that the world is
reducible to our forms of knowing. On the one hand, Nietzsche can be seen to be mounting a defense
of some version of a Kantian-inspired transcendental idealism against the claims of a transcenden-
tal realism which would argue that our forms of knowledge correspond to the way the world actu-
ally is; on the other hand, however, he is clearly arguing the need for a genetic and evolutionary
account of our forms and modes of cognition in order to inject a new kind of “critical” element into
questions of truth and knowledge. He argues, for example:
In the “in itself” there is nothing of “causal associations,” of “necessity,” of “psychologi-

cal constraint.” . . . We alone are the ones who have invented causes, succession, reciproc-
ity, relativity, coercion, number, law, freedom, reason, purpose; and if we project, if we mix
this world of signs into things as if it were an “in itself,” we act once more as we have always
done, that is, mythologically. (BGE 21)
64 Book Reviews
This passage finds Nietzsche using the idea of the “in-itself” to show the extent to which we encounter
the world through our own inventions and schemas (thinking in terms of numbers, for example) and,
therefore, it is an error if, in mixing our signs into things and reifying them in the process, we sup-
pose that this gives us an “in itself.” However, while it is the case that it is we ourselves who have
invented things like necessity, succession, and numbers and projected them into the world, it would
be dogmatic to assume that we cannot think and experience the world outside the domain of num-
bers and succession. It is also clear that for Nietzsche the contrast between appearance and the in-
itself is one that is to be restricted to our mode of thinking and our representation of the world. It
has no validity outside the terms of our cognitive makeup. This is a critical insight he had made as
early as 1868 in his criticism of Schopenhauer’s system.
The author is keen to tidy up problems in our interpretation of Nietzsche left by previous com-
mentators. He acknowledges his debt to Clark’s arguments, but he is also keen to articulate where
he departs from her attempted resolution. For Clark, if there is no thing-in-itself to which our con-
cepts must correspond, then the contrast between falsified and unfalsified empirical knowledge dis-
solves. For Hill, however, the falsification-thesis survives the rejection of the things-in-themselves,
and the proper distinction to be drawn is between naive and sophisticated conceptions and experi-
ences of a mind-dependent world. I believe Hill is right to insist, contra Clark, that the argument on
falsification never disappears from Nietzsche’s work and that it encompasses both scientific and
other modes of knowing (though the extent to which Nietzsche is entitled to a word like “falsifica-
tion” and just what he means by it remain unclear). I would wish to maintain, however, that he has
inadequately penetrated the problematic Nietzsche is dealing with. This can be best demonstrated
through a consideration of the role the will to power is playing in his thinking. Clark’s reading has
become notorious for its demotion of this doctrine, where it is construed as little more than an idio-
syncratic evaluative commitment on Nietzsche’s part.
Given his rejection of the notion of the thing-in-itself as either unintelligible or useless, a posi-
tion we find consistently running through the writings, how is it possible for Nietzsche to present
his own doctrine of the will to power by articulating it in terms of the “world’s intelligible charac-
ter” and of viewing the world “from inside,” as he does in section 36 of BGE? Given that he repeat-
edly draws our attention to how our concepts and forms of knowledge simplify reality, how can
Nietzsche hold to this thesis if he has no recourse to the world as it is in-itself and independent of
our representation? Furthermore, if there is but the single empirical world, why does he insist that
our knowledge necessarily falsifies? Kant sought to show the transcendental character of our forms
of intuition and categories, but for him this did not make them “false” or our presentation of the
world an illusory one (it is only in Schopenhauer that this gets staged).
I would like to suggest that what Nietzsche is attempting to mark with the doctrine of the will to
power is not a difference between the world as appearance and the world as an unknowable, com-
pletely other and metaphysical “x,” but rather between representation and individuation on the one
hand and the sub-representational and pre-individual on the other. Although the mature Nietzsche
is a severe critic of all systems of dualistic metaphysics that divide the world into a “true” world and
an “apparent” world, we should not lose sight of the fact that this does not commit him to holding
to the view that the world, considered not as it is in itself but in terms of its morphogenetic and onto-
genetic aspects, is reducible to our forms and habits of knowing. Although he is a severe critic of
Schopenhauer, we should also not lose sight of the fact that Nietzsche remained attached to a fun-
damental problem that Schopenhauer had opened up, namely, that concerning the genesis and bor-
ders of individuation. The main departure he makes from Schopenhauer is in not conceiving the
pre-individual and sub-representational in terms of an undifferentiated and eternal Will, but rather
in terms of a principle of differentiation and from the perspective of what he calls “a morphology
and theory of evolution” (Entwicklungslehre) (BGE 23).
Nietzsche holds that an appeal to something like a will to power needs to be made owing to the
deficiencies of mechanism, and he makes this appeal in terms of an energetics of life. Mechanical
Book Reviews 65
events, he argues, are only active to the extent that energy is a feature of them, and, moreover, this
energy cannot simply be construed as the effect of matter but only of “will” (the will to life which
is a will to power, a desire to grow and to become more). In short, we might say that life is charac-
terized by development and differentiation, and this is what the modern teaching of evolution, espe-
cially Darwinism, teaches us. Contra Darwinism, however, Nietzsche is arguing that it is insufficient
to account for life solely in terms of an exogenous mechanism such as adaptation to external cir-
cumstances. Such a conception deprives life of its most important dimension, which he names
“Aktivitat” (activity). It does this, he contends, by overlooking the primacy of the “spontaneous,
expansive, aggressive . . . formative forces” that provide life with new directions and new interpre-
tations and from which adaptation takes place only once these forces have had their effect:
I lay stress on this major point of historical method because it runs counter to the prevail-
ing instinct and fashion which would much rather come to terms with absolute random-
ness, and even the mechanistic senselessness of all events, than the theory that a power-will
is acted out in all that happens (OGM II, 12).
When Nietzsche speaks of falsification in all of this, is he holding to a coherent position? Clark reads
Nietzsche on the thing-in-itself as seeking to go beyond the impasse of representationalism while
striving at the same time to avoid lapsing into subjective idealism (as he does, she argues, in GS 54).
Nietzsche’s falsification-thesis and denial of objective truth in respect of our knowledge of the world
are only sustainable, she argues, if we adhere to the notion of a thing-in-itself. Once this had been
soundly rejected by him, he should then have also abandoned the falsification-thesis and denial of
truth, for we can only “falsify” and get wrong the empirical world and seek to correct this through
good empirical practice (which entails a commitment to science and the senses, one that Nietzsche
displays, she argues, in texts such as OGM and Twilight of the Idols). So, the question remains: Why
does Nietzsche continue to hold on to the falsification thesis? Although she acknowledges that there
are places in his texts where Nietzsche denies that his falsification-thesis has anything to do with
the opposition of the thing-in-itself and appearance (for example, GS 354), Clark claims that he is
wrong about this and that his thesis on falsification does commit him to an unsustainable belief of
there being a reality, something in itself, that exists independently of how we perceive and know it
in the particular ways that we do. The “ultimate culprit in this tale,” she says, is the representational
model of knowledge he inherits from Schopenhauer.21 It is representationalism that creates for us
the false problem of the thing-in-itself, and her argument is that even when Nietzsche thinks he has
given up on the thing-in-itself, he has still not gone beyond the impasse of representationalism.
Another way of making Nietzsche consistent and coherent is to recognize as central to his philo-
sophical thinking the distinction between the representational and individuated and the sub-repre-
sentational and pre-individual, and where this distinction is not made, as it is in Schopenhauer, in
terms of a split between phenomenal and noumenal worlds or between appearance and thing-in-
itself.22 There are grounds for reading Nietzsche this way and they can be found in one of the most
important places in his published output where he outlines the doctrine of will to power. Here atten-
tion needs to be paid to both the manner in which Nietzsche presents the doctrine (he does so in
terms of a “conscience of method”) and the specific terms he uses to denote the problem he is focus-
ing on. He makes it clear that it is not a problem of appearance or representation.
Clark argues that in section 36 of BGE, Nietzsche outlines a position that he denies in the very
process of outlining it. This leads her to the contentious claim that with this doctrine Nietzsche is
doing little more than reading nature in terms of his own philosophical and “moral” values, thus
committing the same error he accuses the Stoics of doing in section 9 of BGE.23 Section 36 of BGE
can be read quite differently, however. A recent contribution to the literature has noted that although
Nietzsche does present his doctrine in the subjunctive mood, all this conveys is “Nietzsche’s own
circumspect attitude about what is, by his own admission, a dangerous and radical view.”24 In this
66 Book Reviews
section, Nietzsche invites us to “perform an experiment,” namely, asking whether what is given to
us (the world of our desires and passions) might not also provide a sufficient explanation for the so-
called mechanistic or material world. Nietzsche adds that he does not mean the material world taken
as a delusion, as appearance (Schein) or representation (Vorstellung), whether in a Berkeleyian or
Schopenhauerian sense, “but rather as a world that has the same reality that our emotion (Affekt)
has but in a more rudimentary form” (my emphasis) and conceived “as a kind of instinctual life in
which all the organic functions . . . are synthetically linked to one another—as a pre-form (Vorform)
of life?” As Hales and Welshon note, here Nietzsche is claiming that the appearance/reality dis-
tinction is a bogus and superfluous one precisely because “whatever ontological status drives and
passions have is criterial of all reality” (my emphasis).25
In this section, Nietzsche writes of winning “the right” (das Recht) to designate all effective energy
or force univocally as will to power. The truly important insight we glean from this section of BGE,
however, and which is not contained in the reading given of it by Hales and Welshon, is that Nietzsche’s
thinking does not need to posit a division between the world in terms of appearance and thing-in-
itself because it is placing the difference elsewhere, namely, between a pre-form form of life—life
as pure potentiality or virtuality—and life in a more established and evolved (individuated) form, in
which the former holds within it as a “powerful unity . . . all the potential of the organic process to
develop and differentiate.” The will to power does not denote, therefore, a metaphysical thing-in-
itself but rather a pre-form of evolutionary life subject to actualized development and differentiation
and which can be said to enjoy the same level or rank of reality as our drives and affects. As Nietzsche
makes clear, it is “one problem” that is being addressed and opened up here. When he says in the
final sentence of the section that if we could see the world from inside and according to its “intelli-
gible character” it would simply be will to power, he has, in effect, and somewhat ironically, dis-
solved the problem of appearance and the thing-in-itself. If we could view the world according to its
“intelligible character” of the world and somehow get “inside” it, what we would come into contact
with would not be anything radically different from what we encounter in the phenomenal world of
desires and affects, namely, the same phenomena but existing in a more potentialized and unactual-
ized form. There is, then, only the one reality existing in different modalities and states (Nietzsche is
not saying we can view or know the world from the inside, only carrying out an “experiment”).
The point here is not to argue the case for or against the will to power by considering whether or
not it is a good theory and is one that enables Nietzsche to adequately do the work with it he seeks
to do. Here a whole new set of highly complex questions needs to be carefully posed and consid-
ered. The error made by both philosophy and science (mechanistic atomism, for example) is to
assume ontologically clear and distinct entities that are treated as given unities (subjects, objects,
substances, bodies, souls, egos, things, numbers, atoms, and so on). The doctrine of the will to power
is an attempt, I would argue, to think beyond this error and hence it has to be viewed, at least in one
of its most fundamental aspects, in terms of an experimental ontology.
Conclusion
Hill reads Nietzsche as a Kantian-inspired naturalist who has naturalized the transcendental, includ-
ing the forms of intuition, the categories, and the subject. Although we might think this “humble
naturalism,” as he calls it, is a long way from the “grander themes” of Nietzsche’s project (will to
power and perspectivism), he argues that it is not, for they are deeply rooted in it. Nietzsche is seen
to be close to Hegel in that he too embarks upon a quest for a new metaphysics (Hill refers to
Nietzsche’s alleged panpsychism, which is the idea that force must be mental or that the will to grow
and become more must, in some sense, be felt). He adds, “Though it may sound strange to our ears,
for Nietzsche the concept of the will to power serves to unify elegantly his post-Kantian account of
experience as synthesized by the subject” (194). But is this right? Might the doctrine not simply be
Book Reviews 67
a “metaphysics” but an essential component in a new or enhanced empiricism?26 How can we account
for the fact that the engagement with Darwinism in Nietzsche takes place on the level of biology
and around the concept of “life” itself? Hill appears to be restricting Nietzsche’s doctrine almost
exclusively to the province of phenomenology. The final thought in his chapter on Nietzsche and
metaphysics runs as follows: “Kant could scarcely have imagined that his concept of synthesis would
prove the seed of such florid growth” (195). Although he astutely notes that in Nietzsche’s thought
the will to power is designed to explain both the world and representation (the chaos of unformed
sensations and the synthetic organization of this chaos, or the natural and empirical), once again the
role played by the doctrine and concept in Nietzsche’s thought has, I believe, gone uncomprehended.
This I find the most frustrating part of Hill’s study. In the attention he devotes to Nietzsche’s early
materials, and the attentive reading he produces of them in the context of a close and sophisticated
reading of Kant’s CJ, he has almost everything that is required to comprehend the role the will to
power is playing in his thinking.
Hill wishes to make the judgment that the will to power amounts to an extravagant “florid growth”
from the seeds of Kant’s sober thinking on synthesis. But I am unsure it is as “florid” as he thinks.
The doctrine is designed by Nietzsche, at least in part, to address the very problem of synthesis (an
attentive and informed reading of BGE 36 and other parts of Nietzsche would make this clear). Of
course, and as Hill deftly shows, it is the matter of synthesis that lies at the heart of Kant’s tran-
scendental project. The problem with this project, as Nietzsche fully appreciated, is that it ascribes
miraculous powers of spontaneity and organization to the mind in which “a numerically self-iden-
tical, purely formal subject is regarded as the spontaneous operator of synthetic activity.”27 The sig-
nificance of the third critique is that it shows “that the very capacity to unify experience into a formal
whole requires a confrontation with the wild vagaries of empirical law, and therefore presupposes
a synthetic activity that cannot be understood as formal or conceptual at all.”28 Hill admits that, in
his reading of Kant, out of all the readings available to him he has been most impressed and influ-
enced by the one developed by Patricia Kitcher, which, inspired by the example of cognitive sci-
ence, sought to revive Kant’s mind-imposition thesis and so read the first critique as an exercise in
transcendental psychology.29 Of course, this psychological reading of Kant flies in the face of the
attacks on psychologism at the end of the nineteenth-century that gave rise to some of the principal
and most influential strands of twentieth-century philosophy, notably Husserlian phenomenology
and the analytic work inspired by Frege. According to one commentator, the reintroduction of psy-
chology into an interpretation of Kant enables an investigation to be carried out into the processes
of production—the syntheses—that inform the construction of experience, as opposed to simply
construing the transcendental in terms of a logical formalism. However, it makes this gain “at the
cost of assuming that the mechanisms of such constructive, synthetic psychological processes can
be easily identified with the causal mechanisms of everyday empirical systems, a transcendental
realism that associates things in themselves with constructed experience.”30 This serves, I believe,
as an accurate description of the transcendental realism outlined in this study of Nietzsche. The
problem with it is that it unduly limits Nietzsche’s position and fails to appreciate the emphasis
placed in his writings on unconscious production, an activity of production that cannot in any way
be modeled on the order of representation. Running throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre is the view that
we cannot model natural processes of production on the model of our conscious cognition. It is this
critical view that links his mature work of the 1880s with his early wrestling with Kant and the prob-
lem of the organic since Kant. According to one commentator, Nietzsche’s orientation is best con-
ceived in terms of a “transcendental materialism”: materialism because it demands an asymmetry
of production and genesis, in which individuation as representation has to be accounted for in non-
representational terms; and critical or quasi-transcendental because there has to be in place a “vig-
ilance against the illusions of the anthropomorphic” (hence Nietzsche’s rejection of “matter” where
this matter is conceived along atomistic lines).31
68 Book Reviews
The fundamental weakness of this bold new study is that, although it contains an essential insight
into Nietzsche’s keeping apart of the phenomenal and the natural and knows something of what is
at stake in this keeping apart, it ends up conceiving Nietzsche’s position as involving a “strategic
retreat to empiricism” (171; and hence his “continuing affinity with scepticism”). This displays too
little sensitivity to the complex mapping out of the empirical in Nietzsche, including his attentive-
ness to the sub-empirical and which informs the ontology of the will to power, and also to the vari-
eties of empiricism in existence, such as classical, radical, and superior, a utilization of which could
have enriched the imaginative reconstruction of Nietzsche conducted in this text. Nietzsche was not
retreating into empiricism but experimenting with a new, and as yet inadequately understood, kind
of empiricism.
University of Warwick
Notes
1. See also Michael S. Green, Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2002), 3.
2. See especially the translation of Nietzsche’s doctoral dissertation and the instructive com-
mentary on it in Claudia Crawford, The Beginnings of Nietzsche’s Theory of Language (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1988). See also the excellent chapter on Nietzsche in Elaine P. Miller, The
Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2002), 149–81.
3. See, for example, John T. Wilcox, The Truth and Value: A Study of His Metaethics and
Epistemology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974).
4. Maudmarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990).
5. See note 1 above.
6. See, for example, the thought-provoking reading in James I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysus:
An Essay on “The Birth of Tragedy” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
7. For a notable exception, see the important historico-philosophical study by John Zammito,
The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), and, more
recently, the study by Gary Banham, Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
2000). For a recent example of a major study of the third critique that focuses solely on its first main
part, see Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
8. For comprehensive insight, see the study by Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology
and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1982). The influ-
ence on Nietzsche of key neo-Kantian texts in the field, such as Gustav Bunge’s Vitalismus und
Mechanismus of 1886, remains to be fully and productively examined.
9. The difference to be drawn for Kant is between a mere machine that enjoys only a “motive
force” (bewegende Kraft), such as a watch, and something, namely, an organism, that enjoys a “self-
propagating, formative force” (sich fortpflanzende bildende Kraft). This latter force is one that can-
not be explained in terms of mechanism, hence the validity of the regulative employment of a
reflective teleological judgment but which is valid only from a “human point of view.” See Kant,
CJ section 65. For Kant, it is owing to the nature of our human understanding that the problem of
finality assumes the form it does for us.
10. See also the incisive points made by Banham on teleology and natural science in Kant and
the Ends of Aesthetics, 143–45.
11. See the 1868 essay “On Schopenhauer” in Crawford, Nietzsche’s Theory of Language (1988),
226–32. This early unfinished and unpublished essay will appear in The Nietzsche Reader (Basil
Blackwell, forthcoming 2005), ed. K. Ansell Pearson and D. Large.
Book Reviews 69
12. See F. A. Lange, The History of Materialism, 3 vols., 2d ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1925; reissued, Routledge, 2000), Book Two, chap. 4, p. 35. In his Creative Evolution (1907),
Bergson argues that it is necessary to go beyond both mechanism and finalism since both stand-
points have their basis in our consideration of the work of man.
13. Ibid., 66.
14. See, for example, Nietzsche in Daybreak, section 122: “[V]ision was not the intention behind
the creation of the eye . . . vision appeared, rather, after chance had put the apparatus together. A
single instance of this kind—and ‘purposes’ fall away like scales from the eyes!”
15. Take, for example, this passage from The Will to Power: “The mechanistic world is imagined
as only sight and touch imagine a world (as “moved”) so as to be calculable—thus causal unities
are invented, “things” (atoms) whose effect remains constant—transference of the false concept of
subject to the concept of the atom). The following are therefore phenomenal: the injection of the
concept of number, the concept of the thing . . . the concept of motion: our eye and our psychology
are still part of it. If we eliminate these additions, no things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a
relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta. . . .
The will to power not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos—the most elemental fact from which
a becoming and effecting first emerge (WP 635).
16. This early piece can be found in translation in Crawford’s The Beginnings of Nietzsche’s
Theory of Language, 238–53. In this passage, Nietzsche is drawing heavily on Lange’s History of
Materialism, especially his citations from Goethe’s morphology, which Lange regards as one of the
most fertile pieces of work done in the philosophy of nature and which argues that every living thing
is not a single thing but a plurality. See Lange, History of Materialism, Book II, chap. 4, pp. 37–38.
17. For a reliable and succinct account of Kant’s doctrines of empirical realism and transcenden-
tal idealism, see Sebastian Gardner, Kant and the “Critique of Pure Reason” (London: Routledge,
1999), 89–91. For Kant, the same object can be considered from both empirical and transcendental
perspectives. To consider an object empirically is to consider it from the human standpoint, as an
appearance, and as an object of sensation. Space and time are thus empirically real when considered
from this human standpoint (empirically “ideal” objects would be things like mental images and hal-
lucinations). To view things from a transcendental perspective is to be concerned with determining
the conditions under which objects are possible for us: “The transcendental standpoint differs from
the human standpoint in that it considers things in relation to our mode of cognition, without con-
sidering them merely as they appear to us through our mode of cognition, as common sense does.
The transcendental standpoint allows the dependence of objects on our mode of cognition to be deter-
mined” (Gardner, 90). For Kant, for something to be transcendentally real, it would need to have the
constitution we represent as belonging to it independently of the human standpoint.
18. There is much that remains unclear in this position and that needs thinking through: Why
does nature favor the adoption of Euclidean space within our transcendental constitution? It is true
that Nietzsche repeatedly draws attention to how the intellect schematizes and imposes forms on
the real, but we need to determine how this actually works and the extent to which it is an activity
and a process bound up with certain features of material reality itself (such as a tendency in matter
toward spatialization, for example). On this crucial issue, I believe Nietzsche can be usefully sup-
plemented by Bergson and his commitment to providing a double genesis of matter and intellect.
See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 199–208.
19. Clark sought to show that Nietzsche’s view on falsification undergoes an important shift from
the point of his writing the Genealogy of Morality. From this point on, she suggests, referring to his
last six texts, Nietzsche is dealing only with the single empirical world and seeking, through a com-
mitment to empirical science, to gain a more adequate knowledge of it. She reads, among other
things, the six sections that make up Nietzsche’s narration of “How the ‘real world’ finally became
a fable” in Twilight of the Idols in the light of this claim. She wants to show that Nietzsche aligned
himself with the cause of empirical science and so cannot be read simply as a skeptic holding to the
70 Book Reviews
view that there is no truth. Her reading, however, has recently come under attack from scholars. See,
for example, Christoph Cox, Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Interpretation (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1999), 148–51, 164–65; Steven D. Hales and Rex Welshon, Nietzsche’s
Perspectivism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 28–31; and Michael S. Green Nietzsche
and the Transcendental Tradition, 28–34. Both Hales and Welshon and Green contest the plausi-
bility of Clark’s reading of Nietzsche’s intellectual development in terms of an alleged break in his
views on truth, knowledge, and perspectivism beginning with OGM: “In general, Clark takes
Nietzsche’s preference for science over religion and a priori metaphysics to entail unconditional
endorsement of science. There is little textual evidence that he ever rejected the perspectivity of sci-
entific truth, and plenty of evidence that he endorsed it” (Hales and Welshon, 29).
20. This is precisely the kind of realism or naturalism at work in Bergson’s Matter and Memory
(1896). Bergson reads Kant’s transcendental idealism as having a relative validity when understood
in terms of a theory of human praxis and as then exposing a real extensity and a real duration:
“Homogeneous space and homogeneous time are then neither the properties of things nor the essen-
tial conditions of our faculty of knowing them: they express, in an abstract form, the double work
of solidification and division which we effect on the moving continuity of the real in order to obtain
there a fulcrum for our action. . . . They are the diagrammatic design of our eventual action upon
matter. . . . Hence there is room, between metaphysical dogmatism, on the one hand, and critical
philosophy, on the other hand, for a doctrine which regards homogeneous space and time as prin-
ciples of division and of solidification introduced into the real, with a view to action and not with a
view to knowledge, which attributes to things a real duration and a real extensity, and which, in the
end, sees the source of all difficulty no longer in that duration and that extensity . . . but in the homo-
geneous space and time which we stretch out beneath them in order to divide the continuous, to fix
the becoming, and provide our activity with points to which it can be applied.” Matter and Memory,
trans. Nancy M. Paul (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 211–12.
21. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 118, 124.
22. For Clark it seems that only fully constituted actuals or individuals are ever given. She speaks,
for example, of “brains, sense organs, the bodies to which they belong, and the bodies with which
they interact” as examples of those things Nietzsche must be presupposing to exist as “real, inde-
pendently, existing things.”
23. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 221–24.
24. Hales and Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, 105.
25. Ibid., 106.
26. With the expression “radical empiricism,” I am referring, of course, to the work of William
James, as well as to the work of Bergson and, more recently, that of Gilles Deleuze. For James, see
A Pluralistic Universe (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), and Essays in Radical
Empiricism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). For Bergson, see the aforementioned
texts in the notes above and “Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903), in The Creative Mind, trans. M.
L. Andison (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1965), 159–201, where he argues that a “true empiri-
cism” is one that keeps as close as possible to “life” and is, therefore, “the real metaphysics” (175);
for Deleuze, see Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983),
and Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
27. Alistair Welchman, “Affinity, Synthesis, and Things in Themselves,” in Andrea Rehberg and
Rachel Jones, eds., The Matter of Critique: Readings in Kant’s Philosophy (Manchester: Clinamen
Press, 2000), 202–22, 217.
28. Ibid.
29. See P. Kitcher, Kant’s Transcendental Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
For a critique of this naturalization of Kant, see Henry E. Allison, Idealism and Freedom: Essays
on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
53–67. For a recent attempt to extricate Kant from the “fallacy of psychologism,” see Frederick C.
Book Reviews 71
Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 166ff.
30. Welchman, “Affinity, Synthesis, and Things in Themselves,” 218.
31. Alberto Toscano, “The Method of Nature, the Crisis of Critique: The Problem of Individuation
in Nietzsche’s 1867/1869 Notebooks,” in The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 11 (2001): 36–62, at
p. 60.
Peter Köster. Kontroversen um Nietzsche: Untersuchungen zur theologischen Rezeption [Contro-

versies around Nietzsche: Studies on the Theological Reception]. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag
Zürich, 2003. 384 pp. ISBN 3–290-17277–5.
MARTIN LIEBSCHER
In the introduction to the first volume of his Apokalypse der Deutschen Seele (1937–39), Hans Urs
von Balthasar coins the phrase “Dionysos and the Crucified,” consciously replacing Nietzsche’s
“versus” from Ecce Homo with “and.” According to Balthasar, there is no difference between the
world of Dionysos and the Christian world—the Dionysian reduced to its foundations shares com-
mon ground with Christianity. Thus, Balthasar’s line of argumentation follows a fairly common the-
ological reaction to Nietzsche’s critique of religion. He simply appropriates the content of the critique
for the purposes of the theological interpretation.
When Balthasar’s studies were reprinted in 1998, Peter Köster objected to this attempt to re-
Christianize Nietzsche. Calling upon the likes of Franz Overbeck, Köster claims that Christian the-
ologians like Balthasar have not been able to cope with Nietzsche’s uncompromising atheism, an
atheism that denies the possibility of returning to Christianity. Rather than trying to appropriate
Nietzsche’s thought for their own purposes, Köster thinks that theologians should simply confront
the radical challenge that his thought presents. Köster’s critique of the Apokalypse der deutschen
Seele has now been republished in a collection of his articles that bear witness to his lifelong
encounter with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His critical review of Balthasar’s work exem-
plifies Köster’s approach to Nietzsche, one that he describes as persistently posing fundamental
questions to the philosopher from a theological point of view. The eight articles from 1972 to 2000
found in Kontroversen um Nietzsche: Untersuchungen zur theologischen Rezeption reflect Köster’s
attempt to persuade theologians to accept, on the one hand, the “anti-Christian” antagonism found
in Nietzsche’s work and, on the other, to appreciate the deeply spiritual-practical confrontation.
The title of the volume is well chosen. It emphasizes the way in which Köster’s persistent ques-
tioning of Nietzsche’s philosophy puts him at the center of a number of crucial debates in both the the-
ological and the philosophical reception of Nietzsche’s work. In raising doubts about all-too-comfortable
and seductive interpretations, he seeks to clarify the assumptions of the interpreters he examines and,
in so doing, he sharpens their respective points of view. Moreover, by critically engaging with the work
of opponents such as Martin Heidegger, Eugen Biser, and Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Köster affords him-
self the opportunity to develop and unpack his own rendering of Nietzsche’s thought.
One of the cornerstones of Köster’s interpretation is his insistence that Nietzsche’s work consti-
tutes a unified whole. Thus, he rejects those interpretations that posited an inner, even constitutive
contradiction in Nietzsche’s philosophy. This, however, was not a very popular position to take at
the beginning of the 1970s. When he published his article, “Die Renaissance des Tragischen,” in
1972, the work of interpreters such as Karl Jaspers, who placed contradiction at the center of
Nietzsche’s thought, and of Martin Heidegger still dominated Nietzschean scholarship. To present

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Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought

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Access Provided by Australian National University at 02/06/13 10:21AM GMT

KEITH ANSELL PEARSON

Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 29, 2005

The Early Nietzsche and Kant

The third Critique . . . made available to Nietzsche a new, non-Schopenhaurian way to do

The Later Nietzsche and Kant

. . . there is no obstacle to Nietzsche regarding the entire natural world as mind-dependent.

In the “in itself” there is nothing of “causal associations,” of “necessity,” of “psychologi-

Peter Köster. Kontroversen um Nietzsche: Untersuchungen zur theologischen Rezeption [Contro-

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