I forwarded Mr. May's post to a buddy of mine, Ronald Carrier, who is getting his Piled Higher and Deeper in Continental Philosophy. I asked for comments, and recieved permission to forward his comments to the list. Here it is: Forwarded message:

From rcarrier@suba.com Sat Apr 19 18:02:57 1997 From: "Ronald M. Carrier" <rcarrier@suba.com> Good afternoon. Thanks for forwarding this to me. I've taken a look at it, and it seems to me to be a good introductory indication of what Nietzsche was up to. There are just three points on which I'd like to offer a bit of clarification.

(1) Nietzsche as "anti-systematic" thinker: this is something that is also referred to when Nietzsche is called a "perspectival" thinker. Nietzsche thinks that thinking was an activity that is ultimately in the service of life, where "life" is a process of discovering and developing one's capacities for acting to the fullest. (And on this understanding of life, thinking would itself be one of these capacities for acting.) For Nietzsche, to develop a system is to develop a perspective, and so to develop a certain way of living. Indeed, he regards systems primarily as _symptoms_ of various ways of living.

What he dislikes about systems is that they are perspectives that are, so to speak, monopolistic--they are ways of thinking (and, in the end, ways of living) to which everyone must submit themselves and which deny that there are other ways of thinking and living that may be better suited for someone. Nietzsche is anti-system in that he thinks that life is best served if one is able to develop in oneself the capacity for multiple perspectives, multiple ways of thinking and living. Nietzsche himself attempts to do this in his own writing--hence the aphoristic style of which he was fond. (This is not to say that Nietzsche was not capable of developing a sustained argument--_On_the_Genealogy_of_Morals_ does precisely this.)

For Nietzsche, thinking best serves life and is symptomatic of life at its best (i.e. a life that is active and deals creatively with the circumstances that chance throws up for it, rather than one that is reactive and tries to minimize the role of chance and change in living) if it is the interplay of as many different perspectives as one can handle.

(2) Nietzsche and evolution: I think it's good that the author pointed out the connections that can be made between Nietzsche and contemporary evolutionary biology. Nietzsche did not think much of Darwin, but this is not so much because he disagreed with what Darwin wrote (I'm not sure whether he had read Darwin himself or not) as because he disagreed with what others tended to make of what Darwin wrote (or what they supposed he wrote). Nietzsche disagrees, not with Darwin's notion of natural selection, but with the popular notion of evolution (a notion which Darwin did not himself employ in his works).

"Evolution" presupposes that what organisms there are and what they are like is something that is predetermined and that inexorably unfolds across time. Natural selection, even in Darwin, is incompatible with evolution in this sense because natural selection posits chance and change as both ineliminable and necessary to the process of speciation. And as I pointed out above, Nietzsche thinks that chance and change are ineliminable from life and necessary for the development of life at its best. "Evolution" also involves the idea that there is some one best way of life that is the unavoidable outcome of evolution, namely whatever way of being human that the "evolutionary" thinker thinks is best. This is for Nietzsche a reactive way of thinking.

But while Nietzsche's way of thinking is compatible with contemporary evolutionary biology, I think it's misleading to claim that his understanding of life is "biological." Nietzsche thinks that biology plays an ineliminable and necessary part in life, but he also thinks that life is more than just a matter of biology. (Nietzsche was suspicious of science because he thought that it too aspired to be a system in the sense of a monopolistic perspective. In other words, he disliked scientism.)

(3) Authoritarian v. libertarian: The author claims that these are contradictory positions in Nietzsche. I don't think they are. They would be contradictory if Nietzsche held that everybody was equally capable of attaining to life at its best. Nietzsche is _very_ clear in his denial of this. He thinks that reactive thinking and living is typical of the great mass of people and suitable for them. They are able to live as well as they do precisely because a confinement to one perspective suits them--expose them to the possibility that their perspective is not suitable for all, and they will fall into despair (because from their perspective the way of life they lead must be suitable either for all or for none).

Only a very few are, in Nietzsche's view, capable of thinking and living actively. Insofar as the ideal political arrangement would be one that would discover and cultivate these active few and put them in positions where they could do their best, while letting everybody else get along more or less as their reactive lives permit, it would be libertarian for the best and authoritarian for the rest. To the extent that libertarianism presupposes equality of nature, Nietzsche is not a libertarian; to the extent that authoritarianism is based on a reactive way of life to which both master and slave are beholden, Nietzsche is not an authoritarian. His politics are, if anything, those of Aristotle in the _Politics_. (This is not terribly surprising--Nietzsche was a philologist by training and so had a wide familiarity with ancient Greek writings.)

HTH.

Later...

-- Ronald M. Carrier -- rcarrier@suba.com Graduate Student in Philosophy, Northwestern U. "Philosophy--I'm only in it for the money."