Nietzsche's Ontology

152 Pages·2012·0.77 MB·English

by  Laird Addis

Laird Addis
Nietzsche’s Ontology
To my grandchildren,
Hazen, Luken, Zoe
Laird Addis

Nietzsche’s Ontology
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NIETZSCHE’S ONTOLOGY
Table of Contents

Nietzsche’s Texts

I Introduction 1
II Truth and Objectivity 7
III Constant Change 24
IV Substances and Things 41
V Minds 71
VI Causation 101
VII Will to Power 119

Bibliography 135
Name Index 139
Subject Index 141

1

INTRODUCTION

This is an essay about Nietzsche’s ontology. Because ontology is a part of
metaphysics and because, so it is sometimes said, Nietzsche is against
metaphysics, one would assume that he would also be against ontology.
Indeed, as for metaphysics, in a passage of 1888 in The Twilight of the
Idols that could almost have been written by a hardcore logical positivist
forty years later, he remarks:

Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to
accept the testimony of the senses—to the extent to which we sharpen them fur-
ther, arm them, and have learned to think them through. The rest is miscarriage
and not-yet-science—in other words, metaphysics, theology, psychology, epis-
temology—or formal science, a doctrine of signs, such as logic and that applied
logic which is called mathematics. In them reality is not encountered at all, not
even as a problem—no more than the question of the value of such a sign-
convention as logic. (TI “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” 3, Nietzsche’s emphasis)

Like the logical positivists (and our contemporary New Agers who, to the
distress of philosophers, have their own, related use of the term), Nietzsche
usually regards metaphysics as being about, or putatively about, some kind
of reality beyond our everyday world. So in being against metaphysics in
this sense, he is affirming his deeply held conviction that the everyday
world exhausts reality; there is no “other” world, of any kind. But he
sometimes also uses the term as most contemporary philosophers do–as a
kind of catch-all notion for any kind of investigation–conceptual, ontolog-
ical, linguistic–into any aspect of reality, making the term virtually the
same in meaning as ‘philosophy’ itself. Pace our contemporary conceptual
analysts, there is no point in arguing about the real meanings of words, for
there are no real meanings of words apart from the meanings people give
them; and up-to-date dictionaries are the best guide as to what those are.
But we may say that Nietzsche, whatever he says here or there about
metaphysics, certainly propounds an ontology. And while it is not, by the
usual measures, an ontology of the depth one finds in Aristotle or Leibniz
or Brentano or Bergmann, it nevertheless addresses some of the basic
questions.
2

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, curiously, has no entry on
‘ontology’ and refers the reader to the entry on ‘metaphysics’ where we
read that ontology is the study of being itself or else the same as metaphys-
ics (Audi, 1999, 564). A precise, though not necessarily historically well-
grounded, notion of ontology comes from the person who, more than any
other, brought the idea into, or back into, analytic philosophy; namely,
Gustav Bergmann. Ontology, as he conceives it, asks what exists in the
sense of what are the categories of the “simples” that make up reality
(1959b, 54). For Bergmann, as for Nietzsche, the reality to be dealt with is
the only reality there is or that we have any good reason to believe in–the
everyday world of common experience as further understood by empirical
science. Broadly put, it is a world of physical bodies in space and time, a
few of which bodies “have” minds, and that are bound in their behavior by
the laws of nature. Thus, in this sense, ontology does not concern itself
with putative supernatural or otherworldly things, but is only a certain kind
of understanding of this, our common, everyday world. And at least some
of this form of understanding is analytic insofar as it is concerned with
“simples”. But it is not physics or chemistry, which have their own,
different kind of analytic understanding of physical reality.

Still, what I am calling Nietzsche’s ontology does not quite correspond to
this, or any, formal definition of ‘ontology’, although the notion of analysis
to simples plays some role. I submit that we can get at a comprehensive
understanding of his basic philosophical theory of the nature of reality by
considering his views on five major categories of that reality: constant
change, physical objects, minds, causation, and will to power. Perhaps
what is most importantly absent from such a list is space and time; but,
while I will have occasion to mention them, the fact is that Nietzsche had
almost nothing of philosophical interest to say about them. For the most
part, this lack is of no importance to anything else that he did say nor,
therefore, to anything I have to say about his ontology.

Two of these categories–constant change and will to power–are peculiar to
Nietzsche, especially the latter, while the other three–physical objects,
minds, and causation–are categories that any comprehensive ontology
would include. But I think that Nietzsche would agree that, in an im-
portant sense, “all there is” are bodies, a tiny percentage of which “have”
minds, which exist in space and time and are subject to laws of nature.
Constant change and will to power are not separate realms of entities, so to
3

speak, but instead what Nietzsche believes to be features of bodies and
minds. Still, treating them separately will, if I am not mistaken, give us a
clearer understanding of what I am calling Nietzsche’s ontology.

* * *

I am very much inclined to the view that, in an important sense, there are
two Nietzsches. One is the sober naturalist–the believer in the value and
the pre-eminence of the empirical sciences and of logic and mathematics
(as the quote above suggests), the denier of gods and objective moral facts,
the believer in an independent natural reality which can be and is known in
part and to some degree, and which has existed long before, and will exist
long after, the existence of life and consciousness. The other Nietzsche
also denies gods and objective morality but, as a wild nihilist, further
denies the existence of any objective reality at all as well as of facts, of
truth, of knowledge, of the objectivity of logic, and so on. This book is
primarily about the sober Nietzsche; but part of the reason I see him this
way is because I see some other thinkers similarly, especially some of
those who think they find in Nietzsche some basis for their own views. I
am thinking, for example, of those postmodernists who tell us (as an
objective truth?) that science is “just another narrative” with no claim to
privilege–that germ theory, for example, is not objectively true, and indeed
could not be objectively true because nothing is objectively true. But I
would say that in their daily lives, not to mention some of the arguments
they make for their views, not only these postmodernists, but also idealists,
skeptics, certain kinds of materialists, and all deniers of objective reality
and objective truth contradict exactly what they profess to believe. And if,
as some such persons do say, they are quite content to allow contradictions
as acceptable, then I do not have, and no one else should have, anything
more to say to them.

In their Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, Steven Hales and Rex Welshon express
a milder version of my two-Nietzsches suggestion, speaking of “a kind of
double movement in Nietzsche” and “both a yes-saying part and a no-
saying part” (2000, 8). But they find these somewhat contrary aspects as
complementary, in support of which they cite a passage in Human, All Too
Human in which he says:

The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in
the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which