Nietzsche and Normativity

I

In recent years, “normativity” has become one of the most discussed issues of contemporary philosophy, and it is not surprising that it has already become an important theme in Nietzsche research as well, particularly among Anglo-American scholars.^[1] This article focuses on two main questions: first, I am going to ask whether the tradition that started with Wilfrid Sellars’ conception of the normativity of the “space of reasons,” and that was further developed in the work of John McDowell and Robert Brandom as well as Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, and many others, is relevant for the interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought. The second question focuses on whether Nietzsche’s seemingly hostile view of reason and rationality involves, as is often claimed, reducing reasons to blind causal processes and, therefore, an endorsement of what John McDowell has termed “bald naturalism.”^[2] The basic idea of the normativity of the space of reasons is that human beings are the thinking beings that they are not because they have “representations” of the world, but rather because they occupy social spaces where they judge and act according to norms that give them reasons to judge and act in certain ways. Human beings think of themselves as committed to norms, they subject their values to rational scrutiny and give and demand reasons for their judgments and actions in the social spaces they inhabit – or, in other words, human beings occupy a normative space of justification –, because thought is discursive, i. e. conceptual, and, as Kant and Hegel were first to make clear, concepts are rules, and rules are norms. According to this view, to be human is to occupy the space of reasons, and this is the same as the “space of concepts,”^[3] understood as rules for judgment and action. Thus, the notion of the space of reasons will be relevant for the interpretation of Nietzsche’s writings if the latter involve the claim that human beings are (if not by nature, at least historically) rule-followers who take their values to be open to scrutiny and whose judgments and actions are susceptible to reasons.

The article is divided in three main parts. The first part (corresponding to section II below) attempts to show that the first three chapters in the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality give a genealogical account of the emergence of reason in human history that involves the claim that the latter is a development of human engagement with social rules. The second part (sections III–V) interrogates Nietzsche’s conceptions of value, purpose, and meaning in order to show that he does not endorse any version of “bald naturalism.” He does not conceive of the space of reasons as a structure that our subjectivity adds to, or imposes upon, the “space of subsumption under natural laws,” such that only the latter, i. e. only a natural world devoid of value, purpose, and meaning, should be considered really real. According to McDowell, the belief that what is really real is a space of causation devoid of value, purpose, and meaning (a very common belief since the development of modern science) is what leads to a disenchanted view of the world, or what is usually called “nihilism.” If we were to realize, however, that “our nature is largely second nature, and our second nature is the way it is not just because of the potentialities we were born with, but also because of our upbringing, our Bildung,” then, according to McDowell, we could say that “the way our lives are shaped by reason is natural.”^[4] Thus, a “naturalism of second nature” is McDowell’s alternative to “bald naturalism.”^[5] We shall see that Nietzsche is much closer to endorsing this conception of a “second nature” (an expression he himself uses) than “bald naturalism,” or what he himself calls “the mechanistic interpretation of the world.”^[6]

While McDowell never mentions Nietzsche, Robert B. Brandom often refers to Nietzsche as the proponent of one type of genealogy which aims to unmask all our rational justifications as forms of “irrelevant mystification” by reducing them to blind causal processes, that is, by presenting explanation in terms of reasons as illusory and by reducing all legitimate explanation to explanation in terms of causes. Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy is, thus, supposed to share the assumptions of “bald naturalism” about reasons, value, purpose, and meaning.^[7]

The third and final part of the article (sections VI–VII) seeks to show that, although Nietzsche’s genealogical project restricts the epistemic pretensions of rational normativity – and is very far from assigning to the space of reasons the status of a purely autonomous realm of justification – it does not dismiss rational normativity, or the space of reasons, as merely illusory (i. e. as an “irrelevant mystification”). The focus of these final sections will be on Nietzsche’s perspectivism and the claim that there are no facts, only interpretations. Taken together with Nietzsche’s views on value, purpose, and meaning, such perspectivism is shown to involve a conception of genealogy that, far from reducing reasons to causes, is a reflective questioning of our values which investigates the reasons behind our deeper normative commitments. Such a reflective questioning does not have the aim of reaching the rational justification of universal moral norms, but it is also not a mere “deconstruction” of our values. Its status may be compared, instead, to Kant’s reflective judgments about art and life.

II

The main claim of the three first chapters of the Second Essay of the Genealogy is that what human beings are now resulted from the particular way in which nature gradually responded to a “task” that she set herself: the task of “breeding an animal with the right to make promises” (GM II 1).^[8] This highly teleological language is, of course, metaphorical. Nietzsche does not believe that nature as a whole is a thinking subject with the capacity to set itself tasks. The history that Nietzsche wishes to describe is an evolutionary process that no entity (be it Nature or God or the collective Spirit of mankind) has devised or planned. In less metaphorical language he calls it “the history of how responsibility originated” (GM II 2). But one of the aims of the use of highly metaphorical language here is, perhaps, to underscore one of the main points of the three chapters (and of the whole Second Essay), namely that nature qua life, far from being a fixed mechanism of “pushing and shoving” (e. g. Nachlass 1885, 34[247], KSA 11.503), of mechanic cause and effect and reciprocal action in an absolute, homogeneous space and time, is rather a “creative” reality that tends to be constantly expanding and acquiring new, increasingly more complex forms of organization, as if it were constantly assigning new “tasks” to itself and finding solutions to the problems it faced in accomplishing these tasks. (I write “tends to” because it is also important for Nietzsche that certain forms of life can become “decadent” and self-destructive, and we cannot exclude the possibility that life as whole could also take this path).^[9]

The reason why life had to be creative in order to breed an animal with the right to make promises – that is, an animal that is responsible for its own actions – is because animal life would not be possible if forgetfulness were not an active force in all animal organisms, and the right to make promises presupposes, by contrast, a “memory of the will” (GM II 1). This particular kind of memory had to be bred, cultivated, and slowly disciplined in order to come to being in some forms of animal life and become strong enough to be active as an organic force opposed to the force of forgetfulness. One aspect of this idea which is not always mentioned is that Nietzsche is not referring to an animal that can make promises – as most English translations suggest – but rather to an animal that has the right to make promises, or is rightfully allowed to make promises (the German verb that Nietzsche uses is dürfen, not können). And another point which is often forgotten is that, in the third chapter, Nietzsche makes it very explicit that the right to make promises involves reason. The “history of how responsibility originated” (GM II 2) is the history of how reason originated, that is, of how, after the development of the more elementary forms of the memory of the will, “one at last came ‘to reason’!” (GM II 3). It is this equation of the right to make promises with responsibility and reason – and, in fact, not only with reason, but also with everything else that comes with it: “seriousness, mastery over the affects, the whole somber thing called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of the human being” (GM II 3) – that one needs to understand in order to understand Nietzsche’s view of normativity.

Nietzsche thinks that the emergence of responsibility and reason was prepared by two main events in the course of evolution. First, human beings had to learn to interpret the world in terms of certain categories that not only provided them with orientation in their environments, but also with orientation in time and a sense of purposiveness. These categories were, basically, the categories of cause and effect, essence and accident, and end and means. Nietzsche writes: “first, the human being must have learned to distinguish necessary events from chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, and in general to be able to calculate and compute” (GM II 1). For Nietzsche, this is not yet “reason,” or not yet reason in the proper, full sense of the word, because what he has in view here is an instinctive, pre-reflective use of those categories, as well as, so to speak, a merely half-self-conscious recourse to calculation and computation in accordance with them. He is trying to conceive of a pre-social phase of human evolution in which the “memory of the will” is just beginning to emerge. For the first time, and still in a very elementary way, human beings are beginning to be able to “ordain the future in advance,” to pledge their word and develop an active “desire for the continuance of something desired once,” so that “between the original ‘I will,’ ‘I shall do this’ and the actual discharge of the will, its act, a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of will may be interposed without breaking the long chain of will” (GM II 1).

The second main event in the history of responsibility and reason is the “pre-historic labor” of the “morality of mores” or “morality of custom [Sittlichkeit der Sitte]” (GM II 2). This second “preparatory task” is tantamount to the emergence of society, social life, and to the development of the “State.” It may not be clear at first sight why Nietzsche thinks this would have been necessary for the emergence of responsibility and reason, but it does become clearer once we realize that customs are norms – that is, customs are rules that a community imposes upon themselves, customs establish what the members of a community ought to do in order to live as members of that community. Only with the emergence of society did the human being begin to develop and incorporate the habit of following rules and being responsible for the social enactment and employment of rules. A first form of specifically human normativity appeared on the scene. We can call it social normativity in order to distinguish it from normativity in the emphatic sense, that is, from rational normativity.

It is not too difficult to understand why Nietzsche would assume that social normativity did not yet involve reason and responsibility in the proper sense of these terms, but only prepared their emergence. First, customs were originally devised just for the purpose of holding a society together, and not at all for the sake of their intrinsic rationality. As Nietzsche puts it in Dawn (1881), the original purpose of custom was “custom in general”: social norms began as “fundamentally superfluous stipulations” devised to inculcate “the perpetual compulsion to practice customs: so as to strengthen the mighty proposition with which civilization begins: any custom is better than no custom” (D 16). Nietzsche gives as an example the Kamshadales, who punished with death “the scraping of snow from the shoes with a knife” as well as other harmless uses of a knife. Second, and most importantly, customs are norms that are imposed on the members of a society. The formula “morality of custom” describes the development of society (or civilization, culture) as a process of Zucht und Züchtung: the discipline and cultivation of customs, the “breeding” (Züchtung) of human beings behaving in a certain way, namely in accordance with the customs imposed upon them within a given community.^[10] In the Genealogy, Nietzsche expresses this idea by emphasizing that behaving in accordance with customs depends on the “memory of the will,” and in the “prehistory of the human being” the slow development of such a memory was achieved, and could only have been achieved, by means of “mnemotechnics” involving much blood and pain. Civilization was built upon the principle that “only that which never ceases to hurt stays in memory.” Civilization “has its origin in the instinct that realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics” (GM II 3). Thus, “dreadful sacrifices and pledges (sacrifices of the first-born among them), the most repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all religious cults,” as well as “asceticism,” and above all “punishment” – all of this was used in pre-historical and historical times in order to impose customs and make civilization possible.

These two main events combined –the development of basic categories for orientation in space and time as well as the morality of custom – made the human being “calculable” (GM II 1, II 2). They allowed human beings to “remember five or six ‘I will not’s’, in regard to which one had given one’s promise so as to participate in the advantages of society” (GM II 3). So human beings began to possess elementary forms of memory of the will and to make promises, but they did not yet have the right to make promises, since what they were now capable of was not yet tantamount to what we should call responsibility and reason. The latter emerged for the first time in the history of the human being when the “ripe fruit” (GM II 2) of the whole process finally blossomed – a “ripe fruit, but also a late fruit” (GM II 3), as Nietzsche emphasizes. This fruit is what he terms “the sovereign individual” (GM II 2), a very controversial figure in recent discussions of Nietzsche’s thought.

It is not the aim of this article to enter into the controversy about “the sovereign individual.”^[11] For our purposes, it suffices to claim that Nietzsche’s aim in the chapter about the “the sovereign individual” is to establish an opposition between the human being as a “herd animal” and the human being as a true “individual” (“like only to itself” (GM II 2)). He establishes this opposition in absolute terms, as an opposition between human beings who have been completely disciplined into renouncing their individual wills and obeying customs that are imposed upon them and another kind of human beings, very rare human beings “liberated from the morality of custom” (GM II 2) and self-disciplined into following their own wills and acting in accordance with their own rules. It is important to note that, as Werner Stegmaier has shown, “Typisierung” is part of Nietzsche’s usual rhetoric. He sketches out certain “types,” and he establishes absolute oppositions on that basis, but he himself teaches us to think not in terms of absolute oppositions, but rather in terms of degrees, grades, and shades, so that in his “types” we should actually read human possibilities.^[12] And it is in this sense that one should understand the way in which Nietzsche distinguishes between two human possibilities in GM II 2: on the one hand, social passivity, self-complacent conformism, the mere obedience to social norms; on the other, the activity of actually taking responsibility for one’s own actions. The idea that only the sovereign individual “has its own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises” (GM II 2) means that only a person who takes responsibility for an action by promising to act, and by actually acting in accordance with a principle she freely endorses, deserves to be praised for accomplishing that action. If, by contrast, a person gives her promise to act in accordance with a certain custom, or just lives by the implicit promise of acting in accordance with that custom such that she is moved by fear or any other affect caused by the “will not’s” that have been burned into her memory by the mere morality of custom, then there is nothing praiseworthy in her action as such.

Nietzsche formulates this in many ways. He writes that only the sovereign person “says yes” to herself, that is, affirms her actions, and only she has the right to do so (GM II 3). He writes that the “dominating instinct” of the sovereign person is to exert “the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, this consciousness of this rare freedom, the power over oneself and over fate.” He writes as well that the sovereign person calls this dominating instinct her “conscience” (Gewissen) (GM II 2, 3), and he even resorts to the vocabulary of “free will,” writing that the sovereign person is “sovereign” insofar as her “genuine consciousness of power and freedom” has “become flesh” in her, so that she is “a master of [her] free will” (GM II 2). It is hard to believe that Nietzsche writes all of this merely ironically and does not see a genuine human possibility here. While it is true that he has a lot to say against the idea of “free will,” that is, of absolutely self-determining rational agents, it should also be clear that everything in the first three chapters of the Second Essay of the Genealogy suggests that he sees something very significant in the fact that, at some point in history, some human beings started to take themselves to be capable of rising above the mere obedience to social norms and acting according to what they thought was right. That was precisely the moment when at least a few, rare individuals began to acquire the “right to make promises,” because they “at last came ‘to reason’!” (GM II 3). As John Richardson has recently shown in a very persuasive way, Nietzsche sees this moment as the moment when morality (Moralität, Moral) emerges from custom (Sittlichkeit der Sitte): people now understand themselves as full-fledged subjects and agents, so that “the voice in them that remembers the rules, their conscience, is no longer understood as a group-self but as a ‘voice of reason,’ their own voice.”^[13] That is to say that, even if “free will” in the strict metaphysical sense of the term is impossible, taking oneself to be capable of acting according to one’s own reason gives rise to a new way of valuing. Or, in other words, there is a fundamental change in human history when people begin to understand themselves as knowers and agents that inhabit a space of reasons.

But how fundamental is this change, and what exactly is its nature? Nietzsche seems to hold the view that, although a sovereign individual goes beyond passive obedience to custom, and this justifies, at least to some extent, that he takes himself to be “autonomous” (GM II 2), his autonomy will always remain limited as long as it remains moral, that is, as long as it consists only in the scrutiny or self-assessment of social norms. Again, Richardson’s recent analysis of this point is very illuminating: “morality is different from custom,” he writes, “in the way it values, but is largely the same in what it values.” The function of morality is the same as custom, namely “to secure adherence to norms and thereby to sustain a successful society,” so that the difference between the two is just that morality induces “secure adherence to social norms by inducing members to self-police.”^[14] The reason why this transition from obedience to “self-policing” is fundamental is that now social norms are treated as conceptual meanings: they are scrutinized in the light of their implications and compatibility with other conceptual commitments. That is why Nietzsche is justified in equating this moment of the history of mankind with the emergence of “reason.”

Moreover, his description of this emergence can indeed be interpreted as a description of the emergence of the “space of reasons” because he portrays the rational scrutiny of social norms as an activity which is simultaneously individuating and social. By stepping back and scrutinizing the norms that ought to rule his judgments and actions, an individual becomes, as it were, truly individual, “like only to himself” (GM II 2). It is precisely in this sense that the history being told here is “the history of how responsibility originated.” But this self-scrutiny that makes one responsible for one’s actions is also a social activity for two reasons: first, on Nietzsche’s account, it is only possible insofar as an individual becomes truly an individual by distinguishing himself from a “herd,” i. e. from a previously existing social space in which people live by the passive, conformist attitude of obeying custom without questioning it; and, second, Nietzsche emphasizes that being a sovereign individual necessarily involves having “reverence” or “respect” (Ehrfurcht) for one’s “equals” in autonomy (GM II 2, 3) – that is, if not respect for all others, at least for those who are equally “strong” in being able to establish their “own measure of value” (GM II 2) by not allowing their thought and action to be ruled by unscrutinized norms.

All of this now allows us to unpack the main point that Nietzsche makes in the first three chapters of the Second Essay of the Genealogy about rational normativity and the space of reasons. Concepts are indeed rules – the rules that make rational thought possible – but concepts are one kind of rules that originated in another kind of rules, namely customs, and they remain situated in and substantively attached to the space of these other rules. Nietzsche places the normativity of concepts within the normativity of customs or, put differently, conceives of rational normativity as a development of social normativity along a continuum.

This is the meaning of his genealogy of rationality, and we may now begin to realize that this genealogy is not reductionist (i. e. not an instance of “bald naturalism”) as it does not imply that concepts and reasoning are anything like epiphenomenal occurrences contingently caused by the irrational activity of biological drives hidden from our self-consciousness. On the contrary, Nietzsche emphasizes, as we just saw, that the emergence of reason in human history is an event of great impact, which transfigures everything: just recall the image of the “ripe fruit” (GM II 2, 3), and especially the claim that what is at stake is how nature responded to the self-imposed “task” of “breeding an animal with the right to make promises” (GM II 1) or, which is the same, “how responsibility originated” (GM II 2).

Thus, Nietzsche’s emphasis on the “severity, tyranny, stupidity, and idiocy” (GM II 2) involved in the development of custom as the “preparatory task” that would later make possible the emergence of reason and responsibility does not reduce the latter to the former. Along the continuum which is the development of life on earth something truly new and important emerged when, after the emergence of custom and on the basis of it, reason and responsibility finally emerged. Nietzsche’s non-reductionist point is just that, given that that development occurs along a continuum, what comes later is not wholly distinct from what comes earlier. The space of reasons is never purified from the “severity, tyranny, stupidity, and idiocy” (GM II 2) of social normativity – or, in other words, rationality is inseparable from a ballast of irrationality.

I shall return below to this claim about the impurity of the space of reasons as we know it. But, before we progress any further, it is useful to take a quick view of the broader picture beyond the Genealogy. For Schopenhauer – by far Nietzsche’s main philosophical influence –, the fact that human animals have “reason” makes their lives very different from the lives of other animals because it gives them “the terrifying certainty of death,” while other animals fear death but have no concept of it. Therefore they have no consciousness of their temporal finitude as individuals, and they just enjoy “the absolute imperishableness and immortality of the species.”^[15] Being certain of its own death, the human being lives in need of metaphysical consolation, questions its natural, animal fear of death, and attains wisdom if it realizes that existence is an “error,” something that ought not to be, and so discovers that death is in fact not an evil, but a blessing.^[16] “Metaphysical consolation” is a crucial theme in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872). The whole book is permeated by the question of the justification of existence. In the tragic age of the Greeks, the justification of existence was aesthetic; after the Socratic turn, reason itself – the rational pursuit of truth – becomes the justification of existence. In Nietzsche’s mature writings, the theme of the justification of existence becomes the question about the value of our values, particularly of moral values (GM, Preface 6), taken as a question about whether they are nihilistic or, on the contrary, affirm life. For our purpose it is sufficient to establish that, although Nietzsche denies that the rational scrutiny of social norms – as well as of all the values that they express – is ever free of a ballast of irrationality, he is nevertheless aware that no questions about the “value of our values” would ever have arisen in human history if, at same point, “reason,” or the space of reasons, had not emerged out of the imposition of social norms upon individuals living in human societies. The human animal is a being which is historically fraught with questions about the value of its values, and the very possibility of questioning one’s values involves “reason,” or a “space of reasons” (as follows from the analysis of GM II 3). It is true that “to the great majority it is not contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly without first becoming aware of the final and most certain reasons pro and con [Gründe für und wider], and without even troubling themselves about such reasons [Gründe] afterwards” (GS 2). But for Nietzsche as a philosopher that is exactly what is “contemptible,” as he is in fact moved in life by the “folly” which keeps telling him that “every person as a person [jeder Mensch […] als Mensch]” should feel contempt for those who live their lives “without trembling with the craving and rapture of questioning” (GS 2).

These preliminary results now lead us to the second half of this article. The goal will be to show that Nietzsche is not a proponent of the kind of “bald naturalism” that McDowell, Brandom, and Sellars have shown to be antithetical to the defense of the space of reasons. In order to achieve this goal, we shall start by considering Nietzsche’s conceptions of value, purpose, and meaning.

III

Let us start by interrogating how Nietzsche conceives of the relationship between nature and value. Then we will move to purpose (or end) and the question of teleology. Finally, we shall consider what Nietzsche has to say about meaning and the relationship between nature and meaning.

Nietzsche’s view of value seems to be the very epitome of the kind of “impositionism” and “reductive naturalism” that sustains that “valuing is the source of values” – that values are a mere projection “imposed” by a subject upon an intrinsically valueless, natural world.^[17] In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), for example, Nietzsche writes that “only through esteeming is there value,” every “table of goods” is merely “created” by our own “esteeming [Schätzen],” as “humans first placed values into things, they first created meaning for things, a human meaning” (Z I, On a Thousand and One Goals). And in The Gay Science (1882–87), he notes:

It is we, the thinking-sensing ones [Wir, die Denkend-Empfindenden], who really and continually make something that is not yet there: the whole perpetually growing world of valuations, colors, weights, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. […] Whatever has value in the present world has it not in itself, according to its nature – nature is always value-less – but has rather been given, granted value, and we were the givers and granters! (GS 301)

However, closer inspection of these passages shows that Nietzsche’s position is not as simple as it may seem at first sight. In the passage from Zarathustra, his point is not at all that, since value is “created” by human valuing and not given to our minds from outside, we must conclude that it is merely “subjective” and does not belong to the world. On the contrary, what Zarathustra actually says is the following: “only through esteeming is there value, and without esteeming the nut of existence would be hollow” (Z I, On a Thousand and One Goals). So, the point is that “the nut of existence” is not “hollow” – because the human creation of value makes it not hollow, human valuing makes the world itself have value. (It is important to underline here that, as Heidegger accurately remarks, in passages such as this Nietzsche follows standard Kantian-Schopenhauerian terminology, employing the term “existence” (Dasein) in the sense of “the world,” the totality of what there is, reality as a whole. What he is saying is that the nut of the world is not hollow).^[18]

In the passage from The Gay Science, too, Nietzsche invites us to imagine the world, or nature, devoid of human presence and hence devoid of value – a valueless nature. It is important to note that Kant also evokes this image of a valueless nature in his Critique of Judgment (1790): “without the human being,” he writes, “all of creation would be a mere wasteland.”^[19] Without the human being the world “would have no value whatever, because there would exist in it no being that had the slightest concept of a value.”^[20] As is well known, the word “nihilism” was popularized by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi to designate precisely this Kantian image of nature – the image of a purely mechanical world, a world devoid of value and ruled exclusively by the categories of Kant’s critique of pure reason, therefore a world in which the human will becomes, as Jacobi puts it, “a will that wills nothing.”^[21] Jacobi identifies this nihilism with “godlessness,” and he sees godlessness, or nihilism, as a consequence of transcendental idealism. He thinks that, if we follow Kant, we end up with a Newtonian, mechanical world devoid of value – as, according to the Critique of Judgment, we can only reflect about value, but cannot have knowledge of it – and moreover, we have to regard that mechanical world as a world of representation, therefore “a phantom in itself, a real nothingness, a nothingness of reality.”^[22]

Now, the problem is that, unlike Jacobi – and very much like Hegel in his critique of Jacobi in Glauben und Wissen (1802) and elsewhere – Nietzsche does not think that reason compels us to conceive of human subjectivity in terms of a mind that constructs a world of mere representations. The latter image of the world is similar to, and perhaps even identical with, the one that drives to despair the famous “madman” who announces that “God is dead” (GS 125). The madman shares Jacobi’s fear of nihilism, taken as a synonym of godlessness. If God is dead, he reasons, then there is only an “infinite nothingness,” an “empty space.” But, pace Heidegger and many others, Nietzsche does not identify with the madman, even if he certainly agrees that “God is dead.” Instead, as Robert Pippin puts it, Nietzsche sees the madman’s despair and melancholy as a “kind of symptom, or a modern pathology,” for which he “wants a diagnosis.”^[23] But, if he does not endorse the madman’s Jacobian view of the world, then when he affirms that we are the ones who “create” or “make” a “world of valuations” and that nature without us “is always value-less” (GS 301), it cannot be the case that he means that there is a “subject,” a res cogitans, that “imposes” the concept or thought of “value” onto the world. His starting-point is never the Cartesian mind, but rather what he calls “the optic of Life,” “the prism of Life” (BT, Attempt 2). The “thinking-sensing ones” that he mentions in the text, the peculiar beings that “make” a “world of valuations,” are a part of “life,” are themselves “nature.” He usually portrays them (that is, us) as living, sentient bodies, whose thoughts and desires emerge from the depths of a hierarchical (as well as dynamical and changeable) structure of animal drives and affects – and not at all as merely thinking beings that might somehow stand outside of nature and “project” their representations sui generis, particularly their valuations and their concepts, onto nature. Nietzsche’s point is not that the really real is a valueless nature and that value is merely a human addition coming, as it were, from outside of nature. His point is, rather, that there is something in nature, namely us, that “makes” something different out of it, namely: a world of “valuations, colors, weights, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations” (GS 301).

Such a world would not exist without the human, and yet the conclusion that Nietzsche draws from this fact is not the idealist conclusion that there is a “thing in itself” devoid of value and, opposed to it, as well as separated from it, a “subject” that imposes value onto it. The opposition that Nietzsche wants to establish is not between nature and the human, but rather between nature without the human and nature with the human. And in establishing this opposition, his aim is always twofold. First, he wants to convey that we have to change our view of the human, and look at the human as nature: the human as a form of life, a body, an organism which is “the valuating animal as such” (GM II 8); the human as “a venerating animal” (GS 346), as the form of animal life which deserves to be called “the esteemer” (Z I, On a Thousand and One Goals). But, secondly, Nietzsche wants to convey that, given the existence of the human as a form of life, we also have to change our view of nature to look at nature not just as space, time, and causality, not just as a mechanical space-time reality devoid of value – the “infinite nothingness” of the madman in The Gay Science, the “value-less nature” (GS 301) of the mechanistic world-view – but rather as a reality consisting of “spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces” (GM II 12) that can be creative to the point of being able to create values. If we look at ourselves, at the human, “through the prism of life,” and if in doing that, we recognize in ourselves “the esteemer,” then we have to revise, by analogy, our whole conception of life and, indeed, of the world as a whole.

This is what Nietzsche, in the Nachlass, calls his method of philosophizing by using the “analogy” of the body and “following the guiding thread of the body.”^[24] By reflecting upon the human as “the valuating animal par excellence” (GM II 8), we are forced to revise our view of life and nature and, as Nietzsche puts it in a note from 1885, to try to understand “the creativeness in every organic being [das Schöpferische in jedem organischen Wesen]”; to see that all units of organic life weave “small fabricated [erdichteten] worlds around them”; to acknowledge that their fundamental capacity is “the capacity to create (give form, invent, fabricate)” (Nachlass 1885, 34[247], KSA 11.503). The so-called “outside world” of every organic being, Nietzsche writes, is a “sum of estimations of value,” and “the mechanistic representation of pushing and shoving” is “only a hypothesis based on sight and touch.” In passages such as this, Nietzsche goes as far as saying that “there is no inorganic world.” The inorganic world is merely the world as seen by the lights of the “the mechanistic representation of pushing and shoving,” and this is, at best, a “regulative hypothesis” that we can take as valid for making sense of the “visible world,” but not for making sense of the world or nature as such.

To summarize, in esteeming, in giving and granting value to our world, we “make something that is not yet there” (GS 301), but this does not mean that what is really real is a mechanical world of blind causal processes, while our values are mere figments of our imagination; according to Nietzsche, in “making” a world which is a “sum of estimations of value” (Nachlass 1885, 34[247], KSA 11.503), the human being, the esteemer, really makes nature become something that has value in itself – or, in other words, Nietzsche’s claim is that, through the valuing activity of the human animal, nature becomes something that has value in its “nut” (Z I, On a Thousand and One Goals).

The status of this claim is certainly problematic. It seems to be a claim belonging to a foundational “first philosophy” that could establish, from a transcendental perspective, the reality of our values. But that is obviously not the kind of status that Nietzsche attributes to his philosophical claims. I shall consider this problem in the next section, together with Nietzsche’s engagement with the question of teleology (beginning with his study of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in 1868). But, at this stage of my argument, the really important point is that it is fairly certain that Nietzsche does not want to reduce our values to unreal projections of our subjectivity. We could perhaps say that he wishes us to conceive of our values as anthropomorphic but real. Take, for example, the most famous posthumous note in which he writes that “facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315). In this passage, he makes it explicit that he is not claiming that “everything is subjective,” and he points out that the reason why it would be wrong to make such a claim is that “the ‘subject’ is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315; I shall return to this passage in section VII). Similarly, in a Nachlass passage in which he concedes that he has his own “type of ‘idealism’ [Meine Art von ‘Idealismus’]” (Nachlass 1882, 21[3], KSA 9.683) insofar as he believes that “every sensation contains a certain estimation of value [Werthschätzung],” and that every estimation of value “imagines and fabricates [phantasirt und erfindet],” he puts “‘idealism’” in quotation marks, and he immediately adds that that which our estimations of value imagine and fabricate is real, even if its own kind of “reality [Wirklichkeit]” is “completely different from that of the law of gravity.” Here, too, he remarks that “we cannot wipe off [abstreifen]” all the estimations of value that we imagine and fabricate. The idea that we could do that, and then just deal with a mechanistic world of space, time, and causality without “projecting” any values onto it, is an idea that he explicitly rejects (see, again, Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315 and, for example, GS 373).^[25]

At this stage, the main point is that the claim that, as living beings, we “make” a world filled with value should not be taken as a subjectivist (or “anti-realist”) claim, but rather as a claim about ourselves as (part of) “nature” or “life.” And if we now consider how Nietzsche uses the verb “to make” (machen) when he presents his conception of custom or the “morality of mores” in the Genealogy, I think we can easily confirm that it is correct to reject a subjectivist reading of his claims about the nature of our values. He writes, with emphasis, that customs, mores, “make” us “to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable” (GM II 2), and he clearly does not mean that in obeying customs our original nature remains unchanged, while a thinking subject imposes upon it a given set of merely subjective representations. He means, rather, that human nature, even the human body, or life itself in the human organism, has been really changed by the prevalence of custom. Customs and social life have made us different from what we were before. Indeed, through customs and social life, we have acquired a new nature: a “second nature.”

Nietzsche uses the expression “second nature” three times in his published writings.^[26] In Dawn, he writes that our natural drives can be “transformed by moral judgments,” so that they then acquire a “second nature” (D 38); in The Gay Science, he points out that what he terms “giving style” to one’s character involves adding to one’s character “a great mass of second nature,” as well as removing “a piece of first nature” (GS 290); and in other aphorism of Dawn, titled “First nature,” he writes:

The way in which we are educated nowadays means that we acquire a second nature: and we have it when the world calls us mature, of age, employable. A few of us are sufficiently snakes one day to throw off this skin, and to do so when beneath its covering their first nature has grown mature. With most of us, its germ has dried up (D 455).

By inhabiting a world in which there are moral judgments, in which we can engage in attempts to reshape our own character, and in which we receive an education, it comes about that we develop valuations and estimations of value that involve the intellect and intellectual judgments. These new valuations and estimations of value involve concepts and reasoning, and that is why our specific way of valuing goes very much beyond the instinctive judgments of the drives of our first nature, and differs so much from the way in which other types of living beings that we know of value. And yet, for Nietzsche, this does not prevent these new valuations and estimations of value from being as natural as the valuations and estimations of value that preceded them. In fact, as the three quotes above illustrate, Nietzsche thinks that those supervenient valuations and estimations of value are natural and powerful enough to change our first nature, that is, to make a second nature out of our first one. The latter consists of what Nietzsche calls the “old instincts” of the hunter-gatherer, “all those instincts of a wild, free, prowling human being” (GM II 16), the “animal instincts” (GM II 22) that evolved and made our species what it is before it was forced into the “straitjacket” of custom, “the morality of mores,” “custom” (GM II 2), and social life in general. These instincts remain active in us while they are gradually changed by our social and spiritual valuations, but even when they “grow mature” instead of “drying up,” they are forced to express themselves (to “discharge” themselves) in a social space partially “made” by intellectual judgments, therefore a space in which reasons are given and demanded and certainly count for something.^[27]

All of this means that Nietzsche is much closer to McDowell’s “naturalism of second nature” than to the “bald naturalism” or the mechanistic, reductionist naturalism that many attribute to him. It is also interesting to note, as Stefano Marino has recently shown, that the fact that John McDowell took his conception of “second nature” from Gadamer means that he took it indirectly (and unknowingly) from Nietzsche, as Gadamer took his own conception of “second nature” from a whole philosophical and scientific tradition that goes back from Jakob von Uexküll, Max Scheler, and Arnold Gehlen to the passages of Dawn and The Gay Science quoted above.^[28]

But let us now consider Nietzsche’s conception of “purpose” (Zweck), and the crucial role this conception plays in his attempts to understand life and nature in non-mechanistic terms.

IV

In 1868, before starting to work on the texts that, four years later, would lead to the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche studied Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and planned to write a doctoral thesis about the critique of teleological judgment. Recently, Sebastian Gardner’s ground-breaking article on Nietzsche on Kant and teleology has made clear that Nietzsche’s position in these notes from 1868 is already as complex as it is original, for it involves a critical assessment and an effort of differentiation from other positions besides Kant’s, namely Schopenhauer’s, Lange’s, and Goethe’s.^[29] I shall try to show that Nietzsche’s very serious and comprehensive engagement with Kant’s third Critique sheds much light onto his mature views on teleology.

The notes are dominated by a basic agreement with Kant: living beings – given that they are organisms – cannot be understood in mechanistic terms, even if it is also true that scientific knowledge of nature is mechanistic and no other kind of explanation besides the mechanistic can be allowed in natural science (e. g. divine providence). In order to make sense of living beings qua instances of “life,” i. e., in order to recognize them as organisms, we need the concept of “end” or “purpose” (Zweck). In agreeing with Kant on this, Nietzsche points out that, for Kant, “mechanism” is the world devoid of final causes, the world of sheer causality (Nachlass 1868, 62[41], KGW I 4.565); that Kant saw that the natural sciences are “exact” only in as much as they are knowledge of nature as a mechanical world ruled by mathematical laws (62[23], KGW I 4.557); that he also saw that such a world is the only thing we can properly understand,^[30] and that this means that the mechanical categories define the limits of the strictly conceptual: whatever exceeds the realm of the mechanical is beyond the reach of physics as a mathematical science and therefore beyond the reach of constitutive, determining, or exact concepts (62[39–41], KGW I 4.564–5). As human beings, we are, however, forced to think beyond the mechanical, as we have to think about the phenomenon of “life,” both in ourselves and with regard to other organic beings. That is not because the existence of living beings requires a non-mechanical explanation. The emergence of living beings can and should be conceived of as accidental, non-purposive, and mechanical (62[52], KGW I 4.574). But their form – i. e., the way they exist as individual units of life – is discontinuous with the inorganic and cannot be explained in mechanical terms (62[47], KGW I 4.565).^[31] What Kant has shown is that organic form must be thought of as internally purposive: the activity of the parts causes the activity of the whole, but the activity of the whole, i. e. the functional, hierarchic relatedness of the parts in a whole, causes the activity of the parts, so that “an organism is that in which everything is purpose (or end) and, reciprocally, means” (62[22], KGW I 4.556). However, only the concepts of the mathematical and mechanical sciences are determining, constitutive, exact concepts, so that judgments involving purposiveness are merely “reflective” (62[40], KGW I 4.564) They are not knowledge, but only contemplation (“eine Betrachtungsweise,” as Nietzsche puts it in Nachlass 1868, 62[23], KGW I 4.557); or, as Gardner writes, teleology is not explanation but “contemplation according to forms.”^[32]

Nietzsche endorses Kant’s claim that we cannot avoid conceiving of organic units (organisms, living beings) in terms of their inner purposiveness, which entails that life as such is already beyond the conceptual in the strictest sense of the word. But, for Nietzsche, this means, then, that “life” is “what causes the marvelous” (“das Wunderbare,” 62[15], KGW I 4.554), “life” is “unknowable” (62[52], KGW I 4.574), “life” is “the secret,” “the enigma” (62[29], KGW I 4.560), it is “obscure,” “something entirely dark for us” (“uns etwas völlig dunkles,” 62[47]), KGW I 4.570). Why this conclusion?

The first step leading to it seems to be the idea that the sensuous form of particular living beings is in fact just the surface, or the appearance, of that which we call “life” in them. In each particular case, that which we call “life” in them is, however, the whole which we cannot avoid conceiving of as the “purpose” of the parts that appear in our sensuous experience (62[47], KGW I 4.570). But this concept of a “purpose” is not so much something that we discover in the organism than a concept that we “fabricate” or “invent” (“erfinden,” 62[40], KGW I 4.564, 62[52], KGW I 4.574) in order to control or subdue (in the realm of the understanding) what we cannot really understand, that is, in order to make sense of “the properties that appear” (62[40], KGW I 4.564), the organic form: “What we see from life is form; the way we see it is the individual. What lies behind that is unknowable” (62[52], KGW I 4.574).^[33] “What lies behind” the appearance is each particular whole which we think of as the inner purpose of the activity of the parts, but “the concept of the whole refers only to the form, not to ‘life’,” that is: even after we call it a “purpose” in each individual case, it still remains “entirely dark” – first, because it remains the unexplained emergence of something non-mechanical and non-inorganic from the mechanical and inorganic; second, because what we conceptualize as the inner purposiveness of an individual organism tells us nothing about life as such. Nietzsche unpacks this second idea by writing that there are “innumerous purposive forms” in nature, but “life itself cannot be thought of as a purpose, as it must be presupposed in order to operate according to purposes” (62[46], KGW I 4.568). Life itself has no purpose, the whole of life is chaos, which means that not only no mechanical causes can really account for the emergence of “life,” but also no reason can be given for the existence of what we must think of as the individual purposiveness of the innumerous organic forms that interconnect and constitute the whole of life on our planet. As Nietzsche claims several times in his notes,^[34] life is not rational: out of the end-directedness of the innumerous existing forms of life one cannot in any way derive the existence of a rational whole or, in other words, a rational end-directedness of life itself (which explains why it is so important for Nietzsche to reject one particular idea of Kant’s critique of teleological judgment – the idea that we think of purposes in nature by analogy with the occurrence of purposes in our rational agency).^[35]

What is important to highlight from all this is twofold. First of all, Nietzsche takes concepts, such as “purpose” or “end,” “means,” “organ” etc., to be “made up,” “fabricated,” “invented” – and yet he does not thereby hold that they are merely invented. Nowhere does he imply that he is talking about a merely subjective conceptual scheme “imposed” upon something previously given to our senses, that is, “imposed” upon something simply “given” (upon, as it were, a concept-free intuitive datum). He does not deny that the concepts at stake capture a distinction which is real. These made-up concepts are precisely what allows us to conceive of “life,” and experience “life,” as something different from the inorganic or the mechanical. What we thereby conceive and experience, “life,” is therefore really real, even if “something entirely dark.” Put differently, our made-up concepts do throw some light onto what life is, but this light is dim, and so, for us, life will forever remain “an enigma.”^[36]

The second point that is important to highlight concerns the question of “bald naturalism.” Already in his early notes on Kant, Nietzsche claims, in typical fashion, that “life” escapes conceptualization, or is somehow beyond the reach of even our best concepts. But “life,” for Nietzsche, is not a realm of “subsumption under natural laws,” or of “blind causality.” Life is irreducible to mechanism, life is not accessible to us without the concept of inner purposiveness – even if this concept is only a problematic, “fabricated” concept, since life, like the aesthetic idea in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, is something “to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i. e., no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it.”^[37] Life is beyond the reach of determinate concepts, and yet there is no experience of the limits of conceptualization and no access to life (via art, say) without some indeterminate conception of inner purposiveness. And that is why the claim that life escapes (determinate) conceptualization does not set apart fact and value, as if the former belonged to a realm of blind causality and the latter to a realm of subjectivity cut off from nature. Due to the inner purposiveness of living beings, life involves valuing and value, so that what begins to emerge here is (to borrow Hannah Ginsborg’s formulation) the idea of a normativity of nature (or life).^[38]

I shall develop this idea below. For now, it suffices to remark the following: (a) what we saw above about “social normativity” and “rational normativity” already suggests that these are developments, along a continuum, of the normativity of nature, such that the latter is not an independent realm separated from the former; (b) if our access to life is problematic – if life is “something entirely dark,” life itself has no purpose, the whole of life is chaos, life is not a rational whole etc. – then surely the normativity of nature cannot be taken to be a source of ultimate truth, neither about facts nor about values. But, before we can consider these points in more detail, we have to determine whether Nietzsche’s mature views on teleology differ from his early Kantian reflections. A full answer would, of course, require another article, but a few indications that Nietzsche’s mature views are basically in agreement with his early ones might be sufficient.^[39]

Consider, for example, what Nietzsche writes in GS 109, a crucial text, in which he seems to deny the reality of the teleological by writing that “the total character of the world is […] for all eternity chaos.” Does he really deny the reality of the teleological in this text? If we take teleology to involve the thesis that there is an ultimate, overriding purpose of the universe, then Nietzsche obviously denies the reality of the teleological. The main point of the text is precisely this: that we ought not to conceive of the organic, and especially of the human – of human life – as any sort of “secret aim” of the universe. But this is, of course, completely different from denying that there are organic beings and that the inner organization of living beings must be thought of as involving inner purposiveness. No doubt, Nietzsche claims that “the total character of the world is […] for all eternity chaos” (GS 109, my emphasis), but in claiming this he also acknowledges that not everything is chaos in the universe. The pre-modern belief that the organic is “essential, common, and eternal” in the universe is wrong; the organic, rather, is something “inexpressibly derivative, late, rare, accidental, which we perceive only on the crust of the earth.” But the organic is nonetheless something real; we remain forced to acknowledge the exceptional character of living beings: that they exhibit inner order, inner purposiveness in the midst of the chaos that is the universe. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, we still have to acknowledge that “life,” or “the development of the organic,” is “an exception,” and in fact “the exception of exceptions” (GS 109).

Nietzsche’s fundamental experience of the universe as “chaos” does not deny the inner purposiveness of living beings, and it is in fact tantamount to the experience of the question about “the value of existence,” the “terrifying” question that Schopenhauer was the first to ask in modern times: “does existence [i. e. the world] have any meaning at all?” (GS 357). Nietzsche is very explicit in presenting the emergence of this question in Schopenhauer’s work as the consummation and final expression of the slow historical process that ended with the pre-modern belief in an overriding purpose for the whole universe, particularly an overriding purpose of a moral kind. He calls the death of this pre-modern belief a “pan-European event,” which he describes like this:

Looking at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and care of a god; interpreting history in honor of some divine reason, as a continual testimony of a moral world order and ultimate moral purposes; interpreting one’s own experiences as pious people have long interpreted theirs, as if everything were providential, a hint, designed and ordained for the sake of salvation of the soul – that is over now (GS 357).

All of this develops the claims that Nietzsche makes in the notes from 1868: that life is not a rational whole, that there is no purpose in the inner purposiveness of the innumerous manifestations of life, that life is “entirely dark.”

It is, of course, true that, in his mature writings, Nietzsche usually avoids the vocabulary of “ends” or “purposes,” and instead he tends to describe the organic, or what he calls the “oligarchic” organization of organisms (e. g. GM II 1), in terms of dynamic relationships among “spheres of power” and, later, in terms of dynamic relationships among “wills to power.” But if one looks, for example, at GM II 12 – one of the most important texts in Nietzsche’s corpus about both the concept of purpose (Zweck) and the hypothesis of the will to power (Wille zur Macht) –, one can hardly fail to recognize that, while Nietzsche certainly rejects several aspects of the traditional conception of teleological explanation, at the same time his view of organic life does not aim to deny that organisms are characterized by inner purposiveness, but only to re-describe inner purposiveness in terms of power-relations (or “will to power”). The main idea of this text is that nothing is useful in itself, nothing is born being in itself a means to an end or purpose. Something can only become useful insofar as something else exerts power over it: “purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function” (GM II 12). And this is so not only with regard to the utility (or external purposiveness) of a chair or an apple, but it is also the case with regard to the function of an organ of a living organism. For example, an eye becomes an eye, something that can be used to see, and a hand becomes a hand, something that can be used to grasp, only insofar as the eye and the hand can be mastered by that unit of “will to power” which is the organism as a whole. But, in Nietzsche’s own terms, a “will to power” is nothing else than a “system of purposes,” a “system of ends [ein System von Zwecken]” (GM II 12). Organisms are systems of ends, organisms can only be rendered intelligible as organisms if they are conceived as instances of inner purposiveness – that is, again, Nietzsche’s Kantian point.

One should gladly concede that Nietzsche makes this point in terms that emphasize that the biological realm is a realm of evolution, and that every pre-Darwinian conception of inner purposiveness, such as Kant’s or Hegel’s, has to be reconsidered. Thus, he points out that chance has a decisive role in the course that the evolution of any species or organ takes; he makes clear that no ends and no “systems of ends” that come into being in the biological realm are eternal; and he rightly denies that the development of living beings could be understood as a “progressus towards a goal, even less a logical progressus by the shortest route and the smallest expenditure of force” (GM II 12). Biological evolution has nothing to do with progress toward a final telos, a predetermined state of perfection, and so, again, there is no reason to suppose that there might be an overriding purpose for the whole of life, let alone the whole universe. But the conclusion that Nietzsche draws from all this is not at all that teleological reflections should be replaced with mechanistic explanations. Reflections about life have to remain “quasi-teleological” insofar as they have to take “individuals,” i. e., all particular units of life, to be “systems of purposes.”^[40]

Moreover, he explicitly declares in this text that his philosophical method is fundamentally opposed to the “now prevalent instinct and taste” which consists in believing in the “mechanistic senselessness of all events [die mechanistische Unsinnigkeit alles Geschehens]” (GM II 12). In typical fashion (and in accordance with his genealogical way of thinking), he claims that this mechanistic view of nature does not result from any scientific discovery about the objective nature of things, but rather from certain normative prejudices. It is the “democratic idiosyncrasy” of the modern age that leads people to avoid acknowledging that power-relations are the essence of life, and hence that life is a realm of hierarchic organization resulting from such power-relations – that is, from clashes among “spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces.” The mechanistic view of nature is a function of our “modern misarchism,” and indeed a form of “administrative nihilism,” a formula that Thomas Henry Huxley coined in order to reproach Herbert Spencer’s mechanistic view of evolution, and that Nietzsche corroborates, adding that (unfortunately) this is “a question of rather more than mere ‘administration’” (GM II 12).^[41]

But, in considering Nietzsche’s mature conception of purposiveness in nature, one should also not fail to mention how he sees the relationship between consciousness and purposiveness. The first obvious point is that he understood very clearly, like Schopenhauer before him, that the inner purposiveness of organisms does not depend on consciousness. As he writes, for example, in a posthumous note from 1888: “let us prevent ourselves from explaining purposiveness [Zweckmäßigkeit] through the spirit: there is no reason to attribute to spirit the exclusive capacity to organize and systematize. The nervous system has a very extensive richness: consciousness is something that is added to it” (Nachlass 1888, 14[144], KSA 13.328). This is, of course, fully compatible with Kant’s view of the inner purposiveness of organisms, given that he sees it precisely as a process of self-organization which does not involve any kind of consciousness in most living beings (e. g. in a blade of grass or a tree), and which, even in the case of human beings, is not at all designed by their self-consciousness, and is for the most part as “instinctive” and unconscious as in all other living beings.

It should also be noted that Nietzsche may sometimes seem to deny the very existence of purposes in nature, while he just wishes to point out that the inner purposiveness of organisms does not depend on conscious purposes and does not manifest anything like the overriding purpose that a mind can give to a series of events. So he writes, for example, in a posthumous note from 1876: “there are no purposes [Zwecke] in nature, and yet nature creates things of the highest purposiveness [Zweckmäßigkeit]” (Nachlass 1876/77, 23[114], KSA 8.443). Likewise, his view of our animal drives and instincts – and how they play a decisive role in the formation of our conscious thoughts and deliberate actions – results directly from Schopenhauer’s Kantian definition of instinct as “everywhere an action as if in accordance with the conception of a purpose, and yet entirely without such a conception.”^[42] The claim is not that consciousness is merely an effect of hidden causal mechanisms, but rather that organic forms have to be conceived as operating according to an inner purposiveness that does not depend on consciousness, let alone on rational agency. In order to better understand the implications of this view of life and how it leads to something like the idea of a “normativity of nature,” we need to take a brief look at Nietzsche’s conception of “meaning” (Sinn), which complements his view of value and purpose.

V

Nietzsche often uses the word “meaning” as a synonym for “purpose,” or even “utility” (Nützlichkeit) (e. g. GM II 12–3, GM III 28), and he barely distinguishes “meaning” from “value” (e. g. Z I, On a Thousand and One Goals, GS 373). To find or give meaning to something is to place it within a “system of purposes” (GM II 12), and this involves setting up a certain hierarchy of values. Thus, when he describes the inner purposiveness of organisms in terms of “systems of purposes,” and argues that “purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function” (GM II 12), he paraphrases this by writing that a thing (be it a chair or a “physiological organ,” an organism or “a legal institution, a social custom, a political usage, a form in art or in a religious cult”) acquires “utility” and “actual employment and place in a system of purposes” only insofar as it is “again and again reinterpreted to new ends [auf neue Ansichten ausgelegt] by some superior power to it.” “Subduing” or “becoming master” over something is tantamount to “interpreting anew [Neu-Interpretieren].”

What this implies is, first, that the metaphor of power and the metaphor of interpretation are two complementary ways that we have at our disposal to render intelligible the phenomenon of inner purposiveness. Or, in other words, Nietzsche’s point is that living beings do not present themselves to us as mechanisms: we can only access them as living wholes if we conceive of the relationships between their parts as power-relations and conceive of power-relations as sign-relations, i. e., as meanings, not causes. “Interpretation” is, thus, just a new metaphor for the Kantian insight of the 1868 notes: livings beings organize themselves internally by spontaneously giving functional meaning to their organs, thereby interpreting themselves as “systems of purposes.” Likewise, they deal with their so-called “external world” by interpreting what is out there according to their inner “system of purposes.” Thus, purpose is meaning, and meaning is purpose.

However, if the “meaning” of a hand is that it is useful to grasp, the “meaning” of an apple is that it is good to eat, the “meaning” of an artistic form is that it is beautiful to watch, and so on, then “meaning” is “value,” and finding meaning in the world (including in one’s actions) is the same as finding purpose and value in the world. (Note that the fact that we cannot avoid interpreting everything in light of our inner system of purposes does not imply that we cannot understand, at least to some extent, how other living beings interpret the world and find value, purpose, and meaning in it).

This equation of meaning with purpose and value explains many aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, particularly regarding his view of nihilism. What he calls nihilism is fundamentally the failure of the “valuating animal par excellence” (GM II 8), the “venerating animal” (GS 346), “the esteemer” (Z I, On a Thousand and One Goals) to find any value, purpose, and meaning in the world – a failure which he describes as a sickness, a failure that turns the human being into “the sick animal” precisely because the nature of this animal is to find value, purpose, and meaning in the world (even in the face of tragedy, one might say – although it may be more correct to say: especially in the face of tragedy, because it is then that “life” shows itself most clearly as the whole we belong to, or because, then, we are overwhelmed by the “Dionysian,” the experience of life as a destructive and, at the same time, creative force that compels us to endorse “the highest of all possible beliefs,” namely the belief that “only the individual is reprehensible” and “everything is redeemed and affirmed in the whole” (TI, Skirmishes 49).)

It is now crucial that we give an account of why this equation of meaning with value and purpose involves setting limits on the epistemic pretensions of conceptual meaning, that is, of understanding and justification in the “space of reasons.” In the next section, I shall try to give this account in a concise way by focusing on only one important text that addresses the question of meaning, namely Nietzsche’s most famous posthumous note that there are “no facts and only interpretations.” It should be kept in mind that setting limits on the epistemic pretensions of conceptual meaning is not at all the same as denying conceptual meaning all normative force. Moreover, given that, for Nietzsche, life is irreducible to mechanism and can only be accessed in terms of value, purpose, and meaning, it should already be clear that the sense in which he sets limits to the conceptual has nothing to do with the idea that, as Brandom puts is, “explanations in terms of causes trump explanations in terms of reasons.”^[43] Nietzschean genealogy does not reduce reasons to causes.

VI

Here is the whole posthumous note about facts and interpretations:

Against positivism, which halts at phenomena – “There are only facts” – I would say: No, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact “in itself”: perhaps it is a folly to want to do such a thing.

“Everything is subjective,” you say; but even this is interpretation. The “subject” is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is. – Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis.

In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. – “Perspectivism.”

It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as norm. (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315)^[44]

As we can see, the text is directed against “positivism,” the reductionist, mechanistic naturalism already mentioned above, which “halts at phenomena” because it is “only a hypothesis based on sight and touch” (Nachlass 1885, 34[247], KSA 11.503). But what does it mean that it is “only a hypothesis”? How does Nietzsche justify this claim?

What is presupposed in this note is that it is only by applying certain categories to what is visible and touchable, thereby rendering it intelligible as a mechanism, that the positivist is led to believe that he only deals with “facts,” and that he can ascertain that “there are only facts.” As Nietzsche explains in The Gay Science, the reason why the positivist is deceived is that he is unable to realize that those categories are “human concepts of value [menschliche Werthbegriffe]” (GS 373). Those categories put together an interpretation of the world – but an “interpretation” in the sense discussed above: a “system of purposes.” In this particular case, the system of purposes is conceptual, but concepts of things are in fact “concepts of value”: the determinations of thought are determinations of value. Cause and effect, substance and accident are part of a conceptual scheme whose purpose is knowing the truth. Those categories serve this purpose, are means to this purpose, and in fact they are devised to make this purpose as easy to achieve as possible. Recall Nietzsche’s remark in his notes from 1868: “We can only understand a mechanism [Wir verstehen nur einen Mechanismus]” (Nachlass 1868, 62[24], KGW I 4.557). Cause and effect, substance and accident are part of a conceptual scheme that aims to make the world intelligible as a mechanism. Therefore, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes that the positivists – whom he calls “Mr. Mechanic” (in the plural in the original German text) – have “faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and measure in human thought, in human concepts of value – a ‘world of truth’ that can be grasped entirely with the help of our four-cornered little human reason” (GS 373). The positivist’s interpretation of the world makes the world understandable to reason, but this interpretation “might still be one of the stupidest of all possible interpretations of the world, i. e. one of the poorest in meaning,” because

an essentially mechanistic world would be an essentially meaningless world! Suppose one judged the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas – how absurd such a “scientific” evaluation of music would be! What would one have comprehended, understood, recognized? Nothing, really nothing of what is “music” in it! (GS 373)^[45]

At the end of the posthumous note, Nietzsche writes that “it is our needs that interpret the world, our drives and their For and Against” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315). The mechanistic interpretation of the world is a “system of purposes” that is located within a wider “system of purposes” and serves the needs of this system, that is, of a given form of life, an organism. In fact, it ultimately serves the needs of a whole culture, our modern culture based on the ideal of material satisfaction for everyone achieved by means of scientific and technological progress. This is what emerges from Nietzsche’s effort to look at science “through the prism of life.” And this way of looking at science as conditioned by certain needs of life, such as a need for orientation, a need for material satisfaction, a need to preserve a given culture, to solidify a certain kind of social organization, etc. is genealogical. But it is precisely this kind of genealogical approach to science and, more generally, to the “space of reasons” that philosophers like Brandom believe to involve reducing reasons to effects of “blind causal processes.” However, things are much more complicated. In saying that it is our needs or drives that interpret the world, Nietzsche does not present life, or a certain form of life, as a “cause” of the conceptual scheme of the mechanistic interpretation of the world. He is, first of all, saying that life is too complex to be understood in terms of cause and effect: these are simplifications, concepts “fabricated,” “invented,” devised to make everything in the world, and especially life, easier to understand, simpler (GS 112); cause and effect are “logical fictions” (BGE 4), “conventional fictions” (BGE 21), “regulative fictions” (GS 344) or, as pointed out above, “only a hypothesis based on sight and touch” (Nachlass 1885, 34[247], KSA 11.503). So, Nietzsche’s claim is not that life “causes” the concept of cause and the other mechanistic categories, but rather that the concept of cause and the other mechanistic categories emerge from life, that is, they develop out of a reality, “life,” that is fundamentally different from a mechanism and more complex than a mechanism – a reality that, properly speaking, cannot be said to “cause” anything, as it has to be thought of in terms of inner purposiveness, or, more precisely: in terms of a chaotic multiplicity of units of inner purposiveness.

But it is hard to capture this idea in its full force. It involves a general point about concepts. Nietzsche wants to say that conceptual meaning derives from pre-conceptual meaning, and again: he wants to say that this is not the same as assuming that conceptual meaning is “caused” by pre-conceptual meaning. His point is that conceptual meaning is only possible because life, far from being understandable as a mechanism, can only be thought of as evaluative and purposive, therefore as “meaningful,” “interpretative.” Conceptual meaning emerges from life, develops out of life, because life (at least in the only way we can think of it, or make judgments about it) is already “meaningful” at the pre-conceptual (or infra-conceptual) level. This is the reason why all concepts are “concepts of value.”

Thus, Nietzsche calls the mechanistic categories “human concepts of value” (GS 373, my emphasis), but this does not mean that they are merely “subjective,” let alone that all our concepts are merely “subjective.” No concepts should be understood as a pre-given “form” that a “subject” “imposes” on things (or on non-conceptual intuitions). As the posthumous note about facts and interpretations makes clear, such a “subject” is “not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315). Or, in other words, saying that “everything is subjective” or that we need to “posit an interpreter behind the interpretation” is a way of trying to find a “cause” of conceptual meaning. It involves a false conception of the “I” as a cause of our thoughts (TI, Reason, BGE 54, etc.).

The claim that not only the mechanistic interpretation of the world but, in fact, all our conceptual meaning is made of “human concepts of value” is the claim that concepts are human evaluations and simplifications, devices that humans invent and devise in order to interpret the world in a simplified way and in accordance with their needs. But there is a twist: properly speaking, conceptual meaning is a device that life develops in order to make sense of itself. The formula “it is our needs that interpret the world, our drives and their For and Against” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315) means: life itself interprets the world through our bodies, life interprets the world by taking the form of the drives that constitute organisms. This is how Nietzsche historicizes all conceptual meaning, including the normativity of our most basic categorizations. There is no Kantian “form of the understanding,” except as a historical result of the development of life on earth – the result of a “continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations” (GM II 12), which has not ended and will never culminate in a fixed, unchangeable “human nature.”

As for the particular limitation of the mechanistic interpretation of the world (its “idiocy,” GS 373), the problem is less the fact that cause and effect are human conceptions than the fact that “Mr. Mechanic” applies them to life, and hence also to things such as love, hate, society, morality, or art. Cause and effect are perfectly sufficient for understanding a watch, or any other mechanism. The problem lies in purporting to be able to understand “existence” as a mechanism, because existence, that is, the world as such and as a whole, includes life. A mechanistic interpretation of a piece of music would “understand really nothing of what is ‘music’ in it” (GS 373), a mechanistic interpretation of a living organism would, likewise, understand really nothing of what is “life” in it, and the same goes, of course, for a mechanistic interpretation of life as such. “Mr. Mechanic” thinks otherwise only because he is a particular configuration of drives and affects in which such a poor interpretation of life has come to make sense (which is the kind of thing that usually makes Nietzsche refer to such a configuration of drives and affects as being itself an impoverishment of life).

However, Nietzsche seems to set a specific kind of restrictions on the epistemic pretensions of all of our possible conceptual schemes, and not only on the mechanistic interpretation of the world. What exactly are these restrictions supposed to be? Properly speaking, they do not concern knowledge. As Nietzsche writes in the posthumous note about facts and interpretations: “in so far as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315). Our “regulative fictions” and “hypotheses” (GS 344), the conceptual meanings that we “invent,” “fabricate,” “poetize” etc. are sufficient for the existence of knowledge about the world. They are good enough to give us norms of justification and truth-conditions that allow us to establish whether it is raining or not, to determine that the earth turns around the sun, or that “a chunk of iron reliably responds to some environments by melting, to others by rusting, to still others by falling” (to borrow an example from Brandom).^[46] The problem, for Nietzsche, is not knowledge in this classificatory and inferential sense, but rather understanding in a stronger sense. Or one might say, in Hegelian terms, that the problem, for him, is not Verstand, but Vernunft, not finite knowledge, but knowledge of the whole. The whole, “existence,” includes life – and, as Nietzsche concluded from his study of Kant’s third Critique in 1868, life is “something entirely dark for us” (Nachlass 1868, 62[47], KGW I 4.570). That is why all our possible conceptual schemes have a limited epistemic range. In the posthumous note about facts and interpretations, Nietzsche calls this view “perspectivism.”

VII

In the posthumous note about facts and interpretations, Nietzsche writes: “In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. – ‘Perspectivism’” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315). This is one of the central issues of Book V of The Gay Science, written around the same time as the posthumous note. For example, in the aphorism about “Mr. Mechanic,” Nietzsche notes that the problem with the mechanistic interpretation of the world is that, in the end, it strips the world of its “ambiguous character” or, more literally, of its “polysemic character [vieldeutiger Charakter]” (GS 373). The idea here is that, contrary to the conviction of traditional metaphysics, the world “has no meaning behind it” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315), but its immanent meaning – the meaning in terms of which life and the inner purposiveness of its innumerous manifestations become accessible to us – is intrinsically vieldeutig, polysemic, ambiguous. In fact, The Gay Science practically commences with this idea: when, in GS 2, Nietzsche describes his philosophical way of life as a “trembling with the craving and rapture of questioning [Fragen],” he states that what is there to question, the object, as it were, of his Fragen, is “the whole marvelous uncertainty and ambiguity [Vieldeutigkeit] of existence”, that is, the polysemic nature of the world as such and as a whole. In GS 375, he gives another name to the character of the world by pointing out that this character is the “questionable” or “interrogative character of things [der Fragezeichen-Charakter der Dinge]” – or, translated slightly differently, “things” have “the character of question-marks.” Things are an enigma for us, things are question-marks, things are something completely obscure for us.

The whole context of these passages shows that they refer to the complexity of life. The world is polysemic and enigmatic because the world includes life, and from our perspective as living, organic interpreters of the world, it is even the case that the whole world is life, since in accessing and dealing with the inorganic we cannot avoid giving it value, purpose, and meaning. But note that this does not mean that, according to Nietzsche, things are polysemic and enigmatic only “for us,” only for our “subjectivity.” He always tries to reflect, not through the prism of a “subject,” but rather through the prism of life itself. Thus, in the Genealogy, he describes the polysemic and enigmatic character of any unit of life in terms of a “whole synthesis of meanings” whose unity is “hard to disentangle, hard to analyze and, as must be emphasized especially, totally indefinable” (GM II 13). Note that cultural realities (“a legal institution, a social custom, a political usage, a form in art or in a religious cult”) are units of life: culture is nature. Thus, in the Genealogy, the example that Nietzsche gives of a “synthesis of meanings” that can hardly be disentangled is the institution of “punishment” (GM II 13). Punishment cannot be defined (“only that which has no history is definable”) because it is an extremely complex “synthesis of meanings.” And the point is that these meanings are real, they really belong to life itself, as they are the purposes or uses that a living thing has accumulated over time and that have made it what it is. They are not merely subjective representations of properties.

But, most importantly, for Nietzsche, a thing, a unit of life, is also a synthesis of possible meanings. This is precisely what he means by “perspectivism”: that nothing “has a meaning behind it,” but everything is “interpretable otherwise” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315). In GS 374, Nietzsche gives yet another name to the character of the world. Here, he calls it “the perspectival character of existence [der perspektivische Charakter des Daseins].” Existence, the world is polysemic and enigmatic because it is (really, intrinsically, not just subjectively) “perspectival.” Nietzsche explains this by writing that “today we are at least far away from the ridiculous immodesty of decreeing from our angle that perspectives are permitted only from this angle. Rather, the world has once again become infinite to us: insofar as we cannot reject the possibility that it includes infinite interpretations” (GS 374). A thing is a “synthesis of meanings,” and this synthesis is a crossroads of “infinite interpretations” – a crossroads of actual and possible perspectival interpretations that cannot be surveyed from any particular perspective. Every interpretation that can be thought of as really possible is only one of the interpretations that constitute the crossroads. Note that this does not mean that every perspective is an illusion. It means only that every perspective is partial and that all possible objectivity is perspectival (as Nietzsche famously puts it in GM III 12: “there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’: and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be”).^[47]

The fact that the mature Nietzsche formulates perspectivism in terms of the hypothesis of the “will to power” only confirms that he thinks of life as being intrinsically polysemic, enigmatic, and perspectival. Nietzsche conceives of the will to power as the essence of our drives and affects. As he writes at the end of the posthumous note on facts and interpretations, his view is that “every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as norm” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315). But when he introduces his vocabulary of drives and affects for the first time in Dawn, he declares without hesitation: “these are all metaphors,” “it’s all a figurative language [es ist Alles Bilderrede]” (D 119).^[48] In Nietzsche’s prolific reflections about consciousness as a mere “surface” whose depths are drives and affects, or about consciousness as “only a certain behavior of the drives towards one another” (GS 333), his claim is always that all we can think and say about our inner life is just a “sign” of the “movement of drives [Triebbewegung]” (Nachlass 1880, 6[253], KSA 9.263) –so that all we can try to understand about this movement will again be a “sign” of another “movement of drives.” All our inner access to ourselves is an access to “life,” but one which is mediated by such “signs” as “consciousness,” “I,” “agent,” “drive,” “affect,” “desire,” etc. These words are “signs,” and not linguistic expressions of concepts that might be able to render adequately intelligible the reality they refer to. Introspective self-observation is fundamentally empty: we cannot know ex ante the thoughts, passions, and desires that we really are and that really move us – we can only know about them retrospectively, after they have expressed themselves in our actions.^[49] Therefore, the words that we use to think about our thinking, felling, and willing are, in fact, linguistic abbreviations (“signs”) of images that we make of our thinking, feeling, and willing, metaphors of “syntheses of meanings” which we cannot observe directly and which we hence cannot expect to be able to disentangle. Our inner life gives us access to life, but in a way that only confirms the polysemic, enigmatic, and perspectival character of life in general.^[50]

If this is the case, however, then Nietzsche’s genealogical excavations of hidden “drives” and “wills to power” are much better understood in terms of reasons than in terms of causes. Take, again, “Mr. Mechanic” as an example. Nietzsche applies the genealogical approach to the latter’s interpretation of the world and claims that this interpretation emerges from certain “needs,” which can then be understood as just the “sign language” (Zeichensprache) of a certain configuration of drives and affects (cf. Nachlass 1888, 14[82], KSA 13.261, 14[122], KSA 13.301) and their “For and Against” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315). This interpretation is the “sign” of an order of rank in which the drive for truth has acquired a given shape and prominence, so that it now rules over many other drives and imposes upon them a very simplistic conception of truth as an ultimate purpose. In looking at all of this as just a “sign” and “symptom” of the decay of other drives, as well as of “misarchism” and “administrative nihilism” (GM II 12), a “sign” and “symptom” of a disposition to seek mere preservation and well-being (instead of, for example, “tension of spirit” and “great love” for the “great problems”), Nietzsche is not at all reducing reasons to causes, but rather exposing the most conscious, “superficial” normative commitments of the mechanistic interpretation of the world as dependent upon other, deeper normative commitments.^[51] Nietzsche refers to these other commitments as values pursued by drives (and as hierarchies of values pursued by constellations of drives) because they are, for the most part, hidden from those that take these commitments, for whom they matter, and who are moved by them. For the most part, such commitments operate in us implicitly and at a pre-conceptual level. Nietzsche often treats them as “unconscious.” Perhaps, many of them have never been conceptualized, and if we think, for example, of “sex,” “beauty,” “justice” or “happiness” as “values” pursued by unconscious “drives,” we should understand each of them as “syntheses of meanings” that can never be “defined,” that is, fully captured and fixed in exact and explicit concepts. And yet, in trying to understand them as something that is active in human organisms, we cannot avoid trying to name and conceptualize them. We cannot avoid using a “sign language” that conceives them not as causes but as “oughts” that govern certain “systems of purposes,” that is, as norms that give people reasons to think and act in a certain way – and, thus, Nietzsche himself writes that each drive would like to compel all the other drives to accept its perspective, what is values, “as norm [als Norm]” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[60], KSA 12.315). So, what he aims at with his genealogy of the mechanic interpretation of the world is not to explain it away by invoking the brute force of certain “causes” or “physiological” drives (as if these could have any sort of epistemic authority over reasons), but rather to lay out for his readers the (bad) reasons that explain why one might adopt such a reductionist, poor interpretation of the world, as well as suggesting to his readers (good) reasons to reject it.

This is not at all to say that Nietzsche believes reason can eliminate all contingency from life, or conceptual norms could incorporate the non-purposiveness of life itself (of life as a whole) and transform it into necessity. To put it in Hegelian terms: actuality is not rational for Nietzsche. Or, to borrow Martin Saar’s formula, “Nietzsche’s stance towards values (or normativity in general) is primarily anti-authoritarian,” for his stance is neither a constructive stance aiming at reaching normative principles that everyone could accept, nor a reconstructive stance aiming at getting at the genuine content of pre-existing normative practices.^[52] In my view, this is the case because he thinks that there is a fundamental limitation in our access to life, or that life escapes determinate conceptualization. That is why nothing that he writes about life is supposed to count as metaphysics or first philosophy in the traditional sense. It does not claim to have a transcendental foundation. Its foundation is the experience of the limits of conceptualization, of the mysteriousness of biological life and the irrationality of social life – i. e., the experience of life as “something entirely dark.” For what is the Dionysian if not the experience resulting from gazing at “that which defies illumination” in life, “das Unaufhebbare” (BT 15)? According to the view defended in this article, Nietzsche never abandoned his rejection of “Socratism” understood as the belief that “existence [Dasein]” can be made “comprehensible [begreiflich]” and “justified [gerechtfertigt]” (BT 15). In fact, one should wonder if he ever abandoned the Kantian belief – endorsed in the 1868 notes – that our judgments about life are at best “reflective,” but never “determinate.”^[53]

Nevertheless, one should underscore that Nietzsche is very far from taking his reflections about life to be irrational, a sheer expression of affective preferences. As I have tried to show throughout this article, he does not see the space of reasons as a mere product of subjectivity, and he does not try to replace reasons with blind causal processes. He conceives of rational normativity as a development of social normativity, and of social normativity as a development, along the same continuum, of natural normativity. This is a continuum fraught with meaning, therefore a continuum in which values, purposes, and norms appear that can be questioned and discussed rationally. That is why I think that Nietzsche’s stance towards values should not, pace Martin Saar, be understood as “deconstructive.” Saar is right in pointing out that, for Nietzsche, values and norms just are objects of interrogation and scrutiny, i. e., of critique.^[54] But critique is not necessarily the same as deconstruction. Saar is also right in claiming that Nietzsche’s critique of “the value of our values” does not give us – ready-made, as it were – the new and different values that he claims we need. Nietzsche does not have a method that might allow him to give us those values. But his reflections on the value of our values are not merely negative, or “deconstructive”: they aim at something like the affirmation of life, the preservation and expansion of free-spiritedness, the rejection of the nihilistic devaluation of life, etc. In this sense, they are indeed similar to Kantian reflective judgments about art and life (which discuss, in an intersubjectively meaningful way, what cannot be demonstrated and therefore enhance both our Lebensgefühl and our Geistesgefühl).^[55] Thus, for Nietzsche, the philosopher must be able to combine the spirituality typical of the artist – a “bold and lively spirituality that runs along at a presto” – with “a dialectical rigor and necessity that does not take a single false step” (BGE 213). As the “the human of the most comprehensive responsibility” (BGE 61), the philosopher is a reasoner, even if his, or her, main task is in fact a “transvaloration” and “creation of new values” that depends on a confrontation with life which is tantamount to an experience of the limits of reason.