Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity ed. by Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (review)

Like Nietzsche’s own philosophical corpus, this collection is long on problems and short on (definitive) solutions, but it is an important contribution, peppered with insightful moments that will reward any reader whose philosophical home is at the busy intersection of normative ethics, metaethics and moral psychology and who has—or who by now should have—an interest in the challenge Nietzsche puts to moral philosophy. In a very helpful introduction, Janaway and Robertson provide a crystalline overview of the skein of problems—interpretive and philosophical, normative and metanormative—that these essays aim to address. Since the editors’ interests are, ultimately, metaethical, we find at the center of this tenacious snarl what they call “the authority puzzle”: “If Nietzsche denies the kinds of objectivity upon which morality’s claims to authority rest, he may thereby deprive his own positive ideal of a legitimate claim to objectivity and authority” (10).

Of the nine new essays that comprise this volume, the first three papers, which offer promising aesthetic interpretations of Nietzsche’s normative views, illustrate both the urgency of addressing the authority puzzle and the difficulty of prizing it apart from a host of other, closely related problems that confront even Nietzsche’s most sympathetic readers. Peter Railton, for instance, sees no fewer than four distinct problems: the truth problem (If Nietzsche’s critique is true only “from a certain perspective,” what claim could it have upon the credulity of those who do not already share his standpoint?); the morality problem (Should Nietzsche be read as transcending all morality or advancing a morality of his own?); the normativity problem (What is the role of Nietzsche’s critique, if his naturalism excludes “the possibility of normative action-guidance—of acting for a reason rather than as the result of causal forces”?); and the value problem (How can Nietzsche employ apparently preference-independent evaluative terms when such notions of value clearly contravene both his naturalism and his critical inquiry?) (21–24). The aesthetic interpretation he proposes in response complements that of Peter Poellner, whose general approach veteran Nietzsche scholars will recognize, though Railton—one of two authors (with Alan Thomas) whose primary work is not on Nietzsche—offers a refreshing take. For Poellner, the central interpretive problem confronting Nietzsche’s readers is to settle the persistent disagreement about the content (call this the content problem) as well as the grounding for his evaluative claims (52). And Simon Robertson, in his contribution, takes on the scope problem, that notoriously thorny problem of specifying the target of Nietzsche’s critique of morality in such a way as to distinguish it from his positive ideal (81).

What is our task, in the face of such problems? The approaches adopted in this collection are as diverse as the statements of the problems themselves. At the narrow end of the spectrum, Nadeem J. Z. Hussain suggests that “the interpretive task currently facing us is one of deciding which metaethical position, if any, best fits with Nietzsche’s texts” (112). It defies plausibility to imagine that this task is the one Nietzsche hopes we will take up, though readers interested in the metaethical implications of his work will get invaluable clarification about the basic commitments of the relevant positions—especially (moral) fictionalism, non-cognitivism and error theory—from the three essays by Hussain, Robertson, and Thomas.

The richest essays are those that take on tasks greater in scope, as those by Bernard Reginster, Janaway, and R. Lanier Anderson certainly do. These chapters do the greatest justice to Nietzsche as moral psychologist: for instance, although Reginster tackles a version of the scope problem—one that bedevils Nietzsche’s apparently multifarious use of the concept of compassion—we learn from his solution not only a good deal about Nietzsche, but also about the historical resources available to Nietzsche for thinking through the concept, and about the moral psychology of compassion. Only the last two essays, by Anderson and Richard Schacht...