Nietzsche’s Justice: Naturalism in Search of an Ethics by Peter R. Sedgwick (review)

This is one of the finest studies published to date in the English-speaking reception of Nietzsche’s naturalism. Besides a clear sense of Nietzsche’s naturalism, it provides the reader with a clear understanding of just what it means to read Nietzsche seriously as a progressive political thinker, one in search of an ethics of mercy, and what it means to comprehend the will to power as a philosophy of practice. In particular, Sedgwick wants to demonstrate that for Nietzsche power is normative and is the condition of our historicity as the peculiar animals we are. The book is also lucidly written and deftly argued; Sedgwick is an astute reader of Nietzsche, and he skillfully weaves together the story he wishes to tell.

The book is divided into six main chapters. The opening chapter provides a reading of justice and tragedy centered on The Birth of Tragedy, with the aim of showing that from the beginning of his intellectual life Nietzsche was deeply concerned with questions concerning law and justice. According to Sedgwick, the tragedies of Sophocles serve Nietzsche to demonstrate the necessity and the limitation of the conventions that inform and shape public life, and that have been shown to be contingent and powerless in the face of an elemental Dionysian nature. Nietzsche’s prime concern with justice in his early period is thus with the validity of contemporary attitudes and norms—for Nietzsche, in tragedy “the divine justice of the Greek world of Dionysian myth reveals the limits of the socially mediated world of Apollonian convention and law” (52).

However, it is precisely this privileging of a Dionysian metaphysics of nature over the conventions of culture that Nietzsche breaks with in his neglected middle period texts, including The Wanderer and His Shadow and Dawn. These writings occupy Sedgwick’s attention in the central chapters 2 to 5 of the book, where he is at his most impressive: analyzing these texts with aplomb, he carefully and astutely brings to light Nietzsche’s far-reaching and progressive insights into the nature of law, punishment, justice, and a new ethics based on the “self-overcoming of morality” in the direction of mercy, and then provides a reading of On the Genealogy of Morality as the mature output of Nietzsche’s late period that draws on many of the insights attained in the middle period texts. The author argues that Nietzsche’s project of overcoming morality does not suppose the abandonment of ethics, “for mercy does not stand outside the realm of ethics: it merely seeks to transcend the desire to find reasons that justify vengeful feelings” (127–28).

On Sedgwick’s account, the mature Nietzsche is a post-metaphysical naturalist, a philosopher committed to exposing the nature of our historicity, including the contingent character of much of our becoming. If metaphysics holds the nature of values to pertain to a pure and unchanging realm of meaning, springing from some miraculous origin, genealogy accepts, and indeed embraces, the shifting domain of history as the source to be mined and as a way of decoding the territory of the values we unthinkingly inhabit and enact. This is a position Nietzsche anticipates in Dawn with its commitment to explaining rights and duties in terms of their “natural history.” Sedgwick is in search, then, of what might be called a historical naturalism. This is because evolution is as much cultural as it is biological, with human identity achieved through the mastering and cultivation of biological drives by cultural norms: “For Nietzsche, to be human is to be a creature that has passed from the state of nature to the state of culture” (57). And it is on account of culture that the realm of drives, feelings, and impulses is subject to norms. This ultimately means that the well-known opening paradox of the second essay of the Genealogy, concerning the animal that may make promises as a problem set by “nature...