Nietzsche’s Anthropic Circle: Man, Science, and Myth by George J. Stack (review)

The central claim of George J. Stack’s Nietzsche’s Anthropic Circle is that Nietzsche becomes trapped in a vicious or “anthropic” circle insofar as he makes exaggerated, and even metaphysical, claims concerning the universality of will to power—claims that exceed the interpretational or perspectival framework that he himself considers to delimit all thinking. This criticism is of central importance, for it suggests that Nietzsche either invalidates his hypothesis of the will to power or undermines his theory of perspectivism. An additional claim of Stack’s is that in conceiving of will to power as affirmation, with joy occurring at a deeper level than woe or suffering, Nietzsche presents a metaphysics of affirmation.

In addressing the first issue, Stack rightly reads Nietzsche’s perspectivism as treating all claims about the world as the perspective of an author and as statements based in “human analogy” (55). The issue for Stack concerns Nietzsche’s legitimacy in making any claims that value one view of the world over another, or some metaphors over others. Stack begins with the “aesthetic metaphysics” of the earlier works, which attribute to the artist-philosopher a better—by implication, more truthful—connection with nature than others and the ability to give a form to this that transmits its truth—for example, through music or philosophy. Stack is right to suggest that some of Nietzsche’s claims seem to exaggerate the abilities of the artist-philosopher. For example, Nietzsche’s discussion of the relationship between naked nature, the playwright, the satyr, and the spectator seems to suggest that something true of naked nature can be directly transmitted in some way (BT 10). However, any understanding of this relationship must take Nietzsche’s theory of the metaphoricity of all language into account, especially as the nature being translated is “naked,” in the sense of possessing a necessity prior to the attribution of laws. Stack also argues that Nietzsche’s aesthetic metaphysics is largely rejected in Human, All Too Human through the application of a “scientific spirit” (3), which respects the “small truths” of science, while also realizing that a better perspective requires a discerning analysis of scientific theory (27).

However, Stack finds that Nietzsche is soon frustrated with the completeness of the fictionalization he imposes, and on which his notion of language as metaphor is based, and that in his later work he therefore introduces a “trans-phenomenal” context that transgresses the boundaries of his epistemological skepticism (35). For Stack, Nietzsche should have been content with a “radical phenomenalism,” taking a circumspect view of the phenomenal world, rather than locating a “process theory of nature” (37) behind appearance, a theory that is later named “will to power.”

Nonetheless, while Stack finds that at “crucial points” Nietzsche is unable to resist making claims that slip into “ontological assertions” concerning will to power, he does not accept that in making such claims Nietzsche is arguing that will to power is “in agreement with reality” (93, 95). Thus, Nietzsche is not supposed to claim that will to power is an essential force or substance, despite his use of universalizing rhetoric (101, 206). Rather, Stack claims, Nietzsche produces an “exoteric fable” of will to power (109–10), intentionally evoking a mythmaking mechanism as an alternative way to approach concepts that arise from a still present metaphysical drive, and notwithstanding his own skepticism concerning metaphysical claims. Stack appears to find it acceptable that Nietzsche adopts a form of pragmatism, whereby general claims can be made as long as they concede that they are mythmaking, while also relying on current scientific theories. However, he wonders why Nietzsche persists in making statements which seem to exceed these limits, and argues that proceeding with the hypothetical scientific method would have been a better course. Stack approves of such an approach as antirealist (114), with will to power understood as a useful concept for explaining events as well as for undermining...