Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (review)

Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation. Christopher Cox. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. xvi + 270. $45.00.

The first part of this book, called "Nietzsche's Philosophical Position," is alone worth the price of the book. Cox has no startling new thesis to propound concerning Nietzsche's "theory of truth," but he puts together the most concise, lucid, and persuasive account of Nietzsche as a philosopher that I have seen. He marshals Nietzsche's texts so deftly that he gives the impression of letting Nietzsche speak while he modestly stands by as master of ceremonies. He knows Nietzsche's work thoroughly; when he makes some substantive claim about what Nietzsche thinks he typically gives a dozen citations to back it up, yet deftly, unobtrusively, so that he doesn't clutter up the forward movement of his explication.

Cox's basic view is the now-familiar one that what Nietzsche objects to in traditional concepts of truth is their dogmatism; he offers instead a more flexible, holistic, agonistic, naturalistic account. Distinctive virtues in his presentation of this view include: illuminating explication of Nietzsche's coherence theory of knowledge in relation to W. V. O. Quine, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Nelson Goodman; a stronger than ordinary, and in my view quite correct, stress on Nietzsche's naturalism ("a naturalized ontology that accepts no essential differences of kind in the natural world" [78]); and the neat overall shape of the explication, which transforms what could seem like a fundamental contradiction in Nietzsche's philosophy into a dynamically balanced system: "The apparent relativism of perspectivism is held in check by Nietzsche's naturalism . . . ; the apparent dogmatism of will to power and becoming is mitigated by perspectivism, which grants that will to power and becoming are themselves interpretations, yet ones that are better by naturalistic standards" (106). Already here, however, the strains in Cox's reading begin to show. "Better by naturalistic standards"? How can nature provide standards of better and worse? Nietzsche himself often pretends that it does, but this is precisely the weak point in his attempt at a system.

Having quickly sketched his general interpretation of Nietzsche, Cox in the second half of the book presents three extended explications of the crucial doctrines of perspectivism, becoming, and will to power. While these explications are full of sharp and illuminating commentary, they fill out rather than deepen the earlier account, which has the virtues but also the limitations of what I will hereby dub "the new Nietzsche orthodoxy." My guess is that the kind of synthesis Cox effects in his reading of Nietzsche, reaching across the boundaries of analytic and continental readings and drawing with bland confidence equally on Jacques Derrida and Maudemarie Clark, reflects the intellectual experience of many younger philosophers and will become standard in the near future. On the one hand, Cox presses the notion of perspectivism to its limit, dissolving the world of metaphysical fixities into a perpetual flux of power-configurations. These are defined only by their differences but yield momentary centers of stabilization that constitute perspectival standpoints for as long as they last before yielding to the process of reconfiguration or "reinterpretation" by the ineluctable movement of will to power. On the other hand, this basically "continental" picture, of whom the most influential exponent has been Gilles Deleuze, is held in respectable check by the sort of neopragmatist view of epistemology that Cox puts together out of Putnam, Rorty, and the like, according to which strong constraints on the value of given interpretations emerge out of the contingencies of given interpretive contexts--"webs of belief" or "forms of life."

This picture works very well as long as one does not push very hard on the question of what holds it all together in Nietzsche. For contemporary philosophy, as long as the canonical philosophical questions are dealt with (particularly the question "How can you do epistemology without stable objects of knowledge?"), and an edifying, unradical view of ethics after Nietzsche is provided, no one will poke...