This paper was written by Brian Leiter and published in 2013. In this paper, Leiter provides a very interesting and valuable interpretation of many aspects of Nietzsche’s naturalism. However, given the focus of the investigation on this website, one aspect of this paper does stand out: Leiter’s view of what he calls “the metaphysics of the will to power,” which is his way of referring to the version of the will to power that applies to both biotic and abiotic systems.
Leiter begins this section of the paper (III, C.) noting how Christopher Janaway wrote, “Nietzsche’s commitment to continuity of results with the sciences is put in some doubt by some of his statements about the fundamental explanatory notion of will to power …” (2007: 52). Leiter suggests Maudemarie Clark has made a compelling case that the “bad arguments” Nietzsche makes for this version of the will to power are “an ironic illustration of a tendency of philosophers Nietzsche so often critiques, namely, that they present their metaphysical doctrines as rational discoveries, rather than ‘attempts to construct the world, or an image of the world, in terms of the philosopher’s values’ (1990: 221).” So, we have good reason not to take these arguments seriously.
Leiter adds a concluding reflection at the end of this section: “A concluding reflection on questions of interpretive method, however, may be in order here. My own interest in Nietzsche is not simply antiquarian, and continued interest in any philosophical naturalist, like Nietzsche, should be, at least in part, a function of the extent to which he gets nature and the facts right, and thus teaches us important things. If it turns out that Nietzsche, the man, really is committed to what seems entailed by the most flat-footed literalism about a bare handful of published “will to power” passages (such as GM II: 12), then so much the worse for Nietzsche we might say. We may do Nietzsche the philosopher a favor, however, if we reconstruct his Humean project in terms that are both recognizably his in significant part, and yet at the same time far more plausible once the crackpot metaphysics of the will to power (that all organic matter “is will to power”) is expunged. I am inclined to Clark’s hopeful view that the crackpot metaphysics is really presented in an ironic spirit, and that Nietzsche, the otherwise sound naturalist, knew better. The fact that none of his actual moral psychology depends on the crackpot metaphysics, and that he assigns the crackpot metaphysics no significance in his own appraisal of his corpus, is additional reason to be hopeful on this score. But Nietzsche was a mere mortal like the rest of us, and even being a genius cannot compensate for the dangers of being self-taught about so much. Perhaps Nietzsche really did believe he had some deep insight into the correct metaphysics of nature, one missed by the empirical sciences. If he had that thought—one wholly inconsistent with the rest of his naturalism—so much the worse for him. Those of us reading him more than a century later should concentrate on his fruitful ideas, not the silly ones, especially when they are not central to his important work in moral psychology” (2013, p. 593-594).
If, on the other hand, it turns out that Nietzsche’s development of the “metaphysical” version of the will to power was consistent with the scientist William Henry Rolph’s (1847-1883) view of evolution as involving a “struggle for the expansion of life [Kampf um Lebensvermehrung]” (Rolph, 1884), and Maximilian Drossbach’s (1810-1884) view of force as the “striving for expansion [Streben nach Entfaltung]” (1884), and the botanist Carl Nageli’s (1817-1891) perfection principle, which held that evolution is directed by an “inner” tendency of organisms to perfect themselves, and the German biologist Wilhelm Roux’s (1850-1924) view that a struggle for existence must take place on the cellular or molecular level, and if it turns out that the scientist Alfred Lotka (1880-1949) and the systems ecologist H. T. Odum (1924-2002) in the twentieth century go on to develop a maximum power principle that they argue guides the development of all natural systems, and other scientists develop a maximum entropy production principle that is fundamentally related to the maximum power principle which they argue guides the development of all natural systems, and we find substantial evidence that supports these principles, then we might say so much the better for Nietzsche.
Leiter, Brian. 2013. Nietzsche’s Naturalism Reconsidered. In John Richardson and Ken Gemes (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (576-598). Oxford: Oxford University Press.