Review: Review
Reviewed Work(s): Nietzsche's Justice: Naturalism in Search of an Ethics by Peter R.
Sedgwick
Review by: Keith Ansell-Pearson
Source: Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Summer 2015), pp. 286-288
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.46.2.0286
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286 book reviews
Peter R. Sedgwick, Nietzsche’s Justice: Naturalism in Search of an Ethics. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2013. 256 pp. ISBN: 9780773542693. Paper, $29.95.
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” and involving breeding, is deeply ironic: mere “nature” cannot be invoked
here since, even on Nietzsche’s own account, promising presupposes complex ethical and social
relations, while contractual relations in turn give rise to and form internalized identities and involve
the moralization of legal concepts (Sedgwick quotes Gillian Rose in making this point). Culture,
then, is not an incidental feature of human existence but rather what distinguishes us as normative
types. Of course, this is a familiar point from the history of modern thought, articulated by naturalist predecessors of Nietzsche’s such as David Hume. However, what makes Nietzsche’s account
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book reviews 287
a radical one is the extent to which he shows the bloody origins and sources of the human animal as
the promise-making animal and the progressive psychology he brings into play when he analyses
the phenomena of law and punishment as well as the complexity of human drives.
It is through the emphasis he places on Nietzsche as a philosopher of culture and practices that
Sedgwick is led to contest any reading of the will to power that would interpret it in ontological
terms as something that lies behind phenomena as a hidden (Platonic) essence. He rather conceives
of power as something always normative (the power of command and convention) and something
social and cultural rather than “subjective,” something that cannot be thought of simply in terms of
a psychological trait of the individual, but rather as that which is constitutive of relations between
selves (81). This also means that any history of law and punishment needs to take the form of a
social history of the body and its fashioning into modes of second nature (97). In developing his
reading, Sedgwick makes fresh and effective use particularly of the volumes of Human, All Too
Human, showing that our conceptual habits, including the use of reason, emerged as practical
coping mechanisms, not designed to reflect the world as it really is, but rather arising as p ractical
responses to the need to coordinate action in relation to an environment governed by a law of
survival. Indeed, in these volumes Nietzsche claims to be driven in his intellectual search by the
goddess of justice, and being just in the face of all things appears to be the ethical challenge he
sets up. He even s uggests that we imitate Christ in being just and refraining from judging (AOM
33; see also WS 81).
Sedgwick is both an astute and a sensitive reader of Nietzsche. In his reading of volume one of
Human, All Too Human, for example, he shows just why the text is an exercise in therapeutic philosophy, centered on the analysis of a series of traumas that now afflict human identity, and hence
the need for a novel form of psychological reflection: “the route away from metaphysics that avoids
nihilism requires a historical philosophy that is psychological” (63). He shows well the reasons for
our conflicted nature: on Nietzsche’s conception, the human being is not one of “a smooth space of
calm self-consciousness surrounding a unified will, but a tide of competing inclinations that have
been selected, suppressed, cultivated, fashioned, honed, and regulated and thus unified into something synthetic and law-like by cultural forces” (74). Nietzsche, then, is a specific kind of naturalist,
namely, one who recognizes that the normative force of custom and tradition has shaped human
identity in a fundamental manner. We are creatures of law, as well as of morality and the sacred,
because we are creatures of norms. For Sedgwick, Nietzsche’s emphasis is always on practices of
living and doing in which activity is the decisive feature of our valuing, and this valuing means
taking things to be true, desiring to know, deeming things to be good and bad, considering things
to be just and fair, and so on, such that there is no gap that separates our epistemic and normative
propensities. This, Sedgwick writes, “means that our origins and identity are more animal-like than
the metaphysician would ever assume” (78).
Although I agree with Sedgwick on this point, I would also stress the extent to which the human
animal is the historical animal par excellence, and ultimately it is history that other animals lack. It
is thus a little misleading when Sedgwick argues that naturalism “means emphasizing the animal
origins of the human and re-integrating humanity into the wider world of natural history” (78). This
is largely true, of course, but it should not occlude the extent to which the naturalism we want in
our science of humanity is a historical one, in which human identity is heavily mediated by culture
and a variety of normative practices.
In chapter 5 Sedgwick turns his attention to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and thus moves from an
analysis of man as the punishing animal—the central image in the middle period texts as well as
the Genealogy—to a treatment of man as the law-giving animal. As he notes, Zarathustra not only
challenges established conceptions of morality, it equally challenges conventional conceptions of the
genre of philosophical discourse: although it may well be the summation of Nietzsche’s philosophy,
as its champions proclaim, it is a deeply frustrating one, one that is highly difficult to digest and work
with philosophically. Nonetheless, Sedgwick’s decision to make this text central to his analysis is
a wise one, as it contains numerous thought-provoking discourses on law, punishment, and justice,
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288 book reviews
including “The Pale Criminal” and “Of the Way of the Creator” in the first part and “Of Old and
New Law Tables” in the third part. Sedgwick is especially good in his reading of the meaning of the
overman, which, he writes, “cannot be imposed by way of some superior power and remain what
it proclaims itself to be. Only as an invitation does it retain its integrity as a teaching and as a gift”
(151). He sees Zarathustra as engaged in a search for a new way of living, a new life, including a
new justice, beyond the outmoded metaphysical categories of the soul and free will.
There is much to admire in this book, as there is in Sedgwick’s previous work on Nietzsche. He
is a good writer, and his prose is lucid and accessible; he is a subtle and incisive reader of Nietzsche;
and he is judicious in his assessments of Nietzsche’s strengths and weaknesses. He has a tendency to
treat Nietzsche in an intellectual vacuum—one learns very little from this study about Nietzsche’s
nineteenth-century context and the thinkers he read and was responding to—and at times I wished he
had probed more deeply—for example, into Nietzsche’s conception of drives and into the meaning
of the “joyful science.” Ultimately, though, it must be said that he largely succeeds in his task of
illuminating Nietzsche as a political and normative thinker. This is a fine and important study, and
it deserves to be read widely by students and scholars of Nietzsche’s ethical and political thinking.
Keith Ansell-Pearson
University of Warwick
K.J.Ansell-Pearson@warwick.ac.uk
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