Nietzsche's radical experimentalism

Abstract

The literary complexity of Nietzsche's writings is by now largely familiar; it needs no further display. Instead, I try to reconstruct some of his ideas such that they amount to a sustained philosophical argument and promising project, namely, an attempt to understand — after the Kantian and Darwinian turns — the very possibility of the formation and continuation of infinite varieties of forms of life.

I demonstrate that such a project could make good sense only as a transcendental experiment in which the idea of a reality which is ready-made, immutable, and fixed “in itself” must not only be dismissed as something incomprehensible, but as something not in the least worth striving for, and replaced by the idea of synergetic processes (of self-organization) and what Nietzsche called art without an artist. Read as an empirical-historical narrative we would have to reject Nietzsche's account as a mere rhapsody and arrogant fantasy.