Justin Remhof’s Nietzsche as Metaphysician bucks the trend in Nietzsche studies by arguing not just that Nietzsche is a metaphysician but that his metaphysics informs his thinking on non-metaphysical issues, such as meta-ethics, perspectivism, life, becoming, nihilism, amor fati and eternal recurrence, in important and revealing ways. In so doing, his book is a welcome antidote to the non-metaphysical readings that currently dominate the literature (2), and which tend to take Nietzsche’s rejection of two-world metaphysics as a rejection of metaphysics tout court. As Remhof rightly acknowledges, two-worldism does not define the parameters of what counts as metaphysics and Nietzsche’s rejection of it does not amount to a rejection of metaphysics per se (11). Rather, he argues that Nietzsche should be understood as a naturalistic metaphysician.

The strategy of the book is ‘to offer a metametaphysical interpretation’ that challenges all the current non-metaphysical readings by showing that Nietzsche does not think that ‘there is a special problem for metaphysical philosophy, such that metaphysics is somehow problematically discontinuous with other areas of philosophy’ (11–12). In Remhof’s view, the questions that drive philosophical inquiry, including metaphysical questions, are unproblematic because they are answerable (15). And, he argues, the way metaphysics answers these questions is also unproblematic if we understand metaphysics non-dualistically and as constrained by independent criteria. Remhof outlines three ‘criteria of what should constrain any adequate characterization of metaphysics’ (15). First, metaphysics must be distinguished from the sciences. Second, it must make claims about reality, although these claims, he suggests, need not be about fundamental reality. Finally, an ‘adequate characterization of metaphysics’ should ‘respect the actual practices of metaphysicians’. The latter is achieved by engaging the ‘metaphysician’s playbook’ through demonstrating sensitivity to questions such as ‘what exists’ or ‘what is the nature and structure of what exists’ (15). In sum, Remhof claims that his aim is the second-order one of establishing that Nietzsche is a metaphysician rather than that of laying out his first-order metaphysical commitments. Nonetheless, he does not refrain from informing the reader of what he takes these commitments to be, acknowledging that ‘there are times when I bolster my view by examining various ways in which Nietzsche seems to make first-order commitments’ (12).

Yet rather than offering an account of Nietzsche’s first-order commitments that merely bolster the metametaphysical account, the book runs the two issues dangerously close together. The latter, second-order, issue is concerned to establish that Nietzsche is a metaphysician whilst the former, first-order, issue concerns what type of metaphysician he is. The book often veers towards arguing that Nietzsche is a metaphysician because he adopts a particular constructivist metaphysics. The problem with this is that, as Remhof presents it, accepting that Nietzsche is a metaphysician involves accepting that he is a metaphysical constructivist. Remhof’s view that Nietzsche’s status as a metaphysician depends on him being a constructivist is evident throughout the book. We witness it as early as p. 15 where it is argued that many metaphysical questions are answerable for Nietzsche because he ‘follows Kant in thinking that metaphysics can move forward on the grounds that our metaphysical concepts constitute the structure of the objects of our investigations’ (1). That is, according to Remhof, Kantian constructivism ensures that ‘we can successfully refer to the world’ (15). That Remhof’s aim is not solely to establish that Nietzsche is a metaphysician but also that he is a particular kind of metaphysician is confirmed towards the end of the book when he writes that ‘I have introduced a set of metametaphysical guidelines to follow when attempting to figure out what kind of metaphysician Nietzsche is’ (173). By this stage, the reader isn’t surprised by the repetition of the claim that Nietzsche can satisfy the metametaphysical requirement that metaphysical concepts refer to reality by virtue of adopting the Kantian constructivist view that metaphysical terms construct the objects they refer to (173). For Remhof, what makes Nietzsche a metaphysician is that he is a constructivist.

Consequently, constructivism is implicated not just in establishing that metaphysical questions are answerable for Nietzsche but also in the examination of how they are answered. Accordingly, the requirement that Nietzsche must distinguish metaphysics from science to satisfy the constraints on what constitutes an adequate characterization of metaphysics also relies on constructivism. This is evident from Remhof’s argument that the world of cause and effect described by the scientist is constructed by us. Although Remhof describes the criteria that must be satisfied to establish that Nietzsche is a metaphysician as ‘independent’ criteria, little effort is made to consider ways that he might be a metaphysician besides being a constructivist. There are other non-constructivist ways to satisfy the criteria of being a metaphysician, yet Remhof doesn’t consider them. Additionally, although the idea of being a naturalistic metaphysician does not stand or fall with being a constructivist, Remhof does not explore ways in which Nietzsche might be a naturalist metaphysician independently of constructivism. In the absence of such an examination, we are again confronted with the view that Nietzsche’s status as a metaphysician depends on him being a constructivist. The dependency relation is made clear in chapter three by statements such as ‘I have argued that a proper understanding of Nietzsche’s relation to metaphysics must include an examination of how human beings develop metaphysical concepts to organize the flux of empirical properties’ (65). Despite writing that ‘This neo-Kantian approach should be taken seriously as one way of doing metaphysics’ (65), Remhof’s view is that although constructivism is not the only way of doing metaphysics, it is the only way that Nietzsche can be understood as a metaphysician. But the claim we cannot understand Nietzsche as a metaphysician unless we interpret him as a Kantian constructivist is false.

To see that this is the case, I turn to Remhof’s assessment of Nietzsche’s argument in BGE, 14 to which he points as an example of how Nietzsche distinguishes metaphysics from science and views metaphysical concepts as conditions that make science possible by virtue of ‘bringing order into the world’ (74).Footnote 1 According to Remhof’s reading of the passage, Nietzsche is contrasting explanation with interpretation and arguing that physics provides interpretations rather than explanations of things. Yet, physics seems to offer explanations, we are told, by virtue of its ‘belief in the senses’ (BGE, 14). The question is formulated as follows: ‘what makes physics an arrangement of the world which simultaneously embraces sensory information while going beyond the senses?’ (77). The answer to the question, according to Remhof, ‘turns on Nietzsche’s constructivism’ (77). Constructivism, he reminds us, is the ‘controversial view that human representational practices bring all empirical objects, including natural objects such as planets, into existence’ (77). Appealing to GS, 112 for support and identifying Nietzsche’s use of the term ‘description’ with ‘interpretation’, it is argued that physics is an interpretation rather than an explanation because physics describes a humanly constructed world. It isn’t entirely clear whether Remhof is suggesting that physics constructs the world it describes or whether he is suggesting that physics describes the world that our human practices construct independently of physics. That is, the issue of whether the view being attributed to Nietzsche is that physics constructs the world or whether physics takes itself to be capturing a world that it does not know has been constructed and which it takes to be non-anthropocentric could be made more transparent. The former view is suggested by Remhof’s statement that ‘the process of conceptually organizing sensible properties into certain objects of inquiry provides a more accurate way of understanding how physics functions’ (77). This suggests that physics itself is a practice that conceptually organizes the world, which, in turn, suggests that physics itself is a metaphysical enterprise. But Remhof’s statement on the following page describing physics as studying a constructed, mind-dependent, world suggests that physics studies the world as it has already been constructed by our conceptual practices. He writes that ‘To believe that physics embraces conceptually organized sensory information is to hold that the world physics studies is constitutively mind-dependent’ (78). Still, one thing is clear and that is, according to Remhof’s interpretation, Nietzsche takes the physicist to be describing a mind-dependent world.

However, I am not persuaded by Remhof’s constructivist interpretations of BGE, 14 and GS, 112. In BGE, 14, Nietzsche writes:

It now may be dawning on five or six thinkers that even physics is only a way of interpreting or arranging the world (if I may say so: according to us!) and not a way of explaining the world. But in so far as it relies on our belief in the senses, physics is taken for more than that, and shall long continue to be taken for more, for an explanation. Our eyes and fingers speak for it, appearance and palpability speak for it: to an era with essentially plebian tastes this is enchanting, persuasive, convincing, for it instinctively follows the canonized truth of ever-popular sensualism. What is clear, what ‘clarifies’? First, whatever can be seen and touched – you have to take every problem at least that far. (BGE, 14)

In GS, 112, he writes:

Cause and effect – ‘Explanation’ is what we call it, but it is ‘description’ that distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science. Our descriptions are better – we do not explain any more than our predecessors. We have uncovered a manifold of one-after-another where the naïve man and inquirer of older cultures saw only two separate things. ‘Cause’ and ‘effect’ is what one says: but we have merely perfected the image of becoming without reaching beyond the image or behind it. In every case, the series of ‘causes’ confronts us much more completely, and we infer: first, this and that has to precede in order that this or that may then follow – but this does not involve any comprehension. In every chemical process, for example, quality appears as a ‘miracle,’ as ever; also, every locomotion; nobody has ‘explained’ a push. But how could we possibly explain anything? We operate only with things that do not exist: lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces. How should explanations be at all possible when we turn everything into an image, our image! (GS, 112)

Rather than claiming that we construct objects in the world in the above passages, when Nietzsche claims that the physicist’s appeal to the senses is not explanatory but interpretive and descriptive, he is making a point about the character of human perception rather than about the mind-dependent character of the world. His point is that human perception is anthropocentric and that we mistakenly take physics to be offering non-anthropocentric explanations of things from the outside, so to speak, by virtue of its appeal to sense-evidence. Nietzsche argues that the senses don’t explain anything in this regard because perception, by its very nature, is interpretive and narrowly anthropocentric. The physicist’s appeal to the senses is not explanatory because it assimilates that which is seen to what is already familiar to us. He makes this argument in BGE, 192 where he writes that when it comes to perceiving an object, the imagination must supplement gaps in our senses such that what we see is an ‘image’ of the world. That the human mind constructs perceptual images rather than reality itself is evident from GS, 112 where Nietzsche claims that the images that physics describes are ‘false’ and depict things that ‘do not exist’. As a result, and, despite the Kantian overtones to Nietzsche’s appeal to the role of the imagination in BGE, 192, his is not a constructivist claim or a claim about the mind-dependent character of reality. Rather, for Nietzsche, science offers an imprecise and overly simplified perceptual image of the natural world. In BGE, 22, he describes such simplified accounts as being useful in an everyday context but ultimately too coarse to offer explanatory insight into the nature of the world as it is independently of human simplifying perceptual images of it. Such insight, he tells us, can be achieved by de-humanizing the world. In GS, 109, he argues that only by de-humanizing the world can we begin to properly naturalize the human being within it. According to Nietzsche in this passage, our tendency to understand the world in terms of the ‘aesthetic anthropomorphisms’ that we project onto it through the unquestioning act of perceiving it is tantamount to a deification of nature. This is because our anthropocentric tendency to interpret the world according to what is familiar to us leads us to project necessity and purpose onto the world. But since these projections reflect our view of ourselves as ‘more’ than nature (BGE, 230), they are ‘shadows of God’ (GS, 109; GS, 108). As a result, the failure to understand the character of the natural world in a more discriminating way leads us to misconstrue the human being’s relationship to it. Thus, Nietzsche asks, ‘When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our deification of nature? When may we begin to “naturalize” humanity in terms of a pre, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature’ (GS, 109). Indeed, Nietzsche suggests that when we cease to understand the natural world in a crudely anthropocentric way based on unquestioning acceptance of how we perceive things, we find that our relationship to the world is not a constitutive one. That is, the world is not reducible to our crude anthropocentric categories but is instead ‘a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms’ (GS, 109). The world is not constructed by us, and it is not as we crudely perceive it to be. As a result, Nietzsche’s metaphysical naturalism cannot be of the constructivist metaphysical variety because constructivism is too anthropocentric for Nietzsche’s naturalistic requirements. Nietzsche’s juxtaposition of explanations and interpretations should not, then, be taken to denote a distinction between mind-independency and mind-dependency as Remhof suggests (78–79). Rather, given that Nietzsche claims that all our epistemic claims are irreducibly interpretive (BGE, 22; GM, III, 12; 24) and that we cannot ultimately escape the human point of view by adopting a God’s Eye perspective to look around our own corner (GS, 374), the best we can hope for and all we should legitimately aim for is to adopt less coarse and more discriminating interpretations. An explanation, then, should be properly understood as a more discriminating interpretation of things rather than an attempt to get at things from the outside. To discern that this is the case, notice that Nietzsche claims that physics gives interpretations rather than explanations in BGE, 14 and that he claims that interpretations falsify in GS, 112 and GM, III, 24. Yet, in AC, 52, he refers to the philological art of reading well and claims that it does not falsify. And in D, Preface, 5, he describes good philology as the art of careful reading, of looking before and aft. Notice too that in BGE, 22, Nietzsche describes himself as an old philologist pointing out examples of bad interpretive practices. In this passage, physics and its appeal to necessary laws of nature are singled out as an example of bad interpretive practice. Accordingly, when he describes physics as an interpretation and juxtaposes it to explanations, he is not objecting to interpretations per se but rather to bad, hasty, falsifying interpretations amongst which he includes physics on the grounds that it lacks circumspection regarding the evidence of the senses and fails to penetrate to what he describes as a ‘deeper world of insight’ in BGE, 23. More discriminating interpretations that adopt a perspective from above rather than below (BGE, 2; 30) that consider things from multiple points of view (GM, III, 12) and not just from a narrow vantage point can offer explanatory insight. That this is Nietzsche’s view is evident from his appeal to the will to power in BGE, 36 as an ‘explanation’ of the mechanistic world and his description of the will to power as interpretive in BGE, 22. As a result, whilst I agree that Nietzsche’s naturalism is of the metaphysical variety and that it is not reducible to scientific descriptions, at least not to those currently offered by science, I am unpersuaded by Remhof’s constructivist interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaphysical naturalism.

Similarly unpersuasive is his constructivist account of causality, which Nietzsche takes to be central to overcoming metaphysical dualism (AC, 48; 49). In Remhof’s estimation, the metaphysics of causality, for Nietzsche, stems from the individuating activity of our conceptual practices. According to Remhof’s interpretation, we can describe but not explain cause and effect. We cannot explain it because explanation, he contends, on the basis of his interpretation of BGE, 14 and GS, 112, aims to provide a mind-independent conception of causality. Description, by contrast, understands causality in mind-dependent terms as something that is constituted by us (79–80). In addition to BGE, 14 and GS, 112, Remhof appeals to BGE, 21 to further support his claims. In this passage, Nietzsche writes that we have ‘invented’ causation, which Remhof takes to mean that causation is constitutively dependent on human minds (80). But, once again, Nietzsche is arguing that a particular mechanistic model of causality is false because it is based on crude observation. It is an invention not because we bring it into existence but because our perception of the world is crudely anthropocentric. BGE, 21 and GS, 112 have been discussed in more detail elsewhere (Doyle 2021: 538-39). My discussion of Remhof’s appeal to them in Nietzsche as Metaphysician, however, pertains to how his constructivism provides metaphysical support for our ordinary view of causality. Remhof is, of course, aware that Nietzsche questions how we ordinarily understand things but argues that the constructivist metaphysical support that he takes Nietzsche to be giving to our ordinary notion of causality is itself far from ordinary (134). Yet one can’t help but think of Nietzsche’s criticism of Kant who ‘wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right’ (GS, 193). Remhof’s metaphysical constructivism succumbs to the same complaint.

The ordinary view of causality understands it in terms of observed regularity and succession. The ‘one-after-another’ understanding of causality (GS, 112) is derived from our emphasis on how things perceptually appear to us (BGE, 12) and on that which can be ‘seen and touched’ (BGE, 14). Remhof very interestingly makes much of our ordinary understanding of causality in his argument that Nietzsche provides a priori reasoning against the coherency of the notion of causa sui. He contends that Nietzsche adheres to a conceptual account of the a priori, which holds that ‘a priori justification consists in how our concepts relate to one another’ (124). That is, it holds that ‘once the meanings of certain terms in a relevant proposition are correctly grasped, justification rests solely on understanding that proposition’ (125–26). Nonetheless, he argues that Nietzsche thinks that an ‘experiential step grounds a priori warrant’ (125). This means that justification entails being in causal contact with the sensible world but that such causal contact is genetic rather than justificatory. He contends that ‘causal contact with the sensible world is the origin of our beliefs, including at an advanced level, beliefs about the meanings of our terms. Justification then consists in certain relations between the meanings of our terms’ (126). According to Remhof’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s a priori argument, the notion of the causa sui is incoherent because it involves causation. Informing his reasoning is that our ordinary sensibly acquired meaning of causality requires a distinction between cause and effect and that the notion of the causa sui fails to distinguish between them (132). Remhof contends that Nietzsche can ‘justifiably regard constantly conjoined events as genuine instances of causality’ (133) on the grounds that the distinction between cause and effect requires individuation, which has its source in our constitutive conceptual practices.

But rather than take our ordinary concept of causality as constituted by our conceptual practices, as Remhof argues, Nietzsche takes it to be a regulative or experimental jumping-off point of inquiry (BGE, 210; GS, 344). This accounts for why he describes the ordinary mechanistic view of causality understood in terms of regularity and succession as having a practical use (BGE, 12). It is a crude account of causality but provides a useful point of departure for inquiry into causes. Still, our beginning point need not be our end point. Moreover, the experimental point of departure entertained in his approach to understanding causality is a posteriori rather than a priori because it is based on how we perceive the world. As I see it, Nietzsche is arguing that our ordinary observable account of causation indicates a need to distinguish between cause and effect. Taken as a regulative point of departure, his argument is that if such a distinction is required, then our ordinary perceptual view falls short of satisfying it. In Nietzsche’s estimation, our ordinary view must be replaced with a more discriminating account of causal connection. This fits better with Remhof’s own acknowledgment that Nietzsche thinks that his account of causality as ruling out the causa sui may be subject to revision (133). It also agrees with his experimental approach to doing philosophy that all our claims should be understood as inherently contestable (BGE, 22). Moreover, when discussing the meaning of the term causality, Nietzsche takes his cue from the natural sciences and accredits the natural sciences with placing an emphasis on the need to distinguish between cause and effect (AC, 49). Despite his praise for science on this issue, however, Nietzsche proceeds to show that if causality, for the natural scientist, presupposes the need to distinguish between cause and effect then causality cannot be understood in the ordinary observable terms of regularity and succession.

He argues that our ordinary view fails to capture real causes (WP, 551 KSA 13: 14 [98]) on the grounds that a ‘regular’ (WP, 552 KSA 12: 9 [91]) succession of events does not amount to a causal connection and reduces the ‘effective capacity’ of causality to an invention (WP, 551 KSA 13: 14 [98]). That is, according to Nietzsche, causality, understood in terms of observed regularity and succession, ‘empties the concept of causality of its content’ by reducing it to an anthropocentric projection ‘out of ourselves’ onto events (WP, 551 KSA 13: 14 [98]). This is a different type of projection to the constructivist one of which Remhof writes. The constructivist practice of which he writes is one that brings cause and effect into existence by employing our conceptual practices to individuate causes from effects. In Remhof’s view, individuation is required to distinguish between cause and effect (134). But genuine causality, for Nietzsche, entails power rather than observation of constant conjunctions and their individuation by our conceptual practices. The metaphysical support that constructivism purportedly provides for the regularity and successionist account of causality must fail to capture real causes because acts of individuation do not entail that what is constituted and observed as a cause is causally powerful. In the absence of real causal power, the distinction between cause and effect is reduced to a fictional (BGE, 21) image of the world and, consequently, does not really exist (GS, 112).

Elsewhere, Remhof denies that constructivism entails eliminativism in the context of a discussion of GS, 112. He writes that the latter entailment holds only if Nietzsche denies that constructed causes and effects are empirically real. In order to make such a denial, he argues, Nietzsche would have to claim that ‘causation does not exist simpliciter’ or else ‘claim that causation is merely in our head’ (Remhof 2021: 577). But, according to Remhof, there is no textual support for attributing either of these views to Nietzsche in GS, 112. Rather, he cites Nietzsche’s statement that ‘It will do to consider science as an attempt to humanize things as faithfully as possible; as we describe things and their one-after-another, we learn to describe ourselves more and more precisely’ (GS, 112). But Nietzsche’s eliminativism regarding our ordinary observable view of causality as succession stems precisely from its anthropocentrism, coupled with the claim in GS, 109 that a more discriminating account of nature involves de-humanizing it. Remhof is correct when he claims that Nietzsche is not an eliminativist about causality. But he is an eliminativist regarding our ordinary understanding of it, which must call into question any metaphysical account that purports to support it. This is because our ordinary understanding of causality is founded on crude anthropocentric perceptions of the world that fail to capture its powerful character. Contrary to Remhof’s claim that there is no evidence for eliminativism in GS, 112, Nietzsche clearly states that ‘our image’ of the world depicts ‘things that do not exist’ (GS, 112). Consequently, if causes and effects are to genuinely exist, they cannot be reduced to our observational capacities, and they cannot be constituted by us. That is, contrary to Remhof, they must be mind-independent.

It is important to acknowledge that Nietzsche understands that he is engaging in metaphysical thinking when he appeals to the idea of real ‘efficient’ causal power (BGE, 36) or quanta of energy and driving forces (GS, 360). The natural sciences, he thinks, are unable to cater for real causal power because of their emphasis on observation (BGE, 14) and tendency to reduce the reality of causal power to its measurable and observable effects.Footnote 2 Yet, what makes Nietzsche a metaphysician is that he develops his metaphysics of causal power in conversation with the sciences rather than providing a constructivist metaphysical support to them. Thus, whilst Nietzsche agrees with the scientific distinction between cause and effect, he offers a revisionary metaphysics of causality to be understood in terms of mind-independent causal powers rather than in terms of the observed regularity of events. Although Remhof may be correct that Nietzsche holds the causa sui to be a contradiction in terms because it fails to distinguish between cause and effect, Nietzsche’s view on the matter stems from his conversation with the natural sciences and is, accordingly, rather more a posteriori and experimental than Remhof allows, in addition to requiring a metaphysics of mind-independent causal powers that are not constituted by us.

Remhof’s account of Nietzsche’s will to power in terms of energy transfer and his view of causation in terms of willed drive events (92) suggests a more dynamic and powerful account of causality than the regularity and successionist view to which his constructivism is committed. The problem, as we have seen, is that our ordinary understanding of causality, which is supported metaphysically by human constructivist practices, according to Remhof, eliminates real causal power. Remhof may retort that the will to power is an indeterminate, powerful, something that is individuated by us as causes and effects.Footnote 3 But this cannot be right because, for Nietzsche, our practices of individuation depict things that do not exist. Consequently, causes and their differentiation from effects cannot be constituted by us. Moreover, the will to power is intended to challenge rather than support our ordinary view of things observed from the outside (BGE, 36; 12). Yet Remhof is correct when he writes that ‘In BGE, 36, Nietzsche is interested in causation as it exists across domains – beyond merely physics, chemistry, psychology, and so forth’ and that he aims to ‘characterize the causal character of reality as a whole’ (93). Nonetheless, the implications of this generalized and powerful account of causality are insufficiently explored in the book. That is, if Nietzsche is interested in understanding multiple and diverse phenomena in terms of a generalized account of causality construed in terms of the will to power, then one would expect causal explanations to play a more prominent role in Nietzsche’s account not just of metaphysical, but also of non-metaphysical issues. Take, for example, Remhof’s claim that psychology, for Nietzsche, entails the study of normative reasons (81). Remhof simply accepts Clark and Dudrick’s view that Nietzsche distinguishes between normative reason-giving and naturalistic causes (81). His rationale is that human beings ‘commonly’ exhibit reason-giving behaviour ‘despite the fact that on Nietzsche’s view non-conscious, unconscious and non-rational factors always have some influence on reasoning’ (81). It is odd to play-up what we typically think and to downplay what Nietzsche actually thinks in this manner, especially when we consider that Nietzsche takes himself to be in the business of challenging our commonly held views. Remhof’s motivation becomes clear, however, when he tells us that the distinction between causes and reasons is supported by his constructivist interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaphysics. He writes that ‘For Nietzsche, the world is constitutively dependent on our practices which are typically thought to operate in accordance with reasons’ (81). Additionally, he tells us, ‘science is fundamentally dependent on accepting a constitutive relation between the world the science studies and our reason-giving behaviour’ (81). The latter claim is central to what Remhof takes to be the character of Nietzsche’s metaphysics of science (82). In arguing in this way, however, Remhof loses an opportunity to explore the causal role of the drives in how we think about normativity and values. The lost opportunity is significant because, in its absence, Clark and Dudrick’s distinction between causes and reasons poses problems for Nietzsche’s naturalism. It poses problems by virtue of identifying the sphere of nature with causes and by identifying the sphere of normative reason-giving non-naturalistically (Clark & Dudrick, 2012: 139). Although such a distinction may fit with a Kantian approach to the matter, Nietzsche is unhappy with Kant’s separation of the sphere of morality from the sphere of nature (BGE, 215; GS, 335) and aims, instead, to translate the human being back into rather than out of nature (BGE, 230) by offering a non-moralistic and decidedly naturalistic account of human value (AC, 2). A more thoroughly naturalistic understanding of values and normativity must provide a more robust causal explanation of them in our psychological drives. That the drives should be understood in causal terms is suggested by Nietzsche’s description of them in terms of the will to power (BGE, 36) and Remhof’s own claim that the will to power is put forward as a generalized causal account of things as a whole (93). This generalized causal account suggests that human psychology should not be separated off from the causal fabric of reality as will to power. If Remhof wants to interpret Nietzsche’s psychology in terms of reason-giving normativity that differentiates it from natural causes in the way that Clark and Dudrick suggest, then he owes us more in the way of an explanation of how this differentiation fits with Nietzsche’s generalized causal account of reality. This is because, as things currently stand, there is a tension between Remhof’s constructivism and his appeal to generalized causal explanations in Nietzsche. Even if constructivism did not eliminate the causal, as I have argued it does, constructivism is unable to support generalized causal explanations by virtue of viewing the human sphere of normativity as standing outside or beyond the scope of those explanations. This tension would persist independently of the eliminativist implications of constructivism regarding the causal.

Still, despite my disagreements with Remhof, his book is essential reading for those who doubt that Nietzsche is a metaphysician and it is persuasive in many respects. Its account of the criteria that Nietzsche must satisfy to be counted as a metaphysician is apt, even though one suspects that the claim that metaphysics need not capture fundamental reality stems from a Kantian presupposition set up to support the constructivist interpretation of what kind of metaphysician Nietzsche is. The suspicion is grounded in the fact that Nietzsche, by Remhof’s own admission (16; 100), is clearly interested in the character of fundamental reality in some places. This interest is obvious, for example, in BGE, 36 where he describes the will to power as the intelligible character of things and in GS, 109 where he emphasizes the importance of de-humanizing the world. It seems that Remhof’s assertion that ‘basic reality is not his exclusive concern’ (100) is designed to make way for constructivism. But the implications of those passages where he is concerned with fundamental reality for the constructivist interpretation require closer analysis. For, at least on the face of it, these passages represent a challenge to constructivism. If the implication is that constructivism is not the only possible metaphysical interpretation of Nietzsche, then it needs to be brought out into the daylight because, as already indicated, the book trades heavily on its constructivist interpretation in supporting the claim that Nietzsche is a metaphysician. Nonetheless, the book’s detailed and informative discussions of the secondary literature on topics both metaphysical and non-metaphysicalFootnote 4 succeeds in countering the standard view that Nietzsche’s philosophical reflections are metaphysically neutral. In this lies the book’s greatest achievement. Ultimately, the most significant take away from Remhof’s book is that Nietzsche is a metaphysician and his metaphysics matters.