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The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 26 (2003) 1-11



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Nietzsche and the Analytical Ambition

David E. Cooper


A familiar view among Nietzsche's admirers whose training is in Anglo-American philosophy is that he would, up to a point, have reciprocated and admired the enterprise of analytical philosophy—as far it goes. Richard Schacht, for instance, writes that Nietzsche "would find no fault with the most exacting projects of linguistic-analytical inquiry—as far as they go," but that he would reject the idea that such inquiries comprise "the sole and entire business of philosophy" (1983, 42). I agree with the second point: philosophers, says Nietzsche, should not simply "accept concepts as gifts," but "should make and create them" (WP, 409). 1 Philosophy should be revisionary, not just descriptive. I agree, too, that Nietzsche would applaud several virtues often associated with analytical philosophy—objectivity and tough-mindedness, say, and the close attention to language, not only to particular words but to the grammatical structures that, for Nietzsche as for many twentieth-century philosophers, constrain or reflect our thinking.

I want to argue, however, that Nietzsche would not applaud an ambition that, it seems to me, has informed and organized the practices of analytical philosophers—a "master project," as it were, to which the various "exacting" ones mentioned by Schacht typically belong. If that ambition figures in the very characterization of analytical philosophy, then Nietzsche, as one of its main critics ante rem, is the herald of a "post-analytical" philosophical stance.

The directors of the Centre for Post-analytic Philosophy at Southampton are understandably reluctant to specify too closely what it is that we are now "post." Nor are the entries on analytical philosophy in the recent barrage of encyclopedias, companions, and dictionaries of philosophy much help in illuminating the uninitiated. Some of them are simply historical surveys, in which, unfortunately, the principles of inclusion and exclusion are left obscure. Others do offer characterizations of analytical philosophy, but ones usually too general or too specific. Describing it as manifesting a central concern for language will not distinguish it from any serious contemporary philosophizing, while representing it as the application to philosophical problems of Fregean logic fits only a fraction of the projects pursued by paradigmatically analytical philosophers. [End Page 1]

It is small wonder, perhaps, that some writers abandon attempts at substantial characterization and instead identify analytical philosophers by criteria of style or tone ("dry," "detached," "precise" etc.) or, like Richard Rorty, by the criterion of who they read (analytical philosophers are people who read Russell, Quine, and Strawson, say, rather than Chuang Tzu, Marx, and Derrida). But whatever the directors of the Southampton Centre intend by "post-analytical" philosophy, it is surely not—or not simply—philosophy written in a new style or by people who include Chuang Tzu et al., and not just Russell et al., in their reading.

If we do not give up on seeking a reasonably substantial characterization, what might this be? My suggestion is that those thinkers most comfortably regarded as analytical philosophers are distinguished by a broad ambition they share. I will call it the "analytical ambition" and try to excavate it through a little historical digging. The term "philosophical analysis" had its original and most literal application to work done during a so-called "central period," running from roughly 1910 to 1940: from Russell's theory of descriptions, through the logical atomism of Russell and the young Wittgenstein, to some currents in that rainbow coalition known as logical positivism. What was most salient in, say, Russell's lectures on logical atomism or Carnap's Aufbau was the project of analyzing propositions and concepts in the almost literal—one might say, chemical—sense of reducing them down to their simplest components. To understand a proposition or concept was, the conviction went, to know what it was, as it were, composed of.

Even during that "central period," this was not a project or conviction embraced by all the philosophers usually dubbed analytical, and it is certainly one that few later analytical philosophers have countenanced. So, certainly...

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