Nietzsche's radical experimentalism

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.Abbreviations AS Attempt at a Self-Criticism. 1886 Preface, BT. - BG Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. - BT The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. - GM On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. W. Kaufmann & R. J. Holingdale. New York: Vintage books, 1967. - GS The Gay Science. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. - HH Human, All Too Human. Volume 1. Trans. M. Faber, with S. Lehmann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. - HI On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life. Trans. P. Preuss. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980. - NF Nachgelassene Fragmente.Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe. Volumes 7–13. Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: dtv-W. de Gruyter, 1980. - PT On the Pathos of Truth.Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the early 1870s. Trans. and ed. D. Breazeale. Atlantic Heights: Humanities Press, 1979. - TL On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. Ibid. - UM Untimely Meditations. - WP The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Holingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.