ABSTRACT
There are many stimulating similarities between Nietzsche’s postmetaphysical thought and William James’s pragmatism. Both advance the idea that the world is unfinished, malleable, or in the making and hence waiting for humans to add something to it. In other words, both are poet-philosophers whose contention is that the subject’s creativity or poetic agency is capable of shaping and enriching the world that it finds. Moreover, both critique the idea of a convergence to the antecedently real or true as well as the human answerability to something nonhuman. This chapter discusses these similarities. However, it also draws attention to two differences between their approaches. James’s naturalization of religion, or his utilitarian understanding of religion, is incompatible with Nietzsche’s radical postmetaphysics. The second important difference concerns the question of relations in James’s radical empiricism. He differentiates between fleeting or transitory and essential relations. Nietzsche’s naturalized humanism as panrelationalism would attack James’s notion of eternal or essential relations as still metaphysical, as part of God’s shadow.
