William J. Richardson once suggested that ‘on the longest day he ever lived Heidegger could never be called a philosopher of science’.1 It might seem self-evident that Nietzsche, like Heidegger, was anything but a philosopher of science. But this would be far from the truth: Nietzsche was engaged with the problem of science per se and the questions he raised are of ongoing philosophical importance.
From his early to his later work, Nietzsche was preoccupied (the word is not too strong) with manifestly epistemological issues and questions concerning science. Thus in the well-known, but in his lifetime unpublished, essay, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, the extra-moral (that is, beyond blame and ethical fault or good and evil) is the logical matter of truth, metaphorical reference and, even more precisely, the relation between truth and lie in an observational, all-too eco-physiological sense.2 In the context of a glossed engagement with Gustav Gerber’s 1871 Die Sprache als Kunst (the same Gerber would go on to publish, not at all coincidentally, Die Sprache und das Erkennen in 1884), Nietzsche attends to truth and lie in language, which is also to say, as Josef Simon has argued,3 that his concern is with valid and invalid statements. For Simon, Nietzsche’s propositional preoccupation concerns the possibility of knowledge as such. And Nietzsche offers a number of patent knowledge claims: in addition to his notorious teaching of the eternal return of the same or the totalizing nature of the world as will to power, he makes manifestly metaphysical claims about the death of God, as well as developing critically reflective inquiries into the cognitive status of our knowledge of the world and ourselves as knowing subjects. Furthermore, he makes specific claims regarding logical truth and concerning mathematical representations of phenomena and the theoretical and experimental practice of natural science as such, going as far as to single out physics in particular for a series of radically provocative but unmistakably focused observations. Nietzsche is concerned with truth, the physical world of science, and the potential for, or limits of, knowledge.
All this notwithstanding, it remains the case that those who take Nietzsche seriously are inclined not to take his claims on truth and lie or the possibility of knowledge seriously, let alone his cosmological or ecological theories, nor his claims regarding scientific theory (from Darwin to Boscovich and Democritus to the physio-psychology of diet). More typical is an attention to Nietzsche’s powers of ‘invention’, where Nietzsche is thought not only to have invented a conception of life ‘as literature’ – to use the convention favoured by Alexander Nehamas and Michel Foucault – but entire subject areas such as the ‘pre-Socratics’, or even the idea of Dionysus in the birth of ‘tragedy’.4 And, so the commentator’s reasoning would appear to go, if Nietzsche can ‘invent’ whole vistas of fictive conventions, he can also be said to have invented a vision of truth, a vision of science and even a vision of what physicists do (described with a word from his own discipline as an ‘interpretation’ of, rather than a given ‘fact’ about, the world) (BGE 22). Thus when Nietzsche rhetorically remarks that it ‘is perhaps dawning on five or six minds that physics too is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world’ (BGE 14), or identifies a certain scientific methodology (simplicity) as a deliberate articulation of the ‘greatest possible stupidity’, or criticizes the ‘prejudices’ of science or the ‘crudity and naïveté’ of calculative scientific convention (GS 123, 373) or debunks the Enlightenment conviction concerning the opposition between logos and myth, declaring that the ‘biggest myth is that of knowledge’ (KSA 12, 2[154]), his claims appear as so much excess rhetoric: more hyperbole than philosophically earnest propositions.
In this way, and as a kind of clearing of the conceptual air, recent interpretive trends suggest that whatever Nietzsche was doing (be it rhetoric or cultural criticism or ‘therapy’ or just and merely playing parodically with our own all-too-earnest approach to scholarship), it wasn’t/isn’t philosophy. Hence (analytic) philosophers are not to worry. Even if Nietzsche appears to be talking about philosophy he is only fooling (experimenting) with ideas – not claiming the mantle of philosopher. In particular, this interpretive tendency is characteristic of current studies of Nietzsche’s ‘rhetoric’ and style (although contemporary conceptions of rhetoric and Nietzsche’s own formative specialization in the classical tradition of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric engage importantly different arenas).
This welter of perspectives means (at a minimum) that it is difficult to thematize the nature of Nietzsche’s very stylized interest in science. There is a wide difference between an ironic concern with science and a mistaken one, and both ironic and mistaken perspectives differ from the philosophical concern with science as such. That Nietzsche was interested in science is obvious. Indeed, Nietzsche and science can manifestly be conjoined and – to echo the logic of Kant as much as that of Suarez or Aquinas – whatever is is consummately possible, where determining the conditions of that same possibility is what requires further critical reflection. Here, the question will be: does what Nietzsche have to say about science tell us anything about the project of science, or only, and at a minimum, something about Nietzsche? Only in the former case is Nietzsche’s thought of value for the philosophy of science.
Certainly, the substance of Nietzsche’s claims concerning science are extreme with regard to science as it is usually conceived. Although there are patent exceptions, to read Nietzsche as a philosophic voice concerning science remains a subversive thing to do. In addition to its subversive aspect, the topic of Nietzsche and science invites equivocation. For whatever draws other scholars to find affinities between Nietzsche’s thinking and the abstract theories of modern physics (notably quantum mechanics via Boscovich, but also Einstein), Nietzsche’s conceptualization of ‘science’ is not today’s modern, technological and information-age science. I will return to this equivocal aspect below, but first it is important to consider the context of Nietzsche’s original discussion in The Birth of Tragedy. Two points are relevant. The key locus is what Nietzsche identified as the ‘problem of science’ in his self-critical, second preface to his first book. The second is his discussion of science as such in The Birth of Tragedy itself.
Nietzsche proclaims that ‘the problem of science itself, science considered for the first time as problematic, as questionable’ was at the heart of his book on tragedy (BT ‘Self-Criticism’ 2). Nietzsche’s effort ‘to view science through the lens of the artist and art through that of life’ was addressed not to what we think of as (natural) science today but to the science of classical philology, much as Kant had been able to speak of metaphysics as a science of the future (a future metaphysics). This interest in the ‘future’ of science was Nietzsche’s abiding concern.5 Hence, and from a foundational point of view, the ‘problem of science’ necessitates establishing a science of the future, analogous to Nietzsche’s vision of a philosophy of the future, which resembles the Kantian project of installing a discipline (be it metaphysics or philology, even philosophy itself) on the critical highway of science. Because the problem of science qua science – that is, the problem of the scientificity of science – also corresponds to the logical problem of reflexivity, the problem of science in general likewise calls for this same critical reflection. But, notoriously, this means that science as such, not excluding natural or presumably ‘mathematizable’ sciences, cannot be critically conceived (or founded) on its own ground.
For Nietzsche, the achievement of Kant’s critical philosophy (for Nietzsche this same critical philosophy included Schopenhauer) was its overcoming of the logical optimism of contemporary science, a logical optimism which is still in evidence today as the positivist confidence that knowledge is both possible (in theory) and attainable (in practice), that ‘all the riddles of the universe could be known and fathomed’ (BT 18). Kant’s critical philosophy, conceiving ‘space, time and causality as entirely unconditioned laws of the most universal validity’, demonstrated, in Nietzsche’s view, that these same concepts ‘really served only to elevate the mere phenomenon … to the position of the sole and highest reality, as if it were the true essence of things’ (BT 18). It is Nietzsche’s claim here that Kant’s critical perspective is itself a continuation of what Nietzsche calls ‘Socratic culture’. This is the Alexandrine (or, to use, Nietzsche’s later terminology, slavish) culmination of such a logico-scientific vision: ‘the delusion of limitless power’. For Nietzsche, it is on the basis of ‘the belief in the earthly happiness of all’ that one can trace the genesis of the modern, technological, and ultimately consumerist ‘demand for such an Alexandrine earthly happiness, into the conjuring up of a Euripidean deus ex machina’ (BT 18).6 Hence Nietzsche’s proposal will be to turn the Kantian critical project against itself, and so to take it further as a move utterly in keeping with the same tradition.
Nietzsche argues that critical philosophy takes the culture of scientific reason or logic to its utmost, but still fully logical, consequences. Using ‘the paraphernalia of science itself’, the critique of scientific reason would thus effectively outline ‘the limits and the relativity of knowledge generally’ – ultimately denying ‘decisively the claims of science to universal validity and universal aims’ (BT 18). In this way, Kant’s philosophic legacy signalled the logical destruction of ‘scientific Socratism’s complacent delight in existence by establishing its boundaries’ (BT 19).
The Birth of Tragedy features a focus on science not because of the modern importance of science but because in the person of Socratic optimism – that is, the confidence in the power of reason, in the spirit of ‘logical’ optimism – ‘science’ presided over the death of tragedy. It is possible (Nietzsche argues) to propose a rebirth of tragic culture – precisely where ‘the man of theory’ recognizes the fatal limitations of his own enterprise (including science) in the absence of the foundations that it itself claims as necessary and which it itself has undermined as such (BT 19).
On logical grounds alone, we have noted, empirical science cannot be regarded as self-grounding (Nietzsche would challenge the idea that anything be thought to be self-grounded or, indeed, self-caused). Hence Nietzsche regarded the task of raising the problematic question of science as necessary on critical grounds. The alternative foundation for such a study would be art, and Nietzsche accordingly identified this as the methodology behind his own project. Thus he would not merely refer science to art by taking a leaf from the book of artistic culture, but went further to define art itself in terms of the ultimate perspective of life.
For contemporary readers who are not inclined to speak of ‘scientific Socratism’ and who do not think in terms of the categories of Alexandrine culture or Euripidean machinations (that is, apart from Nietzsche’s Socratism or his Alexandrine vision or critical understanding of Euripides), the question of the meaning of science for Nietzsche can be troublesome. How can one take Nietzsche’s reflections on a particular scholarly discipline (even if he does name it the ‘science of aesthetics’) and apply it to a philosophical reflection on science as such?
It is easy to protest that Nietzsche’s claim to have raised the question of the problem of science as such is a non-starter. There is no ‘problem of science’ as Nietzsche puts it, simply because – as received wisdom tells us – science is itself the basic means for ‘solving’ problems. In this way, the philosophy of science is a straightforward celebration of, and inquiry into, the enabling conditions of science. Science thus constitutes its own self-evident or axiomatic foundation and, anxieties about Euripidean machinations to the contrary, the achievements of technological modernity therefore prove the (perfectly, positively, optimistic) success of science. In this fashion, the debate can be concluded before it begins. Following a similar line of thought, if it may be said – as one scholar has recently claimed – that Nietzsche cannot be said to ‘have’ a ‘philosophy’,7 how is one to argue that Nietzsche has a philosophy of science, a Wissenschaftstheorie?
Nietzsche’s philosophy of science, as I have argued elsewhere, would entail rethinking the aim of the philosophy of science, not giving it a woollier, but rather a much more rigorous, focus on science as such. Here, as a further preliminary to such a critical philosophy of science, it is helpful to begin by asking what Nietzsche meant by Wissenschaft, the term he employed to speak of what we call ‘science’. The German word Wissenschaft is not univocal, and it is worth reflecting, in particular, on its often stated but rarely discussed difference from the English word ‘science’. For the Nietzsche whose first published text begins with a promise of gaining an advantage for what he calls ‘die aesthetische Wissenschaft’ (BT 1), and who went on to write a still insufficiently appreciated book entitled Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Joyful Science), an inquiry into the meaning of Wissenschaft would seem invaluable, even beyond the present context.
Nietzsche alludes to the etymological stem of wissen in Greek (PTA 3) and in several contexts makes much of the limited focus on a single sense (notably ocular) that counts for the tradition of science since the Greeks. In this context, we can see the importance of Nietzsche’s emphasis on the difference that might be made by including the full sensible range of the human body. Thus, in addition to the sense of sight, Nietzsche speaks of hearing and the senses of taste and even smell and touch. It is in this same context of the body as such a complex knowing instrument, widely attuned or keyed to all its senses rather than merely reduced to the single privileged primacy of vision, that Nietzsche could call the body the ‘great reason, a plurality with one sensibility, a war and a peace’ (Z i ‘Despisers of the Body’), as contrasted with the intellect which he downplays as our ‘four-square little human reason’ in the materialist context of empirical science (GS 373).
The German word Wissenschaft dates from the fourteenth century, a conventional term coined in a theological and mystical context as a translation of the same sciens, scientia from which the English word science is derived. But the English ‘science’ (rooted in the Latin, scire (to know) and related to scindere (to cut, divide)) does not render the more complex set of associations implied by Wissenschaft. Wissenschaft is a German word-form which maintains a powerful array of etymological connections via wissen linking it to the Old High German wizzan and Old Saxon wita, but also the English wit and wot, as well as to the Sanskrit veda and the ancient Greek oidá, as well as the Latin videre.8
By contrast, the English term ‘science’ is not (as ‘wisdom’ is) an Anglo-Saxon word. Yet it is instructive that ‘science’ has had its current ‘non-arts’ connotation only since the eighteenth century. Certainly, although Wissenschaft also and increasingly shares this same limiting focus on the mathematical and natural sciences, it has an inherently broad usage, both in Nietzsche’s time and our own. Thus the Wildhagen–Héraucourt German–English Dictionary refers first to natural science before listing the extended definition of ‘Wissenschaft’ as ‘learning, scholarship, erudition, and knowledge’. Although, as first coined, Wissenschaft originally referred only to simple knowledge – Der kleine Pauly notes, for example, Goethe’s ‘davon hab’ ich kein’ Wissenschaft’ – it currently corresponds to the collective pursuit of species of knowledge. In distinguishing between science and Wissenschaft in English and German usage, with important consequences for the discipline of the philosophy of science in particular, this complex difference continues to make all the difference. The Wahrig dictionary thus defines ‘Wissenschaft’ as ‘ein geordnetes, folgerichtig aufgebautes, zusammenhängendes Gebiet von Erkenntnissen’, while the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘science’ as ‘the state or fact of knowing; knowledge or cognizance of something specified or implied’ and features a separate definition of ‘Wissenschaft’ as the ‘(systematic pursuit of) knowledge, science, learning, scholarship’. Wissenschaft defined in terms of an ordered, systematic and coherent disciplinary arena of knowledge corresponds only to the last sub-entry in the OED: ‘The kind of organized knowledge or intellectual activity of which the various branches of learning are examples.’ As the noun corresponding to wissen, Wissenschaft carries the connotations of the ‘ways’ or conduits of knowing – as heard in English with the archaic wis (to show the way, to instruct) or wist (to know) – far more than it is associated with simple ‘knowledge’ (Erkenntnis).
More relevant to our current concern than etymology alone, it is important to underscore the breadth of professional Wissenschaften, as these are more numerous than those that are gathered under the rubric of ‘science’. Hence, although Nietzsche’s identification of himself as a scientific practitioner strikes an English speaker as odd, it was not out of place in his day and would still be an accurate description in contemporary Germany, where, along the Diltheyan axis of Geistes- and Naturwissenschaften, one can speak of Musikwissenschaft, Literaturwissenschaft, Museumswissenschaft and so on. But, as with all equivocations, the subtle problem of ‘what things are called’ (in Nietzsche’s words) remains. Classical philology is not a science – that is, not as the term works in English. Similarly, unless one is a practitioner of a cult religion (such as Christian Science or Scientology), one does not make reference to ‘religious science’ but to ‘religious studies’ and not to ‘art science’ but to ‘art history’, whereas German scholarship – and this makes a not inconsiderable difference for the discipline differentiates between Kunstgeschichte and Kunstwissenschaft. Nevertheless, we can observe that, in the Middle Ages, the study of music was scientia bene modulandi, using a definition of science (a usage ‘now rare’ as we are reminded by the OED) – meaning skill or technique in the (still current) musical sense in which jazz is a ‘sweet science’ and in which not only could Minnesota Fats have his game of pool down to a ‘science’ but an English football team manage to carry the sobriquet the ‘school of science,’ and so on.9
In the context of his early (and later) reflections, when Nietzsche proposed to examine ‘the problem of science’ he refers to this very broad sense of science (Wissenschaft) because what he wanted to address was the specifically scientific character of science. Thus Nietzsche’s talk of science with regard to philology (in his book on tragedy) inevitably exceeded philology in its scope and works, as I have argued, as a genuinely philosophical philosophy of science. Such a philosophy of science requires a specifically critical perspective on, or approach to, science.
For Nietzsche, the critical problem of science derives from science’s own self-founding limit. Neither Aristotle nor Newton nor Kant nor, most recently, Gödel would quarrel with this limitation. But Nietzsche goes beyond the issue of critical foundations and the concept of method and extends his critique beyond his own discipline to the natural sciences like physics and chemistry precisely in their mathematical articulation as such. But, as if difficulties of translation were not enough, the historical referents to such scientific kinds as Nietzsche criticizes are, of course, not the same as those designated by the same terms today. Thus Nietzsche speaks of psychology (recall his discordant reference to the ‘English psychologists’ who have such a mechanical interest in the functioning of altruism at the start of his On the Genealogy of Morals) and here and there he makes manifestly biological and medical references. To parse references of this kind, seemingly very like his invocation of science as such, requires a great deal of scholarly sensitivity. We increasingly have the benefit of several valuable analyses of this kind. Hence when Nietzsche speaks of human physiology and makes some fairly strong claims about nutrition and climate, these are claims which, if you are Gregory Moore or Marc A. Weiner, can be usefully shown to be arising from his own epoch and the prejudicial visions of the day.10
But, even in addition to tracing the history of ideas as a history of scientific concepts and conceptualizations, problems remain because, even on their own terms, Nietzsche’s views are often perplexing – partly, but only partly, due to his rhetorical style. His comments on Darwin, for example, are notoriously confusing to commentators, inspiring some to find him pro- and others anti-Darwinist. Likewise, his discussion of atomism and force seems to mix Lucretius, Democritus and, almost for good measure, Boscovich. If Nietzsche can happily call Boscovich a Pole for the sake of convenient local comparison with Copernicus, some have argued, then his references to science must also be less than precise. Rhetorically excessive and even irresponsible, Nietzsche’s views on science are just bad science (and that would only make his ‘bad’ philosophy worse).
Not so fast – for we are moving very fast when we denounce as factually inaccurate Nietzsche’s contentions on account of their temporal difference from our own era without first examining them in terms of that same period. This, we have noted, is what Nietzsche would call a lack of science – that is, philology, with all its historical sensitivity. And our historical scientificity or sophistication has improved: we know better than an earlier Whiggish tradition of historians (of ideas as much as of the sciences) in the wake of recent sociological and anthropological studies of science and its technologies.11 And we are plainly just beginning with such a re-evaluation of a received view on the ‘genesis and development’ of science. This work is preliminary to any such evaluation and in part it has been begun with specific regard to Nietzsche, although the task is a long one. Relevant contributions such as those of Robin Small and Thomas Brobjer and, earlier, George Stack and, still earlier, the work of the chemist Alwin Mittasch will go some way towards making such a contextual consideration of Nietzsche’s claims possible. But, as the anthropologists of culture, be they of other knowledge discourses (for example, Latour, Pickering) or of other societies (for example, Geertz, Levi-Strauss), have learned to their pain (or, better, are attempting to learn), one can mean to bring a neutrality to bear on one’s studies (and one’s subjects) and still fail to apply it. There is, as in all things, a gap between what we know ought to be done and what we do. This is not merely a matter of akrasia, knowing the good, but failing to act on that knowledge. It is also a matter of not knowing what we incidentally, inadvertently and so unavoidably smuggle into our own effort to know not only what is other than ourselves but – and this was Nietzsche’s great insight – ourselves as well. For Nietzsche took Kant further than Kant himself, which does not mean that he took himself further than he himself could go. That must be our task, though we ought to remember that the same ineliminable residue – what Lacan liked to call the Real will remain, even for us.
So far, in raising the question of the meaning of ‘science’ for Nietzsche, my concern has been to ask how Nietzsche’s critique of science might be turned to the advantage of the philosophical discipline of the philosophy of science as such. Along with Heidegger, I take Nietzsche’s understanding (and his critique) of science and of logic or truth as quintessentially philosophical for the very rigorous reason (in Heidegger’s sense of radical rigour) that, rather than assuming the value of science as such, Nietzsche raises the question of science as a question.
Nietzsche’s philosophical critique of scientific reason puts the critical rationality of science in question. Thus Nietzsche means to pose the question of science as a critical problem rather than as a patent or resolvable problem. This critical project involves the articulation of the problem of science as such, which means that Nietzsche adverts to the prime difficulty of putting science in question as the difficulty of questioning what is ordinarily unquestionable. Indeed, science as authority and as ‘method’ is the means of critique or critical questioning. For this reason, Nietzsche regards raising ‘the problem of science itself … as a problem, as questionable’ (BT ‘Self-Criticism’ 2), as a task to be accomplished over time, not merely as a point to be made or a problem to be remedied.
Given such a long-term expression of the ‘problem of science’, Nietzsche can assert that he is the first to raise the question of the questionableness of science. If he liked to suggest that he aspired to a more radical doubt than Descartes (KSA 11, 40[24], [25]) and if he was surely more critical than Kant in calling for the key reflex of the critical project to be turned against itself, Nietzsche nonetheless differs from the Enlightenment project of philosophical modernity in general (from Kant if not Descartes), because he does not exclude his own deliberately provocative solution as a problem at the limit of critical reflection. This is what Nietzsche calls knowledge’s tragic terminus. In Nietzsche’s words, the logical project of both science and the tragic myth turn out to be ‘shipwrecked’ on the very same issue (BT 15, 18) – namely, the question of foundational transparency – and this could, in some sense, also be extended to what Nietzsche later criticizes as the limit of the subject’s self-knowledge in general. Thus the problem of the subject is itself the problem of critique. In this way, any critical project is irrecusably subject to distortion precisely because an organon, even a reflective organon, cannot be turned on itself. Thus the reflexive limit of the critical project entailed that what Nietzsche termed ‘the problem of science’ could itself not be recognized (conceived or thought) on the ground of science (BT ‘Self-Criticism’ 2).
As an unremittingly questioning (that is, philosophic) approach to the question of science, Nietzsche’s grounding question of theoretical or scientific knowledge takes Kant’s project of critique further than Kant had done, for the simple, arch-critical reason that Nietzsche does not assume the actuality of synthetic a priori judgements (cf. BGE 4). For Nietzsche, strictly speaking, such judgements were not possible for human beings: we have ‘no right to them’ and hence ‘in our mouths’, he would write, ‘they are plainly false judgements’ (BGE 4; cf. BGE 11). In his first Critique, although he asks how (qua actual) the judgements of physical science are possible, Kant himself shrinks from putting science itself in question. And if Kant is deliberately uncritical with regard to science, we are even more restrained today. To criticize science is thought to be anti-science, anti-modern, and ultimately irrational. Hence, when a physicist such as Stephen Weinberg or Richard Feynman or Alan Sokal (who deconstructed the scientific claims of deconstruction for the sake of truth, justice and American science) speaks,12 the authority he commands as a man of science resembles nothing so much as the authority of the priest’s in the era of religious belief (and Nietzsche was among the first to see this critically, whereas Comte would seize upon the same resemblance in just the opposite way). Thus even the philosophic reception of the scientist’s claims tends to reserve criticism, taking a position of justifying defence. A relatively uncritical or trusting adulation of science has characterized intellectual culture since the days not only of Newton but also of Lucretius. Indeed, there are those who will argue – with Nietzsche at the forefront that science itself is the true legacy of Plato’s academy and his proto-Cartesian idealization of geometry as the sine qua non for wisdom itself.13 Among philosophers of science, though not an advocate of Nietzsche’s critique of scientific reason, Paul Feyerabend is alone in his call for a radical scepticism concerning the claims and the activities of science – a scepticism invoked in the critical name of science itself.14 This was exactly the problem of science as it preoccupied Nietzsche, who claimed that the hallmark of the nineteenth century itself was the victory not of science but of the scientific method, as a victory even over itself (KSA 13, 15[51]).
Nietzsche’s critical undertaking challenges the possibility of any knowledge of the philosophic (epistemic) foundations of science (as art) conceived in the light of what he speaks of as art. Regarded as an art, science is a kind of techne (and Heidegger’s critical philosophy of technology employs a similar parsing of modern science and technology). As such an artful practice, science is a means for constructing what is held to be scientific and therefore true. Against physicists who speak of decoding ‘nature’s conformity to law’ – as if ‘nature’ followed ‘laws’ in the image of the ideal of democratic politics – Nietzsche charges that the very idea of such conformity ‘exists only thanks to your interpretation and bad philology: it is not a fact, not a “text”’ (BGE 23). If Nietzsche begins with philological science in his first book – this is what he means by the ‘science’ of aesthetics – he certainly does not limit himself to the art of classical criticism in his later texts where he explicitly invokes physics and chemistry.
As an art or techne/technique, science is a means for winning what will count as truth. Thus Nietzsche argues for a parallel between the ascetic practices and ideals of both religious and scientific projects in the third section (and not only there) of On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche describes the ascetic striving for truth as alienating and alien: ‘Man does not exist by nature in order to know. Two faculties required for different purposes – truthfulness – and metaphor – have engendered the inclination to truth’ (KSA 7 [19[178]). For Nietzsche, rather than an ordinary perceptual correspondence – which is, for him, no more than the idealist fantasy of seeing and saying the truth – the drive to know depends on the humanizing (anthropomorphic) inclination or direction of ego-logocentric engagement with the world: ‘Ultimately, every law of nature is a sum of anthropomorphic relations.’ Nietzsche emphasizes ‘especially number’ (KSA 7, 19[237]), as if to challenge the modern scientific ideal of quantificational objectivity. This we may regard as Nietzsche’s Protagorean qua Procrustean Delphic principle: ‘the basic thought of science is that man is the measure of all things’ (KSA 7, 19[237]). Or, as he puts it elsewhere: ‘All natural science is only an attempt to understand the human, the anthropological; or, more precisely, to return always to the human via the longest and most roundabout way’ (KSA 7, 19[91]).
Nietzsche’s reflections on truth and lie return again and again to the problem of logic in the wake of Socrates’ transformation of the philosophic enterprise because, with Socrates, ‘truthfulness gains possession of logic’. By the time we get to Aristotle, the challenge of ‘the infinite difficulty of classification’ (KSA 7, 19[216]) finds its determinative resolution in the principle of non-contradiction, as Aristotle underscores this first principle as an axiomatic assumption apart from any necessity for (or, indeed, any possibility of) demonstration.15 This same principle sets the terms for what Nietzsche calls the conflict between art and knowledge.
And the outcome of this conflict is decided at the outset.16 There is (can be) no articulable or logical basis for conflict between the irrational and the rational on logical grounds. By the same token, there is no contest (no ratio, no analogy or comparison) between art (qua irrational) and knowledge (or science). Thus while Nietzsche claims that both art and science trade in illusions, traditional philosophers of science, together with the vast majority of scholars in other disciplines and above all scientists themselves, hear in Nietzsche’s assertions (when they advert to them at all) only the chaotic impressions of what they sometimes think to recognize (inaccurately enough) as the ‘Dionysian’ (that is, the irrational). This discounting is not a result of argument but of conviction, to use Nietzsche’s language. Such philosophers of science simply trust that the scientists do indeed know that the object/aim of science is to determine the pure and simple truth. Sociological studies of science, compounded with the new history of science cited earlier, make a difference in this conception, but not enough difference; traditional philosophy of science refuses to raise Nietzsche’s question of the problem of science as such.17
If Nietzsche begins his concern with science as a disciplinarily specific one, a project taking him to a critique of logic and to the limitations of reason, he expands his critical concern to address the limitations of natural science as a discipline charged to ‘know’ the real world. This focus finds its expression in his notorious claim that the nature of the world is nothing but ‘will to power’ (BGE 36) and ‘chaos’ its ‘total character’ (GS 109).
Nietzsche thus describes the ‘total character of the world’ as ‘chaos in all eternity – in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms’ (GS 109). But at the same time, Nietzsche also describes chaos as the veritable source of creative potential within culture: ‘I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star’ (Z ‘Prologue’ 5). In the second half of this chapter, I shall ask what Nietzsche means by coordinating these seemingly conceptually different claims. For, against the assertion of the chaos of the natural world, any pragmatist could counter that the world displays enough regularity for the physicist Alan Sokal to challenge anyone calling the laws of gravity mere ‘interpretations’ to take one’s leave from a New York City skyscraper by way of an upper-story window. More metaphorically, with regard to the relation between chaos and culture, although sometimes the inevitable accompaniment to creative ardour, chaos is not typically regarded as a precondition for creativity. Earlier I inquired into Nietzsche’s understanding of the logical problem of science; in what follows I consider his conception of the natural world not merely as expressed in dynamic terms as will to power but very patently and prosaically enough as chaos. Nietzsche’s understanding of chaos is opposed to the contemporary understanding of chaos as drawn from the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition, as well as to the understanding of chaos resonant in the (popular) science idea of chaos theory.
In the words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, ‘to give birth to a dancing star’ one needs to have retained within oneself the same chaos that exemplifies the world ‘in all eternity’. Yet we recall that chaos simply is a yawning, a gap, so that even in Hesiod’s Theogony, after its first mention, this primordial, self-sufficiently generative chaos recedes, only to be mentioned once more in the context of the battle between Zeus and the Titans and in its persistent displacement at the edge of the world, beyond both Olympian gods and Titans.18 Chaos in its antique provenance, unlike the contemporary physical concept of entropy, does not increase its range. Thus to our modern ears, in a culture Nietzsche so presciently diagnoses with scientific nihilism and with leisurely, thoroughly mediatized decadence, Nietzsche’s classical conception of a creative chaos is increasingly at risk, so that the ‘ultimate’ men of today can only reply to Zarathustra with blinking incomprehension, asking: ‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ (Z ‘Prologue’ 5).
Chaos has primacy in Hesiod’s Theogony. It simply comes to be without antecedent: ‘Ητοι, μέν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ’.19 After Chaos, there arise the unbounded gods of the beginning, divinities of aorgic nature according to Hesiod’s account, including Gaia or broad-breasted earth, dim Tartarus and winged Eros. First of the mothers of being, Chaos gives birth to the deities of darkness: Erebos and the same Night that, in the Orphic tradition recounting these origins, lays the silver egg in the lap of black darkness, from which is born the god of many names, golden Eros or Phanes, who brings everything hidden to birth or to light.20 The Theogony includes this Orphic resonance: it is Night’s incestuous union with Erebos that annuls the character of their respective obscurity, yielding brightest Aether and the day. Thus, Chaos, rather than the masculine world-ordering process of cosmological genesis, is here generatively primordial.
It has been suggested that the Hesiodic meaning of chaos (as chasm or yawning gap) can perhaps be traced back to an Orphic account which names the chasm (or night).21 Yet the names are less important than the consequences. For the pattern of spontaneous (and feminine) creativity is immediately, and from the outset, quashed even in such archaic accounts. This is especially the case, we could say, for the Greeks: take, for example, the story of Eros that tells of insurgent male power ordered – or unhinged – by desire. Thus the creative power of genesis that is originally female becomes – or is made – male Zeus swallows his first wife, Metis, thereby incorporating not only her wisdom (lodged in his belly, her counsel was always his own) but also her feminine nature. Thus the Zeus who gives birth to Athena fully armed, sprung from his forehead, is the same Zeus who can rescue the heart of the dismembered Zagreus from the burnt ashes of his Titanic tormenters, blasted by his thunderbolt. It is the same Zeus who is transferred by the mediating influence of wine into the womb of Semele, his human lover, there engendering the child Dionysus, only to reduce Semele herself to ashes with the same lightning flash of his godly countenance, to sew the not yet fully formed child into his own thigh, finally giving birth to Dionysus of the two gateways, twice reborn in the wake of both titanic and mortal ash. Such a Zeus was a god of the prime male principle made a prime principle precisely by means of its violent incorporation of feminine creativity. Now the father gives birth to the son, now the sky gods, who are always male, form human beings in their own image.
For Nietzsche, what matters is not to pay homage to the old story of the primordial goddess, or the literal mothers of being, but instead for us to attend to the powers of wild nature in creative self-genesis, in becoming ourselves a work of art. To create oneself, giving birth to a dancing star – a wheel rolling out of itself – one needs the ‘chaos and labyrinth of existence’ (GS 322). This imperative holds not because order kills (the letter, the spirit) but because the chaos in creative question is primordial nature itself: that which is older than all other deities, that of which the most darkly aorgic deities are born, as divinities capable of bringing their own opposites out of themselves. The chaos or nature here described is the wild, untamed and uncontrollable force (Hölderlin’s divine, or aorgic, apeiron nature). And we, so Nietzsche’s Zarathustra tells us, still dispose over this creative power. Yet because we are also, in our age, closest to losing this same power of nature, losing the creative force of chaos, through a blindness that is as much a blindness about ourselves as about nature, we need Zarathustra’s reminder.
As self-engendering physis, chaos thus corresponds to a generative excess or plenum, conceived as the Theogonic Ur-chaos or the Anaximandrian apeiron. Such a generative or creative conception of chaos is a feminine aspect of unthinkably consummate, self-sufficient creativity and such a feminine first principle is common to more than one cosmology. Yet the primordial conception of feminine creative potencies (from the notion of chaos to the fantasies of the cultures of the goddess or matriarchy) is eclipsed, as we have seen, from the moment of inception: all accounts of the genesis of the dark children of chaos are quickly elided by the more fertile and various Earth who, herself giving birth to her own lover, sets in motion the dominant account of the succession of masculine progenitors. As the story of the birth of the gods, the theogony becomes a story of genesis (and paternity).
Even more, today’s chaos is a pell-mell representing the failure of order, an order reduced to disorder (reflecting the temporal schematism articulated in both the religious tradition of Genesis and the thermodynamic conception of entropy). Derived from an aboriginally masculinist vision, the Judaeo-Christian tradition regards the lifeless depths recounted in Genesis as the impotent, and featureless, waters of an irreal and feminine abyss prior to the first divine moment of the creation of the world. In this convergence of religious and scientific perspectives, chaos from either point of view is, and remains, a patently non-creative, manifestly negative concept.
By equating chaos with nature, understood in its original Greek or primordial sense, Nietzsche repudiates the traditional Western opposition between nature and art. As an absolute will to power, without remainder – ‘und nichts ausserdem’ – the native chaos of the world is a raw, uncountenanceable and untrammelled realm beyond the imposition of order for the same Nietzsche who teaches the rule (and the illusion) of perspective. Recalling Spinoza’s deus sive natura, Nietzsche’s ‘chaos sive natura’ (KSA 9, 11[197]) de-deifies nature while, at the same time, stripping nature of its rational ground or foundation – its ultimate concord and commensurability with human reason. Nietzsche regards the modern confidence in science as needing critical demythologization as much as any other belief.
Outlining the history of the world of illusion or appearances as the very history of the true (‘real’) world of Platonic fantasy and Aristotelian productivity, Nietzsche raises the key question regarding the rational underpinnings of the ideal real: as the scientific order perceived in nature as a reflection of the phantasms of human sensibility and human conceptual power. There is no reality or nature knowable apart from a thoroughly humanized nature. Thus Nietzsche criticizes the realist conviction that ‘the world really is the way it appears’ as inevitably naive: ‘As if reality stood unveiled before you only, and you yourselves were perhaps the best part of it’ (GS 57).
For Nietzsche, then, rather than a means to reach the inherently unknowable truth of things as they are in themselves (an sich), natural science is a continuous and effective (that is, an exactly successful and consummate) process of what he calls a ‘humanization in summa’ (KSA 11, 25[445]). Nature is a human invention and yet, at the same time, it is nature that works its artistry through us and upon us, so that our inventiveness and our artifices are not non-natural – however much, in the case of science, we use this inventiveness for the purposes of the mastery and control of nature (KSA 11, 26[170]). With the artistic, inventive expression of such scientific ‘means’, we express our own nature, the same essence reflecting the inherent truth of nature as ‘will to power’ or chaos (in all eternity).
Yet, we perceive neither nature’s chaos – nor could we ever do so given our perceptual and conceptual apparatus – nor can we recollect any sense of the chaos of impressions within us – this last given the coordinate limitations of our human psycho-physiology. This is a favourite theme for Nietzsche, who declares that nature threw away the key to the welter of physiological activity within our bodies (TL 1, KSA 1, p. 877), and it forms a fundamental component of his pre-Freudian critique of psychological identity or the subject. In the more straightforward instance of a face-to-face encounter with the natural world, Nietzsche writes:
As I walk about in open country, I am always amazed to think how everything acts on us with such supreme precision: the forest in this way and the mountain in that way; that, referring to the whole of sensation, there reigns within us not the slightest confusion, misapprehension, or stammering. And yet the greatest uncertainty and chaotic aspect must abound …. (KSA 9, 11[252])
In the same way as we do not (cannot) attend to our own range of perceptions, neither do we attend to the full complexity of the things themselves as experienceable objects. Using the metaphor of reading a text (where, as Nietzsche says, the text does not merely disappear in the reading or beneath the interpretation, but the reader instead ‘picks about five words at random out of twenty and “guesses” at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words’), we tend not to see what is actually in front of our eyes. We perceive what we already ‘know’ or believe, ‘rather than registering what is different and new in an impression’ (BGE 192). Nietzsche draws a parallel to our perception of a thing as obvious (and apparently as stolidly static) as a tree. He argues that, even with regard to such a sizeable object of everyday perception, we misapprehend the tree itself, never seeing it ‘exactly and completely, with reference to leaves, twigs, colour, and form; it is so very much easier for us to fantasize some approximation of a tree’. Whether confronted by routine impressions or ‘in the midst of the strangest experiences we still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience’ (BGE 192). We overlook, overleap and so invent our experience in general (for Nietzsche, we are ‘accustomed to lying’). And this circumstance is not ameliorated by adding reference to the complexity of things that are too minor to attract our notice – the wild variety of insects and spiders and plasmodiæ streaming on the bark of the same tree or crawling and flying in the jungles at our feet.
As Ryogi Okochi has rightly underlined in his comparison of Nietzsche’s conception of nature and Eastern views,22 nature is not a correlevant object for human comprehension. Hence, regarding the world as will to power to all eternity that is, naming nature as chaos – Nietzsche emphasizes both its distance from our capacity to comprehend nature in itself (this is Nietzsche’s routine Kantianism) and its inherent creativity (again recalling the archaic Greek conception of chaos). As chaos, nature itself is interpretive and, on this same level, nature itself is invention, replete with subjectivities, wills. Nature as a whole is a constant and thoroughgoing interpretation and ‘necessary perspectivism by virtue of which every centre of force – and not only man – construes all the rest of the world from its own viewpoint, i.e., measures, feels, forms, according to its own force’ (KSA 13, 14[186]). Giving measure and giving form, testing, and reacting, nature is art.
Everything turns on the question of art for Nietzsche. The difference between the art of the human and the art of nature is the difference between the artless art of nature (which lacks all purposiveness) and the artful art of human invention that is both artistically consummate (or artful art) or else poorly executed or aesthetically artificial. Only culture, and especially the art of practical, technical, purposiveness or techne, can call itself art (although it does not always do so). Everything else, be it God or be it nature, lacks artistic awareness, as artless or natural art. This same artlessness is ultimately the key to the (active) creative process. Hence Nietzsche agrees with Kant’s claim that the highest art is the artlessness that is (or appears to be) an unconscious or natural art – hence unaware of what it is or does. This one may name innocence. It is Nietzsche’s goal to recover this innocence, this divine naturalness, for human creativity. The result would be a renaturalized humanity (itself only possible on the basis of a redeemed nature, liberated to its own chaos or independence from the order of human control).
From beginning to end, Nietzsche affirms the origin of knowledge in error and illusion, and hence, or ultimately, in art. Thus in an early reflection on this problem, Nietzsche describes the ideal beauties of perceived ‘nature’, and he paints natural sublimity in the following words: ‘It was evening: air streaming with the scent of evergreen, one’s gaze opened out upon grey mountain ranges, snow shimmering on high, spanning above, becalmed, blue skies’ (KSA 8, 23[178]). And contrary to the straightforward, albeit poetic, descriptiveness of this vista in terms of the senses themselves, Nietzsche challenges the reality of any such pure or direct perception of nature. That refusal of unfiltered or direct sense access to the world around us is the point (Kantian as well as psychological) of his teasing assault upon the sobriety of ‘realist’ perception of the ‘real’ world in The Gay Science: ‘That mountain there! That cloud there! What is “real” in that?’ (GS 57). For Nietzsche:
A thing of this kind we never see as it is in itself, but always overlay it with a tender spirit-membrane – that is what we see instead. Inherited sensations, our own feelings are roused by such things of nature. We see something of ourselves – to this extent, the very world itself is our representation. Forest, mountains, more than a concept indeed, but our own experience and our own history: a piece of ourselves. (KSA 8, 23[178])
There is no world apart from what he explicates again and again as the insensible chaos of our sensations and the veritable chaos of nature itself. And chaos must always be ordered. For us, this describes ordinary perception but, for Nietzsche, it is interpretation and it is not true because it cannot touch the chaotic truth of a world apart from our imposed interpretations, a world of abundance or excess. This is what Heidegger captures with a seemingly paradoxical formula, asserting that for Nietzsche ‘Truth is the lack of truth’.23 What Heidegger means to underscore here is the exactly aletheic character of Nietzsche’s critique of truth and his phenomenological critique of perception and experience. Thus Heidegger is not charging Nietzsche with tacit contradiction – claiming (as true) that there is no truth. Instead, the very question concerning the truth of nature requires an inquiry into the conditions of possible perception as prerequisite conditions of the very possibility of knowledge (be it of nature or ourselves).
Nietzsche invokes the simplified world of everyday and theoretically mediated perceptions as a matter of sensible, aesthetic ‘refinement’, even in the case of science. Scientific laws and scientific entities are creatively, aesthetically (inventively) possible on the basis of flattened differences, and taking such exclusion precisely (calculably) into account, thus bracketing potential exceptions (Nietzsche’s remark that ‘the little errors do not enter into account’ underlines that ‘margins of error’, ‘standard deviation’ and the theoretical finesse of ‘curve fitting’ are exactly operative techniques useful for excluding or discounting these same ‘little’ mistakes). As science operates upon the levels of both pure theory and empirical measure, the scientist is a theoretical technician or artisan of exactitude.
By these means exactitude is, and can be, imposed upon an empirically variable world of becoming or change. Science is the technique (art) of uncovering the Platonic ideal of truth in the phenomenal world (both theoretically and experimentally). Far from praising the achievements of science as such a technites/artisan of chaos/nature, Nietzsche criticizes the flatfootedness of the artifice of science – branding science an ‘error’, just as he portrays it as dedicated to the pursuit of ‘the principle of “the smallest possible effort” and the greatest possible stupidity’ (BGE 14). Nietzsche takes this claim to its hyperbolic extreme because our era is characterized by its unquestioning scientific faith. Recall his critique of the putative opposition between scientific and religious ideals in the closing sections of On The Genealogy of Morals, where faith in the latest, greatest and most efficacious ascetic ideal of all – that is, the faith in science itself – replaces religious faith. For Nietzsche, claims of scientific truth (conventionalizedly objective, natural scientific knowledge claims) are artlessly artificial claims asserting an exactly non-artistic, non-constructed ‘truth’. Nietzsche’s exigence derives from his dedication to the truth not of the ideal world of mathematizable science, but the very real or chaotic world.
Because this world is precisely reality itself, in flux away from what has been and towards what is not yet, empirical nature is always all about change. It is, like ourselves, part of that species of being hostage in time to the immutable reality of the dynamic mode of becoming – as both what is and what is not. Although the later Nietzsche mocks the philosophers’ ‘idiosyncrasies’, most evident in what he calls their ‘Egyptianism’, as ‘their hatred of even the idea of becoming’, he had earlier acknowledged the very human condition that would end in this hostility to ‘change, age, as well as procreation and growth’ (TI ‘Reason’ 1). At the start of his unpublished essay, The Pathos of Truth, he writes: ‘We observe every passing away and perishing with dissatisfaction, often with astonishment, as if we had witnessed therein something fundamentally impossible .… Every New Year’s Eve enables us to feel the mysterious contradiction of being and becoming’ (KSA 1, p. 756). But because of the ‘stone’ fact that no fact is stone, the supreme law of philosophical knowledge lacks any purchase on the empirical world because what is is never beyond change or time.
Given this tragic, but very human, critical reflection on science, when Nietzsche celebrates the sciences of nature in antiquity and in the works of contemporaries such as Robert Mayer and Ernst Mach, he celebrates natural science – but without accepting science’s own ideal of itself as neutral instrument of pure knowing. In spite of its logical self-image (eagerly polished and continually renewed by the reigning philosophy of science), science, especially and particularly natural science, is and can only be an empirical, experiential or experimental discipline. But, for Nietzsche, this means that science must ultimately be a discipline of the body – and of the earth.
Thus construed as an ultimately sensual rationality – which bodily or earthly rationality was for Nietzsche not irrational per se, but a more complex, more nuanced rationality than that of the intellect alone – (physical) science is not a science of ideal conceptions (paradigmatic or theoretical projections) but a constantly artful or poietic science, a praxical techne of recondite reality becoming in time. This practical or real technical object of science is the dynamic ‘truth’ of what works as real (whether artful, inventive, efficacious belief or ‘willed’ illusion), not the ideal and literal ‘truth of truth’. Nietzsche does not stop here (he is not a pragmatist of an Emersonian, Quinean or, indeed, Davidsonian sort) but adds that the so-called (scientific and logical) truth of truth (ideal truth) is purely unreal: not figuratively, but literally insofar as that truth is theoretically ideal. This logical ideality is the truth of tautology: that is, logical truth. The becoming and changing nature Nietzsche recalls to us, both as scientists and as philosophers of science, is and can only be an illogical nature, and he summons us to that same natural world for what he ultimately regards as the honest sake of science: ‘We possess scientific knowledge today precisely to the extent that we have decided to accept the evidence of the senses – to the extent that we have learned to sharpen and arm them and to think them through to their conclusions’ (TI ‘Reason’ 3). Taking his own thinking on logic, truth and reality to its ‘conclusions’ or ‘ultimate consequences’, Nietzsche describes his anti-atomistic ideal of the non-lawlike working of the will to power as an alternative account of ‘nature’s conformity to law’ (BGE 22). For Nietzsche, ‘knowledge’ as a purely logical enterprise strives for what is humanly or naturally impossible (all natural knowledge is inherently anthropomorphic and hence the human and the natural are inevitably convertible). The impossibility of a logical description of the world is thus not an impossibility enjoined by Nietzsche’s terms of analysis but, and precisely following upon, the logical, unchanging terms which philosophers set as the (unconditioned) conditions of knowledge.
Nietzsche challenges the tendentious grammatical distinction between subject and object, active and passive (D 121), organic and inorganic, life and death (GS 109). Thus when he asks ‘if the perspectival is an essential property’ he can answer: ‘this would be possible if all being were essentially a perceiving something’ (KSA 12, 5[12]). In this light, we can read a subsequent reflection: ‘Assuming, however, that we assign certain values to things, after we have forgotten that we were the givers, these same values in turn work retroactively upon us’ (KSA 12, 5[19]). Because ‘every centre of force adopts a perspective towards the entire remainder’ (KSA 13, 14[184]), there is always a reciprocity between interpretations and perspectives. On the basis of the relational interaction of the world conceived both in its subjective and objective dimensions as will to power, and its ultimate interactive involvement with itself (‘the world viewed from the inside … would be “will to power” and nothing else’ (BGE 36)), to regard the world ‘from the inside’ as Nietzsche says – not from the assumption of our own interest but rather as it might be seen according to its collective and varied interests – is to construct the object subjectively. This is Nietzsche’s perspectivalism.
Today’s vision of demythologized, insensitive object-nature is a systematic expression of the cultural illusion of science in the West and the Enlightenment’s reverse mythological vision of a mechanical nature revealed through the sobriety of scientific sophistication. Here we note that the privilege of the subject and its ideal of objectivity are errors (delusions): ‘Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident’ (GS 109). In Nietzsche’s vision of the world, necessity and purpose are dissociated. But in the ideal order of nature’s conformity to law, what opposes purpose is accident. Without this ideal, without purpose, there is no accident and only chance (with its archaic necessity) remains.
We have seen that, as a critique of science, Nietzschean genealogy can be seen in terms of more than one focus. Not only does Nietzsche articulate a genealogy of morals (out of reactivity or ressentiment), but he also began his life’s work with a genealogy of tragedy (from ancient dithyrambic modes to its contemporary decline as an ‘art-form’). Now we see that he likewise offers a genealogy of logic and even reason itself. Nietzsche similarly outlines a genealogy of science – out of the spirit of myth and magic and alchemy but ultimately on the occluded paradigm of religion. In the case of logical thinking, as we have seen, he finds the origins of logic on the side of metaphor, metonymy and the other tropes of language groping towards an apprehension of a reality in transit, an illogical real. Thus logic, for Nietzsche, begins in illogic; logic develops out of, or in, its opposite (cf. BGE 2, GS 111, etc.).24 How?
Concurring with every account of the prehistory of philosophy, Nietzsche reminds us that from myth we advance to logos. But a post-lapsarian history of logic following upon a lost moment of golden insight into, or ‘experience’ of, truth is sheer invention. In sense perception, as in our anthropomorphic linguistic and epistemological constructions, we literally have only what we call the false – that is, perception, representation, and not the thing in itself. Nietzsche describes our practical knowledge of real things in the real world as ‘essentially illogical’ because it incorrigibly involves ‘the identification of things which are not the same, of things which are only similar’ (KSA 7, 19[236]). Nietzsche’s reserve here opposes what he calls the ‘philosophical’ prejudice contra change/becoming as an unflinchingly, exactly epistemological (and not a moral) reservation. Our knowledge accounts of the real or natural world incorrigibly leave out or omit ‘what is individual’ by subsuming it under a ‘concept’, and with this subsumption what we call ‘knowledge begins: in categorizing, in the establishment of classes’ (KSA 7, 19[236]). For Nietzsche, real knowledge of individual or real things – that is, the modern knowledge of natural science – must be essentially illogical if it is to have any kind of approximative or tentative correspondence with the real world, as a practical or real science of nature.
For the sake of the philosophical question of truth and logical rationality, Nietzsche raises the question of science as the question of the measure of the world of real – not ideal – things. Hence Nietzsche continually adverts to the difference between ideal types – like elemental carbon – and real material instances. Not only does he refuse the association (for example, he points to the irreducible, non-chemical difference between diamond, coal, and graphite – KSA 13, 14[187]), but he also challenges the operative application of simple mathematics (or arithmetic) to describe the biological or indeed ecological process. On a variety of occasions, he points out that in the real world of real things, two halves do not add up to or equal a whole – as true for an apple pie as it was in Solomon’s judgement of an early child custody case and as it would apply (using one of Nietzsche’s favourite metaphors) to the lowest worm (KSA 13, 11[259]). In the case of a particularly simple worm cut in half – in the enthusiasm for vivisection that is perpetuated in today’s laboratories but above all in today’s instructional methods – two halves make two wholes. For Nietzsche, this still non-calculative sum is far from the rule in the case of garden-variety worms. Mostly, the sundered parts add up to nothing at all. In statistically rare cases, the two halves can represent a lucky subtraction, reducing to just one somewhat shorter worm. That is, providing both halves do not die (the most likely scenario), the two halves make not two but one truncated worm. Worm segments are not the same as line segments. To take another similarly simple invertebrate, the starfish suffering the loss of one arm regenerates what only an aesthetically challenged individual (or scientist) could call another arm: like the lizard’s tail or hand, the stump is a badly stunted replication of what was originally lost. Nietzsche is fond of pointing to the example of cell division to make the same point in another direction as well as to invoke his general economy of abundance in expression (KSA 12, 1[18]; see also KSA 12, 9[145], [151]).
For Nietzsche, ‘all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error’ (BT ‘Preface’ 5). Nietzsche saw that the critical self-immolation of knowledge (‘the truth that one is eternally condemned to untruth’ (KSA 1, p. 760)) at the limit of the critical philosophic enterprise must be combined with the sober notion that insight into illusion does not abrogate it and, above all, does not mean that illusion lacks efficiency. To the contrary, ‘from every point of view’, Nietzsche argued, ‘the erroneousness of the world in which we live is the surest and the firmest thing we can get our eyes on’ (BGE 34). Nor, as we have traced the etymology of science/Wissenschaft, is this visual metaphor an incidental one here.
As he reflects in his early notes on the ‘Conflict Between Art and Knowledge’, Nietzsche argues that the task of philosophy is the poetic task of a physician of culture. In order to speak in this way, art and knowledge are not to be ordered as disparate categories or separate cultural realms but in continuity with one another. Since science cannot subject itself to critique – that is, as the problem of science cannot be posed on the ground of science – Nietzsche proposes the perspective of the healing power of art. As ‘physician of culture’, the philosopher is to be an artist of science, a composer of reflective thought, refusing the calculations of science as the sickness deadly to the ‘music’ of life (GS 372, 373). Against such deliberate deafness, letting ‘those who have ears hear’ (GS 234), the ‘only’ help for science will not be more science (or better scientific understanding) but the therapeutic resources and risks of art (KSA 7, 19[36]).
Nietzsche regards his own pursuit of knowledge as thoroughly, intrinsically, if exactly joyously ‘scientific’. What Nietzsche means by thinking in the critical service of science (as the ‘mastery’ of science) can only be expressed in its contextual connections to topics in other kinds of philosophic reflection traditionally regarded as distinct. Thus we have seen that Nietzsche links epistemology and politics in an aesthetic, rather than practical or moral, resonance. This aesthetic connection for Nietzsche means that the problem of science must be seen as the problem of art and life. This is neither a perspective opposed to (anti-)science nor is it traditionally on the side of science. Instead, Nietzsche’s interpretive touchstone contrasts what affirms or serves life with what denies or opposes life, which last is what Nietzsche means by nihilism. The problem of Nietzsche’s philosophy of science addresses the problem of life where ‘knowledge and becoming’ mutually and incorrigibly exclude each other (KSA 12, 9[89]; cf. 7[54]). Writing that ‘our art is the reflection of desperate knowledge’ (KSA 7, 19[181]), Nietzsche sets art and knowledge on the same level. For this reason, both art and knowledge can be used either in the service of life or else against it. But Nietzsche’s claim that ‘science can serve either goal’ (GS 12) does not amount to a positivistic or naive expression of science’s celebrated neutrality. As a logical or theoretical project, science is the kind of illusion (or convention) that remains inherently nihilistic. Because science as such is not objectively neutral, it must always be reviewed critically not on its own basis but rather on the ground of what makes science possible, and that is what Nietzsche names the ‘light’ of art. That optic – or perspective prism, to allude to a Goethean metaphor for Nietzsche’s own approach to science – is life in its complexity and not distinct from its tragic sense.
1William J. Richardson, ‘Heidegger’s Critique of Science’, The New Scholasticism, 42 (1968), 511–36.
2See my Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994).
3Josef Simon, ‘Grammar and Truth: On Nietzsche’s Relationship to the Speculative Sentential Grammar of the Metaphysical Tradition’ in Babette E. Babich and Robert S. Cohen (eds), Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory: Nietzsche and the Sciences, II (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), pp. 129–51.
4See Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Tilman Borsche, ‘Nietzsches Erfindung der Vorsokratiker’, in Josef Simon (ed.), Nietzsche und die philosophische Tradition (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1985), pp. 62–87; James I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on the Birth of Tragedy (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 2000); idem, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 2000).
5It was because he wrote as a philological scientist that Nietzsche regarded his methodological considerations directly relevant to the ‘problem of science’.
6Translation modified. Kaufmann’s translation has ‘Alexandrian’ rather than ‘Alexandrine’.
7James I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysus, p. 4, writes: ‘I would say that Nietzsche has no philosophy in the proper senses of “having” or “philosophy”’.
8As a philologist, Nietzsche was characteristically conscious of this root connection between vision and scientific knowledge – hence his focus on the ocular tendency of science in general – but especially natural science. See KSA 11, 25[389]. It might be worth investigating the degree to which this ocular conception inspired both his focus on what he called the ‘science of aesthetics’ in his first book, his emphasis upon the importance of the haptic sense in the physical sciences (cf. TI ‘“Reason” in Philosophy’ 3), and his special attention to taste, a focus he earlier played back to its etymological association with wisdom as such (see PTA 3, KSA 1, p. 813).
9I thank Greg Moore, one of the editors, for this helpful addition. Moore remarked that the Everton Football Club (in Liverpool) used to be known as the ‘School of Science’, such, he explained, ‘was the technical brilliance of their soccer’.
10See Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), especially Chapter 5.
11See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Lawrence Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). See also Ludwik Fleck, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. F. Bradley and T. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1935]).
12For references and a critical assessment, see my discussion of this ‘hoax’ in ‘The Hermeneutics of a Hoax’, Common Knowledge, 6 (2) (1997), 23–33.
13See David Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry (London: Routledge, 1993).
14Paul Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason (London: Verso, 1987).
15Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1005b 15–25 in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
16The logical field of science and philosophy has traditionally been regarded as a battle (eristic) where exactly the best argument wins, and ‘losing’ claims are consequently silenced as irrational or irrelevant. Logic determines the standards for such a contest. Hence the conflict Nietzsche insinuates between art and knowledge must be played out on the terms of a logical contest.
17For a resumé and prospectus of the relevance of such sociological studies, see Rom Harré, ‘Science as the Work of a Community’, in Babette E. Babich (ed.), Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J. (Doredrecht: Kluwer, 2002), pp. 219–29. See also, in the same volume, John Ziman, ‘No Man is an Island’, pp. 203–17.
18Hesiod, Theogony, ed. M.L. West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 116, 814.
19Ibid., 116.
20Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Ancient Greeks (London: Thames and Hudson, 1951), pp. 16–17.
21Evidence for this is given by no less an authority than Aristotle (Metaphysics, 1071b 27), who implies that night is an alternative name for chaos.
22Ryogi Okochi, ‘Nietzsches Naturbegriff aus östlicher Sicht’, Nietzsche-Studien, 17 (1988), 108–24.
23Heidegger, Nietzsche I, (Neske: Pfullingen, 1961), pp. 620–21.
24See Simon, ‘Grammar and Truth’ and, for a related discussion, Holger Schmid, ‘The Nietzschean Metacritique of Knowledge’, in Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory, pp. 153–63.