NIETZSCHE, EPISTEMOLOGY,

AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

 BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Editors

JURGEN RENN, Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science and KOSTAS GAVROGLU, University of Athens
ROBERTS. COHEN, Boston University

Editorial Advisory Board

THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University

ADOLF GRZNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh
SYLVAN SL. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University
JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University
MARX W. WARTOFSKY t (Editor 1960-1997)

VOLUME204
 NIETZSCHE,
EPISTEMOLOGY,
AND PHILOSOPHY OF
SCIENCE
NIETZSCHE AND THE SCIENCES II

Edited by

BABETTE E. BABICH
Fordham University

in cooperation with

ROBERT S. COHEN
Boston University

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

A C.I.P Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-90-481-5234-6 ISBN 978-94-017-2428-9 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-2428-9

Printed an acid-free paper

AII Rights Reserved

© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999
No part of this publication may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from
the copyright owner.
 In memory of

Marx W artofsky

1928-1997
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations Used Xl

ALASDAIR MACINTYRE I Preface XV

INTRODUCTION

BABETTE E. BABICH I Truth, Art, and Life: Nietzsche, Epistemology,

Philosophy of Science 1
Section Summaries 14

ANALYTIC PERSPECTIVES: TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE

RICHARD SCHACHT I Nietzsche: Truth and Knowledge 25

ROBERT C. WELSHON I Perspectivist Ontology and de re Knowledge 39
R. LANIER ANDERSON I Nietzsche's Views on Truth and the Kantian
Background of his Epistemology 47
PAUL J.M. VAN TONGEREN I Nietzsche's Symptomatology of
Skepticism 61

ANALYTIC PERSPECTIVES:
ATOMISM, REALISM, NATURALISM, POSITIVISM

ROBIN SMALL I We Sensualists 73

ROBERT NOLA I Nietzsche's Naturalism: Science and Belief 91
JONATHAN COHEN I Nietzsche's Fling with Positivism 101
DANIEL CONWAY I Beyond Truth and Appearance: Nietzsche's
Emergent Realism 109

NIETZSCHE'S EPISTEMOLOGICAL DARING

BARRY ALLEN I All the Daring of the Lover of Knowledge is

Permitted Again 123
JUSTIN BARTON I How Epistemology Becomes What It Is 141
vii
Vlll TABLE OF CONTENTS

DUNCAN LARGE I Hermes contra Dionysus: Michel Serres's

Critique of Nietzsche 151
BELA BACSO I The Will to Truth 161
DAVID OWEN I Science, Value, and the Ascetic Ideal 169
DAVID B. ALLISON I Twilight of the Icons 179

PERSPECTIVES ON NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

GREG WHITLOCK I Roger J. Boscovich and Friedrich Nietzsche:

A Re-Examination 187
PATRICK A. HEELAN I Nietzsche's Perspectivalism:
A Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science 203
CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSACKER I Nietzsche: Perceptions of
Modernity 221
PAUL VALADIER I Science as New Religion 241
WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLI I Nietzsche's Critique of Truth
and Science: A Comprehensive Approach 253
ANDREA REHBERG I Nietzsche's Transvaluation of Causality 279
PETER POELLNER I Causation and Force in Nietzsche 287

NIETZSCHE AND THE SCIENCES

SCOTT H. PODOLSKY AND ALFRED I. TAUBER I Nietzsche's

Conception of Health: The Idealization of Struggle 299
ERIC STEINHART I The Will to Power and Parallel Distributed
Processing 313
PETER DOUGLAS I The Fractal Dynamics of a Nietzschean World 323
ULLRICH MICHAEL HAASE I Nietzsche's Critique of Technology:
A Defense of Phenomenology Against Modern Machinery 331

Selected Research Bibliography 341

Notes on Contributors 359

Table of Contents of Volume One: Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge,

and Critical Theory: Nietzsche and the Sciences I 365

Index 367
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The publisher's permission to translate Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker's essay,

"Nietzsche: Art, Science, Power" in Wahmehmung der Neuzeit, (Hanser Verlag
1983) is gratefully acknowledged. Richard Schacht's "Nietzsche, Truth and
Knowledge," derives from Schacht's Nietzsche, ©Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1983, and appears here with the permission of the publisher.
I take the happy opportunity to herewith affirm my respect and admiration for
RobertS. Cohen and I thank him for suggesting and encouraging my work on
this volume, as well as for the range of his contributions to its scope. As
always, too, Patrick A. Heelan has my constant gratitude for his insight, critical
advice, and indispensable personal support. I am also inspired by his enthusi-
asm for philosophy and the breadth of his continuing, current research interests.
The institutional support provided by the Graduate School of Georgetown
University is herewith also gratefully acknowledged because the practical labor
on this collection was in pa11 supported by the research project, Hermeneutic
and Phenomenological Approaches to the Philosophy of Science, directed by
William A. Gaston Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, Patrick
A. Heelan.
In an important way, this work first began when as a doctoral student I visited
a conference on the topic Nietzsche: Kunst und Wissenschaft in the Spring of
1985 at the IUC in Dubrovnik in the former, peacefully united Yugoslavia with
the aid of a Fulbright Fellow's small travel grant. There I immediately
recognized the need for a book which might adumbrate the key differences and
points of contact between the German language reception of Nietzsche's
philosophy and Anglophone approaches to Nietzsche - especially with regard
to formal and epistemic issues. Particularly influential were Gunter Abel,
Tilman Borsche, Volker Gerhardt, Friedrich Kaulbach (t), Wolfgang MOller-
Lauter, Birgitte Scheer, and Josef Simon. In addition to my own response to
the challenge of thinking between English and German reflections in Nietzsche's
Philosophy of Science (1994), the current collection represents some of the
many different voices and scholarly perspectives to be heard in this tradition, as
broadly various in the Anglophone as they are in the German contributions
below, a range also including other voices and languages- here presented in
English to facilitate the communication that remains still to be broadened
between different language traditions and different scholarly formations.

lX
X ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Beyond the direct personal trajectory of this collection, the tradition of

reading "Nietzsche and the Sciences" dates from Nietzsche's earliest interpret-
ers. Supplementing the pioneering insights of Hans Vaihinger and Abel Rey,
Alwin Mittasch, Oskar Becker, and, more recently, Milic Capek, must be
acknowledged. Contemporary currents continue with Robin Small's work on
recurrence and the theory of time and Angele Kremer-Marietti combines
research on Nietzsche with a special expertise on Comte. Walther Ch.
Zimmerli's influential paper on Nietzsche's critique of science, published here
for the first time in the present volume, as well as for the broader work of Jean
Granier, Reinhard Low (t), and Dieter Henke (with reference to theology and
Darwinism), and the still-as-yet untapped insights of Dieter Jiihnig' s reflections
on the problem of science as a philosophic problem with regard to the origins
of art in history and culture encourages further research on the themes collected
here. Further: the new and growing interest in Nietzsche and truth (and
including science, metaphysics, and epistemology) on the part of new scholars,
especially those hailing from analytic philosophical quarters, may well be
expected to enhance the project of understanding Nietzsche's thinking while at
the same time highlighting a theme that both invites and supports the possibility
of continental/analytic dialogue.
I express deepest personal thanks to David B. Allison, Richard Cobb-Stevens,
Theodore Kisiel, Alexander Nehamas, Tracy B. Strong, and Marx Wartofsky
(t). Alasdair Macintyre has my special gratitude for his kind encouragement
as well as my appreciation of the contemporary and ongoing engagement with
the problem of science represented in his Preface to this collection. And, I
thank Holger Schmid for his assistance with both collections and for working
with me to correct literally every one of the translations from the German,
especially for philosophic conversation in Nietzsche's own spirit on the esoteric
kernel of antiquity, language, poetry, and music.
 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED

In general, references to Nietzsche's works are abbreviated and included in the body of the text.
References to all other works are listed in the notes to each individual contribution, though this
may vary with different authors. In addition, because this collection is not intended for the
specialist reader alone, an effort has been made to keep references as general as possible.
Specialists will not find this rigorous but it is hoped that by the same token, nonspecialists may
find the discussions less forbidding. This is an overall guide. Some essays will employ individual
conventions.

NIETZSCHE'S WORKS:GERMAN EDITIONS

GOA Werke. Groj3oktav-Ausgabe, 2nd. ed., (Leipzig: Kroner, 1901-1913).

KGB Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by. G. Colli and M.
Montinari, (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1975 sqq.).
KSA Siimtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe (Miinchen/Ber1in, New
York: DTV/ Walter de Gruyter, 1980). Cited as KSA followed by the
page number. Some authors include notebook volume and number.
KGW Nietzsches Werke (Kritische Gesamtausgabe) (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1967 ff.) Cited as KGW followed by the page number.

NIETZSCHE'S WORKS: ENGLISH EDITIONS

The following abbreviations refer to in-text references to English translations of Nietzsche's

works. The original date of publication is listed in parentheses. The manner of citation, whether
to essay and section number or to section number alone, or to specific page numbers in the
translated edition is also noted in the notes to each essay. Citations have been standardized only
where possible and references are not always to the same translation. Where more than one current
translation of the same original work is used in the essays to follow, listings are given below in
order of citation frequency. The specific reference is also listed whenever possible in notes to each
essay.

PT Philosophy and Truth. Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the

Early 1870's, (1872-3), ed. and trans., Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey:
Humanities Press, 1979). Das Philosophenbuch, originally published in

xi
xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED

Nietzsches Werke, Vol. X, ed., Ernst Holzer and August Homeffer,

(Leipzig: Kroner, 1907), pp. 109-232; KSA 7, 417 ff., and elsewhere.
English source edition cited by page number.
TL "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," (1873), pp. 77-97 in
Philosophy and Truth. KSA 1, 875-890. See also "On Truth and Lying
in an Extra-Moral Sense," pp. 246-257 in Sander Gilman, Carole Blair,
David J. Parent, ed. and trans., Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and
Language, (Oxford University Press, 1989). Cited from Philosophy and
Truth by the page number.
PTG Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, (1873), trans. Marianne
Cowan (Chicago: Gateway, 1962). KSA I, 804-872. Cited by page
number.
BT The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, (1872), trans. W.
Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969). Cited by section number.
UM Untimely Meditations, (1873-76), trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983). Cited by page number.
HH Human, All Too Human, (1878-80), trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982). Cited in some essays by volume,
part, and section number.
D Daybreak, (1881), trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982). Cited by section number.
GS The Gay Science, (1882), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage
Books, 1974). Cited by section number.
Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1883-85), trans. Walter Kaufmann, in
Kaufmann, ed., The Portable Nietzsche, (New York: Viking Penguin,
1954). Cited by page number. See also Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans.
R.J. Hollingdale, (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1961). Certain essays also
include section headings.
BGE Beyond Good and Evil, (1886), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmond-
sworth: Penguin, 1973). See also Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). Cited by section number.
GM On the Genealogy of Morals, (1887), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage Books, 1967). Cited by essay and section number.
AC The Antichrist, (1895), trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Viking
Penguin, 1968); see also Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche. Cited by
page number.
TI The Twilight of the Idols, (1889), trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York:
Viking Penguin, 1968); see also Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche.
Cited by page number; certain essays list section headings or shortened
titles as indicated in italics in the following listings. For convenience in
 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED Xlll

referencing other translations or the original text, the section titles cor-
responding to cited page ranges are: "Foreword'': 21-22; "Maxims and
Arrows": 23-27; "The Problem of Socrates": 29-34; "'Reason" in Phi-
losophy": 35-39; "How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth": 40-
41; "Morality as Anti-Nature: 42-46; "The Four Great Errors": 47-54;
"The 'Improvers' of Mankind": 55-59; "What the Germans Lack": 60-
66; "Expeditions of an Untimely Man": 67-104; "What I Owe to the An-
cients": 105-111.
EH Ecce Homo, ([1888] 1908), trans. R. J.Hollingdale (Harmond-
sworth!London: Penguin, 1979, 1992). Cited by page number; certain
essays list essay headings and section numbers. For convenience in ref-
erencing other translations or the original text, the section titles corre-
sponding to cited page ranges are: "Foreword''; 33-36; "Epigraph": 37;
"Why I Am So Wise": 38-50; "Why I Am So Clever": 51-68; "Why I
Write Such Excellent Books": 69-77; "The Birth of Tragedy": 78-83;
"The Untimely Essays": 84--88; "Human, All Too Human": 89-94;
"Daybreak": 95-97; ''The Gay Science": 98; "Thus Spoke Zarathustra":
99-111; "Beyond Good and Evil": 112-113; "The Genealogy of Mor-
als": 114-115; "Twilight of the Idols": 116-118; "The Wagner Case":
119-125; "Why I Am A Destiny": 126-134.
WM The Will to Power, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage Books, 1968). Cited by section number. For corre-
sponding Nachlaj3 references please see the recent double concordance
to the KSA and KGW editions by Scott Simmons in New Nietzsche
Studies I:l/2 (1996):126-153. See also Marie-Luise Haase and Jorg
Salaquarda, "Konkordanz. Der Wille zur Macht: Nachlass in chronolo-
gischer Ordnung der Kritische Gesamtausgabe," Nietzsche-Studien 9
(1980): 446-490.

OTHER WORKS

KdrV I. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990). Also listed
as CPR with reference to The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp-
Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965. London: Macmillan & Co.,
Ltd., 1929).
NSI Babich, ed., Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory:
Nietzsche and the Sciences I (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999).
NSII Babich, ed., Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science:
Nietzsche and the Sciences II (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999).
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE

PREFACE

Why should a philosopher of the natural sciences be interested in Nietzsche's

writings? How one answers this question will depend in part on who you are.
Those who identify themselves wholeheartedly with Nietzsche's central
positions - and this is a harder task than is commonly supposed - have a
straightforward answer. Nietzsche has shown us how the philosophy of science
should be done. And we have an 1:xcellent model for such a response in
Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science by the editor of these volumes.
Historians of philosophy also have a straightforward answer. The story of the
development of Nietzsche's thought remains incomplete, indeed in some
respects unintelligible, until his reflections upon and relationships to the natural
sciences have been charted. But what about those of us who are not
Nietzscheans or who are anti-Nietzschean?
Consider some recent remarks by Steven Weinberg, the elementary particle
physicist. Weinberg is attacking David Bloor and Stanley Fish for contending
that the theories of physics are in part a work of culture, social constructions,
interpretations of a reality that undercletermines those interpretations. Weinberg
is prepared to allow that in the past, when the laws that physicists now acknowl-
edge were in the course of being discovered, cultural and psychological
influences may often have informed their theorizing. But in the final form of
these laws "cultural influences are refined away." So Weinberg concludes that
"the laws of physics as we understand them now are nothing but a description
of reality." 1
In 1885 Nietzsche wrote that "It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds
that physics too is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world (accord-
ing to our own requirements, if I may say so!) and not an explanation of the
world." 2 Nietzsche's view at first sight appears to be the antithesis of Wein-
berg's, yet about the physics of Nietzsche's time Weinberg seems to agree with
Nietzsche. The physicists of the late nineteenth century, on Weinberg's view,
had not yet disentangled that in their work which was genuinely description and
explanation from that which was socially and psychologically influenced
interpretation. Yet of course that was not their view of their theories. They were
- almost all of them - as confident then as Weinberg is now that they had
provided nothing but explanation and description. They too would have rejected
Nietzsche's characterization of their theorizing.

XV

B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, xv-xvii.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
XVI ALASDAIR MACINTYRE

History has shown them to have been mistaken, as Weinberg acknowledges.

Whence then comes Weinberg's confidence that he and his contemporaries will
not suffer the same fate? Weinberg has two answers. He is convinced that our
understanding of Maxwell's equations, quantum mechanics, relativity and the
standard model of elementary particles "is culture-free ... because the purely
scientific arguments for these theories seem to me overwhelmingly convinc-
ing."3 And change in "the typical background of physicists" has not changed
physics. 'These laws in their mature form have a toughness that resists cultural
influence." 4 What is striking about these answers is that both could have been
given by the physicists who were Nietzsche's contemporaries. So why should
we believe Weinberg? Is Weinberg's confidence not misplaced?
Consider what is importantly right in Weinberg's arguments. Physicists are,
by the nature of their enquiries, committed to eliminating from their theories
whatever in them is there not because of experimental or observational
evidence, or because of the compelling character of theoretical argument, but
because of the contingencies of cultural influence. Physics is an enterprise self-
consciously dedicated to freeing itself up from determination by social and
psychological factors. Moreover if a physical theory can be defended only as
one interpretation among others (and of any interpretation it is true that it is
always in competition with its rivals), then so far it has not been vindicated as
a physical theory. So long as the evidence permitted the phenomenon of light
to be interpreted either in terms of waves or in terms of particles, physics had
not yet provided a scientifically adequate account of light.
It follows that, insofar as physics is a successful enterprise by its own
standards, it is just what Weinberg says that it is and not at all what Nietzsche
said that it is. Yet the history of physics teaches us that time and again what was
at one time treated as explanation and description has later turned out to be no
more than interpretation and that time and again what was at one time not
recognized as in important part the cultural product of social and psychological
influence later turned out to be just such a product. And, that is to say, we need
to think about physics and more generally about the natural sciences in two
different and not easily reconcilable ways. We need two alternative images of
science.
One is the type of image elaborated by Weinberg, the self-image of most
professional scientists, an image that is an expression of a deep confidence in
the science of the present. The other is the type of image elaborated by
Nietzsche, an image of natural science as unable to transcend the limits of
interpretation, as akin to the work of the artist in ways that it finds it difficult to
acknowledge, as always inviting a suspicious interrogation of its claims and a
glance towards a possible future in which its pretensions have been unmasked.
Either image without the other, I want to suggest, is apt to corrupt. If we
understand science only in terms of the scientist's self-image, we will blind
ourselves to the part played in the sciences by the will to knowledge and the will
to power. If we understand science only in Nietzsche's terms, if we treat the
views that Nietzsche aspires to undermine as nothing but error, then we will
have not understood the point of the scientific enterprise. We need Nietzsche in
 PREFACE XVll

the philosophy of science as elsewhere, as perpetual antagonist, as combative

outsider, as someone to whose writings we have to return recurrently in order
to reconsider what answer to him we are able to make.
If I am right, then the reading of Nietzsche is almost as important to those of
us who in the end reject Nietzsche's positions as to those who to some large
extent accept them. And it is important in part for aspects of his work about
which I have so far said nothing: the range of his insights, their depth, his
engagement with scientific thinkers as various as Boscovich and Darwin, the
material that he has provided for later reflection. The contributors to this volume
have all in their essays contributed significantly to the project of making
Nietzsche's philosophy of science more easily available and placing it in the
context of a variety of debates and enquiries. In so doing they have put us all,
historians and philosophers, Nietzscheans and antiNietzscheans alike, very
much in their debt. As has their editor.

Duke University

ENDNOTES
1 Steven Weinberg, "Physics and History" in Daedalus 127, I. Winter 1998, p. 162.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., (London: Penguin Books,
1973), 14, p. 26.
3 Weinberg, p. 162.
4 Weinberg, p. 163.
 BABETTE E. BABICH

TRUTH, ART, AND LIFE:

NIETZSCHE, EPISTEMOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Although Nietzsche is typically regarded neither as a philosopher of science nor

an epistemologist, he was surprisingly preoccupied with these issues. 1
Nietzsche's question is the critical question of the possibility of truth itself and
it is in the same critical and Kantian spirit that he reflects upon the dynamic of
scientific inquiry. For Kant, it is the structure of questioning (and the art or
framing activity of questioning) rather than the ideal of objective, "factual"
observation which supports the possibility of a positive or empirical and
progressive or secure science of nature (KdrV Bxiii). 2 Nietzsche's decidedly
radicalized but still-Kantian advance shifts the focus of the critically scientific
question, as the constituting constraint of intuition, to science itself as well as
and thereby to the ideal of critique. This critical move, questioning both science
as well as the possibility of scientific critique, is essentially philosophical:
raising the question of science as the Heideggerian question-of-the-question,
proposed as a genuine question or challenge to the natural sciences.
An increasing number of philosophers have accepted this challenge - as the
present two volumes addressing Niet(.sche and the Sciences would suggest. Yet,
with very few exceptions, an interest in Nietzsche and the philosophical
question of truth characterizes not the rather marginal tradition of so-called
"continental" 3 or historically interpretive philosophy but the mainstream
tradition of analytic philosophy. 4 I refer to recent perspectives like Maudemarie
Clark's important book, Nietzsche and Truth, as well as the wide and growing
range of contributions on the topical conjunction of Nietzsche, truth, and
epistemology by analytically formed younger scholars. 5 These newer analytic
readings of Nietzsche and truth complement both the present author's histori-
cally sensitive and interpretively contextualised (that is to say: "continental")
approach to Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science as well as a wide range of
European approaches to Nietzsche's critical epistemology ranging from
V aihinger to Habermas, important exemplifications of which are offered for the
first time in English translation in both volumes one and two of this collection. 6
Yet, this growing interest does not constitute a "bridge" between continental and
analytic philosophy - partly because the differences in question are political
rather than geographical. 7 What follows develops the difference these differ-

B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Episterrwlogy, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, l-24.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 BABETTE E. BABICH

ences make for our understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy of logic and

science and concludes with summaries of the essays in the present volume.
For this reason it remains essential to the project of this introductory essay -
and it is essential too to the ideal of communication within and across styles of
philosophy - to emphasize and not to gloss over differences. The recent up
swelling of analytic interest in philosophers traditionally associated with the
historically interpretive tradition of philosophy signifies nothing like a conti-
nental turn within analytic philosophy- it is annexation without responsibility
and without the rigours of a genuinely historical, authentically interpretive
move. Nor is it a particular blessing for Nietzsche studies because analytic
philosophers typically take only as much as they can "stand" from Nietzsche,
not puzzling over but instead (this is the classic analytic tactic) dismissing the
rest as unsupportable while maintaining that Nietzsche (had he had sufficient
sense) would have done so as well.
On the other side of this issue: it may be asked why continental theorists
should be less interested in Nietzsche's critique of truth or theories of knowl-
edge than analytic philosophers? I am inclined to imagine that the answer must
reflect political or ideological considerations: analytic philosophy has defined
its approach as uniquely valid for crucial questions concerning knowledge,
especially scientific knowledge, in both experimental and theoretical expres-
sions. This excludes continental approaches. However, having defined its
prerogative for such concerns, analytic approaches prove singularly unable to
reflect on Nietzsche's thought and thus seem condemned to clarify, correct,
clear up, and in other words make sense of (i.e., compel or force sense from or
in) Nietzsche. Contrary to Arthur Danto's influential claim that the focus of
Nietzsche's thought is identical to the analytic interests of mainline philosophy, 8
syncretistic efforts overlook the agonistic aspects and critical dynamic of
Nietzsche's philosophy. 9
The metaphor of a "bridge" supposes that the differences between analytic
and continental styles of philosophy are not critical or essential but can simply
be "bridged" (or "translated" between)- and the same metaphor minimises the
danger of losing one's balance. 10 A reading of Nietzsche in terms of his
relevance to truth and the project of knowing (including exactly scientific
knowing) stretches a line - without for that building a bridge - across the
philosophic differences and sensibilities constituting the analytic-continental
divide. Such a reading cannbt be just another analytically poised colonization
of the historically interpretive tradition of continental philosophy because both
traditions are to be spanned in the light of Nietzsche's philosophy, drawing- in
every bold and every dangerous sense - a very Nietzschean tightrope across
these same traditions. The problem here is not (merely) the opposition between
two different styles of philosophising - one historically minded and interpre-
tively attuned (i.e., the continental style of doing philosophy) the other a-
historical and violently anti-hermeneutical (or analytic), but between qualita-
tively different approaches to understanding Nietzsche - one better and one
almost immeasurably worse than the other.
 TRUTH, ART, AND LIFE 3

With such strong language I mean to say that Nietzsche's thought is less
anathema to analytic conceptual schemes than simply outside its horizonal ken.
But in this esoteric/exoteric sense, Nietzsche's thought persists as a kind of
conceptual dynamite interior to philosophy, from both analytic and continental
perspectives. While the analytic approach has every conviction of right reason
on its side and although it has come to be interested in Nietzsche's epistemo-
logical critique from the side of this same prerogative, it lacks the resources to
read or to understand Nietzsche. By contrast, although politically inept for
reasons of powerlessness and pusillanimity, the continental approach possesses
the only resources with which what Nietzsche has to offer can be appropriated
in all its philosophical complexity. This last term is key to Nietzsche's episte-
mology. Real truth, so far from simplicitt as the real truth of the real world for
Nietzsche, is unspeakably complicated. 1
To emphasize the differences here means that the exactly cognitive disso-
nance of the initial contrast is importantly irreducible for Nietzsche's contribu-
tions as a philosopher and for the overall project of philosophy itself. Philo-
sophically, the overall, putatively plausible analytic effort to "make sense" of
Nietzsche has kept company with Nietzsche's reception in English since the
beginning of this century but efforts to tailor Nietzsche to fit the distinctive
concepts and schemes of analytic reason represent a mistaken passion. Attend-
ing to the process of Nietzsche's own manifestly provocative style of philo-
sophic thinking should move us away from errors of this kind as well as towards
a better sense of his thought.

BEYOND ANALYSIS: CONTRA THE "CONVICTIONS" OF PHILOSOPHY

It is obvious that the recent tum to Nietzsche's critique of truth must be

intrinsically subversive, catapulting analysis beyond its self-stated limitations
- especially in the case of more recent authors like Barry Allen and R. Lanier
Anderson - however, the majority of analytic readings remain irreparably
caught up within the conventions of what Nietzsche would call the "convic-
tions" of analytic philosophy, which is also to say that such readings seek less
to trace Nietzsche's critique of truth or language, or the possibility of knowl-
edge, or the practical and theoretical attitude of science, than to coordinate
Nietzsche within these same original analytic convictions.
In one such analytic reading, we are told that Nietzsche's epistemology not
only reduces to so much "naturalism" as a side line of a proper philosophy of
"agency," but, paralleling the historical reception of his thought, we are assured
that Nietzsche himself, like his enthusiasts, was really more absorbed by
interests other than truth. 12 Nietzsche's philosophic significance is thus limited
to his thinking not on "truth" but much rather on "value." 13 It is capital that such
a reduction of Nietzsche's thought to "value thinking" crosses analytic and
historically interpretive philosophic boundaries. 14 While for the most part, what
Nietzsche challenges on the epistemic level of fact is exactly the distinction
between fact and value, the larger tradition of philosophy treats ethical, cultural
4 BABETTE E. BABICH

and sociopolitical, and theological questions above all as subsequent to logic

and distinct from the theory of knowledge or philosophy of science. 15
The heart of the problem in the context of the philosophy of science for
Nietzsche is that science (sci entia or knowing) itself sets the critical standard for
all philosophical accounts of scientific theory, practice, and progress. Like
religion - and every other invention of the ascetic ideal - science cannot be
questioned on terms other than its own. 16 This is why Nietzsche finds that far
from being opposed pursuits, science and religion represent only variations upon
the ascetic ideals of discipline and renunciation, sobriety and progressive hope.
Science is as jealous a god of the tree of knowledge as the God of the Garden
of the Old Testament: ergo only science or philosophy construed as a science
(i.e., analytic philosophy of science) may pass judgment on science. 17
The assumption that stands behind the compartmentalization permitting
science to exempt itself from critique, Nietzsche named the key "conviction" or
prejudice of the philosopher. This philosophic prejudice holds that questions on
moral, political, cultural, theological, and rhetorical or philological issues are
secondary issues ("values") and, as so ordered, can be regarded as without
epistemological consequence. Such diverse and "soft" questions have no
relevance for the philosophic questions of truth or epistemology and nothing to
do with the "fact" or philosophy of science. The separation of issues of
philosophic inquiry and the ideal estimation of "significance" reflects the
prejudices of the philosophic tradition, analytic and otherwise. 18 It assumes a
hierarchy between these separate issues (philosophy of truth is higher than
moral or value philosophy) and it is the very core of what Nietzsche named "the
problem of science" (BT, Preface, 2) as a problem. 19 Paradoxically, perhaps, this
same institutional conviction seems also to be the reason today' s continentally-
minded scholars, exactly unlike Nietzsche (indeed: unlike Husser! or Heideg-
ger), are almost universally more interested in questions of ethics and politics
(as the worthy emphasis on justice in studies of gender, embodiment, architec-
ture, etc.) than philosophic reflections on the relationship between art and
knowledge or the notion of science or, indeed, issues of truth and lie? 0
Contra analytic appropriations of Nietzsche's thinking but also contra the
majority of "continental" appropriations - like David Krell and Charles Scott,
as well as Derrida and Foucault, etc. -the notion of "truth and lie" is not merely
a moral question for Nietzsche. Instead, the question of "truth and lie" -
particularly as it comes to stand beyond good and evil - concerns the relation
between art and knowledge as it is also the relation between ancient, tragic
wisdom and modern nihilism.

***
From his earliest to his latest work, Nietzsche discusses the crucial philosophi-
cal questions of knowledge and truth and reflects upon the culture, significance,
and theoretical practice of science. Where he differs from professional discipli-
nary style and scholarship is in his approach to these philosophical problems:
rather than asking, for example, how knowledge is possible, he challenges the
 TRUTH, ART, AND LIFE 5

possibility of knowledge on postcritical terms and, far beyond ordinary

skepticism, Nietzsche asks "Why truth?"- that is: he asks why it should be that,
given the limits of human knowing, human beings seek truth at all or undertake
to pursue scientific endeavours in a world of change, that is, in a positively
empirical world, without the assured insurance or ground of a metaphysics, be
it of a Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomist, or, indeed, any other kind.
The ideal of an objective, value-free position (the enlightenment ideal of
"immaculate perception" teasingly described in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke
Zarathustra) as the positive scientific ideal of pure observation, disinterested
prediction, and consummate control is the most contemporary expression of
what Nietzsche in the Twilight of the Idols named the "history of an error."
Contrary to the dreams of pure reason, we are embodied, prejudiced, historical
knowers. Nietzsche's tragic insight emphasizes that knowing this about
ourselves and our knowing projects changes nothing ("Wissen um das Irren hebt
es nicht auf' [KSA 9, 504]): it cannot render the knowledge project objectively
ideal or indeed our knowledge as such clear and distinct or transparent to itself.
Like the ethical problem of akrasia or the philosopher's favourite optical
illusion of a twig "bent" in a glass of water or a sophisticated hologram
invariant throughout any transformation of the angle of vision, insight into
illusion does not alter appearance as appearance but yields only a "truth" or
"knowledge" correcting appearance and incorrigibly distant from what
Heidegger would name aletheic truth.
Because Nietzsche's project is a philosophical reflection upon or investiga-
tion into the kind of things human beings do as human beings in the wider
context of a reflection on nature or the "real" (or life-) world, Nietzsche's
project conscientiously restores the pre-Socratic project of philosophy as a
reflection on the nature of nature to the Socratic-Platonic program of philosophy
as inquiry into human nature. Where we cannot think, as Socrates/Plato (and
Kant) teach us, the nature of nature except in terms of the conditions of human
nature (Plato) and human knowing (Kant), Nietzsche asks us to think the
question of science from the viewpoint of the artist, which is not to say that he
proposes to frame the idea of science from the cultural imaginary of the social
sphere of art but much rather from the viewpoint of art or techne or poiesis as
inventive, creative human activity. With reference to Kant's critical discussion
of the sciences, Nietzsche writes, "Our salvation lies not in knowing, but in
creating!"21 It is as an artistic creator, that the scientist invents, or theorizes, or
"creates." The products, knowledge (science), are manifestly not the same as the
inventions or constructions of an artist but by proposing to regard science on the
ground of art, as indeed, to regard art itself on the ground of life, Nietzsche is
able to suggest the extent to which the conditions for human activity necessarily
make an artist of every human being, consciously or unconsciously, i.e., whether
one likes it or not. 22
Reviewing the possibility of a philosophic inquiry into the knowledge
program of Western science and technology on the basis of this artistic context
means, at the very least, that the significance of Nietzsche's critical challenge
to philosophy in its epistemological core- and not merely, as Nietzsche has
6 BABETTE E. BABICH

more routinely been read, in terms of his incontestably important contributions

to ethical, theistic, aesthetic, and other cultural concerns - exceeds its impor-
tance for Nietzsche scholarship as such and alone.

LOGIC AND SCIENCE CONTRA ART AND LIFE

In the introduction to the first volume of this collection, Nietzsche, Theories of

Truth, and Critical Theory, it was argued that to understand Nietzsche's concern
with the problem of art and culture, this problem must be reviewed within the
context of his concern with the problem of logic as a problem. By questioning
its exactly axiomatic character, Nietzsche challenges the definition of truth as
it might have been stated by Frege or Wittgenstein or Tarski, et al.: "what is true
is what can be proven" ["Was sich beweisen liij3t ist wahr" (KSA 12, 191)]. For
Nietzsche, this kind of definition articulates only "an arbitrary determination of
the concept 'true' which cannot be proven. It is a plain: this should count as
true, should be designated 'true' ... That means, 'what may be proven is true'
already presumes truth as given in advance" (KSA 12, 191). 23 Nietzsche adverts
to this principle and notoriously characterises it not as an insight into the
necessary nature of truth but as a conceptual limit binding upon beings such as
ourselves: a psychological or even an organic inability (cf. KSA 13, 34). Logic,
for Nietzsche, including the principle of non-contradiction, must be regarded
merely as a "backbrace for vertebrates" and not "true-in-itself."24
Similarly, Nietzsche contends that the principle of non-contradiction "is a
biological compulsion: the instinct for the utility of inferring as we do infer is
part of us, we almost are this instinct - but what naivete to extract from this a
proof that we are in the possession of 'truth in itself'!" (KSA 13, 334/WP 515)25
What Nietzsche challenges is not the law-like character of this rule but rather
and only the kind of necessity it has. It is a "subjective empirical law" that we
are "unable to affirm and deny one and the same thing" (KSA 12, 389) and yet
this same "inability" expresses nothin~ like necessity or truth. In the same way,
we project what he calls "seiendes," 6 or enduring substance into the world,
thereby rendering the world of our sensual experience, a world of things,
constant and knowable (353). To calculate, to know, to control the world, we
need to operate with fixed concepts or constants but Nietzsche argues that the
practical utility of such concepts remains logically limited. It does not demon-
strate the truth of such concepts or constants. A stipulated construct has practical
value or utility, but this value does not make it true as such- even if the work
of constitution is subliminal or inherent in our consciousness. What Nietzsche
challenges is not the experience of the regularity of experience (he does this as
little as Hume does) or the matter of fact world- although he usefully reminds
us that "Mathematics is possible under conditions in which metaphysics is never
possible" (266) and continually emphasises the same distinctive difference with
regard to physics as well - he hardly disputes the conceptual possibility of
mathematical theory. Instead, he asks us to examine the conditions of the
possibility of knowledge. Reprising this Kantian endeavor, he concludes, contra
Kant, that exactly synthetic a priori judgments, qua metaphysical rather than
 TRUTH, ART, AND LIFE 7

factive, are not possible. In our mouths, he says, they are brazenly false
judgments: we have no right to them (BGE 11).
By emphasising that "rational thought is an interpretation according to a
schema that we cannot throw off' (KSA 12, 194) and that "all of our organs for
knowledge and sense have developed with regard to the conditions of survival
and growth" (352), 27 Nietzsche's critical supposition is strictly bio-ecological.28
For Nietzsche, the conditions of the human mind and body, its species condition
in a changing and relational world, etc., are the critical conditions of the
possibility of what we name knowledge and truth. But Nietzsche's theory of
truth is not an ecological, pragmatic, or naturalist theory because he does not
forget what is involved when one proposes that one has or seeks truth. Utility
or efficacy for life-preservation is not strictly speaking, convertible with "truth"
as such.
When Nietzsche talks about truth he does not hedge as many contemporary
philosophers today are inclined to do, invoking a watered-down or pseudo or
"weak" conception of truth. Truth for Nietzsche (the truth he contends does not
exist), is exactly Platonic, or ideal, noumenal, or ultimate truth. Nor would
Nietzsche be the only one, to paraphrase Whitehead's dry judgment on the
history of philosophy, guilty of this same presumption. Every philosophic
account of truth, even the more pragmatic or ad hoc varieties, especially
accounts redefining truth in contrast to its Platonic institution, are dependent on
Plato in the same way. From this kind of Platonic/anti-Platonic perspective,
Nietzsche declares that the world of becoming, the domain of contingency and
change, excludes the possibility of truth: "Knowledge and becoming exclude one
another" (KSA 12, 382/ WP 517). 29 Thus- in a negative exemplification of its
ideal Platonic scheme - "truth," for Nietzsche, "cannot be recognized." This
means that qua empirical "truth" (i.e., what today is called scientific or even
factual truth): there is and can be no truth. "Everything knowable is illusion"
(KSA 7, 633/ TL, 97). Thus the real world (i.e., "nature") or apparent, empirical
reality may not be identified with the ideal or metaphysical world of Platonic
truth but rather the world of appearance, its evidentiality qua phenomenal world
or illusion, betrays the inevitable reference to the same ideality. If one could, as
one cannot, go back before Plato, the world of becoming would have its closest
family resemblance to the world of the Ionian philosophers. But the claim that
everything flows is itself (it might seem, be it from the start or in the end) a
Platonic gloss on Heraclitus and not a reflection upon what Heraclitus could call
the logos - which may not be identified as a logical (Platonico-Aristotelian)
identity. To this day, post-Parmenides as much as post-Plato, it is impossible to
restore the original innocence of the notion of becoming precisely as an
innocence that includes war as its logos above all, that is: contradiction and
pain.
Claiming that ''pure logic is the impossibility which maintains science" (KSA
7, 473), Nietzsche highlights the impropriety or incoherence of logic as the
theoretical support of empirical science. (Note that this could not be thought to
undermine the pure coherence of logical abstraction as such.) Declaiming "the
pathos of truth in a world of lies," Nietzsche's project recollects for us the
8 BABETTE E. BABICH

conflict of ideal truth with the changing reality of the real world. Because the
momentary tonus of reality is resonant flux, a backwards echo of what has been
and anticipatory tremor of what is not yet, every moment of reality - that is:
empirical nature- is captivated change. The "stone" fact that no fact is stone
means that the human knowledge project cannot grasp the empirical world
because what is real in it is never beyond change or time.
This empirical, temporal, real emphasis means that when Nietzsche cele-
brates the sciences of nature in antiquity and in the works of his contemporaries
such as Robert Mayer and Ernst Mach, what he celebrates is natural science
construed as an ultimately sensual rationality. Science for Nietzsche must be a
discipline of the bod/ 0 - what he names the "great reason" as opposed to the
smaller or "square little reason" (GS 373) of mathematics and logical theory.
Thus the science of nature for Nietzsche must be the science not of ideal events
and processes but of recondite reality becoming in time. This object of science
is the dynamic "truth" of what is real not the ideal and literal "truth of truth."
For Nietzsche, the so-called (scientific and logical) truth of truth is unreal: not
figuratively but literally insofar as it is theoretically ideal. This logical ideality
is the truth of tautology: logical truth. The becoming and changing nature
Nietzsche recalls to us, as scientists and as philosophers, can only be an illogical
nature and Nietzsche calls us to that same natural world for the honest sake of
science: "We live and think amid nothing but effects of what is illogical- in
ignorance and false knowledge" (KSA 6, 496). In every way then, Nietzsche
takes his thinking on logic, on truth, and reality to its "ultimate consequences,"
to use the language he employs in a related section on the needfullawlikeness
of nature. Thus Nietzsche illustrates the exigence of such consequential
reasoning as he describes his own anti-atomistic ideal of the non-law like
working of the will to power as an alternative account of '"nature's conformity
to law'" (BGE 22)? 1 It is important to emphasize that this notion of necessity
and law reflects the cosmologies of the first philosophers, or presocratic
thinkers. (Indeed it can be argued, here as an aside, that the only way to
understand the term necessity as Nietzsche uses the term is with reference to its
expression as chance in Plato's expression of Pythagorean cosmology in the
Timaeus. [D 130; cf. GS 109J) 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 not an impossibility following from Nietzsche's terms of analysis but
and precisely an impossibility on the logical, unchanging terms philosophers set
as the (unconditioned) conditions of knowledge (cf. KSA 7, 519-520).
In my companion introduction to Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, Critical
Theory, I found it important to observe that the same Nietzsche who offers a
genealogy of morals (out of the creative force of action denied action, that is
reactivity or res sentiment) and of tragedy (from ancient dithyrambic modes to
its contemporary decline as an "artform,") also offers a genealogy oflogic (out
of the spirit of illogic or illusion) and science (out of the spirit of myth and
magic and alchemy but ultimately on the occluded paradigm of religion). 32
 TRUTH, ART, AND LIFE 9

Nietzsche 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. Nietzsche re-reads the traditional philosophical account of the
origins of logic, telling us that logic has its beginnings in illogic. The pre-history
of logic is founded in contradiction: truth begins in error: in its antithesis? 3 Just
as almost every account of the pre-history of philosophy tells us: on the basis
of myth, we advance to logos; from superstition, we progress to reasoned belief,
and critical, empirical observation, and thence to scientific truths. But Nietzsche
asks how anything can begin in its opposite? How do we get truth from lie?
Altruism from egoism? Or- in his more typically received genealogical account
of social mores or Judeao-Christian doctrine- how do the meek (really) come
to inherit the earth? In what sense does the slave prove to master the master, or
the masochist enjoy the superior advantage in contrast with the sadist, or woman
primacy over a man in Western (as in Eastern) society? Nietzsche does not
suppose a dialectic here, he challenges the conviction at its root, supposing
inversion at best (thus the meek and the slave really assume the positions of
power or mastery), delusion at worst (the feminine ideal that complicity with the
same ideal preserves transcendent value for women). If, as Nietzsche argues in
one of his more unappealing claims, the crown of Christian love grows out of
the root of Jewish hatred, it need not be assumed that hatred has been transfig-
ured or redeemed as love. Instead, Nietzsche's genealogical inquiry lays out the
still surviving roots of hatred (or res sentiment to speak obliquely) at the heart
of Christian love.
In the case of logic, our ideal of the correct is derived from error or falsity,
not from any revelation of truth and the error is not sublated but it remains.
There is, in a word, no post-lapsarian history of logic following upon a lost
moment of golden insight into or "experience" of truth, and there is also no
redemption. We retain Plato's truth ideal but we have long since dispensed with
the ideal world. Nietzsche reminds us that in sense perception, as in our
anthropomorphic linguistic and epistemological constructions, we literally
(albeit not figuratively) have only what we call the false: that is, perception,
representation, not the ideal world, not the thing in itself. From raw experience,
from the so-called given, absolutely anything can follow. Thus, for Nietzsche,
"false inferences are more correctly understood as metonymies ... rhetorically
and poetically" (KSA 6, 486). 34 And yet as it involves a reflection upon both the
Humean critique of logical causality and the logical foundation of grammar (as
the grammatical origins of our automatic associations and our deepest convic-
tions regarding God and the subject) Nietzsche's insight is complicated. Given
contemporary, rigorous categorical separations, defined like art in contrast with
knowledge, conceived as rhetoric or as poetry, such "false inferences" are other
than (merely or literally) false. Nietzsche's point is not the point of convergence
or agreement with formal or informal logical calculi but rather the nuanced
observation that although "rhetorical figures" (which he parenthetically
identifies as "the essence of language," so that we do not overlook the dynamic
scheme of his argument) "are logically invalid inferences," what is then
consequently said to be true is generated via the same invalid process by
10 BABETTE E. BABICH

contrast with the recognition of what is false as such: "this is the way reason
begins" (KSA 468), i.e., without warrant. Nietzsche's deconstructive genealogy
of the discursively theoretical character of truth in contrast with its first, mythic
or primitive origins is thus the muster for a similarly minded history of the
problem of enlightenment civilization, as of true religion, and of science, social
and natural. 35
For Nietzsche, the drive for knowledge begins with an impossible demand in
the fantastic judgment that "to be true means to be true always." This demand
cannot have grown out of experience but only on the basis of the seduction of
the words that are always the same: seemingly tokens of eternity. The philoso-
pher is "caught in the nets of language" (KSA 6, 463) and "logic itself is merely
slavery within the fetters of language" (KSA 7, 623).
Our words are imprecise apprehensions of what is intended: they do not and
cannot touch the individual object or thing. Practical knowledge of real things
in the real world "involves the identification of things which are not the same,
of things which are only similar" (KSA 6, 493). The epistemological reservation
Nietzsche introduces here is plain. Our knowledge accounts of the real or
natural world incorrigibly leave out or have to 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" (ibid.). 36
Thus Nietzsche argues that knowledge of individual or real things, i.e., the
modern knowledge of natural science, must be "essentially illogical" if it is to
aspire to any kind of approximative, tentative correspondence with the real
world, as a practical or real science of nature.
Where Nietzsche differs from traditional theories of truth, both logical and
scientific, is in his assessment of the relevant referent. The object of modern
science is nature for Nietzsche, not logic. Thus, the patron saint of modern
science is not to be Aristotle or even Descartes but Bacon, Newton, Boyle, or
indeed, any other alchemist or practical theorist. 37 This utilitarian focus is what
Nietzsche means when he writes that "science in its entirety is directed toward
becoming, not toward being" (KSA 7, 633fTL 97). But beyond the forceful
arguments of efficiency, which are sufficient for pragmatic or merely utilitiarian
purposes, the key philosophical problem for Nietzsche is the persistent problem
of truth, logical rationality, and the measure of the world.
Thus Nietzsche continually adverts to the difference between ideal types -
like elemental carbon- and real material instances. Not only does he refuse the
association (e.g., he points to the irreducible [non-chemical] difference between
diamond, coal, and graphite- [KSA 13, 374]) but he challenges the operative
application of simple mathematics (or arithmetic) to describe biological or
indeed ecological processes. Thus he frequently points out that in the real world
of real things, two halves routinely fail to add up to or equal a whole: as true for
an apple pie as it was in Solomon's judgment and as it would apply- taking
another of Nietzsche's favourite metaphors- to the lowest worm (cf. KSA 13,
98). To make this biological point, in the case of a particularly simple worm, the
halves might yield two wholes. In more advanced worms, the two halves add up
to nothing at all but can represent a subtraction, so that (providing that both
 TRUTH, ART, AND LIFE 11

halves do not die, as is always likely) the one that survives is a much smaller
whole: not two but just one worm. And Nietzsche is fond of the example of
protoplasm and its dynamic of growth and division, pointing to the example of
cell-divisions to make the same point in another direction as well as to invoke
his general economy of abundance in expression. 38
Because the pure ideal of truth is inimical to the changing, impure reality of
the empirical (and that also means the scientific) world, "truth, considered as
unconditional duty, stands in a hostile and destructive relationship with the
world" (KSA 7, 623). The culture of science needs the philosopher as "physi-
cian." What Nietzsche names "the tragic conflict" is the insight that human
society and culture cannot exist without art, i.e., without the untruth of art.
Nietzsche celebrates "Art and nothing but Art!" (TI, Expeditions 24; cf. KSA
13, 194, 521), because art is "the great life-stimulus" but also because in the
creation (and reception) of art we "betray" our character as part of the world
(KSA 12, 33; cf. 385), which same world Nietzsche describes as a "self-
engendering work of art" (KSA 13, 114; 337). The value of art that elevates it
above truth is the life-saving value of illusion. Truth, by contrast, "kills - it even
kills itself (insofar as it realizes that error is its foundation ... )" (ibid.).
The ideal of art is the ideal of reality, but this is a tragic ideal. What
Nietzsche calls the tragic affirms "transitoriness and destruction." 39 Thus
Nietzsche speaks of art as a truth to life, life understood as the reality opposed
to and opposed by the ideal world of metaphysics as of logic, of religion and of
science: where "the lie of the ideal has hitherto been the curse on reality ... " 40
But for Nietzsche, the world of thought mirrors not an ideal truth but only a
simplified version of the apparent world ("reality" or "life").41 Logic itself, like
mathematics, is an artifice, an invention and not a truth. The becoming,
phenomenal world for Nietzsche (via Wittgenstein) is everything that is the
case. Or, as Nietzsche says more explicitly, there is no essence: "Das 'Wesen'
fehlt: Das 'Werdende,' 'Phanomenale" ist die einzige Art Sein" (KSA 12,
249). 42 Science must be included in the categorical claim that "all of life is
based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of
perspectives and error" (BT Preface 5; cf. KSA 12, 129).
Throughout his work, starting with the indulgent fable of vita brevis and
vanitas with which he began his unpublished reflections on truth and lie,
Nietzsche refers to this same tragic ideal. Later Nietzsche expresses human life
as a "hiatus between two nothings," (KSA 12, 473), and still later develops this
challenge to scientific optimism in the same words, describing life as "an
accident, an exception, a hiatus between two nothings, an event without plan,
reason, will, self-awareness, the worst kind of necessity, stupid necessity" (KSA
13, 488-489). 43 Vanity regards the vulnerability and erroneousness of our human
situtation as illusory, optimistically believing in spite of everything in the ideal
promise of a true world, if not in paradise in a life beyond life, then still to be
attained with future scientific achievements in this life.
As Nietzsche recounts the history of the illusion of knowledge, Socratic
optimism, or the Platonic/Socratic faith of theoretical science, is "the unshak-
able faith that thought, using the thread of logic, can penetrate the deepest
12 BABETTE E. BABICH

abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but
even of correcting it" (BT 15). This optimistic ideal endures in modern
technology and science as the durable ideal of progress. 44 Yet Nietzsche's point
is not the pessimistic correction of such a progress ideal (the simplistic meaning
of nihilism) because this, for Nietzsche, amounts to the same thing under the
sign (or the cover) of negation. The critical self-immolation of knowledge ("the
truth that he is eternally condemned to untruth" [KSA 1, 760]), must be joined
to the sober notion that insight into illusion does not abrogate it. Thus although
Nietzsche writes that from "every point of view, the erroneousness of the world
in which we live is the surest and the firmest thing we can get our eyes on ... "
(BGE 34 ), the problem must be to get beyond the notion of truth and lie, to
overcome the thought of "error as the evil par excellence" (BT 15).
Rather than remaining in the dyadic conflict between antitheses, as the binary
thinking endemic to all logical and scientific pursuits (BGE 2), Nietzsche asks
if it were not (or could not be) "enough to suppose shades of apparentness -
different valeurs, to speak in the language of painters?" (BGE 34). Against the
metaphysical faith that generates logic out of illogic, the true from the untrue,
Nietzsche proposes the notion of such artistic "refinements," exactly not as a
pragmatic making-do or "as good as" true but for the sake of the question "Why
truth? Why not error?" Asking this question, we might come to love error, not
only for its fruit in truth and knowledge but as pure illusion, as such. Art is of
greater value than truth. To parse the philosophical importance of this estima-
tion is for Nietzsche already a matter of the degree of artful illusion: There is no
truth. "All men," Nietzsche writes, "are artists." Thus error is not to be mined
for truth and what began in approximations and error is not asked to pull itself
out of the swamp of its own illusions into the heaven of truth. Nietzsche's
perspectivalism (again: more than a sheer "perspectivism" and nothing like a
relativism) articulates a more direct (less transformative or magical kind of)
evolution of thought on truth and on lie, about reality (and so too about
ourselves) than the standard historical convention of a revolutionary transit from
mythos to logos in the development of rational thought. Art trumps truth because
truth itself is illusion or art- and being seduced by illusion, taking it as really
true (being duped) is not an appropriate response either to the work of art on the
stage (in the theatre, museum gallery, public square, etc., ) or to our experience
of the world and of life.
As science is a kind of art, and truth a kind of illusion, life is a kind of death.
Nietzsche rejects the "connection between the inorganic and the organic" (KSA
11, 560) contra the singularity of the organic and supposes - in accord with
modern molecular genetics -that the organic is merely a particular kind of the
inorganic. 45 But as the living is "merely a type of what is dead" (GS 109),
Nietzsche speaks of "shades of apparentness" or seeming, beyond opposites or
antitheses: "there are no opposites" (HH 1: 1). Truth is in continuity with the lie:
truth is a type, species, "kind of error" (KSA 11, 506). Like the valeurs of the
painter (Nietzsche's specific reference is to Delacroix but one can also think of
Vermeer, Raphael or Rembrandt, even Seurat or Van Gogh, etc.), perceived
oppositions "do not exist in themselves." Like a calculated "alchemy" - in
 TRUTH, ART, AND LIFE 13

Rimbaud's modernist mechanic of words- against the imagined proximity of

the painter's hand and from what Nietzsche calls the "right height" (KSA 7,
417), every broad or dotted touch of colour expresses "only variations in degree
that from a certain perspective appear to be opposites" (KSA 12, 384) but with
distance turn to the variegated shapes of life.

TIGHTROPES AND BRIDGES:

DANGER AND THE HORIZON OF NIETZSCHE"S NEW SEAS

I began by making the case that epistemology and the philosophy of science
might be seen as one of Nietzsche's most enduring philosophic concerns. I also
noted that the reception of this epistemological perspective was rather more
common among Nietzsche's analytic interpreters and that most continental
interpretations, at least in Anglophone expressions, have tended to be more
interested in Nietzsche's moral or social/political or cultural critiques than his
critique of truth.
In the present context, it might seem that I would do best to offer at least an
expression of thanks for those who have been gracious enough to read Nietzsche
as a philosopher and for the brave new rhetorical project of building a bridge
between the analytic and the continental traditions. Yet I have maintained that
such a "bridge" cannot be built because the span is incorrigibly ideological and
the intellectual regions that would be linked thereby are not equally stable
continents.
Yet, although the crossing-over remains to be begun, the epistemological
dimension of Nietzsche's thought, indeed: the very idea of Nietzsche's critique
of truth already joins the traditions of analytic and continental philosophy.
Without bridging two regions of philosophy, the philosopher is called upon to
be, as Nietzsche would say, a tightrope dancer. This call applies to philosophers
of every philosophical stripe, analytic as much as continental. But here too there
is a caveat. The idea of dancing is a great metaphor for the continental or
postmodem philosopher, very like the idea of play- and (recalling Nietzsche's
first postmodern antipode): much like leaping. This is appealing language. It is
as if one's concepts could take flight. Yet the metaphor should bring us back to
earth, as it were. Falling is the only thing Nietzsche's human tightrope dancers
ever did do in the end (at the start of Nietzsche's Zarathustra) and falling is the
one thing they always do in practice -- sometimes even in circus performances
to the delight of the crowd. But maybe this is the point to be made. We are told
that as walking itself is a controlled or orchestrated falling, running, dancing,
and leaping represent differently controlled styles of falling. We do not and
cannot have the foundations for the bridge. Hence the running vault as
Nietzsche recommends it as a means of ascending the heights requires above all
that we anticipate that every step we take will dislodge our footing. The light-
footed solution will be the one that takes its security not from the unshakability
of its initial point of departure but exactly from the dynamic momentum of
decadence. This is ceteris paribus, what Neurath proposed when he noted that
the only place to rework the ship of science was plank by plank, not in the dry
14 BABETTE E. BABICH

dock of secured doubt but on the open sea of experience, in the very Eleatic flux
of things that remains the open sea of science, as of art, and that is, fellow
voyagers - as we all of us are - the sea of life.

SECTION SUMMARIES

Analytic Perspectives: Truth and Knowledge

Richard Schacht's first essay below, "Nietzsche: Truth and Knowledge,"
testifies to the influence of his 1983 book on Nietzsche. 46 Although Schacht's
contribution was updated for the present collection, it is important that he did
not choose to add a discussion of recent analytic readings of Nietzsche on truth
and knowledge, like Clark's important, Nietzsche and Truth, or even the wide
range of the growing contributions reflecting the conjunction between
Nietzsche's philosophy and theories of truth and knowledge by analytically
formed scholars. Nor did Schacht find it necessary to review contemporary
European perspectives on Nietzsche and truth, or indeed generally "continental"
interpretations.
In this context, Schacht's essay valuably illuminates the self-sufficiency and
patent hegemony of analytic style in the university-profession of philosophy. In
particular, and like Danto and, though less overtly, like Clark, by reading
Nietzsche's critique of truth and knowledge in terms of categories that them-
selves however exceed analysis, Schacht uses Nietzsche's thought to subsume,
without thereby engaging or even citing, the broader historical, interpretive
tradition of philosophic reflection under the majority rule of the analytic
tradition. And yet this tension institutes a subversive linking which- as I argue
above - inevitably catapults analysis beyond its original intentions. Thus
Schacht can begin with the remark that Nietzsche's criticism of traditional ideas
and ideals of truth and knowledge elicits numerous misunderstandings and
confusions - friendly and hostile. Analysing the sense in which Nietzsche
speaks of "truth" and "knowledge" in the context of the Nietzschean text,
Schacht establishes that these terms do not have a single sense and reference in
all occurrences. In order to interpret any specific mention Nietzsche makes
along these lines, the reader must consider precisely what sort of a remark it is,
and how broadly and on what level of analysis it ought to apply. With this
prescriptive measure, Schacht adds a fairly straightforward and much needed
hermeneutic criterion to the commonplaces of analytic consistency. In this way,
in contrast to those who read Nietzsche as nihilist or anti-cognitivist, Schacht
is able to articulate Nietzsche's philosophic development into a kind of
naturalistic epistemology.
Robert C. Welshon's essay, "Perspectivist Ontology and de re Knowledge,"
seeks to read Nietzsche on or via the terminology and within the basic limits of
analytic philosophy. Welshon assesses some of the epistemological implications
of Nietzsche's perspectivist ontology in terms of three alternatives to object
composition: conjunctivism (any conjunction of two or more entities of a given
ontological category can compose a whole), constellationism (bundles are
composed and individuated by perspectives taken on quanta of power from an
 TRUTH, ART, AND LIFE 15

external point of view), and organization (intrinsic to the bundles is that in

virtue of which they are composed) and explores the implications of these three
alternatives of object composition for de re knowledge.
In "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth," R. Lanier Anderson recalls Nietzsche's
frequent and paradoxical claim that there is no truth, observing - as everyone
handily tends to observe- that this claim apparently refutes itself immediately:
if nothing is true, then the denial of truth itself must also be untrue. Anderson
seeks to resolve these paradoxes, arguing that Nietzsche's attempt to transform
Kant's epistemology implicitly uses two different senses of "true," "false," and
related concepts. Nietzsche attempts to preserve the broad structure of Kant's
"Copernican revolution" while simultaneously rejecting both Kant's noumenal
posit and his claim to articulate a transcendental theory of cognition. However,
Anderson argues, such omissions do leave Nietzsche without good Kantian
grounds for assuming that the objects of knowledge form a unique determinate
world, and thus lead him to reject a traditional sense of truth, as correspondence
to uniquely determinate things. When Nietzsche denies truth, he uses the word
in this traditional sense. Thus, for Anderson, Nietzsche's own truth claims use
a different, "theory-internal" sense of truth, which treats truth as a matter of
satisfying epistemic norms proper to our various perspectives.
Paul van Tongeren addresses the intrinsic and incidental ambiguities of
Nietzsche's epistemological position in "Nietzsche's Symptomatology of
Scepticism." He suggests that the apparent contradictions within Nietzsche's
critique may minimally be understood more fully, if not ultimately resolved, by
an approach distinguishing variant types of skepticism not from an epistemo-
logical perspective (e.g. the distinction between universal and partial, or
between absolute and relative skepticism) but from a "morally" evaluative
diagnosis of the type of life articulated in these types of skepticism.

Analytic Perspectives: Atomism, Realism, Naturalism, Positivism

Robin Small's scholarly essay, "We Sensualists," recounts the inconsistency
initially evident in Nietzsche's attitude to the senses, whereby Nietzsche is able
to make such claims as "Today all of us are sensualists" while yet simultane-
ously attacking belief in the senses as merely vulgar prejudice. For Small, such
ambiguities may be resolved by separating theoretical from practical versions
of sensualism. Nietzsche supports its methodological role while denying it any
dogmatic claim to truth. Small proceeds to explore three related themes: the
association of sensualism with materialism, the relation between the vocabulary
of sensory qualities and the categories of science, and the special cases of
pleasure and pain, showing that sensualism is an important point of reference
in Nietzsche's later thought.
Robert Nola argues that Nietzsche's naturalistic ontology of "force-powers"
is offered as a rival to scientific naturalism in his essay, "Nietzsche's Natural-
ism, Science, and Belief." Nola attempts to show that Nietzsche's view that
objects are fictions is eliminativist (rather than reductionist), but that a central
argument for this claim remains uncompelling. Nietzsche's theory of will to
16 BABETTE E. BABICH

power provides not an account of knowledge but rather of what we hold-true

which may have some empirical support but assigns no role to the rival
rationality-based accounts which may explain some of our beliefs and which are
necessary for explanations of knowledge.
In the next essay, "Nietzsche's Fling with Positivism," Jonathan Cohen
claims that during his middle period, Nietzsche adopts a form of positivism
opposing both his earlier and later views. This periodic shift is motivated by a
change in Nietzsche's conception of his basic project as the promotion of
cultural/spiritual growth. Concomitantly, Nietzsche nevertheless holds certain
views which continue, once his positivistic phase is played out, to develop into
his mature perspectivism.
In the final essay in this section, "The Seductions of Subjective Validity:
Nietzsche's Renascent Realism," Daniel Conway observes that Nietzsche is
revered as the progenitor of post-modern philosophy and as the anti-
metaphysical, arch-villain of speculative system-building. Nevertheless, despite
the contrast and contradiction this suggests, Nietzsche presents himself as a
"reborn" realist in 1888. Nietzsche's appeal to a notion of subjective validity
enables him to avoid some of the signature, anti-affective prejudices of
traditional epistemology. Thus Nietzsche's ideal of "objectivity" is diametrically
opposed to the traditional ideal of objectivity. Far from "contemplation without
interest,'' Conway argues, our best approximation of "objectivity" would be a
maximal expression of subjective interests and affective engagements.

Nietzsche's Epistemological Daring

In the provocative title essay, "All the Daring of the Lover of Knowledge is
Permitted Again," Barry Allen proposes two historically competing ideas about
what knowledge is and why it is desirable. One derives from Greek philosophy:
the best knowledge is an impassive, contemplative state, with things known
clearly and distinctly present to the mind. The other holds the powerful,
operational knowledge of effects, tested by trials and perfected through
experience to be best. Originating in the esoteric tradition, this latter ideal was
appropriated by early-modern philosophers of experimental knowledge- who
at the same time relieved such knowledge of its former association with deviant
ritual, heresy, and morally dubious secrecy. For Allen, Nietzsche reintroduces
an aesthetic-existential dimension to the pursuit of knowledge previously
suppressed by Bacon, Boyle, and other Enlightenment thinkers. With Nietzsche,
the pursuit of knowledge becomes once again a Faustian gamble with error and
mischance.
In "How Epistemology Becomes What It Is," Justin Barton addresses the
generative dimension of Nietzschean critique and the futural dimension of this
genealogy as a mode of what Barton designates reflexive and further develops
as diagramming critique. The central issues of epistemology were not only
second-order questions for Nietzsche, they were also an inhibitory system in
relation to thought, or creativity, which Barton submits as what is really at stake
in the epistemic domain.
 TRUTH, ART, AND LIFE 17

In "Hermes contra Dionysus: Michel Serres's Critique of Nietzsche," Duncan

Large traces the influence of Nietzsche's thought in the writings of Michel
Serres, a controversial French philosopher of science and ecology who for his
own part (anticipating the new wave of French thinkers who conscientiously
renounce Nietzsche for good Habermasian or else Levinasian reasons) 47 has
vehemently refused any insinuation of Nietzsche's influence on his philosophic
reading of epistemology, or science and its history. Large argues that Serres'
denial suggests a more Freudian "anxiety". For Large, a review of the historical
frame of Serres's accounts of Pasteur and of eighteenth century thermodynamics
clearly reveals an important critical debt to Nietzsche.
Bela Bacs6 offers a properly hermeneutic reading of interpretation (and
influence) underscoring the originality of Nietzsche's theory of interpretation
in the radical (and Heideggerian) Umkehrung (turning-about) or utmost point
of understanding as utmost being-beyond-itself, "The Will to Truth as Art of
Interpretation." Contrary to Heidegger's claim in his lectures on Nietzsche,
Nietzsche's later philosophy does not finish or complete metaphysics but opens
the destructive strength of interpretation against any perspectivally/ hypocriti-
cally grounded world of traditional thinking.
In "Science, Value, and the Ascetic Ideal," David Owen argues that Nietzsche
articulates a postmetaphysical understanding of science as a human activity
which provides a value-pluralist perspective on the value of science. Owen thus
contends- despite appearances to the contrary- that Nietzsche's remarks on
science are coherent when located in terms of his concern with the ascetic ideal.
In addition, Nietzsche's epistemological writings provide an effective critique
of scientism. For Owen, Nietzsche's account opens the possibility of, and
provides the tools for, reflection on the value of scientific truth.
David B. Allison in 'Twilight of the Icons," observes that Nietzsche gives an
account of the genesis of conceptual representation, i.e., in Nietzsche's words,
how the concept or idea came to represent the "real." Nietzsche's genetic
account offers a remarkable itinerary - a genealogy of reversion - for the
devolution of the conceptually articulated "true world," i.e., traditional
metaphysics. For Allison, Nietzsche completes his critique (of what Jean
Baudrillard will later call the "hyperreal") in The Antichrist, revealing such a
conceptual construct of rationality as thoroughgoing illusion, bereft of any
relation whatsoever to the experienced world of sensibility: effectively, a
"critique of pure fiction." Ultimately, Allison suggests, Nietzsche highlights the
underlying motivational schema of such a tradition as inherently pathological.

Perspectives on Nietzsche's Philosophy and Science

The next section explores Nietzsche's historical relation to natural scientific
theory or physics. Greg Whitlock, in "Roger J. Boscovich and Friedrich
Nietzsche: A Reexamination," reviews the relationship between Nietzsche and
Boscovich, the Dalmatian Jesuit mathematician and point-particle theorist.
Countering the widespread scholarly conviction that Nietzsche had no interest
in physics in general and his concept of force no connection with physics in
18 BABETTE E. BABICH

particular, Whitlock shows that Boscovich's physics played a key role in

Nietzsche's rejection of extended Substance in its various guises ranging from
Spinoza's pantheism to Newton's corpuscular atomism.
In "Nietzsche's Perspectivalism: A Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science,"
Patrick A. Heelan discusses Nietzsche's epistemological perspectivalism as a
hermeneutical philosophy of science. Epistemological perspectival ism is neither
a form of relativism, nor a form of classical skepticism, both of which suppose
an agnostic realism. Nor is it a form of social constructivism derivative from
any of these. Heelan argues here that among possible forms of perspectivalism.
one follows naturally from the principle that theoretical scientific inquiry
necessarily presupposes something in the lifeworld for which scientific theory
sets the conditions or gives the explanation. Since the Iifeworld is the world of
human culture and, therefore, of human will and purposes, scientific theory, for
Heelan, necessarily serves what Nietzsche calls the "Will to Power." Absent this
consideration, scientific theory is detached from the lifeworld, and as Nietzsche
proclaims, is devoid of (objective) "truth." In this perspective, scientific theory
is pure means, and, lacking any inherent dynamic moral or cultural end, fails to
serve human life in its creative moral and cultural dimensions, and on this
account falls into sterility, meaninglessness, or what Nietzsche calls "nihilism."
Only if scientific theory and cultural praxis are deliberately joined in historical,
moral, and cultural dialogue will scientific theory avoid this human fate. Finally,
Heelan briefly studies the role of metaphor in discovery and of the Dionysian
approach in multi-perspectival inquiry.
Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker's essay, "Nietzsche's Philosophy: Science,
Art, Power," offers a reflective account of Nietzsche's influence in von
Weizsacker's own life as a physicist. Addressing the scientific issues involved
in Nietzsche's thought, von Weizsacker offers an account of human memory as
an instantiation of a Lamarkian mechanism for the organic retention of external
influence, contra received scientific teachings. Von Weizsacker also offers a
discussion of the eternal return as well as a discussion of truth to frame his
proposal of a constructive support structure (reflecting the inspiration of
Goethe's metaphor of"scaffolding" as it also recurs in Nietzsche) 48 as the basis
for Nietzsche's critique of theory and morality.
In the next essay, "Science as New Religion," Paul Valadier argues that even
if it were possible to distinguish a positivist phase interior to Nietzsche's
thought by insisting upon the purifying value of positive, scientific knowledge,
Nietzsche's fundamental philosophic position on modem science would remain
unequivocal. Echoing aspects of Barry Allen's observations above regarding
Nietzsche's reflections on the alliance between science and the forbidden arts
of knowledge- alchemy, magic, hermeticism in The Gay Science and so on -
Valadier independently argues that so far from representing an alternative ideal
in opposition to the ascetic and religious ideal, science today has assumed the
place of religion in many regards, representing the same illusions and likewise
liable to many of the same critiques.
Walther Ch. Zimmerli's survey essay, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth and
Science," discusses the nineteenth century context of Nietzsche's contribution
 TRUTH, ART, AND LIFE 19

to a precisely philosophic reflection on science. Zimmerli shows the value of

Nietzsche's reflection on the science of the time, particularly the thermody-
namic theories of Mayer and Vogt and, perhaps, Mach, as well as Darwin.
Zimmerli thus recounts the theoretical foundations or inspiration of Nietzsche's
eternal return as a critical reflection on energetics. Beyond the Machiavellian
or Schopenhauerian resonances routinely suggested by the notion of the will to
power, Zimmerli reminds the reader of the significance of physical theories of
energy or "Kraft" for Nietzsche. More than simply rehearsing the scientific
theories of his day, Nietzsche's properly philosophic critical regard reflected
their implications in theory and for life.
In "Nietzsche's Transvaluation of Causality," Andrea Rehberg views
Nietzsche's critique of causality as occupying a crucial role in his attempt to
envisage an affirmative science opposed to the reductive, nihilistic conceptuality
he saw as dominant in the sciences. Rehberg traces the distinction between
physiological and anthropocentric values, linking it to the most fundamental
distinction of Nietzsche's physiological thinking between preservation and
expenditure. For Rehberg, Nietzsche is concerned with rethinking change in
non-representational ways, i.e., anterior to the imposition of the conceptuality
of causality upon a multiple, impersonal conception of becoming.
To conclude this section, Peter Poellner's argument in "Nietzsche's Meta-
physical Positivism" reviews the philosophical aspects of Nietzsche's ideas on
causality at the very center of his reflections on epistemological and ontological
problems in the final phase of his philosophical activity. Poellner offers an
interpretation of the prominent "sceptical" current in Nietzsche's thought and
its relation to Nietzsche's sometimes perplexing criticisms of the "so-called
purely mechanical forces of attraction and repulsion" (WP 621) introduced into
modern physics by Newton and Boscovich as they constitute some of
Nietzsche's most interesting insights on the nature and limitations of the modem
scientific enterprise, as well as forming the immediate background to his own
prima facie ontological ideas which figure so conspicuously in the notebooks
of the 1880's.

Nietzsche and the Sciences

In their joint essay, "Nietzsche's Conception of Health: The Idealization of
Struggle," Scott H. Podolsky and Alfred I. Tauber offer an argument for the
importance of Nietzsche's philosophy of the body as a central element in his
thought. Heavily influenced by a popular understanding of Darwin's theory of
evolution, specifically the struggle for survival, Podolsky and Tauber argue that
Nietzsche extrapolated these notions to instinctual struggle within the individ-
ual. The concept of the Ubermensch is thus a highly stylized version of this
primitive process of struggle and overcoming. In this way, Nietzsche's ideas of
health and illness closely mirror the broader biological foundations of his
philosophy. Health would be the rigorous exercise of the instinctual struggle for
aggrandizement, whereas illness succumbs to competition without struggle.
Podolsky and Tauber argue that throughout his opus Nietzsche explored these
20 BABETTE E. BABICH

cardinal principles. Thus the same essential structure of his biologicism must be
seen to frame his broader epistemological, ethical, and metaphysical concerns.
Eric Steinhart's essay, "The Will to Power and Parallel Distributed Process-
ing," develops an entirely different scientific schema, drawn from the analytic
model of contemporary cognitive theory, or computer science, or information
systems analysis. Steinhart claims that Nietzsche's will to power may be seen
as having non-trivial physical models in the class of parallel distributed
processing systems, specifically wave-mechanical discrete dynamic systems
with cyclical entropy. Steinhart thus attempts to link the will to power to
research in non-linear self-organizing dynamical systems, including oscillons,
cellular automata, spin-glass, Ising systems, and connectionist networks.
Peter Douglas takes as point of departure for his essay, "The Fractal
Dynarrucs of a Nietzschean World," the prerillse that mathematical concepts and
relations can be appropriated for the purpose of creating new modes of
interpretation of existing texts and phenomena. Douglas brings together certain
aspects of fractal geometry and chaos theory to provide a speculative interpre-
tive frame for Nietzsche's philosophical work. Given Nietzsche's own critique
of the efforts of the mathematical project to equalize and identify, together with
science's simplification of the tremendous complexity of the world and its
democratic design to preserve life for the sake of its average and reactive
aspects, Douglas suspends any equation of Nietzsche's philosophy with the
mathematical project but rather, inversely, appropriates the mathematic concepts
and relations of his essay for the purpose of a new interpretive approach.
In the ultimate essay, "Nietzsche's Critique of Technology: A Defense of
Phenomenology Against Modem Machinery," Ullrich M. Haase attempts to
resolve the conflict between Nietzsche's thought and Heidegger's interpretation.
Haase proposes a philological prolegomenon to an interpretation of Heidegger' s
move to press Nietzsche into the position of an acolyte of the technologisation
of science, and a philosophical prolegomenon towards challenging a certain
strand of postmodem thought which sets out to "celebrate" plurality thereby
becoming the more entrapped in the net of reason. Where, philologically,
Nietzsche's work in Nietzsche's words "is one and wants, one thing," Haase's
essay offers a philosophical argument (in accord with Heidegger's philosophy)
contra Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche.

Fordham University/Georgetown University, New York City

NOTES

See my Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and more subtly and much more
broadly. Barry Allen, Truth in Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993 ). See also
D.A. Freeman, "Nietzsche: Will to Power as a Foundation of a Theory of Knowledge,"
International Studies in Philosophy, 20 (1988) 3-14; Ken Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth,"
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52, no. I (March 1992): 47-65; Steven Schwartz,
'The Status of Nietzsche's Theory of the Will to Power in the Light of Contemporary Philosophy
of Science," International Studies in Philosophy, XXV/2 (1993); R. Lanier Anderson. "Nietzsche's
 TRUTH, ART, AND LIFE 21

Will to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of Science," Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science, 2515 (1995) 729-750; Steven Hales and Rex Welshon, 'Truth, Paradox, and Nietzsche's
Perspectivism." History of Philosophy Quarterly I 1:1 (1995) I 01-119. etc., and not including non-
analytic or historico-interpretive or continental treatments. See also E.E. Sleinis and Kurt Rudolf
Fischer, in B. Babich, ed., in cooperation with R.S. Cohen, Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge and
Critical Theory: Nietzsche and the Sciences 1 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999 [Hereafter: NSI]). For
more detailed discussion and extensive references, see Walther Ch. Zimmerli, Rex Welshon, and
Anderson's essay below, as well as Anderson's "Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism," in
Synthese 15 (1998) 1-32.
2 This exposition of the critical dynamic of questioning is the keystone of Kant's entire
philosophy of science. The aesthetic design of the scientific question effects its judgment power
(Bxiii). Rather than a science based solely on observation (and inductive regress) which would be
no science at all in the image of logic and mathematics, Kant resolves the Humean problem of
induction in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. in the empirical
practice of questioning because the question (or experiment) both concedes and exploits the
epistemological limitations of reason (KdrV Bix) and experience (cf. A124-126 ). Just as
mathematics owes its scientific integrity to the axiomatic character of its conceptual groundwork,
so physics operates with axioms or defining assumptions on both theoretical and objective levels,
that is both in its fundamental concepts and in its experimental processes (B241/ A 196;
A713/B741-A727 /755). Two different readings of Kant's philosophy of science are useful here
if they both remain- for different reasons- oblique to the traditional or "received" account of the
philosophy of science as such: the first providing an architectonic or schematic of the Kantian
schema, Gerd Buchdahl, Kant and the Dynamic of Reason (London: Blackwell, 1992) and the
second insightfully bridging Kant's first and third critiques in Heidegger's interpretation of Kant:
Pierre Kerszberg, Critique and Totality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). A
recent, excellent historical (and still exactly analytic) account is Michael Friedman, Kant and the
Exact Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
3 "Continental philosophy" is so named in contrast to the Anglo-American or analytic
philosophical traditions - although neither stylistic approach to philosophy is geographically
specific, and indeed analytic philosophy is far and away the more universal. See David West, An
Introduction to Continental Philosophy (Polity: Cambridge, 1995). See also my essay "Continental
Philosophy" in Ouyang Kang and Steve Fuller, eds., Contemporar)' British and American
Philosophy and Philosophers. Forthcoming. [Scheduled to be published first in Chinese translation
trans. Dezhi Duan (The People's Press, Beijing, 1999); subsequently in English.]
4 I refer to Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, as well as the wide and growing range of
contributions on the topical conjunction of Nietzsche, truth, and epistemology by analytically
formed scholars beyond the present essay's argument for an historically interpretive approach to
Nietzsche's philosophy of science.
5 See Clark, et al.
6 In the present volume, translations include: Bela Bacs6, "The Will to Truth as Art of
Interpretation"; Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, "Nietzsche's Philosophy: Science, Art, Power";
Paul Valadier, "Science as New Religion"; Walther Ch. Zimmerli, "Nietzsche's Philosophy as
Critique of Truth and Science." In the first volume, Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and
Critical Theory: Nietzsche and the Sciences I, translations include Tilman Borsche, "The
Epistemological Shift from Descartes to Nietzsche: Intuition and Imagination"; Jiirgen Habermas,
"Postscript from 1968: On Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge"; Josef Kopperschmidt, "Nietzsche's
Rhetorical Philosophy as Critique of Impure Reason"; Angele Kremer-Marietti, "Nietzsche: The
Critique of Modern Reason"; Wolfgang Miiller-Lauter, "On Judgment in a World of Becoming";
Manfred Riedel, "Scientific Theory or Practical Doctrine"; Holger Schmid, "The Nietzschean
Meta-Critique of Knowledge"; Josef Simon, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth and Grammar"; Klaus
Spiekermann, "Nietzsche and Critical Theory"; Bernhard H. F. Taureck, "Habermas's Critique of
Nietzsche's Critique of Reason." Some of these works were originally published in German or
French or Hungarian versions elsewhere but the majority were initially written specifically for this
two volume thematic collection.
7 This is how it happens that practitioners of so-called continental philosophy, which is at times
named "contemporary European" philosophy, are as professionally marginalised in Europe as in
English speaking countries. This marginalisation has many causes although perhaps the most
obvious derives from the rather universal scientism of our scientific, techno-information era which
remains evident in the still-unquestioned prestige of logical and linguistic analytic approaches to
philosophy. For a discussion of the political contours and stakes of this opposition, see my essay
on Alan Sokal's politically motivated exposee of all "theory" not properly scientifically
22 BABETTE E. BABICH

credentialed: "The Hermeneutics of a Hoax: On the Mismatch of Physics and Cultural Criticism."
Common Knowledge. 612 (September 1997) 23-33.
8 See Arthur Dantu's "Preface to the Morningside Edition," Nietzsche as Philosopher (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1980). This bluntly unreconstructed view continues to operate
as the analytic assumption shared by Schacht and Clark and many other scholars and which same
~resumption constitutes the privilege of the mainstream.
Indeed, Daniel Breazeale emphasizes this contrast even with regard to what would appear to
be a common focus on language: "the outstanding epistemological feature of Nietzsche's account
of language- a feature notably absent from most contemporary discussions of the subject- is his
constant critical interest"in Breazeale, ed. and trans., Philosophy and Truth. Selections from
Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's (1872-3). ed. and trans., Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey:
Humanities Press, 1979), p. xxxi.
10 A call for bridge building between the two traditions of philosophy is inevitably a call

adumbrated on the terms of analytic not continental philosophy. especially where one wishes (as
f!Verred by analysts such as Stanley Cavell or Mark Sacks) to speak of only one kind of philosophy
(i.e., good, or only incidentally analytic, and bad, but only coincidentally not). The idea is that any
such stylistic difference must be irrelevant: secondary to issues of quality. Thus the author has
heard this claim from influential philosophers as different as Robert Bernasconi and Cavell (and
while both are analytically trained scholars, the one is at Harvard, blithely unaware of the real
world of scholarly struggle for acknowledged value and the other is somewhat more distant from
Cambridge on either side of the Atlantic). And to hear both scholars, as well as journals editors,
the only criterion for publication (and for other invitations) is quality. This is not nai've, expecially
in the case of important members of the philosophical profession: but at best thoughtless and, at
its worst, mean-spirited or malicious.
11 Nietzsche's first reflections "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense'' point to the

complexities glossed over by words and concepts, and in Twilight of the Idols, challenges the
truisim, "All truths are simple-'' identifying it as a "compound lie" (TI, Maxims and Arrows, 4/
KSA VI, 59). This complexity too is the point of his claim that the world is will to power (rather
than a world of "simples,'' be they elemental or atomic substances). Thus Nietzsche criticizes the
animating parsimony of the scientific knowledge ideal in terms of what he does not hesitate to
name stupidity, reflecting that the challenge would appear to be to design or account for a
mechanism of the greatest complexity and subtlety using the stupidest, most elementary - or
elemental - elements. "Das Ideal ist, das complicirteste aile Machinenwesen zu construiren,
entstanden durch die diimmste aller miiglichen Methoden" (KSA I], 93. Cf. KSA 12. 36/WP 533;
KSA 12, 395/WP 569). For Nietzsche, again and again: "Die Welt erscheint uns logisch, wei! wir
sie erst logisirt haben" (KSA 12, 418).
12 As an illustration of the appropriative conventions characterizing analytic style thinking. this

tyronistic but sophisticated and typical author, comparing Nietzsche's departure from the epistemic
tradition to Wittgenstein's own epistemic rupture, informs the reader that epistemic questions were
"insignificant" for Nietzsche - and exactly "unlike" their same relevance for Wittgenstein. See
Brian Leiter, "Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals" in R. Schacht. ed., Niet~sche,
Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (Berkeley University
of California Press, 1994 ), pp. 334-357. Such a prima facie absurd (and inaccurate) claim is a bit
more pathetic than astonishing (given the utter lack of justification attempted in the essay itself)
but it is the kind of claim that reflects not only the prerogative but also the grounding premise of
professional philosophy. And thus it is far more than a simple error limited to one author. For
Leiter, Nietzsche's break with the philosophic epistemic tradition, boils down (which is of course
the reason the operation is an analytic one) to a view that is "much less radical than is usually
supposed," p. 351.
13 See my essay, "Heidegger's Relation to Nietzsche: Connivance, Concinnity. and Value." New

Nietzsche Studies, 3:1/2 (1999) 23-52.

I.J Thus Kerszberg writes "Nietzsche certainly did not think that he epitomized so well the whole
of critical philosophy when he exclaimed "Will to truth, that might be a concealed will to death."
Critique and Totality. cited above, p. 251. See also Breazeale's comments in a footnote to his
introduction to his translation of Nietzsche's Philosophy and Truth, where he identifies the
galvanizing concern of Karl Schlechta's and Anni Anders' earlier re-examination of the Holzer
and Horneffer edition of the notes for Nietzsche's Philosophenbuch [Nietzsches Werke, Vol X. ed.,
Ernst Holzer and August Horneffer (Leipzig: Kroner, 1907), pp. 109-232: KSA 7. 417 fL and
elsewhere], which they unmasked as a deliberate attempt to eliminate references to the issue of
truth in favor of that of culture: "In particular, they (the earlier editors] had omitted many of the
 TRUTH, ART, AND LIFE 23

notes in which Nietzsche poses most sharply the problem of the value of truth (which Schlechta
and Anders take to be the theme of these notes ... )" Breazeale, p. liv.
15 Sometimes this has unintentionally funny consequences, as in the variety of Prisoner's

Dilemmas, none of which have any bit of real-life plausibility (or can be reasoned) (or make sense)
apart from a course in probability or logic. Contrast this with Sartre' s much more coherent and less
forced discussion of the same quandary of Kantian consequentiality in his short story essay, "The
Wall."
16 See Paul Valadier's books, Nietzsche et Ia critique du christianisme (Paris: Cerf, 1974) and

Nietzsche, /'athee de rigueur (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1975) as well as his "Science as New
Religion" below. For a different tack, see also the essays by Allen's "Forbidding Knowledge" in
The Monist, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker's chapter on Nietzsche in Wahrnehmung der
Neuzeit (Hanser: Munich, 1983), pp. 70-106, translation below. See too, Manfred Riedel,
"Scientific Theory or Practical Doctrine" and Holger Schmid, "The Nietzschean Critique of Meta-
Knowledge" in NSf. Further, see Jean-Luc Marion, L'idole et la distance (Paris: Grasset, 1977)
and Dieter Henke, Gott und Grammatik (Pfiillingen: Neske, 1981 ). And in the direction of theo-
cultural philology: Eric Blonde!, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. Sean Hand (Stanford,
Stanford University Press, 1991). I articulate this genealogical account of the ascetic ideal in
religion and science, in my chapter on "Nietzsche's Genealogy of Science: Morality and the Value
of Modernity" in Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, pp. 175-225, as well as in my review of the
ultimate coincidence of postmodern (and associated putatively alternative) and New Age
perspectives and the scientific ideal in "The Hermeneutics of a Hoax," cited above.
7 See Valadier's work in particular, as well as Riedel (both cited above), and, further, Jean

Griesch, and so on. A reflection on the complexities of the metaphor of the tree of knowledge and
its relation to the knowledge of good and evil, of perdition and salvation, is not one that any
scholar can lay rights to (including Nietzsche) if only because the metaphor is basic to the Judeao-
Christian legacy.
18 After a hermeneutic infusion, the interpretation-intoxicated analyst is prepared to deal with a

mobile army of metaphors, declaring it nothing but sound and fury: so much epistemological
d.fnamite, so little danger. See Leiter.
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random

House, 1969). Samtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe (Mtinchen/Berlin, New York: DTV/De
Gruyter, 1980), volume I. Cited as BT, followed by section number in the text. Citations from the
KSA are limited to volume and page number alone.
20 In this direction, to note a Nietzschean reserve against Levinas's foundational ethics, to invert

the ordering principle preserves the same distinction all over again.
21 Nietzsche, KSA 7, 459. Translations are my own, following wherever possible the exemplary

precedent of Breazeale's translation in his edition of Nietzsche's Philosophy and Truth: cf.
Breazeale, p. 33. Regrettably, and only because it does not render the now-standard sequence of
the Colli-Montinari edition, Breazeale's translation is of limited utility to the specialist scholar.
22 See my essay: "Nietzsche and the Erotic Valence of Art: The Problem of the Artist as Actor-

Jew-Woman" in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 15: 15-33. Spring 1998.
23 Cf. Nietzsche's reserve re demonstration (similar to his reserve concerning the possibility of

communication in general): "Denn das Beweisbare appellirt an das Gemeinsamste in den Kopfen:
weshalb es nattirlich nicht mehr ist als ein Nutzlichkeits-MaBstab im Interesse der Meisten." KSA
12, 191.
24 Nietzsche contends that if mechanics is reduced to a logic ("Wenn die Mechanik nur eine Logik

ist... ") the schema of every "logic" as a kind of "vertebrate backbrace" ("eine Art Riickgrat fiir
Wirbelthiere, nichts an-sich-Wahres" IKSA ll, 359] must be read back into mechanism just as this
schema binds every logic. See further: Mtiller-Lauter's essay, "On Judgment in a World of
Becoming" in NSf.
25 For Nietzsche, both physiology and ecology are at work in this. Thus he contends "Our most

sacred convictions, our immutabilities with regard to the highest values, are the judgments of our
muscles." KSA 12, 169.
26 Nietzsche writes "Das Leben ist auf die Voraussetzung eines Glaubens an dauerndes und

regular Wiederkehrendes gegrtindet; je mach tiger das Leben, urn so breiter muB die errathbare,
gleichsam seiend gemachte Welt sein. Logisirung, Rationalisirung, Systematisirung als Htilfsmittel
des Lebens." KSA 12, 385/WP 552.
27 KSA 12, 352. "Wir haben unsre Erhaltungs-Bedingungen projicirt als Pradikate des Seins

tiberhaupt I daB wir in unserem Glauben stabil sein mtissen, urn zu gedeihen, daraus haben wir
gemacht, daB die 'wahre' Welt keine wandelbare und werdende, sondern eine seiende ist." KSA
12, 353.
24 BABETTE E. BABICH

28 Cf. KSA 13. 334. I discuss this perspective in "On the Eco-Physiological Ground of
!<now ledge: Nietzsche's Epistemology," Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, pp. 77-134.
~ 9 "Erkenntnij3 und Werden schlieBt sich aus." KSA 12, 382.
·' 0 See Taureck's essay in NSf as well as the wider German literature on this theme.
11 For different approaches, first on the question of atomism, see, in NSf, Caygill and Stephen

Gaukroger and see Robin Small below; on the question of Boscovich, see also Greg Whitlock's
and Zimmerli's contributions. See also Poellner. The Timaeus is also a source of Nietzsche's
definition of the world as a closed organic system- feeding on its own excrement. For a contrary
claim, see Duncan Large's discussion of Michel Serres' interpretation of Nietzsche below.
12 See Allen's essay below. On the question of the relation of science to religion, see too Valadier

and von Wcizsacker. And in NSf. sec Kremer-Marietti, Schmid, and Riedel.
·' 1 Cf. BGE 2; GS Ill. A number of essays in NSf address this issue, see in particular Josef
Simon, "Nietzche's Critique of Truth and Grammar," Schmid, etc.
14 Danto makes this same point in the 1980 Introduction to his Nietzsche as Philosopher. See

Josef Kopperschmidt's contribution in NSf and, below, Bela Bacs6.

15 For another and comprehensive account, see Simon in NSf. See Tilman Borsche. Below, see

David Allison· s iconology of the enlightenment cum postmodern condition.

16 Sec Simon.
37 See Gaukroger in NSf. See also David Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry (London:

Routledge. 1993) and Peter Dear, Disicipline and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press: 1996). See also Allen below.
18 KSA 12. 38/WP 659. Cf. KSA 12, 38/WP 654; KSA 12, 420; 424. See too KSA 11, 536-7 .

.w "To realize in oneself the archaic tragic ideal is the eternal joy of becoming- the joy which
also encompasses joy in destruction." Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmond-
sworth, Penguin, 1979), GT: 3, p. 8l/KSA 6, 312.
40 Ecce Homo, Foreword, 2, p. 34/KSA 6, 258. This conception of life or reality as fearful

necessity or chance, is taken in the pre-Socratic sense of the term, as it may be heard from
Anaximander to Plato's Pythagorean Timaeus.
41 Cf. KSA 12. 19, and 26, 38, 39.
42 This is also the same tragic ref1ection to be found in Nietzsche's remarks that "Man geht zu

Grunde, wenn man immer zu den Grunden geht." KSA 13, 10: cf. 562.
41 This is an experimental passage, intercalated between reflecting whether, if existence is said

to have a bad character. truth would be "yet another illusion?" and recalling the "Once upon a
time" story with which Nietzsche tells us that humanity once lived (and died) upon a small star
on which "clever beasts invented knowing" (KSA I, 882/TL 79), but here speaking of humanity
as "eine kleinc ilberspannte Thierart, die- glilcklicher Weise- ihre Zeit hat." Thus life on this
Earth is "Ein Augenblick, cin Zwischenfall, cine Ausnahme, ein Hiatus zwischen zwei Nichtsen,
ein EreigniB ohne Plan, Vernunft, Wille, SelbstbewuBtsein, die schlimmste Art des Nothwendigen,
die dumme Nothwendigkeit..." KSA 13,488-499.
44 Cf. Gaukroger in NSf, and below: Ullrich Haase, "Nietzsche's Critique of Technology: A

Defense of Phenomenology Against Modern Machinery."

40 See GS 109; KSA XI, 537. The distinction is as meaningless as the distinction between inside

and outside for living or organic beings: interpreting and being interpreted by the or-
ganic/inorganic world, active beings created by and creating the supposedly objective world
around them. See my Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science. See also R. Lewontin's account of this
biologically esoteric circumstance in his Biology as Ideology. See below, Alfred F. Tauber's and
Scott Podolsky's "Nietzsche's Conception of Health: The Idealization of Struggle" as well as
Andrea Rehberg, "Nietzsche's Transvaluation of Causality," and, again, Small.
46 As featured in the analytic textbook series, The Arguments of the Philosophers, Schacht's 1983

book on Nietzsche represents the most influential era of North-American Nietzsche reception,
where English translations by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale made the scope of
Nietzsche's published work, including those parts of the Nachlaj3 notes translated in The Will to
Pmver. widely accessible to predominantly Anglophone scholars. Schacht derives the inaugural
essay for the present collection from his second chapter on "Truth and Knowledge."
47 Cf. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, eds., Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, trans. Robert de Loaiza

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1997).

48 Sec Robert S. Cohen· s Preface to the first volume in this collection. NSf.
 RICHARD SCHACHT

NIETZSCHE: TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE

Perhaps no part of Nietzsche's philosophical thinking has been the occasion of

more confusion, misunderstanding and mischief among his readers and
interpreters- both friendly and hostile- than his treatment of knowledge, truth,
and certain matters relating to them (although his treatments of value and
morality and of what might loosely be called our human nature and differences
are also contenders for this distinction). I consider this doubly unfortunate, not
only owing to the consequences of the flames he has been used to fan and fuel,
but also because of the importance of the contribution his thinking on these
matters (as I understand it) might have made to subsequent inquiry. It is my
hope that this contribution might yet be made. 1

TOWARD A NATURALISTIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Two things must be recognized at the outset. First: when Nietzsche speaks of
"truth" and "knowledge," these terms do not have a single sense and reference
in all of their occurrences. In interpreting any particular remark he makes along
these lines, one must take care to consider precisely what sort of a remark it is,
and how broadly and on what level of analysis it is to be taken to apply. (I shall
elaborate upon this point shortly.) And second, Nietzsche's views on these
matters cannot be properly understood unless one grasps the nature of his rather
unconventional general approach to them. Like many others before and after
him, he finds it advisable to examine commonplace examples and paradigm
cases of truth and knowledge, with a view to seeing what they involve. But he
is not content simply to try to understand them and the types they exemplify on
their own terms. Rather, he considers it instructive and important to view them
in the light of other considerations pertaining to the character and circumstances
of the kind of creature we are, in the setting of whose life all such forms of truth
and knowledge are framed and attained.
Nietzsche considers it incontrovertible that in dealing with epistemological
issues one is dealing with certain sorts of human affairs, and that therefore one's
conclusions concerning them will be either superficial or erroneous if they are
not interpreted accordingly. More specifically, he observes that philosophers
have tended to understand ourselves and the elements of our conscious life as
a kind of being and set of activities to be understood in terms altogether

25
B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 25-38.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
26 RICHARD SCHACHT

different from those appropriate to entities and processes occmTing in the world
of nature. And he regards this as a mistake, even though he does not think that
there are no significant differences between ourselves and other things. He
writes: "To translate man back into nature ... - that may be a strange and insane
task. but it is a task- who would deny that? Why did we choose this insane
task? Or, putting the matter differently: 'Why have knowledge at all?'" 2
To this it must immediately be added (lest one mistakenly conclude that he
thereby opts for a merely "biologistic" approach in these matters) that Nietzsche
considers it no less important also to "translate" ourselves - as thinkers and
knowers, as well as in other respects - back into society. For in this context, he
holds, the human intellect is further shaped in important ways, and the means
of all humanly possible thought and cognition are acquired. This further
"translation back" likewise does not constitute his final move and last word
where all truth and knowledge are concerned, however, as shall be seen.

A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF TRUTH

Nietzsche nowhere undertakes to give a thorough, systematic analysis of truth;

but he says a great many things about it in various places in his published and
unpublished writings. Considered individually, many of his remarks are striking;
while when juxtaposed, they collectively are both remarkable and bewildering.
He is best known, in this connection, for remarks of the following sort: "What
are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors'' (GS 265). And:
"Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live"
(WP 493). And: "There are many kinds of eyes ... - and consequently there are
many kinds of 'truths,' and consequently there is no truth" (WP 540). 3
Many commentators have seized upon his remarks along these lines, taking
them to convey the main thrust and character of his position with respect to the
nature of truth. It is less often recalled and taken into consideration, however,
that the same Nietzsche who made these remarks also considered "truthfulness"
to be of the utmost importance (cf. EH IV :3 ), held 'the real measure of value'
of a person's spirit to be "how much truth" it can "endure" and "dare" (EH P:3),
and wrote:

At every step one has to wrestle for truth; one has had to surrender for it almost everything to
which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise. That requires greatness of
soul; the service of truth is the hardest service. (A 50)

This certainly raises problems of interpretation. If one takes seriously the

variety of things he has to say and construes them as qualifying and comple-
menting each other, however, one discovers that they collectively suggest and
constitute elements of a comprehensive analysis that is not only coherent but
also of considerable interest.
Several different kinds or levels of analysis of truth may be discerned and
should be distinguished in Nietzsche's writings. One is primarily descriptive.
It consists in analyzing what might be termed the "surface conditions," or
criteria employed within a particular type of discourse, in virtue of the satisfac-
 NIETZSCHE: TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 27

tion of which a particular proposition may be considered "true." (I shall refer to

such analysis as "first-order truth-analysis.") Another is also descriptive, or at
any rate analytically interpretive, but on a deeper level. It consists in attempting
to determine what is fundamentally involved - what is going on beneath the
surface, conditioning the character of the surface - in the emergence of such
forms of discourse and "truth" ("second-order truth-analysis"). And a third
("third-order") works toward the beginnings of an account of the conditions a
proposition (or better, an interpretation) would have to satisfy - and might
actually be able to satisfy- that would endow it with epistemic status superior
to that of more commonplace "truths'" and their scientific refinements, while
setting it well apart from all empty and mendacious "metaphysical truths."
The broad category of what Nietzsche calls "man's truths" encompasses a
wealth of types which the analyst of "truth" should not ignore. An important
point about them for Nietzsche is that the "truth" of such "truths" cannot be
separated (other than very artificially and abstractly) from their being "held
true" or determined to qualify as true; and that it cannot be adequately under-
stood independently of considerations pertaining to what this involves. Truth
may be a property of propositions; but it is a property of a rather complex
relational sort, which propositions do not possess independently of their
situation in a larger context. And this context is constituted not only by their
relations to other propositions, but also by conditions pertaining to the stand-
point and concerns of those by whom they are or might be asserted. There
further are diverse sorts of ordinary and special discourse in which propositions
are employed and adjudged to be true and untrue. One thus must reckon with the
possibility - which for Nietzsche turns out to be a reality - that the specific
nature of "truth" may require to be explicated in different terms in different
cases, reflecting differences in the kinds of discourse in connection with which
the notion has an established employment.
A fundamental idea underlying his analysis of all such truths is that none of
them can plausibly be regarded as holding true in virtue of standing in a relation
of correspondence amounting to a picturing, representing, or modeling of a
reality which is as it is independently of our experience of it. They are inextrica-
bly bound up with the domains of discourse (and associated forms of life) in
which they occur, and in terms of which the standards or conditions are set by
reference to which they may qualify as "truths." This idea, of what I shall call
their D-relativity, is at the heart of Nietzsche's notorious "perspectivism,"
according to which they may be considered to hold true only within the context
of some particular 'language-game' played in accordance with rules more or
less strongly conditioned by various contingent circumstances.
Nietzsche further holds the correspondence theory of truth (as traditionally
understood) to be wanting in that the "truth" of any such propositions - and
indeed of any propositions at all - cannot be a matter of their standing in a
correspondence-relation to a reality that has an intrinsic structural articulation
and ordering, since there is no such reality for propositions to correspond to.
Thus no version of the correspondence theory presupposing the existence of
what he calls a "true world of being" can stand. Alternatively, if truth is
28 RICHARD SCHACHT

conceived in terms of such a correspondence, there is and can be nothing of the

kind. Except in the case of metaphysical propositions, however, Nietzsche does
not consider this to be the end of the matter. Indeed, having ruled out the idea
of a correspondence of this sort, it can now be allowed that on the level of
first-order analysis of certain sorts of truths there is something to the intuition
that truth involves a correspondence of what is thought or asserted and what
obtains. And far from conflicting with Nietzsche's conception of the perspecti-
val or D-relative character of most truths, this intuition actually squares with it
not only readily but also significantly.
To see how this is so, one must grasp one of the most important features of
the domains of discourse or language-games with which his "perspectives" are
associated. They are not to be construed as mere vocabularies people somehow
acquire and with which they articulate their experiences of pre-linguistically
determinate objects and events and states of affairs of various kinds. Rather,
they are "forms of life"- spheres of human experience and activity- in which
certain kinds of objects and states of affairs are fixed and differentiated in
accordance with various sorts of linguistic apparatus. What counts as an object,
a difference between objects, and a relation between them, is determined by the
concepts and rules of particular schemes of this sort, and has no standing or
meaning independently of them.
The truth of a given proposition framed and used in such a context thus is a
matter of its conformity to the linguistic-conceptual scheme within which it
functions, together with its appropriateness in relation to some state of affairs
holding among the objects that are fixed and constituted in accordance with this
scheme. Its truth therefore is D-relative and may be given a "coherence"
charactetization; but at the same time it may more immediately (i.e., within the
context of the schematized experiential situation in which it is deemed appropri-
ate) be given a "correspondence" analysis. Something does occur to which a
given proposition may be said to cmrespond, in many such cases; but this
correspondence is made possible and conditioned by the emergence of the
specific human context or "perspective" which embraces and links both what
obtains in experience and what is thought and said.
When Nietzsche proclaims "man's truths" to be "errors," on the other hand,
and says such things as, '"Truth': this ... does not necessarily denote the
antithesis of error, but in the most fun.damental cases only the posture of various
errors in relation to one another" (WP 535), he does so to underscore the point
that these correspondences should not be thought to involve anything more than
this. Such propositions represent certain states of affairs as obtaining which do
so only for us, and cannot be supposed to obtain independently of the perspec-
tive within which we happen to be operating. The terms in which such proposi-
tions are cast cannot appropriately be applied to the way the world is apart from
our schematization of it; and so, however things may actually stand with the
world, in relation to its nature such "truths" turn out to be "errors."
Still, if a proposition satisfies the appropriate conditions of use and warrant
within some domain of discourse, it is true-though, of course, true only
D-relatively. Or rather, the satisfaction of these conditions is for Nietzsche what
 NIETZSCHE: TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 29

the first-order truth of most classes of propositions amounts to. On this level of
analysis one's task is to discern and set forth the principles implicit in the
making of various sorts of truth-determinations by those involved in forms of
life in which such determinations are established practices, rather as one might
try to discover and lay out the rules of a game as these are accepted and
followed by those who play it.

"MAN'S TRUTHS" AND HUMAN LIFE

The kind of second-order analysis Nietzsche goes on to pursue involves

stepping back from these practices (or ascending to a meta-level perspective
upon them), examining the nature of the games within which these rules are
followed, and considering what is to be made of the kinds of
truth-determinations encountered in them from what might be thought of as a
general anthropological perspective. Thus whereas his first-order analyses of
"truths" of various kinds center upon their contextual warrant, his second-order
analyses focus upon the functions of truth-determinations of these kinds in the
lives and activities of those who engage in the forms of discourse in which they
are made. In place of the general theme of a foreground of some sort of
correspondence against a background of coherence that runs through many of
his first-order analyses, the dominant theme here is that of a foreground of
convention against a background of pragmatic or instrumental significance.
Here too, however, he discovers important differences, in degree and kind, of
both conventionality and instrumentality.
It is with the general point of such language-games that Nietzsche's sec-
ond-order analysis is principally concerned. They involve the maintenance of
a network of linguistic conventions within which such propositions may be
formulated (and to the perpetuation of which they contribute). And the purpose
thereby served for Nietzsche is twofold: these practices make possible a form
of communication without which we could not exist socially, as we perforce
must do; and they greatly facilitate the processing of our experience in ways
lending themselves to effective action.
The networks of conventions within which such truths occur thus are
fundamentally anthropocentric, in the sense of being geared to certain practical
contingencies and requirements of our human existence. The purposes natural
languages fundamentally serve, however, neither mandate the development of
any one particular language (as is evident), nor place any premium on a strict
and neutral reflection of reality. It is at most "only the relations of things to
men" that are registered in them, expressed in ways subject to no constraints
other than the above-mentioned practical ones, and revealing everywhere the
inventiveness of metaphorical thinking (TL, 82). Thus, with their foreground
conventionality in mind, Nietzsche famously writes, in his early (unpublished)
essay "On Truth and Lies,"

What therefore is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short,

a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transformed, and
30 RICHARD SCHACHT

embellished, and which, after long usage seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. (TL
p.84)

This sort of account continued to be taken by Nietzsche to be appropriate

wherever the truth of a proposition is a matter of the linguistic conventions
governing the use of the expressions figuring in it. Moreover, he regards it as
at least a part of the story in all cases, owing to the fact that any intelligible
proposition can only be stated by employing elements of some human language.
He does not consider it to suffice, however; for it remains to take account of the
kind of instrumentality that is also involved. So, for example, "in the formation
of reason, logic, the categories, it was need that was authoritative-the need, not
to 'know,' but to subsume, to schematize, for the purpose of intelligibility and
calculation" (WP 515 ). A proposition of logic, he writes, "contains no criterion
of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true" (WP
516). Here both the proto-conventionality and also the basic function of the
formal features of our thought and experience of which logical "truths'' are
expressions are indicated.
When Nietzsche goes on to observe that 'The categories are 'truths' only in
the sense that they are conditions of life for us" (WP 516), he is attributing a
conditional form of practical indispensability to them. And where "truth" is
understood in this way, the fact that 'value for life' is relative to the particular
"conditions of life" of a type of creature, together with the fact that these
"conditions" are contingent and "species-specific," has the consequence that a
radical "perspectivism" obtains where such "truths" are concerned. This is a
point Nietzsche never tires of making. The facilitation of our dealings with the
world is what such "truth" ultimately amounts to. And the variable conditional-
ity of such facilitation, together with the more radical contingency attaching to
the selection of specific means of achieving it, has the consequence that
Nietzsche draws in another of his "perspectivist" pronouncements: "There are
many kinds of eyes ... -and consequently there are many kinds of 'truths,' and
consequently there is no truth" (WP 540).
Nietzsche thus adopts a double stance toward such "truths." On the one hand,
he repeatedly insists that since their "truth" is ultimately merely a matter of the
utility of the linguistic schematization of experience within which they figure,
they have no epistemic status that could qualify them as "truths" in any more
significant sense. On the other hand, he is quite prepared to allow the term
"truth" a continued employment in this connection - with its sense adjusted
accordingly. We "grasp a certain amount of reality"- and also artfully trans-
form and schematize it- "in order to become master of it, in order to press it
into service." It is this basic picture, explicitly cast in what he calls "anthropo-
logical and biological" terms, that Nietzsche takes to indicate "the meaning of
'knowledge"' and the character of "truth" as they apply to many of the sorts of
propositions we employ in our ordinary affairs, on this level of analysis. (See
WP 480)
A further important part of Nietzsche's second-order analysis of such truths
relates to their social character, which is to be discerned not only in their
 NIETZSCHE: TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 31

conventionality but also in the kind of instrumental significance they possess.

Linking the emergence and character of "consciousness" to the "capacity of
communication," and this in turn to the "need for communication," Nietzsche
argues that the "strength and art of communication" are proportional to its
practical necessity and utility, serving principally as a means of making possible
and facilitating relations "between human beings." Thus "the development of
language and the development of consciousness ... go hand in hand," and both
fundamentally do "not really belong to man's individual existence but rather to
his social or herd nature." In this process what is "useful in the interests of the
human herd, the species," is decisive in determining the character of experience
and language. And this is held likewise to be the essence of the (only) sort of
"truth" that is here to be found. (See GS 354.)
This second-order analysis of the truth of empirical propositions does not
apply in any straightforward way to particular propositions of this kind. When
the question before one is that of the conditions which must be satisfied in order
for some such proposition to be considered true, nothing more than Nietzsche's
first-order analysis in terms of correspondence and coherence is either called for
or appropriate. While many philosophers might think that this is the end of the
matter, however, and that nothing else remains to be said or can meaningfully
be said about the status of truths of this kind, he demurs. For on his view it is
only when one looks beyond this first-order analysis, taking a broader and
deeper view of what is going on in the playing of this sort of language-game,
that the matter becomes interesting, and one begins genuinely to comprehend
rather than only superficially to understand it.
Nietzsche takes a related position with respect to the character of "truths" in
science. Like our ordinary, pre-scientific schematization of the world, he
suggests, "the scientific view of the world" is linked in its development to our
practical need to "make comprehensible" and "exploitable" (WP 677). It further
manifests "the intellect's dislike of chaos" and predilection for "constancy" (WP
594 ). But Nietzsche also identifies a number of other impulses associated with
it which "had to come together for scientific thinking to originate," such as "the
impulse to doubt, to negate, to wait, to collect, to dissolve" (GS 113). And the
result of their interplay and refinement has been a reschematization of the world
departing increasingly from the original embodied and perpetuated in ordinary
discourse. The manner in which this is done, however, remains fundamentally
linked to the basic human purposes of enhancing the fact or feeling of our
mastery of the world with which we find ourselves confronted, and of rendering
its aspect more agreeable to our intellect.
Thus while scientific thought may aspire to (and indeed may in significant
though qualified sense attain) "objectivity," it remains an expression of what
Nietzsche terms our "will to power" - a refined and subtle expression of it, but
an expression of it nonetheless. It involves the establishment of new conventions
of description, in the construction of models devised and the framing of
concepts introduced in the elaboration of theories; but "truth" here is not merely
a matter of convention. For beyond such conventionality, scientific "truths"
have a further and more significant character, which he takes to constitute the
32 RICHARD SCHACHT

fundamental sense of their "truth." It is to be construed, on his view, in terms

of a twofold effectiveness, to which simplification, abstraction, the use of
fictions, and even a kind of shrewd superficiality often contribute in important
ways.
One face of this effectiveness relates to the extension of our capacity to
control and exploit courses of events. The other pertains to the furthering of our
ability to reduce the chaos and bewildering profusion of phenomena transpiring
in our lives and encounters with the world to a semblance of order and simplic-
ity. Such effectiveness is not tantamount to the achievement of an adequacy
relation between interpretation and reality; and thus scientific "truth" is not to
be conceived along the latter lines. Indeed, he considers it to fall well short of
affording us the most adequate and penetrating comprehension of life and reality
that is humanly attainable. He considers it "a crudity and naivete" to suppose
that "an interpretation that permits, counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and
touching, and nothing more' is 'the only justifiable interpretation of the world,"
and that the world has "its equivalent and measure" in it. "A 'scientific'
interpretation of the world" along these lines, he contends, "would be one of the
poorest in meaning," in that what "would be grasped first- and might even be
the only thing that allowed itself to be grasped" through the kind of thinking it
involves and by means of the concepts employed, is "precisely the most
superficial and external aspect of existence" - its roughest outlines and mere
"skin" (GS 373).
Yet science for Nietzsche does not merely falsify or fabricate. The effective-
ness he takes to be decisive here not only involves selectivity, oversimplifica-
tion and artificiality, but also signifies the capturing of certain features of what
obtains and transpires in the world. The kind of "error" encountered in this case
is not that of "lies" and "illusions," but rather that of distorting abstractions and
convenient fictions, which engage with the world even as they misrepresent it
-precisely through the way in which they do so. The sort of "truth" which the
issue of scientific endeavor possesses thus turns out, on this level of analysis,
to be both distinct from those characteristic of other forms of discourse and a
notable and significant human achievement - even if something rather different
from what it is commonly and naively taken to be.

ORDINARY AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

The foregoing discussion of his multi-level analysis of "truths" of various sorts

requires to be supplemented by an examination of his treatment of knowledge
in its more common forms and as it has generally been construed. Nietzsche
never tires of insisting that human life is the context in which all forms of
human knowledge arise. A proper understanding of them cannot be achieved,
on his view, unless one dismisses the fiction of the mind as the seat of certain
capacities with which we have somehow been endowed quite independently of
our biological and social development and history, equipping us to do things
having no connection with such mundane matters as our preservation, socializa-
tion, and basic dispositions.
 NIETZSCHE: TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 33

What human knowledge generally amounts to and involves, on Nietzsche's

view, is the assimilation of our relations to our environing world to practically
serviceable conceptual schemes, in the establishment and elaboration of which
our needs presumably have played a dominant role. If (as he contends) the
impetus to the schematization of the world of experience within the context of
which human knowledge generally has its place originally was and continues to
be of a fundamentally practical character, then the nature of such knowledge
must be understood in functional terms relating to the basic requirements at
work in it. "Knowing that" is thus a function of "knowing how," which relates
to the attainment of practical objectives in our dealings with the world and each
other, and in which efficacy takes precedence over all other considerations.
"Knowledge works as a tool of power," not merely in the superficial sense that
theoretical insight often can be turned to practical advantage, but also in a more
fundamental sense. For the character of "knowing" reflects both a "will to
power" and the contingencies of our constitution on the one hand, and on the
other the sorts of possibilities presented to us by the world. Such knowledge is
essentially geared to the exploitation of circumstances rather than to their
neutral ascertainment. It is "not some abstract-theoretical need not to be
deceived" that underlies and guides "the development of the organs of knowl-
edge," Nietzsche writes, in commenting on "the meaning of 'knowledge"' here,
but rather the need of "a particular species to maintain itself and increase its
power" (WP 480).
Nietzsche concedes to science a legitimate claim to the title of knowledge,
and takes this claim it has established to supersede (although not entirely to
cancel) the much older and persistingly strong claim to that title made by and
on behalf of common sense. Its best efforts may never yield anything other than
regularities, probabilities, and relative quantitative determinations, applied to
theoretical constructs inseparable from the models in terms of which they are
framed. Yet Nietzsche holds that a form of "knowledge" deserving of the name
is nonetheless to be recognized as the issue of scientific inquiry - in part
precisely by virtue of the instrumental value it proves to have in facilitating our
efforts to achieve practical "mastery" of our environing world. Where models
and hypotheses can be tested by experience, scientific knowledge is possible.
And such testing does not simply function as a criterion in terms of the superior
satisfaction of which something qualifies as a piece of scientific knowledge. It
also can indicate that one has gotten hold of some feature of the world, however
superficial and contingent that feature may be, and even if only in a rough and
ready way.
Of greater importance, however, is a more basic feature of scientific thinking,
which it has acquired along the way. Tied to no particular body of theory and
no single way of rendering phenomena amenable to quantitative treatment, and
subservient only to very general rather than highly specific human interests, it
is characterized by a method and a conscience which render it capable of
continual self-renewal. This not only enables it to develop, but moreover
ultimately contributes to the establishment of the conditions of its own
supersession. This, far more than either the reduction of phenomena along
34 RICHARD SCHACHT

quantitative lines or the enhanced mastery of our environment it affords, is what

Nietzsche has in mind in lauding science as strongly and frequently as he does.

TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE WITH A DIFFERENCE

Nietzsche not only repudiates the very idea of "absolute knowledge" and of
"truth" as an exact correspondence of thought and reality, but also maintains
that "truth" is inescapably perspectival, and "knowledge" essentially interpre-
tive. One should not be too quick, however, to draw radical conclusions from
such assertions. He undeniably also was possessed of a lively intellectual
conscience, confirmed in his view of himself as a "seeker" and "lover of
knowledge," persistent in his attempts to arrive at a deeper and clearer compre-
hension of our human reality and the character of life and the world than others
had attained, and committed to the pursuit of something he does not hesitate to
call "truth," the status of which he takes to be quite different from that of
"man's truths."
How are the truth and knowledge to which Nietzsche aspires- beyond those
more commonplace and misguided or limited varieties he analyzes - to be
conceived? Very generally put, "truth" here is to be understood as a matter of
the aptness of a characterization in relation to that which it characterizes; and
"knowledge" is conceived in terms of the interpreting of something in a manner
that does justice to it. Characterizations, like the metaphors employed in giving
them, may be more or less (or not at all) apt. The justice done by interpretations
to that which is interpreted may likewise vary greatly. On the other hand, there
is no question of an exact correspondence in the case of the former, or of
certainty and finality in the case of the latter. Some characterizations may be
seen to be inappropriate, and some interpretations found misguided, while others
may be accorded superiority in relation to various alternatives; but in both cases
the possibility can never be ruled out of further alternatives which might be
superior in aptness and justice to them. While such superiority may be genuine,
moreover, there is and can be no general set of rules for achieving it, or of
criteria for assessing it. The idea of a rigorous decision-procedure has no place
here, any more than it has in those disciplines dealing with human history,
culture, art and literature, as well as the enterprise of psychology as Nietzsche
understands it. Indeed, he regards the cases of these forms of inquiry as highly
instructive in this matter, and is in effect extrapolating from them.
In conceiving of "truth" and "knowledge" along these lines, Nietzsche
remains committed to the idea that they have a "perspectival" character even
here. He does not take this to be fatal to their epistemic significance; but he does
consider it to affect their status. The language in which any state of affairs is
characterized, he stresses, however apt the characterization may be, is never
immaculately conceived. It always bears the stamp of human invention, whether
it is of our own devising as conceptual innovators or originates in that more
ancient and impersonal legislation through which words have acquired their
conventional meanings. Indeed, what makes a characterization apt is not simply
the relation of the proposition in question to the state of affairs to which it
 NIETZSCHE: TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 35

pertains, but also its relation to a specific sort of linguistic sensibility. The latter,
in fact, is a condition of the very possibility of its aptness. The aptness of a
metaphor in ordinary discourse obviously depends in no small measure upon its
resonance for a group of users of a language, in abstraction from which its
meaning is altered and impoverished. Its ability to articulate and convey
something about that which is spoken of is a function of the exploitability of
associations they are capable of appreciating; and this presupposes the existence
or establishment of a discursive context or perspective.
Knowing likewise for Nietzsche is always and inescapably a perspectival
knowing, because it involves a process of interpreting on the part of creatures
whose relations to that which they interpret affect their interpretations - which
relations are conditioned by their constitutions, histories and circumstances. We
are not (and cannot transform ourselves into) pure spectators of all time and
existence, whose apprehension would be independent of and uninfluenced by
anything other than the nature of that which is contemplated. Indeed, even if we
could, there would be much about our existence as human beings and the world
of which our lives are a part which would escape our grasp, since the human
relations which are largely or partially constitutive of their reality would become
opaque to us. Nietzsche considers it an error to suppose that even if it were
possible, a non-perspectival contemplation of things would yield a fuller and
deeper comprehension of them than may be attained through perspectival
interpretations of them. For he contends that the former would fail to capture
anything of them, lacking any relation to them; whereas the latter afford at least
the possibility of enabling something of them to be discerned. Their reality, on
his view, is a relational affair; and their comprehension is possible, and indeed
may meaningfully be spoken of, only by means and in terms of the adoption of
standpoints attuned to the sorts of relations constitutive of them.
Nietzsche makes much of the point that interpretation generally not only is
at once reflective and determinative of the perspectives within and in terms of
which we operate as we confront the world, but further is fundamentally bound
up with our "affects" (and so, ultimately, with the "physiological conditions" in
which they are held to be rooted). Rather than taking this to rule out the
possibility of the achievement of any sort of comprehension that might merit the
name of "knowledge," however, Nietzsche draws the opposite conclusion. The
very multiplicity and mutability of these "drives" that is characteristic of our
human constitution, on his view, lends itself to this purpose. Thus while
suggesting that it may in a sense be considered to reflect a "diseased condition
in man," he goes on to observe: "This contradictory creature has in its nature,
however, a great method of acquiring knowledge: he feels many pros and cons,
he raises himself to justice" (WP 259).
Nietzsche thus considers it at least to be possible for us to "raise ourselves to
justice" in our thinking, or at any rate to something approaching "justice,"
through the development of more sophisticated interpretations, by drawing upon
and yet transcending the narrower and more distorting perspectives attained
under the influence of the various interpretation-engendering "drives" at work
within us. The latter may themselves be indifferent to such "justice," and indeed
36 RICHARD SCHACHT

may perpetrate "injustices" to the extent that they individually dominate our
thinking. Collectively, however, they constitute the means of compensating for
their particular "injustices" sufficiently to bring the attainment of "justice" and
the acquisition of "knowledge" so understood within the realm of possibility.
These considerations enable one to make good and important sense of the
well-known passage in the Genealogy in which Nietzsche writes: "There is only
a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing."· What he takes to follow,
however, is not only the untenability of the idea of a "pure knowing subject"
and of "knowledge in itself," but also something more positive: "the more
affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will our 'concept'
of this thing, our "objectivity' be." This "objectivity," he continues, is to be
understood as "the ability to control one's Pro and Con and to dispose of them,
so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective
interpretations in the service of knowledge" (GM III: 12).
Another of Nietzsche's points with respect to truth and knowledge, which is
just as easily and commonly misunderstood, pertains to their inescapably
"human" character. He considers it meaningful to speak of "truth" and "knowl-
edge" only in relation to the interpretive articulation of states of affairs in which
we ourselves are implicated, by means of concepts of our devising. It does not
follow, however, that they are thereby radically invalidated in principle. On the
contrary, it is a condition of the very possibility of truth and knowledge that
there exist creatures having access to the world and the capacity and means to
address themselves to it. Indeed, there can be truth and knowledge only where
there exists some medium in which states of affairs can be given expression: and
in the absence of something on the order of human language and thought, this
requirement would not be satisfied. Where nothing can be put into words
because there is no such expressive medium at hand, therefore, and also in
abstraction from the establishment and employment of any such interpretive
schematization, the notions of truth and error, and of knowledge and ignorance,
have no application. If the interpretive process renders everything that might be
said or thought about the world by us a "human" rather than absolute and
unconditioned formulation, it also is our means of entry with respect to it. Truth
and knowledge thus may be held to be importantly "human" without thereby
being reduced completely to the merely human and denied all larger epistemic
significance. Nietzsche may not always have appreciated this point, and may
even have lost his grip on it from time to time: but as I read him it is one of the
more important hard-won gains of his philosophical development.
The road to knowledge for Nietzsche is no royal one, leading directly and
easily to its goal by means of mechanical procedures, immediate intuitions or
revelations. Indeed, it is not even a single road, but rather a variety of circuitous
paths, enabling one to reach various vantage points from which different aspects
of life and the world become discernible. Scientific inquiry, historical and
genealogical investigation, psychological analysis, and reflection upon the
character of differing forms of activity we may observe and experience all figure
prominently among them. Each can afford some insight at certain junctures, and
complements while informing the interpretation of the issue of the rest. The
 NIETZSCHE: TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 37

knowledge that is thereby attainable can only be "discovered little by little,

gradually and piecemeal." And the same applies with respect to the emergence
of "the different means of knowledge," which are manifold: "imagination,
inspiration, abstraction, desensualization, invention, educated guessing,
induction, dialectic, deduction, criticism, material-collecting, impersonal
thinking, contemplativeness, the ability to view things comprehensively, and not
least, justice and love toward everything there is," all play a part in it (D 43).
This relatively early statement of the "many powers" needed by "the thinker"
anticipates Nietzsche's conception of philosophical thought as frohliche
Wissenschaft - an experimental, tentative and interpretive kind of thinking,
"hardened in the discipline of science" (BGE 230) and yet emancipated from the
narrowness of its perspectives; historically and linguistically informed, but
resistant to longstanding intellectual prejudices and "the seduction of words."
Creative and venturesome in the development of concepts and hypotheses, it is
at the same time guided by the "conscience of method," which "must be
essentially economy of principles" (BGE 13). Prepared to avail itself of the
results of any narrower mode of inquiry capable of shedding light on matters to
be dealt with, it is heedless of "the siren songs of old metaphysical bird
catchers" (BGE 230). And, not least, it is characterized by "that genuinely
philosophical combination ... of a bold and exuberant spirituality that runs
presto and a dialectical severity and necessity that takes no false step" (BGE
213).
What may be attained thereby might not measure up to certain standards of
knowledge reflecting the convictions or longings of some philosophers, or
satisfy the criteria derived by others from their consideration of the way the
notion functions in ordinary language or special domains of discourse and
inquiry. Nietzsche attaches great importance to its attainment, however, even if
not supreme importance or intrinsic value, as both his own dedication and his
repeated accordance of high honors to it attest. And he takes it to surpass
anything that might otherwise be achieved, in acuteness, penetration and
profundity.

And knowledge itself: let it be something else for others ... -for me it is a world of dangers and
victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. "Life as a means to
knowledge"- with this principle in one's heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and
laugh gaily too. (GS 324)

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

NOTES
For a fuller treatment of these matters, see my Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1983), Chap. 2, from which this essay is derived. See also my Making Sense of Nietzsche (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), esp. Chaps. 2-4.
2 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 230.
3 I shall avail myself of notes from Nietzsche's notebooks (and in particular of those gathered
together and published under the title The Willw Power), as well as his published writings, on the
38 RICHARD SCHACHT

grounds that these notes provide further valuable indications of his thinking on the matters under
consideration, even if not definitive expressions of it. For a general discussion of this issue, see
my Making Sense of Nietzsche, Chap. 6.
 ROBERT C. WELSHON

PERSPECTIVIST ONTOLOGY AND DE RE KNOWLEDGE

Nietzsche deliberated, in his mature work, about a perspecttvtst ontology

according to which the world is composed of quanta of power to each of which,
and to each society of which, there is coupled a perspective. In what follows, I
outline some relations between that perspecti vist ontology and Nietzsche's
perspectivist epistemology. But there are ambiguities here - many relations
between Nietzsche's ontology and epistemology might be discussed, but only
some will be discussed in this essay. One issue that will not be addressed here
is the epistemological considerations that led Nietzsche to a perspectivist
ontology. Another is the compatibility of a perspectivist ontology with an
antecedent commitment to a perspectivist epistemology. I will instead focus on
a third issue, viz., some of the drastic implications a perspectivist ontology has
for de re knowledge. 1

That Nietzsche needs ontological views of any kind, much less perspectivist
ones, has been denied. 2 But its necessity is revealed once the depth of his
critique of the philosophical tradition is recalled. Parts of this critique are no
doubt complete without appeal to ontology, but those that apply to logic and
epistemology are not. Nietzsche frequently criticizes logic and epistemology for
hidden metaphysical commitments. One might conjecture that his argument
against logic and epistemology is only that since it is impossible to refer to
anything outside the perspectives that constitute them, neither logic nor
epistemology ever come into contact with the world as it really is. But on this
view, logical concepts cut and sculpt the world according to human interests and
knowledge becomes an imposition of those concepts on a world that is itself a
fixed entity, in the end unknowable because we cannot escape the perspectives
we are doomed to adopt in our attempts to reach it. This cannot be correct
interpretation of Nietzsche, for the world has here become a thing-in-itself.
Since Nietzsche thinks the thing-in-itself is "the horrendum pudendum of the
metaphysicians," 3 any distinction premised on its existence must be inconsistent
with his views. Hence, Nietzsche's critique of logic and epistemology goes
through only if the perspectivity characteristic of the human knower is charac-
teristic also of the world.

39
B. Babich (ed. ), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 39-46.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
40 ROBERT C. WELSHON

What then does this perspectivist ontology look like? Infrequently in the
works prepared by him for publication and frequently in the Notebooks,
Nietzsche discusses its component claims. He repeatedly claims that the world
is ephemeral, energetic, and in motion, that it is composed of events, and that
each event is nothing more than "a determination of degrees and relations of
force" (WP 552). Take two examples:

The degree of resistance and the degree of superior power- this is the question in every event ...
A quantum of power is designated by the effect it produces and that which it resists. The
adiaphorous state is missing. though it is thinkable. It is essentially a will to violate and to defend
oneself against violation. Not self-preservation: every atom affects the whole of being - it is
thought away if one thinks away this radiation of power-will. That is why I call it a quantum of
"will to power": it expresses the characteristic that cannot be thought out of the mechanistic order
without thinking away this order itself. (WP 634)

[N]o things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta:
their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their "effect" upon the same. The will to
power not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos- the most elemental fact from which a becoming
and effecting first emerge- (WP 635)

In both passages it is clear that, at the microcosmic level, there are atomic
events of power, referred to by the terms "quanta of power" and "dynamic
quanta." They are individuated by the effects they produce and those they resist.
Their essence consists in their being a relation of effecting and resisting other
such events. The world is thus "a sea of forces flowing and rushing together,
eternally changing, eternally flooding back" (WP 1067), and the set of quanta
of force composes or constitutes the world. As he puts it:" ... the 'world' is only
a word for the totality of these actions. Reality consists precisely in this
particular action and reaction of every individual part toward the whole-" (WP
568; cf. 568).
These insights characterize the entire hierarchy of increasingly complex
societies of quanta of power that compose the familiar objects of our everyday
middle-sized dry goods ontology. Quanta of power cooperate to form more
structured societies or alliances of power, each of which is concerned with
extending its power. Thus, Nietzsche notes that "[every specific body] continu-
ally encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming
to an arrangement ('union') with those of them that are sufficiently related to it:
thus they conspire together for power" (WP 636). As at simpler levels, societies
of power are only contingently cooperative and have only as much unity as do
organizations and cooperatives (cf. WP 561). Given that their membership
regularly changes, they do not, except in a "loose and popular" sense, attain
diachronic identity. 4 Most societies are inorganic, but some form more complex
living beings, each one of whose component parts and actions are best inter-
preted by appealing to maximization of power (cf. WP 642). All life, even a
form as simple as protoplasm (WP 551, 654 ), is "a will to the accumulation of
force; ... life strives after a maximal feeling of power" (WP 689). 5 Of course, at
organic levels too, diachronic identity obtains only loosely. Nietzsche. for
instance, also notes that "living unities continually arise and die ... the 'subject'
 PERSPECTIVIST ONTOLOGY AND DE RE KNOWLEDGE 41

is not eternal" (WP 492). This should be expected, for the organs and systems
that constitute an or~anic being, and not just the quanta that constitute them, can
themselves change.
How is this ontology of power perspectivist? According to Nietzsche,
perspectives are mapped to both quanta of power and societies of power. So,
each atomic quantum event and every molecular society of events generates a
perspective. 7 Nietzsche affirms that there is an interpretation or perspective for
every quantum of power and for every level of complexity above the funda-
mental level as well. 8 Thus, where there are distinct societies offorce, there too
are distinct interpretations on the balance. Since there is an infinity of quanta
and societies of power, there is an infinity of perspectives, as claimed in The
Gay Science, section 374.
Perspectivist ontology is, pretty obviously, akin to a bundle theory of objects,
the thesis that objects are reducible to bundles of properties. For the sake of
simplicity, assume that societies are composed, not of properties, but of quanta
of power. 9 An apparent implication of this view is that any aggregate of such
quanta, no matter how spatially discontinuous, fulfills the conditions for
thinghood. For example, the aggregate composed of my geographic plot of
Denali, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Dalai Lama constitutes a thing
that has every bit as much of a claim to ontological respectablity as a tree. There
are three options Nietzsche might pursue in response to this possibility. The first
accepts that the object composed of my geographic plot of Denali and the Dalai
Lama is as robust an object as a brick. This form of the bundle theory is a kind
of conjunctivism, the view according to which any conjunction of two or more
entities of a given ontological category can compose a whole. 10 The second
option is to claim that bundles are composed and individuated by perspectives
taken on quanta of power from an external point of view. On this constellation-
ist alternative, 11 my geographic plot of Denali and the Dalai Lama may be an
object in some perspectives, but not in others, or may be an object in no
perspective. A third option, organizationism, 12 claims that something intrinsic
to the bundles is that in virtue of which they are composed. So, since there is
nothing intrinsic holding my geographic plot of Denali and the Dalai Lama
together, there will be no object composed of them. Nietzsche weighs all three,
so consider each.

(I) Conjunctivism
[T]he world, apart from our condition of living in it, the world that we have not reduced to our
being. our logic and psychological prejudices, does not exist as a world "in-itself'; it is essentially
a world of relationships; under certain conditions it has a differing aspect from every point; its
being is essentially different from every point. every point resists it -and the sum of these is in
every case quite incongruent. (WP 568)

Nietzsche suggests here that the interpretations imposed on a segment of

reality by external interpreters can be deleted and that, once deleted, what
remains are dense societies of dynamic quanta in relationship with one another.
Since each quantum is related to all other quanta, all distinct aggregates of
quanta are bundles.
42 ROBERT C. WELSHON

(2) Constellationism. Textual evidence for constellationism is more plentiful.

For example, Nietzsche asserts "[t]hat things possess a constitution in them-
selves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity, is a quite idle hypothe-
sis ... " (WP 560). Likewise, "[N]o things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a
relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation
to all other quanta, in their 'effect' upon the same" (WP 635). 13 In these
passages, Nietzsche suggests that objects are, as Alexander Nehamas puts it,
"just the unity or organization of certain activities which, when interpreted from
some particular point of view, can be taken to be directed toward a coherent
end." 14

(3) Organizationism. However, Nietzsche also argues against constellationism.

For instance, he suggests that its requirement of an external interpreter for object
individuation is ungrounded:
Where a certain unity obtains in the grouping of things, one has always posited spirit as the cause
of this coordination: for which notion there is no ground whatever. .. there is no ground whatever
for ascribing to spirit the properties of organization and systematization. (WP 526)

Here it appears that bundle individuation is not accomplished by any spiritual

sort of interpreter. Generalizing to other sorts of interpreters, the assumption
that an external perspective composes bundles would then be false. Hence, there
must be an alternative to constellationism. Conjunctivism is one such alterna-
tive, but it is not the only one. Nietzsche presents a version of a third option in
which he explains how quanta of power interact with each other. According to
this alternative, each unit of will to power "strives to become master of over all
space and to extend its force," and each encounters "similar efforts on the part
of other bodies." Eventually, a truce is achieved in which the units of power
come "to an arrangement ('union') with those of them that are sufficiently
related." Having thus formed a new bundle, these quanta "then conspire together
for power" (WP 636). On this organizationist view, it is through the interaction
and collaboration of quanta of power that more complex societies of power are
formed. No external bundler is entailed by the interaction, and since not all
combinations reach the appropriate arrangements, not all aggregates of power
quanta constitute objects.

II

Epistemology is concerned with, among others, the following questions: How

much do we know? What is it that we know when we know? What are we doing
when we know what we know? How do we know what we know? Nietzsche has
interesting things to sal about all these questions, but I will focus only on the
first and second here. L
When he discusses knowledge, Nietzsche usually has in mind de re rather
than de dicto knowledge, that is, knowledge of things rather than knowledge of
propositions. One of his most trenchant critiques of epistemology is that there
is no de re knowledge of things-in-themselves. But from his rejection of de re
knowledge of things-in-themselves it does not follow that there is no de re
 PERSPECTIVIST ONTOLOGY AND DE RE KNOWLEDGE 43

knowledge of anything. For that conclusion to follow, the only things of which
we could have de re knowledge would have to be things-in-themselves. But,
after dumping the real/apparent world distinction and things-in-themselves
along with it, Nietzsche offers the bundle view of objects discussed above.
There is no good reason that there cannot be de re knowledge of these bundles. 16
It is true that he vacillates between three different views of bundle individuation,
so the view is not univocal. Since it is here that some of the extraordinary
implications of perspectivist ontology for de re knowledge begin to emerge,
consider, again, each alternative in turn.
(1) Conjunctivism. Under conjunctivism, all combinations of quanta of power
are objects. 17 Given an infinite number of power quanta, there is then an infinite
number of objects. However, that the world is composed of an infinite number
of objects does not imply that human knowledge is infinite. On the contrary,
human knowledge of conjunctivist objects is still finite because human mental
capacities are finite, as are our needs and desires. Thus humans cannot have de
recognitive attitudes towards the infinite number of conjunctivist objects in the
world. Rather, only those objects required by our perspective are ever known by
us, for it is only the objects required by our perspective about which we will
form perspectivally true and false beliefs, beliefs that then will or will fail to
qualify as knowledge. Hence, although conjunctivism countenances bundles of
every possible size - from atoms and molecules to galaxies - and countenances
every possible configuration of bundles - from cueball-cats to Ponderosa Pine-
Moonlight Sonata performances - human knowers will not form beliefs about
them unless their perspective requires them to do so. And if there are no beliefs
about them, there is no de re knowledge of them either. Thus, human knowledge
of the world is necessarily limited.
It would be a mistake to infer from these epistemological limitations anything
about the existence of a relationless and unconditioned world, a world of things-
in-themselves. Hence, it would be a mistake to infer that the bundle-objects
beyond human knowledge are unconditioned clusters of extra-perspectival
quanta of power. It is true that our knowledge is limited, but from this it follows
not that there is a world composed of unconditioned objects, but only that there
is a world composed of objects not conditioned by human knowledge. If
conjunctivism is true, the number of objects remaining after deleting those of
which humans can have de re knowledge is still infinite and still infinitely
conditioned and infinitely relational. For, ex hypothesi, every possible configu-
ration of power quanta is a bundle, and the spatial, temporal, constitutional,
mereological, causal, orginating, and other relations and conditions in virtue of
which those bundles are composed do not shrivel up and vanish because we lack
knowledge of them. Moreover, the relations in virtue of which conjunctivist
bundles are composed are, each and every one, also species of perspectives. So
the world that remains once our perspectives are deleted is still perspective-full
all the way down. Hence, although there is on conjuctivism a world of things
beyond our knowledge, there is no world of things that are in-themselves.
(2) Constellationism. According to constellationism, bundles are composed
and individuated by perspectives taken on subsets of the set of quanta of power
44 ROBERT C. WELSHON

by other subsets of that set. Thus, there is also an infinite number of constella-
tionist bundles if there is an infinite number of power quanta, for to each
quantum there is mapped a perspective. So too, constellationist bundles are
pervasively perspectivist, for their constitution and their individuation is
extrinsic to them.
As it is on conjunctivism, so too is de re knowledge of constellationist
bundle-objects bounded by our cognitive finitude, so our de re beliefs and
knowledge are finite and perspectival. Not only is composition of objects
determined by perspective on constellationism, so too is their decomposition
and destruction. If, for example, a perspective requires that objects from middle-
sized dry goods ontology such as telephones be reductively decomposed into
their atomic constituents, then there are no telephones from that perspective.
And if a perspective entails that there are no objects composed of a molecule
from my left foot and the Holy Roman Empire, then so be it. It is of course
possible that there be a perspective in which there is such a bundle-object, but
that this is a possibility rather than an actuality marks the difference between
constellationism and conjunctivism, on which every combination of quanta is
actual.
Just as it would be a mistake to infer from conjunctivism that there are
unconditioned bundle-objects beyond human knowledge, so too would it be a
mistake to infer from constellationism that there are no unconditioned bundle-
objects beyond human knowledge. Thinking that constellationism implies that
what there is is restricted to what a person or group of persons believes confuses
perspectives with beliefs. Perspectives are not beliefs - they are modalities
generated by quanta of power and societies of them, some of which societies can
generate beliefs. 18 Individual human perspectives will, of course, be partially
composed of needs and desires, so intentional attitudes will help to determine
the structure of the human world. But de re knowledge is not simply a matter of
having beliefs about objects. Rather, de re knowledge is having perspectivally
true beliefs about a bundle object licensed by one's operant perspective. These
perspectives can change, so the bundle objects of which one has de re knowl-
edge can change. Thus, one can operate within the perspective of quantum
physics and discover things about the microphysical world, but, since quantum
physics is not the only perspective on the microphysical world, one may still not
know all there is to know about it. 19 But no matter how often and how much our
perspectives change, the world of constellationist bundles is determined neither
by individual nor by social beliefs. so typical formulations of subjectivism and
social relativism are false.
(3) Organizationism. According to organizationism, bundles of quanta of
power are composed and individuated by intrinsic power maximizing principles
of organization. Hence, unlike conjunctivism, not all possible combinations of
quanta of power form actual bundles, for there are some bundles that could be
formed which would not be power maximizing. And, unlike constellation ism,
extrinsic bundle individuation is not entailed, for it is not the case that an
external perspective is required for individuation. None of this is to say that,
given a set of quanta of power of infinite cardinality, there would not be a set
 PERSPECTIVIST ONTOLOGY AND DE RE KNOWLEDGE 45

of organizationist bundle-objects of infinite cardinality. There may well be, but

if there is, it will be a smaller infinity than those of conjunctivism or constella-
°
tionism. 2 For the infinity of organizationist bundles is constrained by the
organizing principle of power maximization, and this constraint makes
organizationist bundles akin to Nietzschean natural kinds, of which there are
only so many, even if an infinite many? 1
De re knowledge on organizationism is a matter of knowing about bundles
of quanta of power that have organized themselves together in a quest for
power. What can be known de re of these Nietzschean natural kinds is also
finite. But it is so for an additional reason to the reasons that support the
finiteness of human knowledge on conjunctivism and constellationism. On
organizationism, only those objects which are collections of quanta of power
that have independently conspired together for power are objects. Collections
of quanta not intrinsically organized so as to maximize power are not objects,
and so cannot be known. Hence, on organizationism there is an initial cut in the
total number of objects that can be known. Of course, the grounds on which
certain organizationist bundles have bundled together may well be beyond our
ken, so there is still a world of perspecti vist objects beyond our knowledge. So
too, de re knowledge of organizationist objects is perspectival because knowers
have perspectival interests in determining which things in the world will be
attended to and inserted into the structure of de re belief. But on both conjunc-
tivism and constellationism the number of objects that can be known is equal to
the number of members in the set of all subsets of all power quanta. On
organizationism, this is not true.

III

There are other epistemological implications of a perspectivist ontology, such

as those concerning de dicta knowledge, what knowing is, and the nature of
knowers. And many of these implications trail off into other Nietzschean
concerns, such as his views on change, causality, science, natural law, and
absolute truth. It is more than a little problematic to extricate one piece of the
mosaic of Nietzsche's work and turn it every which way in order to better know
it. For, as has often been noted, his thought is itself an instance of the perspec-
tivism he promotes, and any close scrutiny of a facet of it will miss its connec-
tions with others of those facets. Still, what is lost in comprehensiveness in the
study of a part of a whole is in part offset by the gains in detail of one's
knowledge of that part.

University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

NOTES

I have considered these questions in earlier papers. See Robert C. Welshon, "Nietzsche's
Perspectivist Ontology," International Studies in Philosophy (Summer, 1996): 77-98; Robert C.
Welshon, "Nietzsche's Perspectivist Causality" International Studies in Philosophy, forthcoming.
See also chapters 3, 4, and 5 in Nietzsche's Perspectivism, a book-length manuscript co-authored
46 ROBERT C. WELSHON

with Steven Hales. The ideas in this paper are direct and indirect implications of work done by
both of us in Nietzsche's Perspectivism, so I gratefully ackowledge Steven Hales's participation
in this paper as well.
2 See in D. B. Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche (New York: Dell Publishing, 1977), Jean Granier,
"Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos," pp. 137 and 139; Michel Haar, "Nietzsche and Metaphysical
Language," pp. 6 and 12; Sarah Kofman, "Metaphor, Symbol, Metamorphosis," pp. 201-214. Cf.
Ofelia Schutte, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984), p. 47, 92-104; Alan Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation (New York:
Routledge, 1990), chapters 5-7.
3 Nietzsche, T1 VII 3; also GS 335, BGE II, TI V, WP 552b.
4 See GS 110, Ill; WP 520. See Roderick Chisholm, Person and Object (La Salle, Illinois: Open
Court Publishing, 1976), pp. 92-97.
5 Cf. BGE 13, 36,230, 259; GS 118, 349; AC 2; GM II 12; WP 644
6 See GM II 12
See WP 567, 637, and 639.
Cf. WP 259; BGE 34.
An alternative view, that societies are property constituted, is discussed at WP 557 and WP
558.
10
For more on mereology, see Chisholm, Person and Object, Appendix B.
11 Following Nietzsche; cf. WP 551.
12 Again following Nietzsche: WP 561.
13 See also WP 515, 559, and 639.
14 Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: L(fe as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1985), p. 83.
15 For further reflections on the other questions, see chapter 6 of Hales and Welshon, Nietzsche's

Perspectivism.
16 One (bad) argument for the conclusion that there can be no de re knowledge of Nietzschean

bundle-objects is considered in the paragraph after next.

17 The set of all possible configurations of power quanta is the power set of the set of power

\\uanta.
1 Were perspectives sets of beliefs, there could be no untrue beliefs within a perspective. But
Nietzsche affirms just the opposite. In AC 23 he writes "truth and the belief that something is true:
two completely diverse worlds of interest". Compare: "a belief, however necessary it is for the
preservation of a species, has nothing to do with truth" (WP 487) and "a belief can be a condition
of life and nonetheless be false" (WP 483).
19 Thus Nietzsche claims at GM III 23 through 25 that even science is perspectival.
20 Just as denumerable infinities are smaller than non-denumerable infinities.
21 Natural kinds with a caveat: kinds are typically thought to be inhabitants of the world
regardless of perspective. But Nietzschean natural kinds are perspectivist inhabitants of a
perspectivist world.
 R. LANIER ANDERSON

NIETZSCHE'S VIEWS ON TRUTH AND THE KANTIAN

BACKGROUND OF HIS EPISTEMOLOGY

THE PROBLEM ABOUT NIETZSCHE'S VIEWS ON TRUTH

Nietzsche's remarks about truth are among the most notorious and philosophi-
cally problematic in his entire oeuvre. The trouble centers on his repeated claims
that there is no truth, or that all our beliefs are false in some sense - for
example, that "There exists neither spirit, nor reason, nor thinking, [... ] nor
truth: all are fictions that are of no use" (WP 480), or that "Truth is the kind of
error without which a certain species of life could not live" (WP 493). These
claims about truth are self-refuting in the most straightforward way: if they are
assumed to be truths, then by the force of their own assertion, they are false
("errors," "fictions"), and have no cognitive value. Some recent commentators
have insisted that Nietzsche's talk about truth should be evaluated rhetorically,
and not semantically. 1 Nietzsche's rejection of truth is rhetorically problematic
as well, however, for he is very willing to indulge in the rhetoric of criticizing
views by calling them false, or the like, 2 even though this would seem to be no
criticism at all, given his view that such falsity is inevitable. To add to the
paradox, Nietzsche's general denial of truth did not stop him from claiming that
some particular beliefs are true. Perhaps most famously, he closes the first
section of the Genealogy of Morals by expressing the hope that- whatever their
other faults - his much maligned "English psychologists" of morality "may be
fundamentally brave, proud, and magnanimous animals, who [... ] have trained
themselves to sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth, even plain, harsh,
ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth.- For such truths do exist.-" (GM I:
1). A more unambiguous affirmation of the existence of truths could hardly be
asked for.
In light of these difficulties of philosophical and textual coherence, it is
tempting to dismiss Nietzsche's denials of truth as slips of the pen, or at least
to find some way of interpreting his writings to show that he eventually
abandoned his denial of truth. 3 Two factors make such an interpretive strategy
difficult to carry out. First, the denial of truth is very widespread in Nietzsche's
text. The view is stated, or at least strongly suggested, in most of his published
works, and throughout his philosophical development, from the ear~, unpub-
lished essay "On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense" (1873), down to

47
B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 47-59.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
48 R. LANIER ANDERSON

Twilight of the Idols (1888). 5 Moreover, as we shall see, there are texts in which
Nietzsche makes claims to truth and statements of his denial of truth within the
space of one paragraph. It is therefore hard to imagine that all his denials of
truth could be mere slips, or that he simply failed to notice the apparent
contradictions arising from the view.
Second, Nietzsche's rejection of truth is deeply intertwined with his broader
views in epistemology. Nietzsche claims not only that there are no true
statements or beliefs, but further, that key and unavoidable features of our
highest cognitive processes work to falsify our views of the world. For example,
Nietzsche marvels at "the way in which precisely science at its best seeks most
to keep us in this simpl!fied, thoroughly artificial, suitably constructed and
suitably falsified world- the way in which, willy-nilly, it loves error, because,
being alive, it loves life"(BGE 24). As the final clause intimates, this "falsifica-
tion" is not merely a result of some special mystification found only in scientific
thinking, but is rather so general that we must "recognize untruth as a condition
of life" (BGE 4). In light of such claims about the inherently falsifying effects
of our cognitive perspectives, Maudemarie Clark has aptly characterized
Nietzsche's view as a "falsification thesis." 6
This thesis about systematic falsification arising from the very processes of
our cognition locates the denial of truth in a broader philosophical context, and
thereby makes it difficult to dismiss the truth paradoxes outright. Moreover, if
Nietzsche's denial of truth has these broader epistemological roots, then it is
hard to allay worries about the inconsistency of his thinking in truth and
knowledge through appeal to the increasingly popular gambit of denying that
Nietzsche meant to offer any "positive" theory of truth. 7 Whether Nietzsche has
a "theory" of truth or not, his falsification claims make it clear that the para-
doxical statements about truth are systematically connected to his characteristic
idea that our knowledge and evaluations of the world are limited by the
influence of perspective, and if these falsification claims are self-refuting, then
substantial parts of Nietzsche's views on knowledge - and even about the
relation between human values and the world through perspectives- may also
be implicated in the contradiction. 8
Thus, the widespread and obtrusively paradoxical character of Nietzsche's
comments about truth, coupled with the close connection between these
comments and central notions in his broader philosophy, leave Nietzsche's
readers under the obligation to confront this paradox directly, and try to make
some sense of the things he says about truth. Nietzsche's own claims to truth
arise within his self-proclaimed task as a seeker after knowledge, 9 and in fact,
the paradox emerges immediately from Nietzsche's usage of the truth predicate
in making knowledge claims. He writes relatively short texts that use the
predicates "true" or "false" in one place to make claims to truth (or falsity), and
in another place to suggest his wholesale rejection of truth. 10 If the falsification
thesis is the flagrant self-contradiction it appears to be, then it will be impossible
to make any sense at all of such texts. The project of understanding Nietzsche's
comments on truth must therefore begin at the most basic level, from the attempt
to make sense of this kind of usage.
 NIETZSCHE'S VIEWS ON TRUTH 49

The most straightforward interpretive strategy is to assume that Nietzsche

employs the semantic predicates "true" and "false" in different senses when he
suggests that something is true, on the one hand, but that everything is false, on
the other. Richard Schacht has proposed a complicated version of this resolution
for the truth paradoxes, according to which Nietzsche employs three different
fundamental senses of "true" and "false," some of which have further specific
applications to particular kinds of statements. 11 Since Nietzsche himself never
explicitly distinguishes different senses of truth, I find it implausible that he was
operating with such a complicated theory. Nietzsche's usage nevertheless
clearly indicates an implicit dependence on different senses of truth. In what
follows, I will pursue Schacht's basic idea, and propose a distinction between
senses of truth which is simpler than his, and also more immediately tied to the
epistemological concerns that first led Nietzsche to find something problematic
in our ordinary notion of truth.

NIETZSCHE'S KANTIANISM AND THE RESOLUTION OF THE TRUTH

PARADOXES 12

It is hardly surprising to find paradoxical formulations in Nietzsche's text, but

these views about truth present special interpretive challenges. Not only is the
falsification thesis self-refuting as it stands, but further, it seems plainly
incompatible both with Nietzsche's many straightforward claims to truth, and
with his rhetoric of criticizing views for being false. It cannot be argued that
Nietzsche simply held incompatible positions without realizing it, for his claims
to truth occasionally coexist in the same paragraph with statements of the
falsification thesis. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche begins one
section by promising to reveal one of the "palpable truths that remain unspoken
for centuries," but by the end, he posits a "basic will of the spirit which strives
for the apparent and superficial" (BGE 229), and which, he goes on to claim, is
responsible for systematically "retouching and falsifying the whole [world] to
suit itself' (BGE 230). The contradiction between these two claims made in
such proximity is too clear for Nietzsche simply to have missed it. In order to
make minimal sense of such texts, then, we are forced to the remarkable
conclusion that Nietzsche thought the falsification thesis was compatible with
his straightforward claims to truth. Any adequate interpretation of his thinking
on truth must explain how he could have maintained this apparently impossible
position.
The difficulties only deepen when we turn to the connections between
Nietzsche's views on truth and his perspectivist epistemology. I have argued
elsewhere that Nietzsche understands perspectives along loosely Kantian lines: 13
perspectives include schemes of concepts which organize the data of our
experience and thereby give the world a certain "look" for us. Nietzsche
frequently indicates the Kantian provenance of this idea by giving lists of the
conceptual constituents of perspectives that center on basic concepts and
distinctions posited by Kant's theory of experience. For example, our perspec-
tives organize the world in terms of "bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects,
50 R. LANIER ANDERSON

motion and rest, form and content" (GS 121), or again, in terms of "the synthetic
judgments apriori," along with "logic, ... the unconditional and self-identical,
... [and] numbers" (BGE 4 ). 14 Elsewhere, Nietzsche writes in an even more
Kantian vein, speaking of the way our cognition works to "simplify the
manifold" (BGE 230) in accordance with "a scheme [... ] posited by ourselves"
(WP 516). Like Kant, then, Nietzsche holds that our experience is the joint
product of empirical evidence provided by the world, and the influence of the
cognitive resources we use to organize that evidence. Nietzsche thus maintains
something of the structure of Kant's famous "Copernican revolution" in
epistemology, according to which knowledge is not simply a matter of bringing
our concepts into conformity with mind-independent objects, but is rather the
result of a process in which our own concepts have a positive influence, so that,
in an important sense, the objects of knowledge must themselves conform to a
framework arising from our cognitive activity. 15
Apparently, this last point is what leads Nietzsche to his falsification claims.
Our subjective perspectives transform our experience of the world, and thereby
prevent our knowledge from simply conforming itself to things as they are in
themselves. Clearly assuming that truth is just such a relation of conforming or
correspondence, Nietzsche concludes that our knowledge is subject to endemic
falsification: since Kant we have realized that "delusion and error [are] a
condition of cognitive and perceptual existence" (GS 107). 16 Kant himself drew
no such conclusion, however. Thus, despite the broad structural similarities
between Nietzsche and Kant I have just rehearsed, there must also be significant
differences that make Nietzsche think he is entitled to infer from the influence
of perspective to a general falsification thesis.
Perhaps the most obvious of Nietzsche's departures from Kantian orthodoxy
is his conclusion that the very notion of the thing in itself is incoherent.
Famously, Kant's considered view is that we cannot know anything about things
in themselves, but nevertheless, he never fails to think of them along the lines
of the traditional (pre-Kantian) notion of substance, i.e., as "objects of the pure
understanding" (A 264/B 320). Such things, as the proper objects of complete
conceptual descriptions of the intellect, or understanding, must be self-subsistent
(and thus independent from all other things) and completely determinate. 17 This
conception seems coherent enough at first blush, but Nietzsche ultimately finds
deep problems with it, precisely by following out the implications of Kant's
own argument that we could not have any power of the "real use" of the
intellect, 18 or intellectual intuition. Things in themselves are conceived as the
proper objects of just this cognitive power, and if we lack any such power, then
the thing in itself, qua "object of the pure intellect," could only be the com-
pletely unknowable "something in general" (B 307, cf. A 252, A 256/B 312)
that Kant posits as the underlying ground of the objects we know through
experience.
Nietzsche's worry begins from this point. The unknowability of things in
themselves is part of their very conception: it arises not from some contingent
deficiency or incompleteness in our experience or theorizing to date, but from
general and inevitable limitations on our cognitive resources, most importantly
 NIETZSCHE'S VIEWS ON TRUTH 51

the lack of intellectual intuitions capable of representing such objects. This

means that in attempting to conceive of things in themselves, we outstrip the
legitimate realm of our concepts, and therefore stop making sense altogether.
That is, due to the very nature of our cognition of objects, nothing we think can
be meaningfully applied to things in themselves. As Kant himself puts the point,
"in the case of the noumenon, there the entire use, indeed even all significance
of the categories completely ceases" (B 308, my emphasis). But if our cognition
has no meaningful application to things in themselves, then it also has no way
to make sense of a purported distinction between them and the things we do
know: "we do not 'know' nearly enough to be entitled to any such distinction.
We lack any organ for knowledge [Erkennen], for 'truth"' (GS 354) where an
"organ for knowledge" would be a power of intellectual intuition. Nietzsche
concludes, then, that the very notion of the thing in itself is incoherent, since it
radically transcends the legitimate and justified employment of our cognitive
resources. 19
Thus, for Nietzsche, we cannot coherently posit a realm of fully determinate,
self-subsistent entities underlying the objects of our empirical knowledge. This
very conclusion, however, seems to undermine the motivation for the falsifica-
tion thesis. Absent such an underlying reality, why should we count the
transformation of experience through the influence of perspective as falsifying?
Of what could our transformed view of the world be false? It is not false of the
things in themselves, since there are no such things for our cognition to fail to
represent adequately, and it is not false of the objects of empirical knowledge,
because the fundamental constitution of those things is conceived in terms of
precisely those basic concepts that our perspective uses to organize experience.
(This is what makes talk of empirical objects intelligible, where talk of the
purported things in themselves is not, on Nietzsche's account.)
The explanation for Nietzsche's falsification claims resides in a second
crucial and characteristic departure he makes from the orthodox Kantian account
of our cognition: Nietzsche denies that the concepts we use to organize
experience have the transcendentally necessary status assigned to them by Kant.
For Kant, our basic concepts transcend experience, in that they are prior
conditions of the very possibility of any experience, and no cognition would be
possible without them. Nietzsche's appeal to the notion of perspective is meant
as a rejection of just this Kantian claim about the necessity of a single concep-
tual apparatus. According to Nietzsche, we adopt our perspectives not because
they are necessary preconditions of experience, but because of contingent,
naturalistically conceived facts about us, e.g., our needs, interests, and values
(see GM III: 12, GS 110-11, and 355). Such facts constitute the cognitive
"situations" in which we find ourselves, and which in tum influence the way the
world appears to us. Since these features are contingent and variable, so are the
perspectives available to us.
The necessity and uniqueness of our basic conceptual scheme are crucially
important within the account of empirical truth offered by orthodox Kantianism.
These features serve to guarantee that there is a single, unique world of objects
of experience. That world of objects takes its form from our basic concepts, and
52 R. LANIER ANDERSON

the "matter" of experience (A 167/B 209, see also A 20/B 34), which these
formal concepts organize, arises ultimately from the things in themselves. Both
the form and the matter in this account have a fixed, determinate character; the
basic conceptual scheme is necessary, and the things in themselves are fully
determinate (albeit unknown to us). Therefore, form and matter combine to
produce a uniquely determined world of experience, and it is to this world of
objects that our beliefs correspond when they are empirically true.
When Nietzsche abandons the necessary status of our organizing concepts,
he thereby gives up the only good Kantian grounds for positing a uniquely
determined world of objects of appearance, existing in independence from
idiosyncratic facts about the perspectives cognizers use to organize the data of
experience. This has serious implications for Nietzsche's thinking about the
possibility of truth. Truth, on the traditional way of conceiving it, is just a
relation of correspondence to a uniquely determined, and (at least relatively)
independent world of things. Nietzsche's perspectivism prevents any belief from
being true in this sense. As we saw, beliefs cannot correspond to things in
themselves for Nietzsche, since he thinks the very idea of such a correspondence
is unintelligible. But without a unique transcendental order for experience, there
is also no longer any single world of objects of appearance - necessary for all
finite knowers like us 20 - to which our beliefs could correspond. In ordering and
transforming our experience, each of our perspectives limits the legitimate,
meaningful application of its perspectival representations to a world that is
inextricably tied to potentially idiosyncratic features of that subjective perspec-
tive -that is, perspectives limit us to a "simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably
constructed and suitably falsified world" (BGE 24). So in the end, none of our
beliefs can count as true in the traditional sense.
As the qualification "in the traditional sense" suggests, however, once the
motivations of Nietzsche's underlying philosophical position are fully out on the
table, it is easier to make sense of this paradoxical conclusion about truth. When
Nietzsche rejects truth in this way, he is rejecting just the assumption- shared
by Kant and the rationalist metaphysicians whom Kant criticized - that there is
a uniquely determinate world of objects to which our beliefs and theories
correspond (or fail to correspond). This rejection of truth is motivated by two
considerations: first, Nietzsche's broadly Kantian conception of cognition, as
knowledge of an experience that is itself formed through the "active" (GM III:
12) operation of our perspectives; and second, Nietzsche's commitment, in
contrast to orthodox Kantianism, that our perspectives are contingent and
various, and that each of them organizes the data of our experience in a
particular way, so that different claims about the basic ontology of the world
may be justified in different perspectives. According to Nietzsche, when we use
concepts like those of "enduring thing" or "causality" to organize the data of
sense, we are imposing a stable order onto experience from our own perspective,
and because this is not the only possible order, it cannot uniquely define what
counts as an object of experience. Nevertheless, we cannot do without some
concepts to organize experience, even if no particular concept (or set of
concepts) is necessary for this purpose: "That mountain there! That cloud there!
 NIETZSCHE'S VIEWS ON TRUTH 53

What is 'real' in that? Subtract every phantasm and every human contribution
from it my sober friends, if you can! ... There is no 'reality' for us- not for you
either, my sober friends" (GS 57). As this anti-realist conclusion suggests, to the
extent that some of their basic features derive from the "active" operations of
our particular perspectives, the objects of knowledge themselves have a
"subjective" component: as Nietzsche puts the point, "interpretation and
subjectivity are essential to things" (WP 560). Our basic concepts therefore do
not have the objective validity claimed for them by Kant, and when we use such
perspectival concepts, we "falsif[y] the testimony of the senses" (Tl III, 2) and
are "caught in error, compelled into error" (Tl III, 5), in the sense that the
resulting claims do not correspond to a unique world of objects - whether things
in themselves or empirical objects - that are independent in a serious way from
the subjective "conditions of life" that generate our own perspective.
None of this, however, prevents Nietzsche from insisting that some perspecti-
val interpretations are cognitively or epistemically better than others. To cite
only the most obvious example, Nietzsche insists that his view of nature as "de-
deified" (GS 109) is cognitively superior to a Christian interpretation which sees
the hand of God in every event (see GS 109 and 357, and BGE 188), and he
clearly indicates that his task as a genealogist and "man of knowledge" (GM
Preface, 1) is "to replace the less plausible with the more plausible" (GM
Preface, 4)- that is, to produce new interpretations which are better than those
currently on offer. Nietzsche's argumentative practice in such contexts makes
it natural to assume that one perspective is cognitively superior to another
whenever it better meets the epistemic standards we use to evaluate theories
(e.g., plausibility, in GM Preface, 4, or, elsewhere, simplicity, empirical
adequacy, explanatory power, etc.). For example, when Nietzsche criticizes the
conception of natural selection employed by his contemporary physiologists (in
BGE 13), he does so on the explicitly methodological grounds that their
explanations made illegitimate appeal to a teleological principle (involved in the
concept of a "will to survive" attributed to organisms). Nietzsche insists that his
own explanatory strategy, based on the will to power, is better because it better
satisfies the maxim that teleological explanation should have as limited a role
as possible in the sciences of nature, and "thus method, which must be essen-
tially economy of principles, demands it" (BGE 13). 21 Many of Nietzsche's
other arguments 22 also rest crucially on claims that one interpretation satisfies
our epistemic standards better than its competitors.
I submit that Nietzsche utilized a second notion of truth, fundamentally
distinct from the traditional sense, in order to express this kind of cognitive
superiority. In this second sense, there is nothing more to being true than
meeting our epistemic standards relatively well. Thus, an interpretation is truer
if it better meets our epistemic standards, and since these standards can be met
to a greater or lesser degree, theories can be more or less true. It is just because
he uses such a conception of truth, I think, that Nietzsche insists that truth is a
matter of degree in this way (see BGE 34, WP 535). This alternative, "theory-
internal"23 conception of truth emphasizes the dependence of truth claims on the
nature of our cognitive practices (e.g., on the standards that guide those
54 R. LANIER ANDERSON

practices), and it is thus related to Nietzsche's broadly Kantian epistemological

stance. By contrast, the traditional conception of truth (as correspondence to
determinate, independent objects) indicates a commitment to a strong form of
monistic realism he rejects.
Nietzsche's usage indicates that he was implicitly operating with both of
these conceptions of truth? 4 Indeed, absent such an implicit commitment it is
hard to see how Nietzsche could even have written a sentence like "'Truth': this,
according to my way of thinking, does not represent the antithesis of error, but
in the most fundamental cases only the posture of various errors in relation to
one another"(WP 535). If this sentence is not to be reduced immediately to
nonsense, then claims which fail to be true, in the sense of the first word, must
be errors in a different sense than the "errors" mentioned in the final clause;
otherwise calling something "true" could not mark out its "posture" relative to
other claims. While this passage from Nietzsche's notebooks is a particularly
clear case, since he uses the different senses of semantic terms within the same
sentence, 25 the same distinction between two conceptions of truth is equally
necessary to make sense of published texts like BGE 229 (quoted above), which
contain both truth claims and allusions to the falsification thesis within the space
of one paragraph.
Given this distinction between two senses of truth, we can resolve the
interpretive difficulties surrounding the falsification thesis. Nietzsche claims
that all our beliefs are false (in the traditional sense), but this is perfectly
compatible with his own claims to truth (in the different, "theory-internal"
sense, which motivates the arguments I mentioned above). Even the falsification
thesis itself will be true in this second sense, if it is a better interpretation of our
cognitive situation than the strong realist alternative, as Nietzsche clearly thinks
it is. 26 The threat of self-refutation therefore disappears. That everything is false
(in the traditional sense) need be of no concern to Nietzsche, since the contra-
diction this entails belongs not to his epistemology, but to the traditional
conception of truth associated with the strong realism he rejects.
It might be argued that, if this was all Nietzsche had in mind, he chose a
misleading way to express himself. Since he thinks the notion of a thing in
itself, and therefore also the idea of correspondence to such a thing. are
incoherent, and since he rejects the Kantian transcendental standpoint, which
could justify appeal to a unique world of objects of experience, he should have
claimed that any truth claim using the traditional sense of truth is meaningless,
and not that our beliefs are false in the traditional sense. 27 It seems to me,
however, that in statements of the falsification thesis, Nietzsche simply exploits
the traditional conception of truth in order to give dramatic rhetorical expression
to his view that (contra the monistic realism of his opponents) "interpretation
and subjectivity are essential to things'' (WP 560)?8 Of course, if Nietzsche is
right that "subjectivity [is] essential to things" then the traditional conception
of truth on which the falsification thesis depends is itself incoherent, since that
conception depends on the notion of a unique world of objects independent from
any idiosyncratic features of our particular perspectives. This is not the only
case, however, in which Nietzsche makes use of a notion that is incoherent from
 NIETZSCHE'S VIEWS ON TRUTH 55

his point of view, in order to exploit the rhetorical force of the resulting
paradox. To cite only the most notorious example, he claims "God is dead" (GS
108, 125). Thus, attention to the dual senses in which Nietzsche uses "true" not
only enables us to resolve the truth paradoxes, but also allows us to see the
underlying philosophical point of his use of these paradoxical falsification
claims.

CONCLUSION

This solution to the falsification paradox presupposes a significantly stronger

and more controversial version of the broadly Kantian background epistemology
than the one frequently attributed to Nietzsche.Z9 In the more cautious version
of the view, Nietzsche's rejects only "the metaphysical concept of substance,"
or the notion of things in themselves, and leaves "our ordinary concept of a
thing" 30 completely unaltered. By thus preserving our ordinary knowledge of
things without change, this version of the view that all knowledge is perspecti-
val "places no limit whatsoever on our cognitive capacities." 31 There is nothing
here which we somehow cannot know. On the contrary, precisely perspectivism
prevents our making the mistake of thinking that there are unknowable things
in themselves to which our beliefs and theories may (or may not) correspond.
On this kind of account, all Nietzsche means to do is to rein in the metaphysical
excesses of a priori philosophy, and to do so without Kant's objectionable
appeal to the thing in itself. This relatively conservative reading thus saves our
ordinary notion of a thing, and our ordinary knowledge about things, but
precisely because of this, it makes it very hard to understand why Nietzsche so
persistently indulges in his paradoxical rejection of truth.
On the solution I propose, by contrast, Nietzsche effectively reduces truth (in
the only sense in which he accepts truths) to a matter of meeting our epistemic
standards. This claim requires philosophical underpinnings which pose a
significant challenge to our common sense notions. According to this stronger
view, the truth about the world - and thus the way things are with the objects of
our knowledge - depends on our cognitive perspectives and the epistemic
standards appropriate to them. This includes even the truths that describe the
identity conditions of the objects we know, so that what those objects are is in
part dependent on the structure of our perspectives: this is why Nietzsche insists
that "interpretation and subjectivity are essential to things" (WP 560, my
emphasis). Along with truth, then, Nietzsche gives thinghood, too, a "theory-
internal" treatment, and his paradoxical claims about falsification are meant to
emphasize the essential subjectivism of this new conception of things. In his
words, "we possess the concept 'being,' 'thing,' only as a relational concept"
(WP 583). That is, the very identity conditions of "things" depend on the
relations into which they are placed by our theories.
Thus, Nietzsche's rejection of metaphysical realism is significantly stronger
than the one Kant defends, and this is not only a question of Nietzsche's denial
of the thing in itself. Nietzsche attacks not only a metaphysical version of
realism which assumes that the world we know is made up of independent and
56 R. LANIER ANDERSON

fully detenninate substances, or things in themselves, but also Kantian empirical

realism, which offers a transcendental guarantee of a unique world of objects of
knowledge, independent of any subjective features of our cognition that are not
transcendentally necessary, and therefore universally shared. Instead, Nietzsche
proposes that objects sufficiently determinate to answer to our detailed
conceptual descriptions are not given independently of our perspectives. The
identity conditions of the objects of our knowledge are themselves theoretical
statements, which can be made and justified only from within some perspective
or other, and since Nietzsche can offer no a priori guarantee that all perspec-
tives must ultimately be compatible, he is ultimately committed to a thorough-
going ontological pluralism.
This last point about Nietzsche's refusal to guarantee the compatibility of
perspectives deserves emphasis. By contrast to Nietzsche's program, a Hegelian
might argue that our various perspectives are all ultimately compatible - that in
the end they will all be reconciled in a single broadest perspective by the
complete historical self-understanding of Spirit in the moment of Absolute
Knowing. Nietzsche rejects such a position because of his fundamentally
empiricist attitude, which prevents any such a priori guarantee of total success
in the cognitive enterprise. For Nietzsche, our perspectives can be justified only
in terms of the data of experience they help us to organize, and the lives they
thereby make possible. For him, it is an empirical question whether any two
perspectives that are useful for knowledge can be reconciled in a single, broader
perspective. We can only try it and see. Moreover, no matter how much breadth
we achieve in any particular perspective, we will never be justified in conclud-
ing that the path of inquiry is now closed. Not only is more experience possible,
but other perspectives might throw what we have already accomplished into a
new and more problematic light: "the world has become 'infinite' for us all over
again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite
interpretations" (GS 374). Since Nietzsche's internal treatments of truth (and
thing hood) imply that he cannot accept any claim to truth (or any ontology of
the world) independent of the epistemic standards of some perspective, this
potential pluralism of interpretations has serious implications for him. It
undermines not only the monistic realism of Kant and his rationalistic predeces-
sors, but also our ordinary, common sense idea that we live in a world of
uniquely determinate things.
If we are to accept Nietzsche's thought on truth, then, it appears that some
serious rethinking of our "ordinary concept of a thing" 32 will be necessary. On
our ordinary conception, things are theory-independent, and this would indicate
to Nietzsc?e that our ordinary conce~~ is ac~ually deeply_ b_ound up with the
"metaphysical concept of a substance"·· he reJects. In fact, It IS among the great
contributions of Nietzsche's epistemology that he recognized the power and
intuitive plausibility of the strong rationalist form of realism he was arguing
against, and also that much of our traditional, common sense way of thinking
would have to be abandoned along with it. To my mind, this clear recognition,
and the accompanying refusal to shrink from initially counter-intuitive conse-
 NIETZSCHE'S VIEWS ON TRUTH 57

quences, are among the chief advantages of Nietzsche's "internalism" over later,
twentieth century versions of the position.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks are due to Katherine Preston, Alexander Nehamas, Gary Hatfield, Babette Babich, and
Bernard Reginster for their comments on earlier versions of this paper, and to Hatfield, especially,
for helpful conversations about Kant. Thanks also to Fred Dretske, for pushing me to become
clearer about Nietzsche's reasons for rejecting the thing in itself.

Stanford University, California

NOTES
See, e.g., Bernd Magnus, "Nietzsche Today: A View from America," International Studies in
Philosophy 15, no. 2 (1983): 95-104, Alan Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation
(New York: Routledge, 1990), chs. 6-7, and, in a somewhat different vein, Ken Gemes,
"Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52, no. I (March
1992): 47-65. The approaches of Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. D. Large
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans.
B. Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), and Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979) are similar to this move in spirit, but they also go
further than this claim in important respects.
2 For example, "we thus reject the Christian interpretation and condemn its meaning as
counterfeit" (GS 357); "We, too, do not deny that faith 'makes blessed': that is precisely why we
deny that faith proves anything- a strong faith that makes blessed raises suspicion against that
which is believed; it does not establish 'truth,' it establishes a certain probability- of deception"
(GM III, 24); "As for materialistic atomism, it is one of the best refuted theories there are, and in
Europe perhaps no one in the learned world is now so unscholarly as to attach serious significance
to it, except for convenient household use" (BGE 12); and perhaps most dramatically, "In the
Christian world of ideas there is nothing that has the least contact with reality- and it is in the
instinctive hatred of reality that we have recognized the only motivating force at the root of
Christianity. What follows from this? That in psychologicis too, the error here is radical,[ ... ] One
concept less, one single reality in its place, and the whole of Christianity hurtles down into
nothing" (A 39).
3 This last interpretive tack is most prominently and thoroughly pursued by Maudemarie Clark,
Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Although the
reading of Nietzsche I advocate here bears some similarities to Clark's informative treatment, I
cannot accept her central claim that Nietzsche eventually abandoned his denial of truth. For a
fuller treatment, see R. Lanier Anderson, "Overcoming Charity: the Case of Maudemarie Clark's
Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy," Nietzsche-Studien 25 (1996): 307-41.
4 "What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in
short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified,
transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical
and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that
have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their
embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins" (TL, 84).
5 "They [the senses] do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies;
for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. 'Reason' is the
cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses" (TI III, 2).
6 Clark, Nietzsche on Truth, 95.
7 This claim has been prominently made by Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 52-55, and also by Gemes, "Nietzsche's
Critique," and Randall Havas, Nietzsche's Genealogy: Nihilism and the Will to Knowledge (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Nehamas seems to share my contention that this point by
itself does not resolve the truth paradoxes, since he goes on to offer additional considerations to
resolve those problems. See Nehamas, Life as Literature, 56-63 and 65-69. By contrast, Gemes
and Havas try to get more work out of simply :insisting that Nietzsche was not offering any theory
58 R. LANIER ANDERSON

of truth, and was indeed "not interested in the notion of truth per se" (Gemes. "Nietzsche's
Critique," 64).
8 According to Nietzsche, our perspectives organize our experience. and thereby give things a
certain "look" for us. Such perspectives include our most basic logical, metaphysical. and
scientific concepts (e.g., "logic" (BGE 3), mathematics, the "self-identical." and the "synthetic
judgments a priori" (BGE 4 ), "bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest. form and
content" (GS 121) ). We adopt the perspectives we do because they respond to our needs, interests,
and values (see BGE 3, 4; GS 110, 112, 121 ). Nietzsche makes it clear in BGE 4 that he thinks this
organization of experience in accord with our concepts and values amounts to a "falsification··
(BGE 4), and therefore Nietzsche's basic epistemology and his account of the relation between our
values and the world are deeply bound up with the falsification thesis. I give a fuller interpretation
of perspectivism along these lines, and propose a resolution for other self-referential difficulties
besides the truth paradox, in R. Lanier Anderson, "Truth and Objectivity in Perspectiv-
ism,"Svnthese 115 (1998): 1-32.
9 In addition to the famous passage from GM I: l, quoted above, see, e.g., "Let us say once more
what we have already said a hundred times, for today's ears resist such truths- our truths" (BGE
202); and "In late ages that may be proud of their humanity, so much fear remains. so much
superstitious fear of the 'savage cruel beast' whose conquest is the very pride of these more
humane ages, that even palpable truths remain unspoken for centuries [... j. Perhaps I dare
something when I let one of these truths slip out: let others catch it again and give it 'milk of the
pious ways of thinking'" (BGE 229). On the importance of the pursuit of knowledge within
Nietzsche's conception ofhis task, see GS 110, 324, and 325. GM Preface. and BGE 227-230.
Claims to truth naturally arise in connection with such a task.
10 See, e.g., BGE 229-30, and even more dramatically WP 535. Both passages are discussed in

section 2, below.
11 See Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). ch. 2.
12 The following discussion is based on my "overcoming Charity: The Case of Maudemaric

Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy," Nietzsche-Studien, 1996, 25:307-41.

13 See Anderson, "Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism," and Anderson. "Overcoming

Charity." Others have also noted the broadly Kantian character of Nietzsche's perspcctivism. See
esp. Friedrich Kaulbach, Philosophie des Perspektivismus, 1 Teil: Wahrheit und Per.1pektive bei
Kant, Hegel, und Nietzsche (Tiibingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1990), and also Clark.
':iietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. esp. ch. 5.
See the lists of concepts at BGE 21 and 34, GS II 0, and WP 497, 516, and 574.
15 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St.
Martin's 1962) citations to the Critique will be made parenthetically in the text. Kant describes
his position as a second Copernican revolution in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique
of Pure Reason, because it reverses the traditional approach to knowledge: "Hitherto it has been
assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But [... j we might have more success in
the tasks of metaphysics if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge" (B xvi).
Objects "conform to our knowledge" in the sense that possible objects of knowledge appear to us
only through the framework we use to conceptualize our experience. All objects of knowledge thus
bear the influence of that framework.
16 I have altered Kaufmann's translation of this passage.
17 On the conception of things in themselves as "objects of the pure intellect." see. e.g .. A 254/8

310, and A 264-5/B 320-1. A complete conceptual description of the intellect, capable of
determining a thing in itself, would be a description which determined, for every possible
predicate, that the object in question had that predicate, or had its opposite. This is the sense in
which things in themselves are completely determinate and self-subsistent, in Kant's way of
thinking about them. Such a conception is clearly implicit, for example, in Kant's discussion of
Leibniz at A 281/B 337, and also in his inference to transcendental idealism as the solution for the
Antinomies of reason, at A 506-7/B 534-5.
18 In his so-called "Inaugural Dissertation,'' Kant makes much of the distinction between the "real
use" of the intellect and its merely "logical use." See Immanuel Kant, On the Form and Principles
of the Sensible and Intelligible World, in Theoretical Philosoph.v, 1755-1770, trans. and ed., D.
Walford and R. Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 385, 386, 406 (Ak.
pp. 393, 394, 411). By the time of the Critique of Pure Reason. however. (and especially in the
second edition) Kant comes to reject the possibility of any such "real use." See, e.g., B 68, B 71-2.
A 51/B 75, B 135, B 138-9, and B 145. Gary Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative: Theories
of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) has pointed out
that this is one of the central insights separating Kant's mature thought from his "pre-critical"
 NIETZSCHE'S VIEWS ON TRUTH 59

writings, and also that this rejection of any real use of the intellect was of fundamental importance
in changing our understanding of the powers of the mind. See esp. pp. 59, 78-9, 81, 93, 127, and
213. For the broad story of how this point influenced conceptions of the mind, see also Gary
Hatfield, "The Workings of the Intellect," in Logic and the Workings of the Mind: the Logic of
Ideas and Faculty Psychology in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Patricia Easton, (North American
Kant Society, 1997).
19 There are two other potential ways to justify the posit of something like things in themselves,

and thus to underwrite our ability to make sense of the notion. Things in themselves could be
understood as the underlying cause of the objects of experience, or they could be posited as what
Kant called the transcendental "correlate" (A 250) of the world of experience, i.e., as the ultimate
source of the "matter" which our "formal" cognitive resources organize in order to produce
experience. Nietzsche follows Schopenhauer's point that the first way involves an illegitimate
application of the concept of causality beyond the realm of possible experience, and he rejects the
second way since he denies that our cognitive resources have the transcendental status attributed
to them by Kant. I discuss these points more fully in Anderson, "Truth and Objectivity in
Perspectivism."
20 In this Kantian context, "like us" would cover the very broad class of all finite intellects that

have space and time as forms of intuition, a class which comprises (at least) all human beings.
21 For a fuller discussion of this argument, and how it fits into Nietzsche's larger defense of his
will to power doctrine, see R. Lanier Anderson, "Nietzsche's Will to Power as a Doctrine of the
Unity of Science," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25, no. 5 (October 1994): 729-50.
22 Including. for example, his argument for a particular interpretation of punishment at GM II:
12-14, and his arguments against the hypotheses of the "English psychologists" about the origins
of morality at GM I: 1-4.
23 Elsewhere (Anderson, "Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism"), I have distinguished these

two conceptions of truth as "internal" and "external." Nietzsche's new sense of truth is "internal"
because it depends on notions drawn from within our cognitive practices (epistemic standards),
while the traditional conception of truth is "eli:ternal" because it posits a standard of truth which
is outside the circle of our cognitive practices (independent things).
24 As I noted in section 1, above, Richard Schacht. Nietzsche, ch. 2, has also suggested that

Nietzsche operates with more than one sense of "true."

25 The cited passage is far from the only such case. See, for example, Nietzsche's comment that
"Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species could not live" (WP 493).
20 Naturally, the falsification thesis is false, in the traditional sense, just as everything else is. It

fails to correspond to the way things are "in themselves" with our cognition, since the very notion
of such a way things are is incoherent.
27 Thanks are due to Bernard Reginster for forcing me to become clearer on the issues connected

with this point.

28 Nietzsche also appeals to the notion of "appearance" in a similar fashion. See BGE 34.
29 See, e.g., Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, ch. 5.

°
3 Clark, Nietzsche on Truth, 107.
31 Clark, Nietzsche on Truth, 134.
32 Clark, Nietzsche on Truth, 107.
33 Clark, Nietzsche on Truth, 107.
 PAUL J. M. VAN TONGEREN

NIETZSCHE'S SYMPTOMATOLOGY OF SKEPTICISM

Nietzsche's epistemological position seems to be ambiguous. On the one hand

he argues skeptically against the claims of the "dogmatic philosophers" 1 and,
more or less in continuity with contemporary Kantian and naturalistic theories,
he develops a skeptical theory of knowledge and truth. On the other hand,
however, Nietzsche himself seems to assert the truth of many of his own
interpretations of human nature and its "human all too human" products. In
addition to this epistemological ambiguity in his philosophical practice, there
seems to be a tension between the obvious skepticism of his critique of the
epistemic claims of the philosophers and his attack on skepticism as he finds it
not only in some philosophical positions from the past, but especially in the
general philosophical and scientific climate of his time. In this article, I will
briet1y point out some of these ambiguities and then suggest that the apparent
contradiction in Nietzsche's critique may- not perhaps be solved but- at least
be understood more fully by approaching it differently. That is, we should
approach this apparent contradiction from his symptomatology of skepticism
which distinguishes between variant types of skepticism not from an epistemo-
logical perspective (e.g. the distinction between universal and partial, or
between absolute and relative skepticism) 2 , but from a "morally" evaluative
diagnosis of the type of life which expresses itself in these types of skepticism.

''KANT, SCHOPENHAUER, AND THIS BOOK OF LANGE"

Apart from his plentiful contact with the ancient philosophers from his years in
Schulpforta, from his courses at the university, and from his weekly lessons on
Plato at the Piidagogium in Basel, Nietzsche's most influential experience with
philosophy was his discovery of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Repres-
entation. For Schopenhauer, it is well-known there were only two philosophers
towards whom he felt indebted: Plato and Kant. Nietzsche wrote in a letter in
1866 how much he was impressed by F.A. Lange's History of Materialism, a
book in which the author elaborates a strong but liberally interpreted Kantianism
in skeptical and positivistic directions. Nietzsche concludes in his letter sayin§
that he did not need more than "Kant, Schopenhauer and this book of Lange."
We may assume that Plato was too obviously important to Nietzsche to be
included in this remark.

61
B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II. 61-71.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
62 PAUL J. M. VAN TONGEREN

Plato's connection to Kant, Schopenhauer, and the other nineteenth century

critics and interpreters of Kant is the problem of the relation between thought
and reality, or rather the problem of the relation between a conceptualized,
represented, perceived, or phenomenal reality to some true, real, or noumenal
reality. 4 Plato reduces the reality we perceive or represent to the domain of
appearance and doxa. This so-called reality is as ontologically insignificant, or
unreal, as are opinions and representations epistemologically deficient; that is,
the latter fall short from being genuine knowledge. From appearance he
distinguishes real reality which is the domain where thought and genuine
knowledge are possible. Two millennia of metaphysical attempts to obtain
knowledge of this real reality have produced a wild variety of theories that to
a certain extent contradict each other. Since the beginning of what we call
"modernity" there have been two new developments. On the one hand we see
the rise of empirical and experimental science which- because of its verifiabil-
ity (or at least falsifiability) and because of its practical use- seems to redeem
the promise of true genuine knowledge of a real reality more than any specula-
tive philosophy. On the other hand we see the renaissance of skepticism which,
precisely on the basis of empiricism, disputes the legitimacy of all philosophical
and scientific claims of knowledge. Science, after all, inevitably uses categories
that are preconditions for the possibility of experience, without these categories
themselves being empirically justified.
According to Plato, philosophy is the way to obtain genuine knowledge of the
real reality, a goal which can only be attained if one liberates oneself from the
illusions of empirical reality. Kant did legitimize knowledge of this empirical
reality, but this empirical reality, a phenomenal reality, he always distinguished
from reality as it is in itself. Although Kant showed that knowledge of this real
reality is impossible, it could, and even should, still be thought- and as such it
had a great practical significance. Schopenhauer, on the one hand, stressed the
illusory nature of phenomenal, representational reality and the impossibility of
ever obtaining genuine knowledge of reality in itself. The relation between
reality and the knower (implied in every cognition) cannot itself be a character-
istic of reality but only of knowing and thus of the knower. The same is true of
every cognitive relation and thus, as Nietzsche will say, of every quality or
property (KSA 12, 104 ): they cannot be attributed to reality as it is in itself. On
the other hand, Schopenhauer enlarged the possibility of reaching this real
reality both through a self-consciousness of willing, in which the distinction
between subject and object is overcome, and through a self-annihilating practice
of this will. By pointing to the phenomenal world as illusory, he suggests a
radicalization of the Kantian position. But in fact a reversal comes about
because it opens up the possibility of genuine knowledge of the thing-in-itself,
which is identified as the Will.
Without doubt Nietzsche falls in the tradition of these thinkers. One need
only read some sections from Nietzsche's first aphoristic book, Human All Too
Human, to see how much he is experimenting with Kant's distinction between
the phenomenal and noumenal, and Schopenhauer's interpretation of it. 5 But he
 NIETZSCHE'S SYMPTOMATOLOGY OF SKEPTICISM 63

is mainly engaged in criticizing the dogmatic tendencies in these critical

epistemological theories.
Dogmatic philosophy attempts to maintain something independent from the
perspectival, it seeks and relies on something which is not relative but is
absolute. For the most part, the history of philosophy consists in identifications
of this "absolute." Often these identifications are revealed through a more or
less skeptical "unmasking" of false claims. Nietzsche addresses specifically
those philosophers who are or were, by themselves or others, considered to be
pivotal; those philosophers who criticized prevailing and traditional doctrines
and dismissed them as being not knowledge but opinion, superstition, prejudice,
philosophers who sought through this critique a way to a genuine knowledge of
real reality. These include Plato's doctrine of the Forms from a critique of doxa,
Descartes' evidence of the cogito from the experimental doubt of all previous
knowledge, Kant's notion of a noumenal world from the critique of dogmatic
metaphysics, Schopenhauer's discovery of the will from a critique of Kant's
position, and Lange's materialism from a critique of Schopenhauer's metaphys-
ics of the Will. Nietzsche attempts to present their "genuine knowledge" as mere
belief and prejudice, to call into doubt their "certainty," to put in perspective
their "reality." By doing so he wants to show that even these supposedly
undogmatic thinkers are actually dogmatists. Along these lines, considering only
some of the examples from Beyond Good and Evil, we find him criticizing
Descartes' "I think" (BGE 16 and 191), Schopenhauer's "I will" (BGE 16 and
19), Plato's Form of the Good (BGE, Preface), Kant's critique of reason through
reason itself (BGE 11), Schelling's "intellectual intuition" (BGE 11), and so
forth. In addition to these rationalistic speculative philosophers, however,
Nietzsche also criticizes, and along the same lines, philosophical empiricists and
empirical scientists: Locke's innate ideas (BGE 20), the materialists who think
they can identify a final element of reality (BGE 12), and the physicists who
consider their laws of nature to be reality itself (BGE 14 and 22). It might be
significant that these examples are randomly mentioned in the first part of
Beyond Good and Evil. The differences between all these positions, their
chronological order, and their logical order are less important than what they
have in common: they all point to a principle by which genuine knowledge of
real reality is possible. Where they claim to identify a basic element of reality,
or a principle which allows for genuine knowledge, there Nietzsche will call
them superficial, superstitious, naive, dishonest, or just foolish.
Such a comprehensive criticism cannot but suggest a radical skepticism on
the side of the critic. Indeed we find this skepticism throughout all of
Nietzsche's works: from his earliest writings such as On Truth and Lies in A
Nonmoral Sense even until his latest writings such as, for example, the fable
about "How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth" in the Twilight of the
Idols.
64 PAUL J. M. VAN TONGEREN

NIETZSCHE'S SKEPTICISM

The main strategies of Nietzsche's skepticism are the arguments that the theory
of truth is a linguistic (metaphorical) construction with the aim of securing a
type of life, and that a naturalistic understanding of knowledge is produced by
the instincts and needs of the knower.
Language plays an important role in the external determination of thinking.
Indeed, that a verb presupposes a subject and that therefore an effect presup-
poses a cause is not an immediate insight but a "grammatical habit" (BGE 17-
16). Or, that to the single word "will" corresponds also a reality which is one is
not self-evident but a prejudice (BGE 19). Philosophies are dominated by
prejudicial grammatical schemes (BGE 20). This idea of the enormous influence
of language on our thinking and knowing, language itself being a product of
physiological needs, desires, and instincts, is a permanent theme in Nietzsche's
writings from the very beginning. In On Truth and Lies in A Nonmoral Sense he
points out that the intellect was the means through which the human being, this
weak animal, managed to become stronger than its enemies:

As a means for the preserving of the individual, the intellect unfolds its principle powers in
dissimulation, which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves
-since they have been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with horns or with the
sharp teeth of beasts of prey. (TL, 80)

We recognize what seems to be Nietzsche's starting point: the deceptive

nature of knowledge. Here Nietzsche was very much influenced by Schopen-
hauer's version of Kantianism. What for Kant counted as genuine knowledge,
though only knowledge of the phenomenal world, was for Schopenhauer
illusion. Nietzsche starts at this point and asks a new question: "Given this
situation, where in the world could the drive for truth have come from?" (TL,
80).
Nietzsche's answer takes away the paradox which is suggested by the
question through an interpretation of truth from this same framework: truth is
itself a product of this deceptive intellect. It is not so much something for which
the intellect strives, or which it considers to be its judge. Rather truth was made,
created by this intellect, and thus has its own deceptive characteristics. In the
bellum omnium contra omnes, the human being needs an instrument for peaceful
coexistence. Hence, language is invented as a means of stability, and truth is the
agreed upon meaning of words. Whoever uses the words in another way is con-
sidered a liar, and will be excluded from society. Truth is therefore a completely
arbitrary thing; it is the consensus, the agreement which alone is important.
Language is not at all "the adequate expression of all realities" (TL, 81 ).
Words are stabilized and standardized sounds which are originally metaphorical
translations of images that are in turn the metaphorical translations of nerve-
impulses. They certainly cannot be called images of "reality," though one can
neither deny that they are. Words say more about the organism which was
affected by "reality" than about this reality itself. These original words become
concepts through a further adaptation, that is, through making equal what is not
 NIETZSCHE'S SYMPTOMATOLOGY OF SKEPTICISM 65

equal and through forgetting about the individual and particular. These concepts
and abstractions become, then, the elements with which the human being starts
to think about reality! All structure and "intelligibility" that we discover in
reality are discovered with the help of this language of words and concepts;
thus, they are a creation of man. "Genuine knowledge" uses language according
to conventions and reproduces these conventions in ever more interpretations.
Since we always think within the constraints of language (KSA 12, 193-4),
and since language is the product of some type of life, we can understand the
thoughts of the philosophers as symptoms of the type of life that expresses itself
in them. This is what Nietzsche does when he criticizes "the philosophers" (and
it explains why for Nietzsche the differences between many of the thinkers from
the history of philosophy are less interesting than the similarities; cf. BGE 20).
Genealogy is the name of Nietzsche's method of reading philosophical and
scientific theories suspiciously, reading them as symptoms of the kind of life
that expresses itself in them. The faith in opposite values emerges only from a
"frog perspective" (BGE 2), logic is dominated by the physiological demand for
the preservation of a certain type of life (BGE 3), sensualism gives witness of
a plebeian taste (BGE 14), and so forth. Philosophers are guided by their
dominating instincts (BGE 6) which determine the type of life they represent.
This genealogy characterizes Nietzsche once again as a skeptic insofar as it
undermines the truth-claims ofthe theories. Nietzsche's critique of the epistemic
claims of the philosophers consists to a large extent in his showing the psychol-
ogical and physiological demands from which the epistemic claims descend. He
replaces "the Kantian question, 'How are synthetic judgments a priori possi-
ble?' by another question, 'Why is belief in such judgments necessary?"' (BGE
11). He tries to comprehend why "creatures like ourselves" need to believe in
the truth of such judgments (ibid.), that is, what type of life we represent. A
genealogical analysis always fights the interpretations which pretend to be the
truth and it shows that they are merely perspectival interpretations. It fights their
claims to being self-evidently true, beyond discussion, necessary, and eternal.
It exposes them as descended from a certain type of life, as mere possibilities
next to which other interpretations are possible. The history of a phenomenon
is the history of overpowering interpretations. There is not one "true" meaning.
There is not even one phenomenon: the phenomenon to be interpreted is itself
already an interpretation. What exists is merely a series of interpretations of
which the presently prevailing one is just one possibility: "facts is precisely
what there is not, only interpretations" (WP 481; KSA 12, 315).

NIETZSCHE'S SYMPTOMATOLOGY OF SKEPTICISM

There seems to be enough evidence to consider Nietzsche a skeptic, though in

an ambiguous way. On the one hand he seems to suggest that knowledge is
impossible because our categories, concepts, and words always stand between
us and reality. They place our human all too human needs between the knower
and reality. The instruments with which we try to acquire knowledge obstruct
our very access. On the other hand Nietzsche seems so radically to abandon the
66 PAUL J. M. VAN TONGEREN

whole concept of reality that even its opposite, "appearance," is abolished. I

mentioned already a famous passage from the Twilight of the Idols in which
Nietzsche summarizes in six steps the history of metaphysics, according to him
"The History of an Error." In the first four steps we find characterizations of
Plato, Christianity, Kant and positivism; that is, characterizations of the real
world as, respectively, "unattainable to the wise," "unattainable for the
moment," "unattainable (in the sense of) undemonstrable," and "Unattained, at
any rate. And if unattained also unknown." After these first four steps, an
additional two steps follow which are in fact stages of Nietzsche's own
development, and in which even skepticism is left behind. Step five describes
the free spirit, and the last step reads:

6. The true world-we have abolished. What world has remained~ The apparent one perhaps? But
no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest
shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) (Tl, 486)

If there is no reality then it is not even possible to deny the possibility of

knowledge, at least if knowledge strives for adequacy to reality. 6 Thus there are
two different ways of denying the possibility of knowledge in Nietzsche, one of
which has the form of a skeptical epistemology, the other the form of a
metaphysical me-ontology, a logos which says that there is no being (me on).
Both seem to be susceptible to self-refutation (how does the skeptic "know"
about the truth of his skeptical claims, and what does it mean that there "is" no
reality?), and moreover they seem to contradict each other (how could one deny
the possibility of acquiring knowledge of a reality whose existence is denied?).
Instead of discussing these difficulties as such, 7 we will only contribute to such
a discussion by paying attention to what Nietzsche himself says about skepti-
cism in an important sequence of sections from Beyond Good and Evil.
Nowhere in his writings does Nietzsche treat skepticism as systematically as
he does in sections 208-211 of Beyond Good and Evil (part 6). Here we find not
so much the presentation of Nietzsche's ambiguous epistemological position,
but rather the symptomatological description of an opposition between two
types of skeptics. Nietzsche distinguishes them not so much in epistemological
terms, but rather according to the qualities of their lives, as weak and strong
types of life. The way in which he characterizes both will reveal their suscepti-
bility to self-refutation, though in an unexpected way. Weak skepticism, it turns
out, is a hidden denial of the skeptical denial of truth. Strong skepticism, on the
other hand, is a creative affirmation of this idea of the absence of truth. Section
208 criticizes a certain type of skepticism (weak). 209 describes the possibility
of another kind of skepticism (strong). 210-211 indicate how this latter
skepticism will be realized in the philosopher of the future.

WEAK SKEPTICISM

Nietzsche's critique of skepticism in section 208 follows the framework of a

depiction of the type of philosopher that is held in high regard in our days, as we
find in sections 204-207. The contemporary philosopher attempts to appear as
 NIETZSCHE'S SYMPT0.\1ATOLOGY OF SKEPTICISM 67

scientific as possible. He searches for a scientific kind of objectivity. And when

he is not doing simply scientific work, he primarily deals with epistemology:

Philosophy reduced to 'theory of knowledge,' in fact no more than a timid epochism and doctrine
of abstinence- a philosophy that never gets beyond the threshold and takes pains to deny itself the
right to enter- that is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony, something inspiring pity.
(BGE 204)

Nietzsche speaks of "abstinence" because this philosopher abstains from

being a person. As a person he tries to stay outside of his knowledge. He wants
only to be "a mirror" (BGE 207), not a judge. The most distressing picture
Nietzsche gives of this objectively oriented spirit is in the chapter "The Leech"
in part four of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra stumbles over what turns out
to be a man who is lying stretched out at the edge of a swamp, with his arm in
the swamp. He studies the leeches that are biting his arm. He presents himself
to Zarathustra in the following words:

I am the conscientious in spirit,' replied the man; 'and in matters of the spirit there may well be
none stricter, narrower, and harder than I( ... )
'Rather know nothing than half-know much! ( ... )A hand's breadth of ground- on that one can
stand. In the conscience of science there is nothing great and nothing small.'
'Then perhaps you are the man who knows the leech?' Zarathustra asked. ( ... )
'0 Zarathustra,' replied the man who had been stepped on, 'that would be an immensity; how
could I presume so much! That of which I am the master and expert is the brain of the leech: that
is my world. ( ... )Here is my realm. For its sake I have thrown away everything else; for its sake
everything else has become indifferent to me; and close to my knowledge lies black my ignorance.
( ... )
'Where my honesty ceases, I am blind and I also want to be blind.' (Z IV, Leech)

It is this attitude which Nietzsche calls skepticism, even if it would call itself
'"objectivity,' 'being scientific,' 'l'art pour l'art,' 'pure knowledge, free of
will'" (BGE 208). This may sound odd unless we keep in mind the fact that
Nietzsche does not point to one specific philosophical position but to an attitude
that can be recognized in several positions. Whether it is Descartes' feeling of
being forced by the evidence of the cogito, Kant's or Schopenhauer' s disinter-
ested knowledge, or the positivism of Nietzsche's contemporaries, the attitude
of abstention from one's own personality is similar in every case. This attitude
limits its own epistemic claims to what can be established by observation. And
Nietzsche suggests that this attitude is a symptom of an illness which he
diagnoses as "nervous exhaustion and sickliness" or "paralysis of the will"
(BGE 208). What kind of an illness is this, and what is its cause?
A reference to ancient skepticism might be helpful here. Anciently, skepti-
cism was primarily an ethical doctrine, aiming at inner peace or tranquillity of
the mind. Skepticism was a means to liberation from unrest. Nietzsche compares
it with a poppy and he calls it a "soporific and sedative" (ibid.). The desire for
rest is always a symptom of a disease. It indicates someone's suffering from
something which causes unrest. It is not the unrest which is the disease, but this
particular reaction to it: the inability or unwillingness to sustain it.
68 PAUL J. M. VAN TONGEREN

The physiological basis of this disease is according to Nietzsche the "radical

mixture of classes, and hence races" (ibid.) in Europe today. Classes and races
always refer in Nietzsche's writings to a physiological and societal way of
valuing. For Nietzsche the situation in Europe since the nineteenth century is
characterized by this mixture in which a plurality of cultures with different ways
of living, different tastes, beliefs, and convictions is gathered. The "obligation
for everybody to read his newspaper with his breakfast" (ibid.) is typical of this
mixed culture in which all different kinds of worlds appear in an indifferent
melange. The skepticism which Nietzsche describes as a reaction to this
situation is a kind of relativism. For Nietzsche it is related to parliamentarism
and democracy (BGE 208, 210), and it also indicates a decadence. Why?
Confronted with many possibilities, the decadent person no longer knows
what to do, what to believe, what to will. When there are many truths, he con-
cludes then that nothing is true. But if nothing is true, or truly worthwhile,
convincing, appealing, then nothing really matters anymore! This is what
Nietzsche calls nihilism. For some people, the decadent ones, this implies that
it becomes impossible to really will anything. For them, this nihilism and its
consequences are frightful, and therefore the latter are concealed in a pretended
scientific and objective attitude. One withdraws one's own person from one's
own knowledge. One only describes or establishes the facts, without ever
judging. By disconnecting himself from his knowledge, the skeptic need not be
affected by the discovery of the absence of truth. The fear of nihilism is lulled
into a sleep through skepticism.
Positivism is the concealment of skepticism which is itself the concealment
of the inability to recognize and fully acknowledge that there is no truth. By
declaring that reality cannot be known, the positivistic skeptic maintains belief
in a real world, in a true (but unknowable) reality. He ceases to seek for the truth
in order to prevent his discovering that there is no truth. He clings to the "true"
world by forbidding himself the entrance into it.
Ancient skepticism was an instrument to save morality in changing conditions
and times of growing uncertainty. It seems as if for Nietzsche that history is
repeating itself: weak skepticism is an instrument to save morality and religion
in modem times, against the alarming consequences of "the greatest recent event
-that 'God is dead'" (GS 343), of which the disappearance of truth is only one
of its manifestations. Though skepticism might be "anti-Christian," it certainly
is not "anti-religious" (BGE 54).
It is hard to ignore at this point the moral basis of Nietzsche's critique of this
skepticism. By removing the person, her personality, her morality, and so forth,
from her knowledge she makes this knowledge hostile to life. Nietzsche calls
this skepticism a "vampire" or a bloodsucking "spider" (BGE 209), evoking the
image of the "conscientious spirit" from Zarathustra with his arm in the swamp.
The science or the philosophy which this person develops will be hostile to life,
and so will be the morality and the religion that she maintains with this
skepticism.
 NIETZSCHE'S SYMPTOMATOLOGY OF SKEPTICISM 69

A FUTURE SKEPTICISM

There is, however, also another type of skepticism which can be introduced by
a quote from The Antichrist:

One should not be deceived: great spirits are sceptics. Zarathustra is a sceptic. Strength,Jreedom
which of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction
are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue.
Convictions are prisons.( ... ) A spirit who wants great things, who also wants the means to them,
is necessarily a sceptic. (A, 54)

In sections 209-211 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche describes this other
form of skepticism. But it is not easy to understand what exactly it is. He calls
it "another and stronger type," a "more dangerous and harder new type," "the
skepticism of audacious manliness," "the German form of skepticism" (all209).
What does this all mean?
In these sections of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche describes this form of
skepticism in two different ways with the help of antitheses. In section 209 there
is an antithesis within the skeptical attitude itself. And in sections 210 and 211
skepticism forms itself an antithesis to other characteristics of the new philoso-
pher.

This skepticism despises and nevertheless seizes; it undermines and takes possession; it does not
believe but does not lose itself in the process; it gives the spirit dangerous freedom, but it is severe
on the heart; (BGE 209)

Four times we see a version of the antithetical combination of skeptical

criticism on the one hand and engagement on the other. The skeptic that is
depicted here despises moral and religious convictions, but still will try to
master them. He has no faith; yet, he does not get lost in the despair about
everything being meaningless. He does not have any convictions but yet is not
indifferent. On the contrary, he engages in all kinds of passionate experiments.
The description remains enigmatic. Neither is the riddle solved by the other
characteristics which Nietzsche mentions: "an intrepid eye, ... the courage and
hardness of analysis, ... the tough will to undertake dangerous journeys of
exploration and spiritualized North Pole expeditions under desolate and
dangerous skies" (ibid.)
It is obvious that the first quoted description mentions four characteristics of
the skeptical attitude (despise, undermining, disbelief, freedom) and combines
them with something which one would not expect in this framework: commit-
ment, interest, measure, discipline. In the second quoted passage this antithetical
part seems to come to the forefront: perseverance, courage, hardness, tenacity.
These antithetical parts are in a preeminent way opposed to the weak skepti-
cism, or to the illness and the symptoms it conceals: tiredness, weakness of the
will, vulnerability, desire for rest, etc.
The opposition becomes even stronger in section 210. But now the anti-
skeptical characteristics are not presented as part of this strong kind of skepti-
cism, but as elements which characterize the philosophers of the future (in
70 PAUL J. M. VAN TONGEREN

addition to their being skeptical). They will be skeptics and critics, experiment-
ers, passionate seekers; they use evaluative criteria, they hold a rigorous
method, are courageous, are able to justify, etc.
These characteristics of the philosopher of the future show once more the
problem of the weak skeptics. Their skepticism prevented them from making
commitments. Because there is no truth and thus no true criteria, they cannot
judge. Because nothing is really worthwhile, they cannot engage with anything.
Because of the absence of truth, they cannot really seek for knowledge. How
could they be accountable if there is no basis for any justification? This
relativism which is unable to make any commitment must become hypocritical
and hide itself behind moral virtues ("tolerance") and behind scientific values
("objectivity") to protect itself against its own nihilism.
But this confirmation of the diagnosis of the weak skeptic is only a negative
result. We still do not know how Nietzsche's other skepticism is possible? How
can this other skeptic be anything else besides skeptical? How can she escape
from nihilism? How can she seek knowledge, knowing that there is no truth?
Let's summarize what we have discussed up to now. In terms of the Kantian
distinction, Nietzsche radicalizes the unknowability of the thing-in-itself- with
the help of a theory of the relation between life, language, and knowledge -
until the real reality disappears and the distinction between reality and appear-
ance is neutralized. In his genealogical analyses he criticizes the philosophers
because of their dogmatism which presents itself in two seemingly opposed
ways: in the claim for genuine knowledge of a real (really existing and
intelligible) reality, and in the positivistic concealment of a skeptical-relativistic
denial of the possibility of such knowledge. Nietzsche shows that such
prejudices or unconsciously determining forces exist behind each and every
epistemic claim, indicating that it is not reality which is represented but the
reflection of the knower. Skepticism, however, is also criticized because its
thesis - that reality is not to be known - is just a means to maintain the belief
in the existence of reality. Episternic claims and skepticism are both explained
from a sick and weak life which tries to protect itself by clinging to this real
reality.
Nietzsche's position from which he criticizes dogmatists and skeptics alike
is itself skeptical to some extent: he attempts to show the illegitimacy of their
open or concealed claims for knowledge. The radicalness of his critique,
however, sometimes makes him go beyond skepticism into a "metaphysics"
which denies any kind of "real" world. But even without discussing his
"metaphysics" of the will to power, we may assume that we are not to identify
Nietzsche with his critique of other positions. He distances himself explicitly
from the popular idea of nowadays that

"Philosophy itself is criticism and critical science - and nothing whatever besides." This
evaluation of philosophy may elicit applause from all the positivists of France and Germany (and
it might even have pleased the heart and taste of Kant [ ... J); our new philosophers will say
nevertheless: critics are instruments of the philosopher and for that very reason, being instruments,
a long way from being philosophers themselves." (BGE 210)
 NIETZSCHE'S SYMPTOMATOLOGY OF SKEPTICISM 71

We should, however, also not forget that these "new philosophers" are not yet
present today. They are needed (BGE 211). One of the reasons for the typical
"postponing" characteristic of Nietzsche's descriptions of the new philosophers
might be that these philosophers are at the same time involved in two conflicting
activities. On the one hand they are beyond skepticism in their recognition that
there is not even a real world of which one could even want to obtain genuine
knowledge. And on the other hand they are engaged in a passionate experiment
and a creative evaluation as if they did not feel any urge for doubt or suspension
of judgement (epoche). The realization of this contradiction cannot but be
postponed to a future to which Nietzsche only gives us a prelude.

Kath. Univ. Nijmegen, The Netherlands

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For a further elaboration of the metaphysical and epistemological framework of Nietzsche's

skepticism, see chapter III of my Reinterpreting Modern Culture: An Introduction to Friedrich
Nietzsche's Philosophy (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1999). For the correction of my
English, I am much indebted to David Jensen (UCLA).

NOTES
1 See Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, Preface.
2 Cf. Matte Hossenfelder, "Skepsis," Handbuch Philosophischer Grundbegriffe, (Munich:
Hanser, 1974), Bd. III, 1359-1367, p. 1359.
3 Letter from November 1866, quoted from: C.P. Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche. Biographie. vol. I,
~Munich/Vienna: Hanser Verlag, 1978), p.l98.
Illustrative in this respect are the titles of some of the main writings of nineteenth century
thinkers who were read by Nietzsche. E.g., Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
(Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung). A. Sp:1r's most important book is Thinking and Reality
(Denken und Wirklichkeit) (1873). See also 0. Liebmann, On the Analysis of Reality (Zur Analysis
der Wirklichkeit) (1880) and Thoughts and Facts (Gedanken und Tatsachen) (1882).
5 SeeforexampleHuman,All-Too-Human,I,9-II, 16, 19.
6 And Nietzsche does not abandon this conception of truth as adequacy. See the excellent article
on Nietzsche's concept of truth by Rudiger Bittner: "Nietzsches Begriff der Wahrheit," Nietzsche-
Studien, 16 (1987): 70-90.
7 The problems indicated here are thoroughly elaborated in Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and
Metaphysics, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
 ROBIN SMALL

WE SENSUALISTS

"Today all of us are sensualists," Nietzsche writes in Book Five of The Gay
Science.' This striking assertion provides a signal for a set of problems
concerning knowledge or, more particularly, the relation between knowledge
and life. Nietzsche had been concerned with these questions for a long time, but
only after Thus Spake Zarathustra did he define them in the ways that provide
the theme of this discussion. As his thinking found its own path more and more,
Nietzsche moved decisively away from the pessimism and romanticism which
had earlier influenced him, and gained a new appreciation of the philosophers
of the French Enlightenment, even describing their sensualism and hedonism as
the "best inheritance" available to his own century. 2 Hence, for example, his
suggestion that the credit for Stendhal, in his opinion the greatest French writer
of the nineteenth century, must go to "the best, most rigorous philosophical
school in Europe, that of Condillac and Destutt de Tracy." 3 The term "sensual-
ist," as used here, refers in the first instance to these thinkers who, proceeding
from the empiricism of Locke, attempted to derive all ideas from elementary
sensations. (Hence the alternative expression, "sensationalism.") It does not
imply a preoccupation with sensual pleasure, although the English word may be
used most often in that sense. 4 On the other hand, it can hardly be denied that
any moral philosophy which finds its basic evidence in sensation will be
naturally inclined towards hedonism, or at least utilitarianism. Less evident, but
equally seen in these French writers, is the affinity between sensualism and a
materialist interpretation of human nature.
Nietzsche is aware of these points, but his own concern with sensualism is
prompted by its relevance to the problem of knowledge: he considers it as a
respect for the worth of the evidence of the senses. Quite apart from his
announcement that "we" are all sensualists, it might be assumed that Nietzsche
is clearly a supporter of this view. Even at an earlier stage, he described his
thinking as an "inverted Platonism." 5 For it not only refuses to devalue
appearance in favour of some reality which is accessible to thought alone, but
asserts that the further we depart from "being," the more we encounter what is
beautiful and valuable. Is this what his endorsement of sensualism in the
passage just cited means? The main concern of the section is to draw a contrast
between certain "new" philosophers of today - the "fearless ones" of Book
Five's title- and the thinkers of the past, in terms of their relation to the senses.

73
B. Babich (ed. ), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II. 73-89.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
74 ROBIN SMALL

Nietzsche writes: "Formerly philosophers were afraid of the senses. Have we

perhaps unlearned this fear too much? Today we are all sensualists, we
philosophers of the present and future, not in theory but in praxis, in practice."
The older philosophers, he explains, were afraid of the senses as these might be
compared to the music of the sirens which lured travellers to their death. Now
we recognise the danger of an abstract thinking which removes the life from the
world. Such idealism is like a disease; yet in Plato's case idealism was perhaps
just the opposite: "the caution of an over-rich and dangerous health, the fear of
over-powerful senses." On that assumption, he concludes, our own untroubled
acceptance of sensualism may testify to the weakness of our senses rather than
to the strength of our character.
Some of the complexities in this theme are signalled by the distinction
Nietzsche wants to make between theoretical and practical versions of sensual-
ism. How can one be a sensualist in practice, but not in theory? If this were said
of sensualism in the common sense, it would be something like a charge of
hypocrisy. Even with the different meaning Nietzsche intends, there is a
suspicion of inconsistency in his position, assuming that one expects theory and
practice to correspond to each other. Taking this puzzle as a starting-point for
our discussion, I shall explore three particular issues raised by the theme of
sensualism. The first is about the association of sensualism with materialism,
recognised by Nietzsche as a dominating influence in modern science. There
again an ambiguity in his attitude is already apparent, and it will be seen that the
two cases throw light on each other. The second problem concerns the relation
between the vocabulary of the senses and the categories of objective knowledge,
understood as defined by the demands of scientific method. Whether the two can
be made consistent with each other, or even connected in useful ways, is one
puzzle addressed by Nietzsche which remains in philosophical debate today.
Finally, I shall look at Nietzsche's approach to the special cases of pleasure and
pain, and the place of these feelings within a general theory of the senses. The
further question there is whether sensualism and hedonism do go together, as
has often been supposed, or whether, as Nietzsche seems to think, such an
assumption reveals a misunderstanding of the nature of pleasure and pain.

SENSUALISM AND MATERIALISM

Running through Nietzsche's published and unpublished writings is a dialogue

with scientific materialism which cannot be resolved into either straightforward
sympathy or straightforward hostility. It is true that he often expresses himself
as a seeming opponent of mechanism, particularly in The Gay Science, where
he writes:

A "scientific" interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might even be one of the most
stupid, that is, poorest in meaning (sinn-iirmsten ), of all possible interpretations of the world. This
thought is intended for the ears and consciences of our mechanists who nowadays like to pass as
philosophers and insist that mechanics is a doctrine of the first and last laws on which all existence
must be based as on a ground floor. But an essentially mechanistic world would be an essentially
meaningless (sinnlose) world. Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according
 WE SENSUALISTS 75

to how much of it could be counted, calculated and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such
a "scientific" estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, known
of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is "music" in it! 6

In the immediately preceding section, cited earlier, Nietzsche had emphasised

the power of the senses, comparing their attraction to the seductive music of the
sirens. Here he makes the same link, but in the other direction: the qualities of
music which determine its meaning and value are accessible only through the
senses. In other words, music is essentially sensual, a reality that lies in
appearance. Nietzsche does not say this, however: he chooses to express himself
in terms of cognition, referring to "understanding" and its object, "meaning."
This agrees with the earlier part of the section, which criticises natural science
for eliminating the "ambiguous character" of reality; yet the example given
seems rather to be directed against a subordination of the senses to the under-
standing.
Turning to a typical expression of sympathy with materialism, one finds
Nietzsche declaring his agreement with the mechanistic movement of the
present day, "tracing back all moral and aesthetic questions to physiological
ones, all physiological questions to chemical ones, all chemical questions to
mechanical ones" -but with an important reservation: "that I do not believe in
'matter' ." 7 This difference is closely bound up with the issue of sensualism. The
physical theory of Boscovich, which replaces substantial extended atoms with
unextended "points of matter" is, Nietzsche says, "the greatest triumph over the
senses that has been gained so far," comparable only with that of Copernicus,
who overcame the seeming certainty of sense experience in proving that the
earth does not stand fast. 8 Nietzsche's reading in natural science had convinced
him that the dynamic physics of Boscovich, recently renewed in Faraday's
development of the new science of electricity, would replace materialism in its
older form. Neither Boscovich's "points of matter" nor Faraday's "centers of
force" could be identified with the solid particles of Boyle's atomism; but more
importantly, neither could be pictured by analogy with the familiar objects of
everyday experience, known through the senses.
For Nietzsche, the question about sensualism as a theory of knowledge is also
a question about materialism, as these examples demonstrate. For materialism
is the world interpretation which gives these concepts a systematic form and
asserts their sole validity in explaining phenomena. We may note two main
sources for his interest in materialism. The first is its oldest and, for him, purest
version in the thought of Democritus. Possibly this arose from his work on
Diogenes Laertius, but some aspects of the thought and personality of Demo-
critus, as Nietzsche reconstructed or imagined them to be, appealed to him at an
early stage of his career. And that sympathy continued: in Daybreak, Nietzsche
nominates Democritus as the high point of natural philosophy in the classical
age- corresponding to Sophocles in poetry, Pericles in politics, Thucydides in
history, and Hippocrates in medicine. 9 Democritus represents an advance
beyond his nearest predecessors, in that he achieves for the first time an account
of natural phenomena which makes no use of mythology. Empedocles and
Anaxagoras had come close to this, but in each case had retained a certain
76 ROBIN SMALL

element of teleology within their systems, in the nous of Anaxagoras and the
"love" and "hate" of Empedocles. Democritus alone is fully consistent in that
he admits only concepts that refer to what is visible and tangible. These ideas
were revived by modern atomism, to such an extent that Nietzsche could
describe Democritus as "the only philosopher that is still alive." 10
The other main source for Nietzsche's preoccupation with materialism is F.A.
Lange's History of Materialism, which he read shortly after its first publication
in 1866 and at many later times. The importance of this work for Nietzsche has
been described at length by several commentators. 11 A sympathetic critic, Lange
gives full credit to the contributions of the materialist standpoint in both
philosophy and science, while in the end rejecting it in favour of a Kantian
idealism. According to Lange, the great appeal of materialism lies in its use of
the vocabulary of the senses:

Materialism trusts the senses. Even its metaphysics is formed by analogy with the world of
experience. Its atoms are small corpuscles. Certainly one cannot represent them as small as they
are, because that goes beyond human perception, but one can represent them by analogy, as if one
were seeing and feeling them. 12

Although materialism, from Democritus onward, denies that qualities such

as colour, taste and sound are objective features of the world, its conception of
reality is nevertheless formulated in the categories of two senses: vision and
touch. It postulates atoms which move and interact, combine and separate,
exerting force upon one another by pressure and impact (Druck und Stoss). 13
This is the Democritean model of nature which, although modified and
supplemented in various ways, has been the most durable of all scientific
theories.
Lange's influence can be seen in Beyond Good and Evil, written at the same
time as Book Five of The Gay Science. Here Nietzsche seems at first sight quite
unsympathetic to sensualism. He follows Lange in suggesting that the success
of mechanism in gaining public acceptance is, to a large extent, due to its
affinity with sensualism. He speculates on growing support for a new concep-
tion of physical science as an interpretation or exegesis of the world, determined
by practical interests rather than by the authority of objective truth. The fact
remains that mechanistic science is commonly regarded as providing an
explanation of the natural world, and this is because it is "based on belief in the
senses."

It has eyes and fingers in its favour, it has visual evidence and palpableness in its favour; this
strikes an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes as fascinating, persuasive and convincing- after
all, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternally popular sensualism. What is clear. what
can be "explained"? Only what can be seen and felt - every problem has to be pursued to that
point. 14

For this reason. Nietzsche concludes, mechanism may be an appropriate

philosophy for crude and unefined personalities. In contrast, the charm of the
Platonic way of thinking consisted precisely in its resistance to immediate
sense-evidence, and this asceticism suited it for a period of noble natures ..
 WE SENSUALISTS 77

In the next section of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche continues to discuss
sensualism, but in a completely different way: this time in refutation of an
argument which uses the evidence of the senses to prove the inadequacy of
philosophical materialism. Nietzsche's target here, although unnamed, is clearly
Lange; for the position addressed is one adopted by Lange in the course of his
critique of materialism. We may summarise his main line of thought, rather
briefly, along the following lines. Lange gives full credit to the materialist
contribution: the many successes of modem science arise from a research
program whose aims and methods are inspired by the Democritean doctrine that
"nothing exists but atoms and empty space: everything else is mere opinion."
Yet this reductionist orientation reveals both the strength and the weakness of
atomism. For despite all its advances, natural science has never explained the
occurrence of even the simplest sensation. There seems to be an unbridgeable
gap between material motion and consciousness, and this failure to account for
an entire domain of reality makes philosophical materialism an untenable
doctrine.
Even if this problem were somehow solved, Lange argues, there would be
another fatal objection to materialism. When natural science turns its attention
to the human subject and its capacity for gaining knowledge, a surprising
outcome is seen. The science of physiology points to idealism by demonstrating
that the senses cannot be regarded as providing an accurate picture of the real
character of the world. Lange endorses Helmholtz's theory that all perception
involves a hidden process of inference from what is given to the senses. 15
Hence, scientific theory confirms the Kantian claim that the world as we
perceive and understand it is a product of our own organisation. Even our own
bodies and their organs, Lange concludes, are pictures of something that
transcends our knowledge and must remain unknown to us.

Just as it was once amazingly difficult for people to think of this fixed earth on which we stand,
the prototype of rest and stability, as moving, so it will be even harder for them to recognise their
own body, the prototype of all reality for them, as a mere scheme of representation, a product of
our optical apparatus, which must be distinguished from the object that occasions it as much as
any other representational picture. 16

Thus, the bodily senses too are only representations, like the objects of the
outside world: "The eye, with which we believe we see, is only a product of our
ideas." 17
It is this line of thought that inspires the admiration expressed in Beyond
Good and Evil for those contemporary thinkers who are bold enough to deny the
reality of the whole world of appearance. Nietzsche says they "rank the
credibility of their own bodies about as low as the credibility of the visual
evidence that 'the earth stands still,' and thus, apparently in good humour, let
their securest possession go (for in what does one at present believe more firmly
than in one's body?)" 18 But this praise is soon followed by a firm rebuttal of any
scepticism concerning the body:
78 ROBIN SMALL

To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist that the sense organs are not
appearances in the sense of idealistic philosophy; as such they could not be causes' Sensualism,
therefore, at least as a regulative hypothesis, not to say as a heuristic principle. 19

Nietzsche goes on to state a reductio ad absurdum objection to the proposi-

tion that the external world is the work of our organs: since our bodily organs
are themselves part of this external world, they would have to be their own
causes- an apparent philosophical absurdity.
In the previous section, sensualism was identified with "belief in the senses."
Now it is characterised as a regulative or heuristic principle- a very different
matter. This is clearly another version of the distinction between sensualism as
a theory and as a practice. In the first case, there is a dogmatic commitment to
the truth of the doctrine; in the second, it is used as a guideline which directs the
course of inquiry without anticipating its outcomes. What this might mean in
practice is indicated in Twilight of the Idols: "Today we possess science
precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the
senses - to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm them, and have
learned to think them through to the end." 20 Spelled out in this way, an
affirmation of the importance of the senses is turned into a vigorous research
program, one that improves its techniques of observation and makes the best
theoretical use of their findings.
What then is the outlook of the practical sensualists? Their intention is to
achieve a better, more detailed and accurate description of natural processes,
"perfecting the image of becoming" rather than pretending to grasp its underly-
ing causes. 21 They treat the senses not as an authority for conviction, but as a
source of provisional hypotheses. For the senses themselves do not contain the
interpretations we impose upon them, as Nietzsche explains in commenting on
the philosophical tradition which postulates a "true" world separate from that
of appearance. These idealists, he says, repudiated the world of the senses
because they could not endure the facts of growth and decay, of birth and death.
Heraclitus was right in opposing this prejudice with a reaffirmation of becom-
ing, but he fell into a similar error concerning the senses.

Heraclitus too did the senses an injustice. They lie neither in the way the Eleatics believed, nor as
he believed- they do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies;
for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. "Reason'' is the
cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. 22

Thus, rather unexpectedly, Nietzsche seems to be saying that most people are
sensualists in theory but not in practice. For while they trust the evidence of the
senses, they are not committed to developing this approach to knowledge as far
as it can go. In that case, they are unlikely to encounter the problem to be
addressed in the next part of our discussion. The distinction between primary
and secondary properties, already present in early Greek thought, has been a
prominent theme in modem philosophy from Locke onwards. Empirical
knowledge encourages us to make this distinction, in order to establish a single
scheme of categories which will cover the greatest possible range of phenom-
 WE SEJ\SUALISTS 79

ena. If this does not lead to the general scepticism inferred by Lange, it does
pose the problem of relating a scientific description of reality to the evidence of
the senses. Nietzsche's reflections on this issue are scattered and incomplete, but
they also bear on some important themes in his thought.

QUANTITY AND QUALITY

Sharp differences between the various presentations of Nietzsche's thought of

eternal return have always puzzled commentators. One principal form of the
doctrine uses a vocabulary taken from natural science. It portrays the world as
a configuration of basic elements, and so understands recurrence as a reappear-
ance of the same configuration of elements. The other version uses the ordinary
language of human experience. In one notebook he writes, "Everything has
returned: Sirius and the spider and your thoughts in this hour and this thought
of yours that everything returns." 23 This passage is cited by Martin Heidegger
as evidence that a quasi-scientific reading of Nietzsche is of little value. He
comments, "Since when are 'thoughts' and 'hours' objects of physics or
biology?" 24 This is not a request for information, I take it, but a dismissive
statement. Heidegger thinks that scientific thinking is irrelevant to the doctrine
of recurrence, at least as it is of philosophical importance.
Nietzsche's interest in scientific theories, a feature of his thinking at every
stage, finds little or no response in Heidegger. The text quoted occurs in the
same notebook as an extensive series of notes on the scientific significance of
eternal return. That suggests that the incongruity which Heidegger is assuming
was not so evident to Nietzsche himself. For the ancient Greek thinkers he
admired over later philosophers, divisions such as that between "ethical" and
"cosmological" ideas - a commonplace in Nietzsche interpretation since
Simmel' s lectures - did not exist.
Oddly enough, the problem we are concerned with here is hinted at in what
seems to be Nietzsche's first reference to the notion of eternal return, in his
"untimely meditation" on history. There he writes:

Fundamentally what was possible once could only be possible a second time if the Pythagoreans
were right in believing that with the same com.tellation of the heavenly bodies the same events had
to be repeated on earth down to each small detail: so that whenever the stars have a certain relation
to each other a Stoic will join with an Epicurean and murder Caesar, and ever again with a
different configuration Columbus will discover America. 25

It is clear enough that Nietzsche does not accept the picture he attributes to
the Pythagoreans. He does not seem Ito doubt that the same constellation of the
heavenly bodies might occur again, although this assumption had been
questioned by some critics of astrology, such as the fourteenth-century natural
philosopher Nicole Oresme?6 Rather, what Nietzsche doubts is whether such an
event would lead to a return of the corresponding events of human history. But
this raises the same issue that faces his own later doctrine. Even the terminology
is very similar: the question is whether the same "constellation" of points of
force would condition a return of the same things and their properties "down to
80 ROBIN SMALL

the smallest detail." 27 Again, it is the relation between these two sets of concepts
that constitutes the problem. How does the language of scientific knowledge
translate into a discourse which we can recognise as an expression of our own
experience?
On looking more closely at Nietzsche's own vocabulary, we see that he
speaks of properties (Eigenschaften) and of qualities (Qualitiiten) in quite
different ways. In discussing the world as a collection of elements, Nietzsche
asserts that their properties are to be identified with their relations to other
things. The sum of a thing's relation to other things he calls its "state" (Lage).
"The state in which people find themselves, in relation to nature and other
people, makes their properties- it is the same as with atoms." 28 The world as
a whole has a "general state" (Gesammtlage) which is just the totality of the
relations between its elements. This idea figures prominently in some discus-
sions of eternal recurrence. When Nietzsche speaks of the world as consisting
of "centers of force" rather than the solid atoms of mechanistic materialism, he
uses the word "constellation" - as in the earlier reference to the stars and planets
-to designate the overall configuration of these centers at any given time.
Properties are closely linked with the project of a systematic formulation of
knowledge and, on that basis, a scientific understanding of the world. Quantity
is prominent in this conception, because measurement and calculation are
powerful procedures for organising knowledge. Quality, on the other hand,
seems to be an idea not driven by any theoretical need, but expressing directly
what we experience through our various senses. Nietzsche sometimes charac-
terises qualities as the effects that things have on us: a familiar claim made by
empiricist theories of knowledge. This means that the same things may have
different qualities for different perceivers, according to their constitutions. In
addition, some beings are aware of aspects of the world that others fail to
perceive: for instance, those animals that hear sounds or see colours outside the
human range of experience. Nietzsche concludes that our human experience of
the world is an idiosyncratic perspective which should not be generalised: "It is
obvious that every creature different from us senses different qualities and
consequently lives in a different world from that in which we live." 29
How can these different worlds be reconciled with the single world of
objective knowledge? This is just the task of finding some relation between
quality and quantity. One answer is already found in Nietzsche's early lectures
on pre-Platonic philosophy, where it is attributed to Democritus: "All qualities
are conventions, things vary only quantitatively. Thus all qualities are to be
traced back to variations in quantity." 30 The idea here is that quality arises from
quantity by way of difference. In a later notebook, Nietzsche writes:

Our "knowing" limits itself to establishing quantities; but we cannot help sensing these differences
in quantity as qualities. Quality is a perspectival truth for us; not an "in-itself." Our senses have
a definite quantum as a mean within which they function; i.e., we sense bigness and smallness in
relation to the conditions of our existence. If we sharpened or blunted our senses tenfold, we
should perish; i.e., with regard to making possible our existence we sense even relations between
magnitudes as qualities. 31
 WE SENSUALISTS 81

A nearby entry describes qualities as "insurmountable barriers for us." 32 We

know that the colors we see correspond to different wavelengths of light, but we
still experience them as various qualities which cannot be reduced to one
another. If this substitution is an illusion, it is one of the most necessary
illusions that living things undergo. For the transformation of differences in
degree into differences of kind, firstly between qualities and then between
things themselves, has valuable advantages in the task of survival. Since failure
to recognise beneficial and harmful features of the environment is very
dangerous for any creature, any factor that guards against such errors will be
favored by natural selection. A further advantage comes from the association of
sensations with pleasure and pain, owing to the influence those feelings have on
behaviour. This important point will be discussed in detail later.
This emphasis on the differences between quantities, rather than simply on
quantities, seems quite hard to understand. Any attempt to make better sense of
the idea will require some interpretation. At this point I make a suggestion
which draws on the distinction between two kinds of quantities: those that
involve extension, and those that involve intensity. My suggestion is that the
quantities figuring in Nietzsche's approach to quantity and quality should be
interpreted as intensive quantities. The difference is rather hard to define in a
non-circular way, and one finds little helpful discussion in the literature of
philosophy. One writer who does raise this issue is Kant: he explains the
distinction by saying that with an extensive magnitude the representation of the
parts precedes that of the whole, whereas with an intensive magnitude the
representation of the whole precedes any representation of parts? 3 Some
familiar examples may be more instructive. Length, duration and mass are all
extensive quantities, while temperature, pressure and brightness are intensive
quantities. Kant's definition makes some sense when we reflect that these latter
phenomena are apprehended all at once. This explains the ability of perceived
qualities to evoke immediate reactions, an important consideration in their
usefulness for sentient beings, for whom making quick decisions may be a vital
factor in self-preservation.
We may still want to say, as Kant does, that intensive magnitudes do have
parts, for otherwise it is hard to see how any numerical value could be assigned
to them. So, how do their parts differ from those of extensive magnitudes?
Instead of following Kant's emphasis on the relation between parts and whole,
we may simply note that intensive magnitudes involve succession: their parts
are essentially ordered in a way that those of extensive magnitudes are not. This
is why we cannot add them together in the same way. 34 It makes sense to add
one length to another length, but not one temperature to another temperature.
From this point about addition follows one about subtraction: the difference
between two intensive quantities is not itself an intensive quantity. For instance,
the difference between one temperature and another is not a third temperature.
What is the difference between 20 degrees Celsius and 40 degrees Celsius? The
correct answer is not 20 degrees Celsius, but 20 Celsius degrees. Now there is
a further puzzle, for although two intensive magnitudes cannot be added, an
intensive magnitude can be multiplied or divided - for instance, doubled or
82 ROBIN SMALL

halved. Here we must be careful, however, in carrying out these operations. It

would be quite meaningless to say that a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius is
"twice" a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius. That is because this scale does not
start from a genuine zero point, but arbitrarily designates a finite magnitude as
having that numerical value. Further, since intensity has to do with order, it is
represented by ordinal rather than cardinal numbers: in our example, it is not a
question of forty degrees, but of the fortieth degree. The fortieth degree does not
include the twentieth degree, any more than Henry VIII includes Henry V.
In Kant's treatment, intensive magnitude is closely linked with the element
of sensation in knowledge. It is because our sensations are more or less intense
that we can perceive intensive magnitudes, and it is because all empirical
perception involves sensation that Kant can formulate the principle of the
"anticipations of perception," which states that "In all appearances, the real that
is an object of sensation has intensive magnitude, that is, a degree."35 Sensations
are of various kinds, as are the corresponding qualities of the things that cause
them. For Kant, that is enough to justify a rejection of the atomism which
banishes qualities from the external world, allowing only extension and solidity.
If there are intensive magnitudes in reality, there must be qualities which are
capable of varying in intensity. What these may be is left open. Kant seems to
be acknowledging that, depending on the nature of their sense organs, different
sentient beings will experience different sensations and thus perceive different
qualities. All we can say of these in advance is that they must have some degree
of intensity. As for the relation between the intensities of sensations and those
of their external causes, that too is a subject for research by empirical psychol-
ogy. 36
Now one might ask: if the difference between two such quantities is not a
quantity, what is it? Given his earlier statement, Nietzsche's answer seems to
be: a quality. One might object that quality has already been assumed, in that
every intensive magnitude is associated with some quality: temperature with
heat, brightness with colour, and so on. But the point at issue concerns the
circumstances under which qualities are perceived by us, and this may involve
conditions of a narrower kind. Sometimes Nietzsche suggests that qualities are
our awareness of changes in quantity, rather than just differences. "N.B. Given
particular alterations of quantities, what we sense as a distinct quality arises." 37
This is not surprising, if one reflects that a difference in quantity will usually not
just be present, but have some consequence, that is, give rise to some change.
An example will make this clearer. What do we mean by describing things as
"hot" and "cold"? As used in everyday language, these terms are relative to
one's own body: any object whose temperature is noticeably above that will be
judged as "hot," and below it as "cold." We sense these differences because they
affect our own body, since heat passes into or out of it as a result. That process
of change, not the difference by itself, is what produces the sensation that we
experience. In other words, something is hot or cold because it makes us hot or
cold. This conclusion coincides with the earlier notion of a quality, understood
as the effect of a stimulus on our bodily organisation.
 WE SENSUALISTS 83

All this is still a long way from "thoughts" and "hours," no doubt, but it
suggests that a dismissal of the problem posed by the differences between
Nietzsche's vocabularies may be premature. Despite their dissimilarity, the life-
world and that of objective knowledge have a common ground. Nietzsche
writes: "Belief in the 'senses' is the basis of all science, as of alllife." 38 Should
we take the word "belief' at face value here? He has already insisted that
sensualism need not be a dogmatic claim, amounting to one of those convictions
which he says "are more dangerous enemies oftruth than lies."39 Rather, it may
serve as a regulative hypothesis or a heuristic principle, both in science and in
life. In that case, the relation between scientific concepts and the ideas of sense
experience is still an open question, for which a closer analysis of the nature of
sensation is an appropriate procedure.

PLEASURE AND PAIN

As well as bodily sensations, there are what Nietzsche refers to in Human, All-
too-Human as "the moral sensations." The term is borrowed from his friend Paul
Ree, whose book On the Origin of the Moral Sensations had offered a specula-
tive account of feelings such as sympathy, gratitude, justice and self-regard,
along the lines suggested by Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural
selection. 40 In his later writings, Nietzsche suggests that all sensations are
valuations: he notes that "all our value sensations (i.e., simply our sensations)
adhere precisely to qualities."41 Our senses have evolved in accordance with our
conditions of life, and so the qualities we attribute to things are determined by
what has been beneficial or harmful in the past. 42 Every sensation thus involves
assumptions about benefit or harm; and this is especially evident with pleasure
and pain.
I shall approach Nietzsche's ideas on the subject of pleasure and pain by way
of a contemporary writer whose "scientific theory of sensibility" links pleasure
and pain with sensation in general. Leon Dumont (1837-77) was a French author
on philosophical psychology and aesthetics. Dumont was not an academic
philosopher but the sort of marginal figure that appealed to Nietzsche. 43 His
principal work, published in 1875, is an attempt to formulate a scientific theory
of pleasure and pain. 44 As Dumont observes, this has never been done before;
and he expresses the hope that his theory will make possible a science of
aesthetics, as part of a more general science of feeling. 45 The framework for his
approach is a scientific reductionism which, it is argued, modem psychology has
substantiated by explaining all facts of consciousness as combinations of
elementary sensations, eliminating both a separate self and any notion of free
will.
With this in mind, one may at first suppose that pleasure and pain are simply
elementary sensations, which are irreducible and hence indefinable. The
association of these sensations with others will vary greatly, since we know that
the same perception may give pleasure on one occasion and displeasure on
another. In that case, Dumont points out, there could hardly be general laws, and
a science of pleasure (and hence of aesthetics) would be impossible. His own
84 ROBIN SMALL

opinion is that, while pleasure and pain arise from sensations, they are not
themselves sensations. Rather, they correspond to certain rebtions between
successive mental states: "What we have said is sufficient to show that pleasure
and pain are not real phenomena, like sensations, ideas, perceptions, concepts;
that they are, rather, strictly speaking, the transition from one phenomenon to
another, that they correspond to a change and not to a state."46
This theory explains why we cannot identify pleasure and pain with qualities
of the object, as we do with sensations: such feelings express what is happening
within the subject itself, and are related to objects only indirectly. Again, since
pleasure and pain are not particular states, they have no place in the causally
connected sequence of our experiences and actions. They accompany these
phenomena, but are not their antecedent conditions: in other words, pleasure and
pain do not act as motives for the will. But, one may object, is not there such a
thing as a love of pleasure, which may readily be a cause of action? Dumont
agrees, but says that it is found only in higher animals, who are capable of
memory and foresight in judging the consequences of their actions. 47 As a
motive, then, this is not reducible to a mode of feeling, taken by itself.
Dumont has a further theory about the sorts of change involved in feelings of
pleasure and pain: that they are symptoms of the union and dispersal of forces.
Pleasure arises when the sum of force that constitutes the self undergoes an
increase (provided this is not sufficient to disrupt its organisation) and pain
when a corresponding decrease in force occurs. 48 So although pleasure and pain
have a relative character - they do not arise from a single sensation or set of
sensations, and are not caused by a single kind of external object - they
nevertheless occur according to a general principle, which in turn points to a
more detailed theory. Later, Dumont goes on to discuss kinds of pleasure and
pain which differ from one another not just because they are located in different
locations or activities but, more significantly, because force increases or
decreases in them in different ways. For example, the sum of force may
decrease owing to an increased output (as in fatigue and related states) or to a
decreased input (as in boredom, doubt, impatience, grief, pity and fear, or more
generally, the frustration of our desires). The rest of his discussion outlines a
classification of pains and pleasures which will provide the plan for a general
science of feeling.
Sensations themselves, in so far as we are conscious of them, are identical
with brain states: they are the "subjective side" of these observable phenomena.
Similarly, pleasure and pain are the subjective side of the causal relations
between successive states. Dumont considers that pleasure and pain - and
feeling in general - extend beyond consciousness to processes located within the
human organism but outside the system that constitutes the self. Local anaesthe-
sia, he thinks, confirms this idea: sensations go on occurring in the organs
concerned, but are not communicated to the brain. 49 Further, if feeling is just
one aspect of motion, it may even occur in the inorganic world, despite the
absence of organisation there; for the nerve system does not create sensations,
but only carries and combines them. It may be, Dumont speculates, that pleasure
and pain are found throughout nature, wherever force is gathered or dispersed. 5°
 WE SENSUALISTS 85

The metaphysical character of his theory is evident here: its ultimate aim is to
provide knowledge of the absolute being which, he believes, underlies and
expresses itself in all phenomena.
Nietzsche owned a copy of Dumont's treatise, which had been translated into
German and published in 1876 as Vergniigen und Schmerz. That he was reading
Dumont in early 1883 is clear from a notebook which contains several quota-
tions from that work. 5 1 Only later does Nietzsche go into the subject of pleasure
and pain on his own account, and then he endorses several of Dumont's leading
propositions. He agrees that pleasure and pain are not primary facts of con-
sciousness but only epiphenomena. 52 Hence the absurdity of those philosophies,
such as hedonism and utilitarianism, which take pleasure and pain as their
standard for evaluating the world. He repeats Dumont's claim that these feelings
are not part of the causal process: "Upon reflection, however, we should
concede that everything would have taken the same course, according to exactly
the same sequence of causes and effects, if these states 'pleasure and displeas-
ure' had been absent, and that one is simply deceiving oneself if one thinks they
cause anything at all." 53 And because they are only epiphenomena, Nietzsche
concludes that pleasure and pain are not motives for action: "- there is no
striving for pleasure: but pleasure occurs when what is being striven for is
attained: pleasure is an accompaniment, pleasure is not a motive ... " 54
One aspect of Dumont's theory is of particular importance for Nietzsche: his
identification of pleasure with an increase of force, which is readily assimilable
to Nietzsche's own theory of the will to power. Hence he can refer to '"that
general feelin~ of overabundant, overflowing power that constitutes the essence
of pleasure." This description is part of a much broader picture. Nietzsche
postulates an economy of force which entails a cyclical process of accumulation
and release of force (or rather energy, in modem terms) in all living things, and
includes a conception of power as a relation of control and submission between
such forces. In a speculative mode, he suggests that the instinct which drives the
development of organic beings is a drive to discharge their strength, rather than
the imperative of self-preservation which he supposes to be the leading principle
of a Darwinian approach in biology. 56 Even more speculatively, he sometimes
hints at a cosmic cycle with a similar pattern, resembling that of pre-Socratic
thinkers like Heraclitus. But these are wider areas, which will not be entered
here.
Despite these overlaps, Nietzsche advances other ideas which make his
account of pleasure and pain quite distinct from Dumont's. One is an emphasis
on the role of interpretation, especiallly in the case of pain. In The Gay Science,
Nietzsche had written: "Second, when a strong stimulus is experienced as
pleasure or displeasure, this depends on the interpretation of the intellect which,
to be sure, generally does this work without rising to our consciousness: one and
the same stimulus can be experienced as pleasure or displeasure." 57 The
interpretation Nietzsche has in mind is a judgment about the benefit or harm
expected to follow from the phenomenon: a more or less complex calculation
which is condensed into an immediate reaction, presumably as a result of the
past history of the individual or species. In contrast, Dumont explains the
86 ROBIN SMALL

variability of pleasure and pain in terms of the varying context within which the
stimulus occurs, and excludes a process of thinking, even unconscious, from his
account. 5 8
Further, Nietzsche's ideas often resemble a theory of pleasure and pain which
Dumont has considered and rejected. The "Epicurean" view, as he labels it, is
that pain arises from obstacles to the satisfaction of our wishes, and that
pleasure is the overcoming of such obstacles. Hence, pleasure is always bound
up with pain. Pessimistic thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Hartmann, arguing
that pain must always outweigh pleasure, recommend a policy of renunciation
as the only solution for the predicament. The conclusion usually drawn from the
"Epicurean" theory, according to Dumont, is that avoiding pain is more
important than achieving pleasure. However, he notes, Jerome Cardan suggested
that we must seek out what causes pain, in order to gain greater pleasure by
overcoming it. It is significant that this is a reference noted down by Nietzsche
for his own use. 59 While Dumont may have reported Cardan's idea only as a
curiosity, or as a reductio ad absurdum of the theory, Nietzsche takes it
seriously. He is prepared not only to admit the interdependence of pleasure and
pain, but to go further, questioning whether they are really distinct, let alone
opposites. Pleasure may be a series of small pains, he suggests, a "game of
.
resistance an d victory.
. ,60

While it is hard to identify a single account of pleasure and pain with

Nietzsche, the question remains: how do his ideas on the subject fit in with the
"sensualism" which is prominent in his thought after Thus Spake Zarathustra?
If a distinction is made in epistemology between sensualism as a theory and as
a practice, is there a corresponding distinction for morality? If "all of us" are
sensualists these days, are we also hedonists in some sense or other? Nietzsche's
dismissive remarks on utilitarianism sug~est otherwise: "Man does not strive for
pleasure; only the Englishman does." 6 Yet he does not want to abandon a
material element in value judgment, in favor of an formalistic ethic of abstract
principle such as Kantianism. Hence his interest in a subtler account of pleasure
and pain, which denies them the authority they would have in a hedonistic
system, but gives them a certain role as indicators or clues, and perhaps even as
heuristic principles. Rather as sensations were earlier seen as functions of
differences in force, pleasure and pain are interpreted as symptoms of differ-
. 62
ences m power.
If we ask why the theme of sensualism becomes so important for Nietzsche
in his later development, the answer seems to be that it brings together concerns
which, until then, he could deal with only one at a time. It is true that the
relation between knowledge and life was a central issue in, for example, the
"untimely meditation" on history, and in writing of the same time on higher
education and scholarship. But these are largely programs for a project which
could not be fulfilled at that stage. The contribution of the concept of sensualism
is made possible by the emergence in Nietzsche's thinking of a radical denial
of distinctions between sense and spirit or, in the language of Zarathustra,
between passions and virtues. His new account is both an explanation and a
revaluation. The higher authority traditionally attached to reason disappears
 WE SENSUALISTS 87

when we recognise that it "evolved on a sensualistic basis." 63 Similarly, our

picture of the virtues is transformed when their origin is disclosed as a sublima-
tion of the passions, rather than an insight into some higher realm. In either case,
the activity of "thinking to the end" corresponds to the adoption of sensualism,
understood as a method rather than a doctrine.
Some other issues might be linked with sensualism in a fuller treatment,
although they have not been touched on here. For instance, the idea of "order of
rank" is evoked when Nietzsche writes: "The most spiritual men feel the
stimulus and charm of sensuous things in a way that other men - those with
'fleshly hearts' - cannot possibly imagine and ought not to imagine." 64 No
example is given, but an artist such as Goethe comes to mind readily and would,
indeed, probably be Nietzsche's own nomination. Those representatives of the
highest culture who can be said to attach a more fundamental value to the senses
than to "spirit" may, he suggests, be called "sensualists in the best faith." So, if
"today all of us are sensualists," it is to the extent that we can recognise the
achievement of such figures and use it as a model, one which points the way not
only in scientific knowledge but in life itself.

Monash University, Australia

NOTES
GS 372. Apart from published works of Nietzsche, including the notes included in The Will to
Power, all remaining translations are my own, unless otherwise stated.
2 Nietzsche. Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke [hereafter: KGW], ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari
~Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1973-), VII/2. 234.
· KGW VIII/3, 455.
4 Not trusting his readers on this point, Kaufmann translates Sensualisten as "believers in the
senses," a rather misleading phrase in view of the qualification Nietzsche goes on to make in this
passage.
KGW III/3, 207.
6 GS 373.
7 KGW VII/2, 264.
8 BGE, 12. One may here recall the admiring words of Galileo when referring to the heliocentric
theories of Aristarchus and Copernicus: "Nor can I ever sufficiently admire the outstanding
acumen of those who have taken hold of this opinion and accepted it as true; they have through
sheer force of intellect done such violence to their senses as to prefer what reason told them over
that which sensible experience plainly showed them to the contrary." Dialogues Concerning the
Two Chief World Systems, trans. Stillman Drake, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1967), 328.
9 Daybreak, 168. See also KGW VII/3, 278 (WP 443).
10 Nietzsche, Historische-Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, Band 4, ed. H.J. Mette and K.
Schlechta (Miinchen: C.H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1937), 84.
11 See G.J. Stack, "Nietzsche and Lange," The Modern Schoolman 57 (1980), 137-49, Ji:irg

Salaquarda, "Nietzsche und Lange," Nietzsche-Studien 7 (1978), 236-53 and GJ. Stack, Lange and
Nietzsche (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 1983).
12 F.A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart
(lserlohn: Verlag von J. Baedecker, 1866), 345.
13 See e.g. Geschichte des Materialismus, 405, for this phrase which is often used by Nietzsche:

BGE, 21; also KGW VII/3, 224 and 288 (WP 618). KGW VII/3, 439 and KGW VIII/1, 90 and 110
(WP 622).
14 BGE, 14.
15 Geschichte des Materialismus, 500.
16 Ibid., 485.
 88 ROBIN SMALL

17 !hid., 496.
18 BGE, 10.
19 BGE, 15. See also KGW VIlli, 88 and 230.
20 Twilight of the Idols, '"Reason' in Philosophy," sect. 3. Similarly, Zarathustra says, "You

should think your own senses through to the end." Thus Spake Zarathustra, "Upon the Blessed
Isles." Cf. KGW VII/2, 124 (WP I 046).
21 GS, 112.
22 Twilight of the Idols, "''Reason' in Philosophy," sect. 2.
23 KGW V/2, 422.
24 Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), Band 1, 375.
25 On the Uses and Disadvantages of HistOI)' for Life, 2 (in the translation of Peter Preuss). A
somewhat similar passage occurs in the book which was the occasion of Nietzsche's first
"untimelv meditation," David Friedrich Strauss's Der alte und der neue Glauhe. Strauss writes:
"When the great year of the world has thus elapsed, the formation of a new world begins, in which
- according to the Stoic fancy- the earlier one repeats itself precisely, down to particular events
and persons (Socrates and Xanthippe)." Der alte und der neue Glaube (Leipzig: Verlag von S.
Hirzel, 1872), 155.
26 See Robin Small, "Incommensurability and Recurrence: from Oresme to Simmel," Journal of

the History of Ideas 52 (1991): 121-37.

27 For "cons.tellation" see KGW VIII/3, 68 and 165 (WP 551 and 636); and for "smallest detail,"

KGW V/2. 421.

28 KGW V/2, 421.
29 KGW VIII/I, 244 (WP 565).
30 Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke, Band 4, ed. M. Oehler and R. Oehler (Miinchen: Musarion

Verlag), 334.
31 KGW VIII/I, 201 (WP 563).
32 KGW VIII/1, 244 (WP 565).
33 Critique of Pure Reason, A162 = B203 and Al68 = B210.
34 The proposition that intensive magnitudes cannot be added together has been put to ingenious

use by C.S. Lewis. He begins by observing that if two people are each suffering a toothache of
intensity x, it does not follow that anyone is suffering a toothache of intensity 2x. He goes on:
"There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the
· maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but
we have reached all the suffering there can ever be in the universe. The addition of a million
fellow-sufferers adds no more pain." The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940), 103-04.
A reply is that sensations have not only intensive but also extensive magnitude, in the multiplicity
of subjects who experience them and, within a single person, in their bodily extent and temporal
duration. Accordingly, we can say that there is more or less pain in so far as any of these
magnitudes increases or decreases. Someone who overlooks that consideration might attempt to
prove that eternal punishment is no more severe than the most brief or even momentary
punishment, since the intensities of the successive states of pain cannot be added together. Anyone
arguing in that way, though, would be forced to concede that eternal bliss is no more rewarding
than a very fleeting pleasure.
35 Critique of Pure Reason, B207.
36 The pioneers in this area were E.H. Weber and G.T. Fechner, who developed a model for

estimating the intensities of sensations, and on that basis postulated a formula in which the
magnitudes of sensation and stimulus are related in a logarithmic function.
37 He goes on: "It is the same with morality. Here accompanying feelings of beneficence or utility

arise in someone who perceives a human characteristic in a certain quantum; doubled or tripled,
he is afraid of it..." KGW VII/2, 238.
38 KGW VII/2, 234; reading die 'Sinne' for das 'Sein,' as indicated by KGW VII/4/2, 654.
39 Human, All-too-Human, i 483.
40 Paul Ree, Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (Chemnitz: Verlag von Ernst

Schmeitzner, 1877).
41 KGW VIII/I, 244 (WP 565).
42 KGW Vll/2, 183.
43 For an outline of Dumont's life and work, see Alexander Buechner, Un philosophe amateur.

Essai biographique sur Leon Dumont ( 1837-1877) avec des extra its de sa correspondance (Paris:
Librairie Felix Alcan, 1884).
 WE SENSUALISTS 89

44 Leon Dumont, Vergniigen und Schmerz. Zur Lehre den Gefiihlen (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus,
1876). This volume is a translation of Theorie scientifique de Ia sensibilite. Le plaisir et la peine
~Paris: Librairie Germer Bailliere, 1875).
5 The term "science" may suggest consistency with a reductionist and materialist program in

psychology, but does not imply a reliance on empirical evidence; indeed, Dumont argues that a
science of pleasure and pain is like dynamics or mathematics, in being concerned not with facts,
but with more general and abstract objects. Vergniigen und Schmerz, 100.
46 Vergniigen und Schmerz, 98.
47 Ibid., 307.
48 Ibid., 82.
49 Ibid., 129.
50 Ibid., 136. An equally surprising result of his theory emerges when the principle of the

conservation of energy is taken into account. This law implies that any increase of energy in one
location must correspond to a decrease of energy elsewhere. According to Dumont's theory, these
processes are identical with pleasure and pain respectively. Hence, the amount of pleasure in the
world must always be exactly equal to the amount of pain. This invalidates any claim that
existence as a whole contains more pain than pleasure, or vice versa - in other words, it disposes
of both pessimism and optimism, so understood. It has an even more startling implication: that for
every subject experiencing pleasure, another must experience pain. Dumont acknowledges this
only by referring to the successes of the human race at the expense of other species in the struggle
for existence. He forbears to mention that a similar conclusion must also apply to individuals.
Accordingly, he does not address the novel ethical problems that would arise from an assumption
that one person's pleasure necessitates another's pain.
51 KGW VIlfl, 308 and 322.
52 BGE 225. See also KGW VIII/I, 338; VIII/2, 272 and 275; VIII/3, 127 and 152 (WP 579, 701,

669, 478 and 702).

53 KGW VIII/3, 127 (WP 478).
54 KGW VIII/3, 92 (WP 688).
55 KGW VIII/3, 150 (WP 699).
56 BGE 13.
57 GS 127.
58 Vergniigen und Schmerz, 57.
59 See KGW VII/1, 322.

°
6 KGW VIII/3, 150 (WP 699).
61 Twilight of the Idols, "Maxims and Arrows," sect. 12. It is only fair to point out that this is not

how Englishmen see themselves. As A.P. Herbert puts it, "The Englishman never enjoys himself
except for a noble purpose." Uncommon Law (London: Eyre Methuen, 1977), 198.
62 KGW VIII/3, 70 (WP 695).
63 KGW VIII/2, 33 (WP 516).
64 KGW VIII/I, 200 (WP 1045).
 ROBERT NOLA

NIETZSCHE'S NATURALISM: SCIENCE AND BELIEF

NIETZSCHE'S NATURALISM

Nietzsche is one of the great nay-sayers concerning ontology. He denies the

existence of the following: abstract objects such as universals (he favours a
strong nominalism); souls, spirits and personal self-identity; Kantian things-in-
themselves and any kind of noumenal or other-worldly realm (he lampoons the
idea of other-worldly realms advocated from Plato and Christianity to Kant); 1
substances, self-identical objects and atoms (understood as ultimate indivisible
continuants); anything in the world that our truths could represent. Since he
often says that there are no truths, it is a contentious matter to say what
Nietzsche's views on truth are; however he maintains that no belief can
represent any feature of the world and that the world has no items that could
serve as truth-makers for our beliefs. So, what does exist?
The fullest account of his ontology is in The Will to Power, and can be briefly
summarized. 2 1) There is infinite time but finite space. 2) There is a finite
quantity of force, and of "power." These are different in physics, but it is
unclear whether Nietzsche thinks of them differently; for convenience they will
be referred to collectively as "force-power." 3) Each force-power acts from
some "center," and though conserved changes its distribution over time. That
each force-power has a center of action and a direction (or perspective) gives
content to Nietzsche's talk of a will to power. 4) There is a total nexus of force-
power each part of which can come into conflict with any other part:

Perspectivism is only a complex form of specificity. My idea is that every specific body strives
to become master over all space and to extend its force ( - its will to power:) and to thrust back
all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies
and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related
to it: they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on - (WP 636)

(5) Nietzsche also adopts a Humean position in claiming that there are no
substances, and no causal or law-like natural necessity, in the world. However
there are regularities that allow calculation of how one centre of force-power
acts on another (see WP 551-2 and 634 ).

91
B. Babich (ed.). Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 91-100.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
92 ROBERT NOLA

(1) to (5) comprise the core of Nietzschean naturalism: "This world is the will
to power- and nothing else besides! And you yourselves are also this will to
power- and nothing besides!" (WP 1067). Nietzsche's force-power naturalism
encompasses not only the non-human world but also the individual and social
realm of humans with their psychological drives. As a program Nietzsche's
naturalism has much in common with current scientific naturalism; but with its
single ontological category of force-power it is a quite distinct rival.
Like all naturalisms, Nietzsche's extreme version needs to account for those
things not in its ontology but which have been commonly thought to exist, or
have been postulated in the sciences. How this is done is a large interpretive
project which cannot be undertaken here. Instead in what follows some brief
comments will be made about Nietzsche's naturalism concerning three matters:
ordinary objects; its rivalry with scientific naturalism; and its account of belief
and knowledge.

NIETZSCHE'S NATURALISM AND ORDINARY OBJECTS

Given two frameworks of thought with different ontological commitments, such

as Nietzsche's and our commonsense framework which postulates ordinary
objects, what relationships can there be between them? There are several options
including reductionism, eliminativism, supervenience, an anti-realism with
respect to both ontologies, and so on. Though it cannot be argued here,
Nietzsche is eliminativist with respect to many of the items not in his preferred
ontology. Substances, selves and other-worldly realms are said to be fictions just
as much as Zeus' thunderbolts, fairy spirits and phlogiston are now fictions. But
what of ordinary objects such as leaves, drops of water or stones? The smooth
pebbles we find on beaches are hardly fictitious and seem to be as real as
anything might be (whatever Berkeleyan idealists might say, a view Nietzsche
rejects).
Nietzsche's view of the ontological status of common objects like pebbles is
unclear. A few of his remarks tend to support the more plausible view that a
pebble could be the same as a nexus of force-power which has a great deal of
stability over time: "Duration, identity with itself, being are inherent neither in
that which is called subject nor in that which is called object: they are com-
plexes of events apparently durable in comparison with other complexes- e.g.,
through a different tempo of the event" (WP 552c). This remark supports
reductionism based on type-type identity; there are pebbles but, appearances to
the contrary, they are identical to some relatively stable nexus of force-power.
Thus the commonsense view that objects such as pebbles do exist is saved by
reduction to items in Nietzsche's naturalistic ontology of force-power.
But by far the largest number of comments in his work suggest that objects
such as pebbles are fictions, i.e., that our framework of ordinary objects is to be
eliminated. The following is a diagnostic reconstruction of Nietzsche's
argument for rejection of reductive-identity in favour of eliminativism with
respect to ordinary objects:
 NIETZSCHE'S NATURALISM: SCIENCE AND BELIEF 93

(1) All objects are substances, or are bits of substantive matter, with identity
conditions.
(2) Anything which is a nexus of force-power (NFP) has no identity condi-
tions.
(3) Therefore a NFP cannot be a substance, or substantive matter.
(4) The only thing which exists is the total set of NFPs.
(5) Therefore, there are no substances or bits of substantive matter, with
identity conditions.
(6) Therefore there are no objects (they are fictitious projections or con-
structions we impose).
If we accept (4) which expresses Nietzsche's naturalism, the only premises
left to examine in this valid argument are (1) and (2).
Nietzsche's argument for the rejection of substantial objects is quite unlike
the epistemological arguments that can be found in Berkeley or Hume; instead
his argument turns on metaphysical matters to do with identity conditions, as
indicated in (2). Since Nietzsche's world is in such a state of flux, given the
changing kaleidoscope of the NFPs, nothing has any continuing identity:
"Continual transition forbids us to speak of 'individuals' etc: the number of
beings is itself in flux" (WP 520). But is this correct? We humans are said to
change, albeit over a period of about seven years, all the cells in our body, yet
we preserve our bodily continuity. Each new part has a historical connection
with some other earlier part, and performs a functional role similar to the part
it replaces. It is the host of such historical and functional continuities that give
us our bodily identity despite total change in its parts. Much the same could be
said of Nietzschean NFPs; though the magnitude, direction, and even center of
action of force-power might change, it does not follow that there is no continu-
ing identity for any such NFP. There may be sufficient historical continuity
within one NFP to establish identity over time.
Historical continuity conditions may suffice to establish identity where much
stronger conditions would fail to establish any. Thus consider what may be
called mereological essentialism: 3 for strong [weak] mereological essentialism,
a whole has identity just when all [at least one of] its parts (such as its sub-
stance) must have identity and be co-present throughout the life of the whole.
Clearly strong mereological essentialism is too strong since it requires a whole
to change none of its parts; in contrast the weak version only requires that at
least one thing remain the same for the lifetime of the whole. But even the weak
version is too strong a requirement for bodily identity if we allegedly change all
our cell-parts within a seven year period. And it is too strong a requirement for
the identity of NFPs if at least one direction, or magnitude or center of some
NFP must remain the same. It would appear that to support premise (2),
Nietzsche, the "Nay" -sayer to all essentialism, says "Yea" to essentialist identity
conditions. It is some such view that underlies that claim that "continual
transition forbids us to speak of 'individuals."'
What of premise (1 )? The philosophical doctrine of substances does much
work in different contexts. One such piece of work is to ensure that if anything
is a substance, then it must come equipped with identity conditions; there can
94 ROBERT NOLA

be no substance that lacks identity. But do we think that all our commonsense
objects are substances? Though not obviously part of our common sense
framework of objects, such as pebbles, the idea that objects are substances has
been a constantly accompanying philosophical doctrine that has many advocates
from Aristotle to Kant. Locke, Berkeley and Hume raised epistemological
worries about our knowledge of substances which Kant attempted to answer.
However Nietzsche's challenge does not proceed from their epistemological
stance. Rather he seems to accept the Kantian view that objects are substances
in accepting ( 1) - but then so much the worse for our talk of ordinary objects,
as the argument shows!
Though (1) seems plausible there are many reasons provided by twentieth-
century philosophy of language and metaphysics for rejecting it. The work of
Kripke and Putnam (for which there are some antecedents in Kant) shows that
even if we were to discover that objects were not substances but were NFPs, our
reference to them would remain invariant despite the falsification of a fairly
constantly accompanying philosophical theory of objects as substances. As an
example, we have rejected the Aristotelian view that air and fire are pure
substances yet we continue to talk of the very same stuff that Aristotle and other
Ancient Greeks breathed, or warmed their hands by. That there are pebbles is
an existence claim that remains unaltered, even if we were to discover that they
were not substances but some nexus of force-power.
If we reject (1) and (2), we can also reject (5), viz., Nietzsche's elirninativism
with respect to objects; this leaves open a more plausible reductionist view in
which ordinary objects are nothing but NFPs. Since the argument above is
intended to be a diagnostic reconstruction, it remains to show that (5) is a
pervasive feature of Nietzsche's philosophy. It appears in his early writings:
"Logic too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world
corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things,
that the same thing is identical at different points in time; but this science came
into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the
real world)" (HH 11). And it also appears in his late writings: 4

The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our
new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting. life-
preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. And we are fundamentally
inclined to claim that the falsest judgements (which include the synthetic judgements a priori) are
the most indispensable for us; that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring
reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant
falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live - that renouncing false
judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognise untruth as a condition
of life - that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a
philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil. (BGE. 4)

The fictitious imposition of identical objects on the world by us is not only

a requirement of logic and of reasoning generally; it is also alleged to be
necessary for our existence. However Nietzsche's reasons for the elimination
of objects and their fictitious character is far from compelling.
 NIETZSCHE'S NATURALISM: SCIENCE AND BELIEF 95

THE WILL TO POWER AS THE LEADING HYPOTHESIS OF AN

EX PLAN A TORY PROGRAM

Nietzsche used his theory of force-power, i.e., the will to power, as the basis of
an ambitious program which rivals explanations in sciences such as mechanics,
biology and psychology, as well as theories of morality and society. Sometimes
the rivalry is metaphysical as when Nietzsche contrasts the interpretations of
phenomena offered by sciences which suppose that there are laws of nature with
his own power hypothesis which eschews such laws. Nietzsche thinks, wrongly,
that all talk of"nature's conformity to laws" is an anthropomorphism based on
our own conformity to laws we have promulgated. There is a genetic fallacy
here; perhaps an anthropomorphic model might have suggested that nature is
also bound by laws; but whether or not there are laws of nature cannot be
established in this way. 5
Setting this aside, Nietzsche's contrast is between the belief that nature does
conform to laws, and interpretations of the same nature using the law-less will
to power: "somebody might come along who, with opposite intentions and
modes of interpretation, could read out of the same 'nature,' and with regard to
the same phenomena, rather the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless
enforcement of claims of power -- an interpreter who would picture the
unexceptional and unconditional aspects of all 'will to power"' (BGE 22).
However Nietzsche recognises that even within his own theory, the actions of
power are not entirely law-less and by his own admission are calculable using
formulae expressing regularities(§ 1, thesis (5)). In adopting Hume's view that
there is no natural necessity (but not for Hume's reasons), Nietzsche thinks that
necessity is just one interpretation which we have imposed on the world. But he
also recognises that there is nothing privileged about his denial of necessity, this
being merely yet another interpretation: "Supposing that this also is only
interpretation- and you will be eager enough to make this objection?- well, so
much the better."
This provides no grounds for arguing that no adjudication between rival
interpretations is possible. Even though the debate between Humeans and anti-
Humeans over natural necessity has been long-lasting, there are no grounds for
assuming that no argument is better than any other in this area. But this is not
the only rivalry that Nietzsche envisages; there are also the rival interpretations
of the same nature and phenomena provided by sciences (which employ laws of
nature) and by his power theory (which supposes regularities but no natural
necessity). How do these fare?
Nietzsche claims in BGE that the explanations and/or interpretations provided
by the power hypothesis are superior to all other hypotheses. In discussing
exploitation within society Nietzsche harshly declares: '"Exploitation' does not
belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society; it belongs to the essence
of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to
power ... If this should be an innovation as a theory - as reality it is the
primordial fact of all history" (BGE 259). In Nietzsche's view not only is it a
fact that exploitation is an organic function, but also the power hypothesis is
supported by all of history; moreover the power hypothesis explains this better
96 ROBERT NOLA

than any other hypothesis because it appeals to the very "essence of what lives
as a basic organic function." Explanations which allegedly go to the essence of
things are taken to be better explanations than those which do not.
The wide scope of the power hypothesis is best illustrated in the following
extended passage. Nietzsche begins by supposing that the only reality is our
inner drives and speculates whether a more general hypothesis about the will to
power would suffice for an understanding of even "the so-called mechanistic (or
'material') world":

In short, one has to risk the hypothesis whether will does not affect will wherever "effects" are
recognised- and whether all mechanical occurrences are not, in so far as a force is active in them,
will force. effects of will. Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life
as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will- namely, of the will to power,
as my proposition has it; suppose all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power
and one could also find in it the solution of the problem of procreation and nourishment- it is one
problem- then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as- will
to power. The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its
"intelligible character"- it would be "will to power" and nothing else. (BGE 36)

One hundred year later we can judge Nietzsche's metaphysical program to be

either a non-starter or a failure. Concerning modern physics the "will" has
played no role whatever. It would be superficial to see in, say, Einstein's mass-
energy equivalence theorem, an instance of a non-material ontology of force-
power. Moreover Nietzsche's program has provided no impetus to the develop-
ment of physical theories and is thus a "degenerate" program (to employ a term
of Lakatos).
In biology Darwinian evolution and genetics (based on the DNA molecule)
leave no room for any notion of the will to power, including the theory of
procreation. Even Richard Dawkins' metaphorically described "selfish gene"
theory is not an instance of the will to power. Dawkins uses the anthropomor-
phic term "selfish" to characterise the activity of genes but always insists that
this is a metaphor which can be translated back into the language of gene theory
viz., the language of biochemistry. Turning more generally to the theory of
evolution, Nietzsche constantly railed against Darwin's theory; but he neither
understood it properly nor saw the ways in which it might be used to develop
his own naturalism about the evolution of humans, including their cognitive
powers and social activities. Darwin's theory of natural selection is a still a
progressive program in biology compared to which Nietzsche's non-starter
power theory fades into non-significance.
One can see in Nietzsche's remarks about Darwinian natural selection some
Lamarkian fallacies which arise from the will to power. In a section headed
"Against Darwin" he says: "The influence of 'external circumstances' is
overestimated by Darwin to a ridiculous extent: the essential thing in the life
process is precisely the tremendous shaping, form-creating force working from
within which utilizes and exploits 'external circumstances'" (WP 647; see also
684-5). True, though he supposed that something was passed from parent to
offspring, Darwin did not talk about "what is within" as the mechanism of
evolution. Nietzsche's remark may be read as supposing that there is a selection
 NIETZSCHE'S NATURALISM: SCIENCE AND BELIEF 97

force from within, and not only external to, organisms. To illustrate, it is alleged
that, say, muscle-builders can pass on larger muscles to their off-spring by
somehow passing on genes for large muscles. But this is precisely what is ruled
out by Darwinian theory. No matter how active they may be in replicating
themselves, genes do not exploit or use external circumstances. Rather it is
external circumstances, either acting through natural or sexual processes of
selection, which determine which genes in a gene pool manage to have their
frequency increased. 6
The above are brief comments on the lack of success of Nietzsche's natural-
ism compared with two rival areas of scientific naturalism. Though the
program's best known application concerns the genealogy of morals, we will
consider only its attempt to account naturalistically for one human cognitive
ability -belief.

NIETZSCHE'S NATURALISM AND THE WILL TO BELIEF

Not only are our bodies and sense-organs the product of evolution, but also our
minds: "We have senses for only a selection of perceptions- those with which
we have to concern ourselves in order to preserve ourselves. Consciousness is
present only to the extent that consciousness is usefur' (WP 505). And: "All our
organs of knowledge and our senses are developed only with regard to condi-
tions of preservation and growth" (WP 507; cf. BGE 36 and WP 498). Thus
Nietzsche's naturalism explores the same issues as recent naturalistic ap-
proaches to the mind, cognition and belief, albeit within a different explanatory
framework.
Nietzsche also maintains that our (almost) unique human ability to have
beliefs has evolved from the long history of the action of the will to power. For
Nietzsche all our beliefs, i.e., what we hold-true, need to be explained naturalis-
tically: "Believing is the primal beginning even in every sense impression: a
kind of affirmation the first intellectual activity! A 'holding-true' in the
beginning! Therefore it is to be explained: how 'holding-true' arose!"; and "The
valuation 'I believe that this and that is so' as the essence of 'truth'" (WP 506-
7). Though it will not be argued here, Nietzsche often advocates a view of truth
in which it is to be analysed in terms of what we hold-true, rather than analysed
in terms of an independent substantive property of our beliefs, that of corre-
sponding to the world. Thus Nietzsche rejects the idea that the truth of our
beliefs is to be explained in terms of a substantive truth property. Rather what
has to be explained is why we hold-true the beliefs we do; and what does the
explaining is the particular operation of the will to power, i.e., the drives, or
will, that lead us to believe some prather than an alternative q.
This casts Nietzsche's talk of "the will to truth" in a new light. Above we
discussed Nietzsche's view that self-identical objects are fictions that are
necessary both for thought, reason, logic and even our survival. From whence
these fictitious beliefs which we (allegedly) hold-true? Two important notebook
passages tell us:
98 ROBERT NOLA

Toward an understanding of logic: the will to equality is the will to power - the belief that
something is thus and thus (the essence of judgement) is the consequence of a will that as much
as possible shall be equal (WP S II).

Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases. In fact, to make possible logical
thinking and inferences, this condition must first be treated fictitiously as fulfilled. That is: the will
to logical truth can be carried through only after a fundamental falsification of all events is
assumed. From which it follows that a drive rules here that is capable of employing both means,
firstly falsification, then the implementation of its own point of view: logic does not spring from
will to truth. (WP 512)

The role of the will to power is fundamental in constructing a fiction of self-

identical objects to impose on a world which contains none. Without such a
construction our whole cognitive apparatus could not have allegedly evolved in
the way it did; and without such a radical falsification of the world Nietzsche
contends that we could not exist. Once the will to power has done its job of
fiction-constructing, the will to "truth" can then play its subordinate role in
yielding more of what we hold-true, but only within a framework made possible
by the will to power.
In the light of this I propose the following general meta-hypothesis of the will
to belief (WB) as an interpretation of Nietzsche's account of the genealogy of
all belief:
WB: For a given group of people over a given time, and any body of belief
B that they hold, there is a specific action of the will to power on those people
(e.g., cognitive and/or psychological drives), WP, such that WP gives rise to, or
causes, the group's holding-true B.
Such a genealogy of belief makes no appeal to the role of a substantive
account of truth. It also allows that what is held-true can vary over time, social
classes (e.g., the "herd" as opposed to the masters), epochs, cultures, and even
grammars, thus giving a significant historical dimension to the beliefs we
humans have held. It applies equally well to factual (including scientific) beliefs
and value judgements (thus there is also a genealogy of moral belief).
However the schematic nature of WB does not tell us how or in what way the
will to power operates to produce belief; it merely tells us that it operates. It is
a further research project to discover in what way it operates to produce
particular kinds of belief. The bare outlines of the genealogy of one kind of
belief, the belief in self-identical objects and the functional role such beliefs
have in our survival, has been sketched above. However in the light of the
criticisms given of the arguments for the fictional character of self-identical
objects, such a genealogy of belief may not be without its difficulties. In
particular, one needs to avoid possible genetic fallacies. One such fallacy has
already been cited above in connection with the anthropomorphic origin of our
belief in laws of nature; even if our belief in natural necessity did originate
anthropomorphically, it does not follow that there is no natural necessity.
Whatever judgement may be passed on specific genealogies, there is a measure
of similarity between Nietzsche's project expressed in WB, and Hume's account
of the origin of our belief in, say, natural necessity; neither are to be founded on
substantive truths about nature but rather on human psychology.
 NIETZSCHE'S NATURALISM: SCIENCE AND BELIEF 99

Finally, what of knowledge? Sometimes Nietzsche adopts a coherence view

when he says: "An isolated judgement is never 'true,' never knowledge: only in
the connection and relation of many judgements is there any surety" (WP 530).
Coherence fits well with WB even though coherence involves more imposition
of the fictions of logic, namely a minimal requirement of non-contradiction
amongst beliefs we hold-true. In contrast, contemporary naturalists tend to adopt
a reliabilist view of knowledge in which person A knows that p iff p is a true
belief of A, and p arises as the result of a reliable belief-forming process.
However such a reliabilism is usually accompanied by a robust substantive
account of truth in which the very reliability of a belief-forming process is
cashed out in terms of the high ratio of truths to falsities it generates. As
indicated, Nietzsche rejects robust substantive truth. And the reliability of the
will to power as a belief-forming process (along the lines set out in WP) is not
a matter which Nietzsche even addresses. (There appear to be no independent
grounds for assuming it is a reliable producer of belief, and thus knowledge). In
fact he down-plays notions of knowledge and of truth in favour of his more
fundamental notion of holding-true.
The down-playing of knowledge is clearly set out in the important sections
109-12 of The Gay Science, two of which have titles such as "Origin of
knowledge" and "Origin of the logical." In the final paragraph of 109 entitled
"Let us beware," Nietzsche bids us to beware postulating enduring substances
and asks: "When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds?
When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to
'naturalize' humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed
nature?" Even though the stance is naturalistic, it is a moot question whether the
genealogy of our belief in substances is to be traced to a belief in God. And it
is also a moot question as to whether the will to power can be used more
generally to explain all of what we hold-true, while ignoring the role substantive
truth may play not only in the genesis of a belief but also in its maintenance
through justifications which appeal to truth. The rivalry here is still being played
out between those such as Michel Foucault, advocates of the Strong Program in
the sociology of scientific knowledge and postmodernists who eschew truth for
power or politics, and those who hold that there are truth-based justifications for
belief which may sometimes, if not always, ground what we hold-true.

The University of Auckland, New Zealand

NOTES
See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "How the 'Real World' at Last Became a Myth."
This is a quite minimal account of Nietzsche's ontology (not unlike that attributed to Boscovich
in BGE § 12) that omits many other aspects of his metaphysics, including a metaphysical version
of eternal recurrence (WP §1062-3) and the doctrine of perspectivism. The first of these is an
independent adjunct that can easily be dropped; but the second may well render his metaphysical
system incoherent. The latter matter is raised and well discussed in chapter 6 § 2 of Peter Poellner,
Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).
100 ROBERT NOLA

See Peter Simons, Parts: A Study in Ontology (Oxford, Clarendon, 1987), especially index
under "essentialism, mereological"; see also D. Wiggins Sameness and Substance (Cambridge
MA, Harvard University Press, 1980) chapters 4 and 6.
4 Cf. BGE 11 and WP 511-2.
5 See F. Weinert (ed), Laws of Nature: Essays on the Philosophical, Scientific and Historical
Dimensions (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995) which contains a number of papers on what are laws
of nature. The paper by Giere argues for a conception of physical sciences without laws, and the
papers by Ruby and Steinle discuss the history and sociology of the concept laws of nature,
including the thesis of their anthropomorphic origin.
6 See Chapter 16, section 2, "Friedrich Nietzsche's Just So Stories" in Daniel Dennett, Darwin's
Dangerous Idea (London: Penguin, 1996) for an account of Nietzsche's view of the theory of
evolution proposed by Darwin and especially his remark that "Nietzsche's idea of a will to power
[in biology and evolution] is one of the stranger incarnations of sky hook hunger." p. 466.
 JONATHAN COHEN

NIETZSCHE'S FLING WITH POSITIVISM

By "positivism" (which can mean many things) I mean here a stance which
prizes science for its ability to both produce reliable knowledge and contribute
crucially to human flourishing. By "fling" here I mean merely a temporary
attachment. Nietzsche was, by any definition, an ardent anti-positivist for most
of his philosophical career. My thesis here is that he can nevertheless be
described as a positivist (at least in the above sense) during a certain phase in
(what must now be called) his philosophical development. I am thus arguing
that we must periodize Nietzsche with regard to issues of science and episte-
mology: positivism belongs to Nietzsche's middle phase, beginning with
Human, All Too Human (published in 1878) and concluding some time before
The Gay Science (published in 1882). The connotation of "fling" as being
somewhat fleeting and not especially serious or heartfelt is also intended, for not
only does Nietzsche give up his positivism after a short time, but even while
professing it holds at the same time some of the views which will develop into
the perspectivism for which he is better known in his later works.
By "Nietzsche," then, I refer to a philosopher whose primary philosophical
concerns are not in the areas of science and epistemology. Rather, I see
Nietzsche as changing the views he holds in these areas so as to better fit and
contribute to his primary project, the cultural/spiritual growth of humanity.
While it is true that this latter project changes somewhat too during the course
of Nietzsche's career, the changes in his views are much more dramatic in the
areas of science and epistemology; this indicates, I take it, which is the tail and
which is the dog.
That Nietzsche was an anti-positivist in his early period is not controversial;
however, I locate and characterize his opposition to positivism in a somewhat
different way than is usual. For this reason I will begin by looking briefly at his
account of science during this period before devoting most of my space here to
outlining and explaining Nietzsche's turn to positivism. I will then offer an
explanation as well of why Nietzsche turned away from positivism in his later
works.
Opposition to positivism is strong and unmistakable in Nietzsche's unpub-
lished writings of the period prior to 1878, especially (and famously) in the
sketch for an essay entitled On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense. However,
I will pay only scant attention to this essay here, for two reasons. On the one

101
B. Babich (ed. ), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 101-107.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
102 JONATHAN COHEN

hand I hold that we must in general try to eschew interpretive reliance on

unpublished material, since we can never be quite sure it represents a finished
view of Nietzsche's rather than merely a discarded experiment. And on the other
hand, when one looks at the published works of the period, one finds a different
stance on science- anti-positivist still, but in a different way- than that of On
Truth and Lie. Since published works must always trump unpublished in terms
of attributing a view to Nietzsche, I will limit myself to locating anti-positivism
in the published works of the period.
On Truth and Lie attacks the idea that humans attain anything that can be
called knowledge; by implication, then, science is a delusionary waste of time.
However, the published works of the period show that Nietzsche actually does
concede that science attains knowledge. In fact, this is the very basis of his
criticism of science. He argues in The Birth of Tragedy that knowing in the
ordinary cognitive way of science gets in the way of knowing in the deeper,
more spiritual way of tragic art. 1 Since it is art, specifically tragic theater, which
provides the deepest insight into the human condition, Nietzsche is critical of
science, but this very criticism is based on the fact that science does in fact
attain knowledge. Similarly, in the second Untimely Meditation, "On the Use
and Abuse of History," science is criticized for its objectivity as well as its
characteristic habit of puncturing illusions. These features lead Nietzsche to
complain that science "robs things that exist of the atmosphere in which alone
they can live." That is, the cold, objective facts which science produces
undermine the love and partiality which creativity requires, "for it is only in
love, .. .in the unconditional faith in right and perfection, that man is creative."2
Again, as in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche concedes that science does indeed
attain knowledge; his accusation against science is that it unjustly undercuts
other forms of knowing as well as the emotional/spiritual states necessary for
the growth of culture.
Thus, in the early works, despite- and indeed, ironically, because of- the
fact that science attains knowledge, Nietzsche opposes science as the single
most important factor working to prevent the resuscitation of culture in
contemporary Germany. 3 The remedy for the cultural illness which science
represents for Nietzsche is philosophy. 4 Philosophy will provide the focus
necessary to control the "unlimited knowledge drive." 5 It will do this by
propounding values which will guide science by indicating what is worth
inquiring into and knowing. Thus it will impose limits, it will declare a certain
perspective privileged, and it will keep some things above disillusionment. In
these ways it will keep science from vitiating artistic culture.
Given the vehemence of the attack on science in the early works, it is a shock
to find Nietzsche reversing his position on science so diametrically in Human,
All Too Human. Having earlier argued that philosophy must control the
unlimited knowledge drive, he now describes philosophy as "the mischief-
maker in science" precisely because philosophy's quest for utility "applie(s) a
ligature to the arteries of scientific research." 6 There is even a direct reference
to an earlier passage7 which attacked the "mixed" motives of the scientist; now
in Human, All Too Human, he claims that everything has a mixed origin and
 NIETZSCHE'S FLING WITH POSITIVISM 103

dismisses the earlier passage as ironic. 8 In an unpublished note Nietzsche had

satirized the "Pet topic of the present age: the great effects of the smallest
thing." 9 Now in Human, All Too Human he asserts that "It is the mark of a
higher culture to value the little unpretentious truths which have been discov-
ered by means of rigorous method more highly than the errors handed down by
metaphysical and artistic ages and men .... " 10
The most striking passage betraying positivism in Human, All Too Human is
section 29:

(O)ne believes that the more profoundly a man thinks, the more tenderly he feels, the more highly
he rates himself, the greater the distance grows between him and the other animals-the more he
appears as the genius among animals-the closer he will get to the true nature of the world and to
a knowledge of it (urn so naher werde er dem wirklichen We sen der Welt und deren Erkenntniss
kommen): this he does in fact do through science (diess thut er auch wirklich durch die
Wissenschaft), but he thinks he does so even more through his arts and religions.

Here the preference of the early works for artistic knowledge is turned on its
head; now, instead of tragedy, it is science which reveals the true nature of the
world. 11 Whence this about-face from the anti-positivism of the early works?
The rhetoric of HH 1, which argues that "(h)istorical philosophy ... can no longer
be separated from natural science," seems to imply that Nietzsche now believes
science has developed to the point where his earlier worries about science and
its effect on artistic culture no longer apply. However, there were no earthshak-
ing scientific discoveries between 1874 (when Untimely Meditations II and III
were published) and 1878 (when Human, All Too Human was), nor did
Nietzsche become aware only then of earlier advances. 12
The key, I believe, is that science means something different to Nietzsche in
Human, All Too Human than it did in the early works. There science was
conceived as an almanac of random, unfocussed objective facts whose cumula-
tive effect was to disillusion belief in the values which true culture must
propound and undercut the love which culture producing work requires. In
Human, All Too Human, however, science is valued as a method which teaches
discipline, "how to achieve an objective by the appropriate means." 13 "Men who
are gifted but unscientific value every token of spirit, whether it is on the right
track or not... .Scientific natures, on the other hand, know that the talent for
having ideas of all kinds must be rigorously curbed by the spirit of science." 14
'The school has no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking,
cautious judgment and consistent reasoning." 15 Thus science in Human, All Too
Human is a discipline in the most literal sense, rather than a compendium of
random facts. It does of course produce such facts, as the above quotes make
clear, but science's knowledge-producing capacity is valued only secondarily;
what Nietzsche values above all is the training science provides. "(I)t is
invaluable, with re~ard to everything one will afterwards do, once to have been
a man of science." 6
But why should Nietzsche's opinion of science have changed between the
early works and Human, All Too Human? The answer, I suggest, is that this
change is actually secondary to a change in Nietzsche's conception of culture.
104 JONATHAN COHEN

In the early works culture is explicitly defined as "the unity of artistic style in
all the expressions of the life of a people." 17 In Human, All Too Human there is
no explicit definition of culture; instead one must glean Nietzsche's new
understanding of culture from oblique references such as the one in which
culture is placed in ':?position with "the sum of sensations, items of knowledge,
(and) experiences." 1 Now Nietzsche recommends, instead of adopting a unified
focus, turning oneself into a vast "hall of culture" which can include both
science and the arts, and describes higher culture as "many-stringed." 19 Such a
change in conception of culture necessarily requires a new look at science. If
culture is a matter of unified focus, then science's demand for objectivity and
impartiality-privileging no particular focus -is a threat. However, if culture is
loosely defined and hard to grasp, then scientific method, as an orderly way of
thinking which helps one proceed in an orderly way towards one's objectives.
becomes quite valuable and even necessary for navigating the vast new hall of
culture Nietzsche envisions.
Thus our question about why Nietzsche reversed his evaluation of science
must become instead a question about why he changed his understanding of
culture. Here it is easy to locate a motivation for his change, for between 1874
and 1878 there was indeed a crucial change in Nietzsche's cultural world: the
Wagner festival at Bayreuth was inaugurated. Although Nietzsche began this
period as a Wagnerian, having closed The Birth of Tragedy with a paean to
Wagner, even the full length encomium published in 1876 as the fourth
Untimely Meditation, "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," already sounds forced and
artificial. For in fact Nietzsche was appalled by the ignorant jingoism of the
Wagnerians. At Bayreuth, he saw the dangers of understanding culture as
artistic unity; he may have even seen the political dangers (note the use of the
word "people" (V olk) in the early definition of culture). In particular, he came
to see that anti-scientism can degenerate into emotionalism and irrationalism.
In Human, All Too Human, he takes a stand in favor of a crucial role for reason
in our cultural/spiritual growth. To effect this cultural correction on the
emotionally overheated Wagnerian age, he reaches for science as a cooling
bath. 20
Thus Nietzsche turns to science in Human, All Too Human in order to battle
Wagnerian culture and promote his own more cosmopolitan vision in its place.
This leads him to espouse his own form of positivism, as noted above. However,
though he turns to science for its value as a discipline, he praises along with its
educative and cooling powers its ability to reach truth; this is not a necessary
corollary and so demands its own explanation. It is possible that the claim that
science lays bare "the true nature of the world" (HH 29) is mere rhetoric
designed to get the reader to tum to science seriously and so reap its cultural
benefits. However, I believe there is more afoot. Had it appeared in BT, the
phrase "the true nature of the world" would have referred to that mysterious
metaphysical ground in which the principium individuationis breaks down, a
ground attainable only by Dionysian tragic insight. The knowledge which
Nietzsche agrees in the early works is indeed attained by science concerns only
the foreground world of our empirical experience, which Nietzsche calls the
 NIETZSCHE'S FLING WITH POSITIVISM 105

"discarded covering" of the world (BT 15). Here in Human, All Too Human,
Nietzsche's primary target is any metaphysics (such as those of Kant and
Schopenhauer) which asserts the existence of a "second" world beyond the
natural one. 21 Once that world is discarded (and Nietzsche's argument against
it in Human, All Too Human has for the most part been given already (at least
programmatically) in the sections preceding 29), the one true world left is the
empirical world. Thus Nietzsche's claim in favor of science in HH 29 conveys
not only a view about science but at the same time a certain epistemology and
metaphysics as well. Thus this claim is not merely a rhetorical push to take
science seriously for its cultural benefits, even though the latter are what
motivates Nietzsche to change his view of science in the first place.
However, this turn to positivism is but a fling, for alongside positivism,
Nietzsche also expresses in Human, A.ll Too Human certain views which work
to undercut science's claim to truth. Under the heading of an attack on meta-
physics, he offers searching criticisms of the efficacy of language, logic, and
mathematics.

The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things
designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of things;
language is, in fact, the first stage of the occupation with science .... (O)nly now- it dawns on men
that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. Happily, it is too late for
the evolution of reason, which depends on this belief, to be again put back -Logic too depends
on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the
presupposition that there are identical things ... .It is the same with mathematics, which would
certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in
nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude. (HH II)

These criticisms of the reliability of language, logic and mathematics, even

if meant by Nietzsche to damage the claims of metaphysics, hit home against
science at least as well. Indeed, they make the bald claims of HH 29 - that
science reaches knowledge of the true nature of the world - almost laughable.
Nietzsche defends science in the face of these very criticisms in section 19:

The establishment of conclusions in science always un-avoidably involves us in calculating with

certain false magnitudes: but because these magnitudes are at least constant, as for example are
our sensations of time and space, the conclusions of science acquire a complete rigorousness and
certainty in their coherence with one another (bekommen die Resultate der Wissenschaft doch eine
vollkommene Strenge und Sicherheit in ihrem Zusammenhange mit einander): one can build on
them ....

The appeal to a coherence theory of truth does not of itself disqualify one
from being a positivist (and is certainly in keeping with Nietzsche's Kantian
heritage). And Nietzsche elsewhere22 defends the idea that scientific truth is
"enduring" rather than eternal; this point too need not vitiate positivism.Z 3 How-
ever, the claim that science succeeds in attaining knowledge of the true nature
of the world made in section 29 must still be considered untenable. Though
coherent with each other, scientific facts need not reach the true nature of the
world. It seems that Nietzsche's battle against a metaphysical world has led him
to claim too much in favor of the ability of science to succeed cognitively in its
106 JONATHAN COHEN

world. He claims too much, that is, in view of his own post-Kantian perspectiv-
ist instincts, which are visible in Human, All Too Human as well. 24 This fling,
then, must be considered somewhat half-hearted.
When the fling ends, in The Gay Scienci 5 , Nietzsche emerges with the
perspectivism most readers know him for, a view which (among other things)
denies that the phrase "true nature of the world" is epistemically coherent, and
which sees science as one perspective among others, no better equipped to yield
knowledge than they. Why did Nietzsche tum away from his positivism to
realize and assert the perspectivism which indeed seems latent in certain
sections of Human, All Too Human? 26 The answer is threefold. First, perspec-
tivism does indeed seem to be more consistent with the Kantian framework in
which Nietzsche is working than does positivism. Second, for polemical
reasons, Nietzsche found it advantageous, while breaking with Wagner and with
Schopenhauer, to side with the science which they both anathematized, but once
the polemic receded, Nietzsche believed he could attack science again, now with
himself, not Schopenhauer, representing the cause of philosophy. 27 Third, with
his attack on metaphysics in Human, All Too Human having failed to win a
decisive victory, Nietzsche came to realize that the only way to conclusively
undercut the claims to absolute truth made by metaphysics was to abandon
science's similar claim as well. 28
Having done so, Nietzsche in his later works would reject both aspects of
positivism as defined above. First, science does not attain truth, but is rather
itself an interpretation of the world; qua interpretation, it is no more legitimate
than any other. Second, science inhibits the highest life, first because it does not
admit its perspectival character and is thus mendacious, and second because it
represents merely another form of Christian asceticism. In the early works the
task was to limit science's drive for knowledge for knowledge's sake in favor
of knowledge for the sake of an entire national culture. Now in the later works,
the task is again to control and limit science, only now the unit with which
Nietzsche is working is the strong individual. Such an individual adopts a
perspective suitable to his own flourishing, thus creating a sort of "culture of
one." 29
As final defense of my reading, I close by noting that Nietzsche himself,
looking back on his career, sees a pair of periodizing shifts. In the preface to
Human, All Too Human, added in 1886 from the perspective of his later work,
Nietzsche uses the image of a bird first going aloft and then returning to earth.
Its ascent is necessary to free itself from former attachments; at its height it sees
from a disinterested distance; finally it de-scends to rejoin the cultural fray. 30 So
too Nietzsche's free spirit goes through a phase of training in the detachment
and objectivity of science, so as better to "become what one is," 31 so as to be
able to know one's own perspective for what it is. For Nietzsche, this middle
period of growth, of detachment from former views, involved the adoption of
positivism.

University of Maine at Farmington

 NIETZSCHE'S FLING WITH POSITIVISM 107

NOTES

Friedrich Nietzsche, BT sections 14 and 15.

Section 7. This and all translations from the Untimely Meditations are by Hollingdale.
Though there are others; cf. UM III 6.
Thus one of the discarded titles found in the early notebooks is "The Philosopher as Cultural
Physician" (Der Philosoph als Arzt der Kultur). See Philosophy and Truth: Selections from
Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, trans. & ed. by Daniel Breazeale, (New Jersey:
Humanities Press, 1979), p. 69.
5 This handy phrase comes from section 25 of The Philosopher, yet another discarded beginning
found in the early notebooks, as translated by Breazeale, p.7; by contrast philosophy is character-
ized as "the selective knowledge drive." The published argument, which runs along the same lines
even though it does not use these exact phrases, can be found in UM II 4 & 6.
6 Section 7; cf. section 6. This and all HH translations are by Hollingdale.
7 UM III 6.
Section 252.
The Philosopher 41 (Breazeale, p. 13).
10 Section 3.
11 The contrast with TL (and other unpublished material), which denied that science produced any

knowledge at all, is even more shocking.

12 Darwin, at least, is explicitly referred to in UM 1.7.
13 Section 256.
14 Section 264.
15 Section 265.
16 Section 256.
17 UM 11.4.
18 Section 244.
19 Sections 276 and 281.
20 The metaphor of heat and cooling applied to artistic culture and science runs throughout HH;

cf. sections 38, 244, et passim.

21 See my "The Roots of Perspectivism," International Studies in Philosophy 28:3 ( 1996), p.60.
22 Section 3.
23 See the discussion of HH 637 (and of Hollingdale's translation) on pp. 149-150 of my

dissertation, Science, Culture, and Free Spirits, available from University Microfilms, 1991.
24 Cf., for example, the notion of interpretation in section 16.
25 Cf. especially sections 110 ff.
26 By this token TL can be seen as latent perspectivism as well, taken up again after the

rositivistic fling has run its course.

7 Cf. BGE 204-213 and Ch.l of my dissertation, op.cit., esp. pp. 35-37.
28 See my "The Roots of Perspectivism," pp. 69-71.
2" Such individual cultures are still justified, however, by the role they play in the progress of the

overall societal culture; see my "Nietzsche's Elitism and the Cultural Division of Labor," in
Rending and Renewing the Social Order, ed. Yeager Hudson, (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen
Press, 1996), pp. 389-400.
30 See HH Preface, sections 3 through 6, especially 4.
31 HH 263.
 DANIEL CONWAY

BEYOND TRUTH AND APPEARANCE:

NIETZSCHE'S EMERGENT REALISM

The word "Gbermensch." ... has been understood almost

everywhere with the utmost innocence in the sense of
those very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant
to represent- that is, as an "idealistic" type of a higher
man, half "saint," half "genius."
-Nietzsche. Ecce Homo 1

l have found the theologians' instinctive arrogance

wherever anyone today considers himself an "idealist"
- wherever the right is assumed, on the basis of some
higher origin. to look at reality [Wirklichkeit] from a su-
perior and foreign vantage point.
-Nietzsche, The Antichrist2

Nietzsche should have known better. His withering critique of the Kantian Ding
an sich launched the anti-foundationalism that continues to define the agenda
of twentieth-century philosophy. His figural definition of truth issued marchin§
orders to a "movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms,"
which, having established command centers in Paris and New Haven, quickly
colonized a transatlantic empire. His celebrated "perspectivism," which is now
firmly entrenched as the official dogma of post-Kantian epistemology, linked
the pursuit of objectivity to the "castration of the intellect." His textbook
debunking of the metaphysical prejudices of folk psychology paved the way for
behaviorism, epiphenomenalism, functionalism, eliminative materialism, and
various other reductionist approaches to the philosophy of mind. His stirring
exhortations to "become what we are," and thereby own the world that we have
pre-reflectively fashioned from our primitive superstitions and archaic fetish-
isms, have spurred the development of cottage industries in worldmaking and
narrative redescription. Widely recognized as a "master of suspicion," he is
revered as the progenitor of post-modern philosophy and the arch-villain of
speculative system-building. In short, his anti-metaphysical influences on the
career of twentieth-century philosophy are indisputable.
Equally indisputable, however, is the robust realism that emerges in his
writings from 1888, his final year of sanity. Despite having recorded the anti-
109
B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, I 09-122.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
110 DANIEL CONWAY

foundationalist insights that have collectively defined the ambit of post-modern

philosophy, Nietzsche presents himself in 1888 as a reborn realist. His newly-
installed symptomatology exposes the "idealism" of his enemies as an involun-
tary recoil from the painful, amoral immanence of the real world, which he
manfully confronts with considerably more courage and fortitude: "It is my fate
that I have to be the first decent human being; that I know myself to stand in
opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia (EH:destiny 1)"
The true test of "health," it turns out, is the capacity to behold the world as
it is, independent of the saving fictions that have been confected by theologians,
priests, philosophers, and other invalids. While explaining what Zarathustra's
teaching of the Ubermensch is meant to convey, Nietzsche observes,

It is here and nowhere else that one must make a start to comprehend what Zarathustra wants: this
type of man ... conceives reality as it is [concipirt die Realitat, wie sie ist], being strong enough
to do so; this type is not estranged or removed from reality but is reality itself and exemplifies all
that is terrible and questionable in it- only in that way can man attain greatness. (EH:destiny 5)4

Nietzsche should have known better - or not? My aim in this essay is to

attempt a charitable reconstruction and defense of the realism that emerges in
his writings from 1888. Although these writings may appear at first glance to
contradict the defining, anti-foundational insights of his career, I hope to
demonstrate that his realism in fact provides a welcome opportunity to revisit,
and perhaps reconsider, the philosophical context within which he formulated
these insights.

SECTION ONE

In his famous recounting of "How the 'True World' ['wahre Welt'] Finally
Became a Fable" (TI), Nietzsche offers a compact, six-step synopsis of the
history of Western metaphysics. Beginning with Plato's epiphanic experience
of himself as the truth, breezing through the metaphysical calisthenics per-
formed by scholastic theologians, Kantian skeptics, and obtuse positivists, he
arrives at the final, consummatory stage in the evolution of Western meta-
physics:

6. The true [wahre] world- we have abolished [abgeschafft]. What world has remained? The
apparent [scheinbare] one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the
apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of
humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) (TI 'Real World'i

Does this double abolition perhaps betoken the dawn of a post-metaphysical era,
which Nietzsche inaugurates by deconstructing the most stubborn binarism of
Western philosophy? Many scholars have reached precisely this conclusion,
happily conscripting Nietzsche as the progenitor of post-modern philosophy. If
the true and apparent worlds are both abolished, or so the story goes, then the
world must be a fiction, a construct, a narrative artifact created by that exceed-
ingly clever animal, homo faber.
 BEYOND TRUTH AND APPEARANCE 111

Here we must be careful, however, lest the "moment of the briefest shadow"
temporarily obnubilate the truth of Nietzsche's rnisplaudited achievement. The
time of day recorded in this passage is not dawn, but noontide. Although the
abolition of the true and apparent worlds may herald a new beginning for
Zarathustra, it more distinctly marks the midpoint in a larger process of
development. Distracted perhaps by the "pandemonium of all free spirits,"
Zarathustra makes precisely this mistake in his own initial solar calculations,
assuming that the way is now clear for him to promulgate a revolutionary, new
teaching: the Vbermensch. Zarathustra may begin his ill-fated Untergang at
dawn, saluting the rising sun while vowing to emulate its autarkic independence
(Z Preface 1), but Zarathustra, unbeknownst to its eponymous hero, begins at
high noon [Mittag] (ibid.). Plato's embarrassed blush, it seems, is extremely
contagious.
Having adjusted our chronometers, let us investigate the conclusion that
Nietzsche draws from his brief history of Western metaphysics. What does it
mean for him to announce that we have abolished the true and apparent worlds?
What, in short, is the logic of abolition? This unspecified "we" cannot comprise
humankind as a whole, for we know from Nietzsche's writings in 1888 that the
sick and infirm masses continue, involuntarily, to invest their fading belief in
these ersatz worlds. Even if he means to refer here to a more restricted "we,"
perhaps comprising himself and his merry band of (fictitious) free spirits (HH
I Preface 2), it is simply not the case that their collaborative "abolition" renders
these worlds nugatory or otiose. While it is perhaps true that he has exploded the
mendacious lies that sustain this bogus metaphysical distinction - a signal
achievement in its own right - his expose in itself need not prove to be
liberatory. As Nietzsche himself immediately cautions upon announcing the
death of God, "given the ways of men, there may still be caves for thousands of
years in which his shadow will be shown" (GS 108). In the post-Zarathustran
cosmos, that is, knowledge does not readily translate into virtue.
Rather than knell the death of metaphysics per se, 6 Nietzsche's account of
"The History of an Error" exposes the basic fabrications that Western meta-
physics has perpetuated. In the symptomatology developed in his post-
Zarathustran writings, he summarily reduces all philosophical judgments, pro
and contra, to signs (or symptoms) of an underlying physiological condition:

Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true:
they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in
themselves such judgments are stupidities (Tl Socrates 2/

Deploying this general symptomatological approach in the service of his critique

of metaphysics, he consequently interprets the hoary distinction between truth
and appearance as a prime symptom of sickness and decay:

To invent fables about a world "other" than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of
slander, detraction, and suspicion against life has gained the upper hand in us. In that case we
avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of "another," a "better" life ... Any distinction
between a "true" and an "apparent" world ... is only a suggestion of decadence. (Tl Reason 6)
112 DANIEL CONWAY

Nietzsche's "History of an Error" thus exposes the decadence that lies at the
heart of the Western metaphysical tradition. In fact, philosophical allegiances
either to "truth" or to "appearance" are equally symptomatic of decadence.
These allegiances therefore tell us a great deal about the physiological disarray
of the philosophers who pledge them, but virtually nothing about the real world
itself. All we know about the real world is that it induces in these decadents the
pathological recoil that defines the essence of metaphysical thinking:

The instinctive hatred of reality [Realitiit]: a consequence of an extreme capacity for suffering and
excitement which no longer wants any contact at all because it feels every contact too deeply ...
The fear of pain, even of infinitely minute pain- that can end in no other way than in a religion
of love. (AC 30)R

Nietzsche's symptomatological approach thus sheds clarifying light on the

nature of his critique of metaphysics. He abolishes the true and apparent worlds
only in the sense that he identifies the belief in these ersatz worlds as a symptom
of advanced decay. While he may wish for his expose also to transact a change
in the beliefs and actions of some of his readers, he is generally aware that the
realization of this wish is not supported by his symptomatology itself. His
expose no more liberates his readers from the thrall of metaphysics than a
physician's diagnosis cures a patient of a debilitating illness. Nietzsche thus
conceives of the logic of abolition on the model of diagnostic pathology: The
"true" and "apparent" worlds are abolished in the limited sense that they can no
longer be regarded (by the "we") as anything but signs or symptoms; they can
no longer be treated as if they were real.
Nietzsche, in short, is not Feuerbach. He does not believe that metaphysical
prejudices are simply atavistic epistemic confusions, corrigible in principle and
in fact by timely philosophical (or psychoanalytic) intervention. His compact
"History of an Error" is thus advertised as a cognitive, rather than a volitional,
triumph. It consequently generates a great deal of light, but very little heat. Yet
if he does not intend his abolition of the true and apparent worlds as a gesture
of existential liberation (as it is so often interpreted), then what is the point of
this daring expose? Why attempt a critique of metaphysics if not to release
others from the captivity of its stranglehold?
The guiding impulse behind "The History of an Error" is previewed in the
section immediately preceding "How the 'True World' Finally Became a
Fable." As we have seen, Nietzsche believes that the distinction between truth
and appearance is now tenable only for the sick and infirm, who are physiologi-
cally indisposed to renounce their dependence on it. But what about his
mysterious "we," those rare, healthy individuals who presumably do not require
the saving fictions sustained by this bogus distinction? For these free-spirited
types, the true and apparent worlds have been abolished, but the real world
remains: "The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as
'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality [Realitiit]; any other
kind of reality [Realitiit] is absolutely indemonstrable" (TI Reason 6)."9
Here, it would seem, Nietzsche has legitimate cause to recommend his
abolition as an exercise in de-mystification and enlightenment. The distinction
 BEYOND TRUTH AND APPEARANCE 113

between truth and appearance has functioned as a sort of prophylactic smoke-

screen, shielding the botched and the misbegotten from the harsh, brute reality
of existence itself. He thus exposes the perennial philosophical debate over the
relative merits of "truth" vis-a-vis "appearance" as a monumental ruse. Both
worlds are decadent fabrications, each an abstract similacrum of reality itself:

Any distinction between a "true" and an "apparent" world ... is only a suggestion of decadence,
a symptom of the decline of life. That the artist esteems appearance higher than reality [Realitiit]
is no objection to this proposition. For "appearance" in this case means reality [Realitat] once
more, only by way of selection, reinforcement.. and correction. (TI Socrates 6) 10

Nietzsche's abolition of the true and apparent worlds thus discloses the real
world, for all who can afford to behold it in its amoral, undifferentiated
immanence.
Hence it is not the case, as Nietzsche's post-modem scions are wont to
maintain, that he deconstructs the distinction between truth and appearance in
order to set aside a pernicious binarism and frolic in the resulting play of
dif.ferance. Rather, he rejects the philosophical distinction between truth and
appearance because it occludes the precise binarism that he wishes to invoke.
In the following passage, in fact, he proposes a new distinction to replace the
recently debunked distinction between truth and appearance:

Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of
the real [der Begriff des Rea/en] and the distinction between what is real and imaginary [die
Unterscheidung des Realen und Imaginaren], are still lacking; thus "truth," at this stage,
designates all sorts of things which we today call "imaginings." Moral judgments are therefore
never to be taken literally: so understood, they always contain mere absurdity. Semeiotically,
however, they remain invaluable: they reveaL at least for those who know, the most valuable
realities [Realitaten1 of cultures and inwardnesses which did not know enough to "understand"
themselves. Morality is mere sign language, mere symptomatology: one must know what it is all
about to be able to profit from it. (TI 'Improvers' 1) 11

As this passage suggests, Nietzsche's opposition to philosophical binarisms is

by no means absolute. Although his critique of metaphysics debunks the
confabulated distinctions in which priests and philosophers customarily traffic,
it does so only in order to enable genuine philosophers to distinguish without
confusion between what is real and what is imaginary.
Just in case readers of Twilight have overlooked the emergent realism that
both motivates and survives Nietzsche's abolition of the true and apparent
worlds, he restates his case even more succinctly in Ecce Homo: "The 'true
world' and the 'apparent world' -in German that means: the mendaciously
invented world and reality [Realitiit]" (EH:Preface 2). 12
This clarification is crucial to our understanding of his realism. Having
deconstructed the binary opposition between truth and appearance, he now
wishes to investigate the residue of this retired distinction, which leads him, or
so he believes, to the real world. What German philosophers call the "true
world'' is in fact a mendaciously invented world; what they slanderously call the
114 DANIEL CONWAY

"apparent world" is in fact the real world, which they cannot afford to behold
in the immanence of its ownmost existence.

SECTION TWO

Our attention to Nietzsche's abolition of the "true" and "apparent" worlds thus
sheds light on his understanding of "The History of an Error," but it also raises
a host of difficult questions about his matter-of-fact appeals to Realitat. What
are we to make of this tertium quid that he so calmly introduces into his account
of the history of Western metaphysics? What is the ontological status of this real
world- especially if it is neither the "true" nor the "apparent" world?
As is typically the case with the basic, central terms of Nietzsche's philoso-
phizing, the concept of Realitiit receives neither a precise definition nor an
extended elaboration. As we have seen, precious little can be said about the real
world without idealizing/slandering it in the process, and Nietzsche generally
observes this limitation by maintaining an uncharacteristic, quasi-reverential
silence. Unlike my own practice in this essay, he is loathe to describe his
ongoing investigations of the real world under the heading of "realism" - or of
any other -ism, for that matter.
As one might expect of a fully-initiated disciple of Dionysus (BT Preface 6),
he typically refuses to convey his "realism" directly, for fear of profaning the
world he wishes to engage. In this respect, his "realism" more closely resembles
a (this-worldly) religious position, whereby he adopts a posture of receptive
attunement to the Dionysian whirl and flux of reality. 13 In an apparent display
of reverence and humility in the face of an immeasurably dense, undifferentiated
Ur-eine, he tends to refer to the real world only by explaining what it is not, or
by describing its typical effects on the representative philosophers who
encounter it. Rather than attempt to articulate a position or theory of realism, he
prefers to rely on concrete examples. He singles out Thucydides and Machia-
velli as realists whom he admires, and he confers similar honors upon Pilate,
Bacon, Napoleon, Goethe, and Leopold Ranke. Most deserving of the title
"realist," however, are the tragedians whom he praises in his first book, for
tragedy affirms Life itself in the entirety of its painful immanence: "The tragic
artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the one who says yes to everything
questionable, even to the terrible- he is Dionysian" (TI Socrates 6). Deaf to the
siren song of metaphysics, these arch-realists celebrate the innocence of
Becoming and proudly profess their amor fati; they alone could fearlessly will
the eternal return of the same.
Nietzsche also (if indirectly) sheds light on his realism by contrasting it with
idealism, which he generally identifies with metaphysical thinking. An ideal
suggests to him a "flight from reality," a theoretical construct that may or may
not admit of concrete instantiation (EH:gb 1). Defending his alternative to
idealism, he thus maintains that "What justifies man is his reality [Realitat] -
it will eternally justify him. How much greater is the worth of the real[wirkli-
che] man, compared with any merely desired, dreamed-up, foully fabricated
man? with any ideal man?" (TI Expeditions 32). 14
 BEYOND TRUTH AND APPEARANCE 115

Nietzsche thus exposes idealism in all its forms as an indictment of reality

itself. He consequently presents idealism as the philosophical antipode to his
own "realism" (EH:clever 10). To the extent that reality falls short of the
stipulated ideal, it is judged by metaphysicians to be deficient. Ostensibly
describing his own philosophical activity, he thus allows, "Overthrowing idols
(my word for "ideals")- that comes closer to being part of my craft. One has
deprived reality [Realitiit] of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness [Wahrhaftig-
keit], to precisely the extent to which one has mendaciously invented an ideal
world (EH:Preface 2)" 15
Here he not only opposes his realism to the idealism purveyed by priests and
philosophers, but also explicitly links truth (as opposed to "truth") to his own
experiences of the real world. As we shall see, his renewed interest in truth in
1888 is no mere coincidence.
He consequently dismisses "idealism" in any guise as "cowardice"
(EH:destiny 3), for ideals invariably place pre-ordained constraints on the range
of exotic human types that might otherwise emerge. In fact, if idealism were
simply a solipsistic flight from reality, it might be harmless enough. But
idealists invaribly attempt to impose their stamp on reality itself, by way of their
involuntary impulse to police the fecund plurality of forms of life that the real
world amorally produces:

Reality [die Wirklichkeit] shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the abundance of a lavish play
and change of forms- and some wretched loafer of a moralist comments: "No! Man ought to be
different." He even knows what man should be like, this wretched bigot and prig: he paints himself
on the wall and comments "Ecce homo!" (TI Morality 6) 16

Nietzsche's realism thus furnishes both the context and the impetus for the
fatalism expressed in his 18 88 writings. The truth of the real world, it turns out,
lies in the fatality of the undifferentiated Whole that it encompasses. Contrary
to the popular wisdom of idealists and moralists alike, the real world cannot be
altered or ameliorated in piecemeal fashion. Any wish to change a "part" of the
Whole conveys an unstated desire to slander and reject the Whole. In the
following passage, Nietzsche not only clarifies the nature of his realism, but also
speaks from the realist perspective he wishes to endorse:

But even when the moralist addresses himself only to the single human being and says to him,
"You ought to be such and such!" he does not cease to make himself ridiculous. The individual
human being is a piece of fatum from the front and from the rear, one law more, one necessity
more for all that is yet to come and to be. To say to him, "Change yourself!'' is to demand that
everything be changed, even retroactively. (ibid.)

In keeping with the strongly cognitive inflection of his realism, he comes to

regard his insight into the sheer fatality of existence as a signal achievement of
his philosophical project:

What alone can our teaching be? That ... no one is responsible for man's being there at all, for his
being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment. (TI Errors 8)
116 DANIEL CONWAY

Unlike most human beings, to whom the future remains unknown, the author
of Ecce Homo actually "knows his fate"; he consequently assures us that "one
day [his] name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous
(EH:destiny l)."
In sharp contrast to the bristling voluntarism of Zarathustra's teachings,
Nietzsche's 1888 writings propose a recognition of one's fatality as emblematic
of human greatness. He consequently concludes his critique of metaphysics by
proposing amor fati as the antithesis of all idealism:

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different,
not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal
it- all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary- but love it. (EH:clever I 0)

As this passage suggests, we might confidently interpret a sincere profession

of amor fati as a prime symptom of that mysterious condition of "health" to
which Nietzsche regularly alludes. This would also mean, however, that he
cannot in good faith recommend amor fati as a prescriptive ideal, to be attained
(or not) by dint of an act of will. His "we" should certainly admire the greatness
exemplified by any human being who professes amor fati, but this "we" should
also resist the temptation to install this "formula for greatness" as a successor
moral ideal.
In fact, Nietzsche does not ordinarily intend his critique of idealism to essay
a moral evaluation. The idealist cannot help but recoil from the real world and
fabricate an analgesic simulacrum of it. In making his case against the meta-
physical indictment of existence, Nietzsche thus claims to take his appointed
place "beyond good and evil" (TI 'Improvers' l), for he refuses to blame
philosophers for the decadence that their idealism invariably manifests. He
similarly attempts to refrain from issuing moral evaluations of those healthy
types who stolidly resist the blandishments of idealism. Just as the sick naturally
recoil from reality and resort involuntarily to abstract distinctions between truth
and appearance, so the healthy naturally embrace the real world as it is,
involuntarily refusing all such prophylactic distinctions. For the most part,
Nietzsche resists the temptation to idealize his own commitment to realism.
At the same time, however, it is important to bear in mind that he is not
immune to the siren song of idealism. His trenchant opposition to metaphysical
thinking does not free him, or anyone else, from its thrall. Nor does he conclude
from his critique of idealism that those who are inured to the metaphysical
comforts purveyed by Western philosophy can afford somehow to foreswear
them. As the contrast with realism is designed to show, the "metaphysical urge"
of philosophers is not a choice, mistakenly elected by wayward thinkers, but an
ineluctable symptom of decay:

A condemnation of life by the living remains in the end a mere symptom of a certain kind of life:
the question whether it is justified or unjustified is not even raised thereby ... [B]ut of what life?
of what kind of life? I have already given the answer: of declining, weakened, weary, condemned
life. (Tl Morality 5)
 BEYOND TRUTH AND APPEARANCE 117

Elsewhere he confirms this controversial symptomatological analysis, linking

the priests' embrace of ideals to their incapacity to suffer reality any longer:

Who alone has good reason to lie his way out of reality [Wirklichkeit]? He who suffers from it. But
to suffer from reality is to be a piece of reality that has come to grief. The preponderance of
feelings of displeasure over feelings of pleasure is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion;
but such a preponderance provides the very formula of decadence. (AC 15) 17

The preponderance of idealism thus serves as an indirect confirmation of the

realism Nietzsche wishes to defend. Only in the event of a painful collision with
the amoral immanence of the real world, he believes, would sufferers and
invalids resort to fabricating imaginary worlds of their own design, in which
their suffering is finally explained and justified. The advancing tide of deca-
dence in late modernity thus indirectly attests not only to the existence of the
real world, but also to "our" diminished capacity to confront it as it is.
Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics consequently does not discredit all
investigations of the real world, but only those that recoil, via idealistic
contrivances, from the brute immanence of the real world. The failings that he
associates with metaphysics are thus attributable not to philosophy per se, but
to those individual philosophers who lack the strength of soul needed to
confront reality as it is. Indeed, although he regularly observes how readily
philosophical investigations degenerate into metaphysical diversions, he
nowhere advises his readers to suspend their investigations of the real world.
His own experiment with realism may yet land him in metaphysical jeopardy,
but he is not willing to abandon philosophy altogether simply in order to avoid
the dangers of idealism. As a temporary antidote to the siren song of metaphys-
ics, he reminds us that

One should use [metaphysical categories] 18 only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional
fictions for the purpose of designation [Bezeichnung] and understanding [Verstiindigung]- not for
explanation !Erkliirung]. (BGE 21, emphasis added)

SECTION THREE

Nietzsche identifies warranted belief in the existence of the real world as one of
the most significant casualties of the advance of decadence in late modernity.
Unable to withstand the suffering endemic to any confrontation with the real
world as it is, decadent philosophers presumptuously conclude that no real
world exists to which human agents enjoy empirical access. Rather than
acknowledge, simply, that they cannot penetrate the veil of Maya, philosophers
characteristically attempt to valorize their debilitating infirmities by generaliz-
ing them across the compass of humankind as a whole.
Nietzsche does not doubt that most philosophers are ill-constituted to behold
the world in its painful, amoral existence; nor does he dispute that for them, the
world is unknown (and probably unknowable) in its ownmost reality. He simply
objects to the validity of these (decadent) experiences for the rest of humankind.
That decadent philosophers have variously projected their sickness onto the
118 DANIEL CONWAY

world as a whole tells us a great deal about their besetting illness, but virtually
nothing about the real world. Contrary to popular interpretation, Nietzsche's
"perspectivism" does not decree that the world is unknowable in itself; any such
decree would simp,ly implicate him in the pathology that he detects in predeces-
sor philosophers. 9 His "perspectivism" instead stands as a reminder that the
failure of decadent philosophers to engage with the real world need bear no
relevance for his (or our) own attempts to know the world? 0
Although Nietzsche's "perspectivism" helpfully deflects the pessimism of
decadent philosophers, it also raises serious epistemic questions about the
validity of his realism. How, after all, can he legitimately discount the epistemic
value of the subjective realities to which priests, invalids, and decadents
regularly appeal? 1 With what epistemic warrant can he say, for example, that
"Whatever a theologian feels to be true must be false: this is almost a criterion
of truth" (AC 9). Indeed, if he rejects the traditional epistemic appeal to
objective validity, then by what mode of apprehension or attunement does one
come to know the world as it is?
Nietzsche's apparent solution to these epistemic problems is to appeal to a
notion of subjectively valid knowledge. One gains access to the real world not
by adopting the detached, external standpoint of the disinterested, panoptic
observer, but by immersing oneself in the chaotic affective engagements
afforded by an imbricated plurality of competing perspectives. One comes to
know the real world, as it is, by virtue of the range and depth of the opposing
perspectives one has mastered- by virtue, that is, of one's capacity to suffer
reality as it is, unmediated by metaphysical buffers. In an attempt to secure an
immanent critical standpoint, Nietzsche consequently endeavors to view the
world "from inside," as "will to power and nothing else" (BGE 36). In the
writings from 1888, he thus presents his own multiplex perspective as valid (or
more valid than others), because it draws on the various, antipodal perspectives
at his unique disposal.
In fact, Nietzsche explicitly links the validity of his realism to his decadence,
which has endowed him with the capacity to command antipodal perspectives.
He thus attributes his own excessive "wisdom" to his mastery of the art of
reversing perspectives (EH:wise 1). As evidence of this mastery, he points to his
unique, dual experience of the decadence that besets late modernity: "Apart
from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the opposite" (EH:wise 2, emphasis
added). Owing to the dual descent of his patriarchal and matriarchal lineages,
respectively, he is, "at the same time a decadent and a beginning" (EH:wise I).
He furthermore advertises this mastery in the reversal of perspectives as "the
first reason why a revaluation of all values is perhaps possible for [him] alone''
(EH:wise 1). Precisely because he is decadent, he perversely insists, he has
glimpsed the truth of his age (EH:wise 1).
In attributing his copious wisdom to this acquired mastery at reversing
perspectives, Nietzsche renews a familiar line of argumentation, in which he
links the richness and value of knowledge to the range of perspectives the
knower commands. In his most famous sustained account of the position now
 BEYOND TRUTH AND APPEARANCE 119

known as "perspectivism," he proposes that we re-conceive of "objective"

knowledge in terms of an aggregation of perspectives:

[L]et us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a "pure, will-less,
painless, timeless knowing subject"; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts
as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge in itself'; these always demand that we
should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in
which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something,
are supposed to be lacking ... There is only a perspectival seeing [perspektivisches Sehen], only
a perspectival "knowing" ... (GM III: 12)

Here Nietzsche exposes the "dangerous old conceptual fiction" of the

disinterested knowing subject, who supposedly gains objectively valid knowl-
edge through the suspension of all subjective interests. 22 At the same time,
however, he also proposes an alternative conception of objectivity (which he
consistently denotes in his post-Zarathustran writings by way of quotation
marks). As this passage indicates, he conceives of "objectivity" on an aggrega-
tive model, as a function of the quantity and quality of the perspectives
commanded by the knower: "[T]he more affects we allow to speak [zu Worte
kommen] about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe
one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity"
be" (GM III:12).
As we have seen, the "objectivity" to which he appeals here may be better
described as a species of subjective validity, where the value of one's attune-
ment to the real world is related directly to the number of opposing perspectives
one commands, and inversely to one's need for the prophylaxis of metaphysical
fabulations.
The capacity to command multiple perspectives actually presupposes (and
thus signifies), rather than causes, the "great health" that Nietzsche believes is
required to attain "objectively" valid knowledge. As the passage cited above
indicates, he furthermore tends to characterize this condition of great health not
exclusively in terms of the cognitive resources at the knower's disposal, but also
in terms of the knower's capacity for deep affective investments in various
perspectives. In the sentence immediately preceding the passage cited above
from GM Ill: 12, Nietzsche explains that the achievement of "objectivity"
requires "that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective
interpretations in the service of knowledge." 23 His ideal of "objectivity" is
therefore diametrically opposed to the traditional ideal: our best approximation
of "objectivity" would not be a "contemplation without interest," but a maximal
expression of subjective interests and affective engagements.
Although Nietzsche does not again explicitly invoke this aggregative model
of "objectivity," it nevertheless informs his appeal in 1888 to the subjective
validity of his own multiplex perspective. As we have seen, his "perspectivism"
discredits all epistemic claims to objective validity, but it need not disallow all
claims to validity. As in the case of his "perspectivism," his ability to reverse
perspectives attests to an underlying condition of health (EH:wise 1). Because
120 DANIEL CONWAY

he can afford to invest himself affectively in the polar perspectives of decadence

and health, that is, he commands a superlative perspective on the real world.
It is no coincidence, then, that Nietzsche conveys his realism via a novel
mode of self-presentation. Even though he both announces and celebrates the
abolition of the "true world," he also introduces himself in 1888 as the supreme
arbiter of truth, as the teller of truths nonpareil (EH:destiny 1). 24 If "truth is a
woman" (BGE Preface), then Nietzsche may finally enjoy the amorous embrace
that has for so long eluded him. In fact, he seems to believe that because he
alone can afford to live without the metaphysical comforts furnished by the
distinction between truth and appearance, he is able to see - and report - the
truth for the first time. Nietzsche, the great deconstructor of "truth," now tells
the truth like no one before him. As he immodestly confides in his faux
autobiography,

IT] he truth speaks out of me.- But my truth is terrible; for so far one has called lies truth ... It is
my fate that I have to be the first decent human being; that I know myself to stand in opposition
to the mendaciousness of millennia. - I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to
experience lies as lies- smelling them out.- My genius is in my nostrils. (EH:destiny I)

As this passage indicates, moreover, his unprecedented access to the truth is

facilitated not by any of the exclusively cognitive faculties prized by orthodox
epistemologists, but by the aesthesiological enhancement- "my genius is in my
nostrils" - that was wrought by his occupation of multiple, opposing perspec-
tives.
Nietzsche's realism thus furnishes the context within which he dares to
attempt and announce his "revaluation of all values." Having experienced the
truth of the real world, by dint of his unprecedented mastery of opposing
perspectives, he now prepares to share this terrible truth with others. Indeed, he
conceives of his vaunted "revalution of all values" not as a titanic act of
iibermenschlich will, but as a grand, calamitous expose:

Revaluation of all values: that is my formula for an act of supreme self-examination on the part
of humanity, become .flesh and genius in me ... For all that, I am also the man of calamity. For
when truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of
earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of.
(EH:destiny 1, emphasis added)

CONCLUSION

As we have seen, Nietzsche's appeal to a notion of subjective validity enables

him to avoid some of the signature, anti-affective prejudices of traditional
epistemology. His own pursuit (and capture) of the truth is not conducted at the
expense of his subjective interests and affective engagements, and it apparently
does not result in the "castration of the intellect." At the same time, however,
his appeal to a standard of subjective validity raises a number of thorny
problems for his emergent realism. For example, aesthesiological appeals to
subjective validity do not admit of independent, intersubjective verification. In
 BEYOND TRUTH AND APPEARANCE 121

fact, Nietzsche brazenly defends the superiority of his own multiplex perspec-
tive by invoking its inaccessibility to lesser noses (EH:gb 1).
Even more damaging for his own project, however, is the eerie "family
resemblance" that obtains between his own realism and the romantic pessimism
against which he regularly inveighs. He bravely insists, after all, that his
iibennenschlich capacity for suffering secures his unprecedented access to the
real world, and that his elevated state of soul renders him friendless and
misunderstood (EH:gb 1). Owing to the subjective validity of his realism,
moreover, he is tragically consigned to bear without respite the burden of his
knowledge, while fools and vulgarians tirelessly mock his unverifiable wisdom.
His only response is to decree, loudly and resentfully, that he alone is aesthesi-
ologically equipped to descend into the well of Being, that his true readers and
kindred spirits belong only to the audiences of a distant posterity. In the end, is
his enhanced olfaction all that far removed from the hyper-refined sensibilities
of, say, the young Werther, who was similarly convinced of the subjective
validity of his own communion with the beautiful soul of the cosmos?

The Pennsylvania State University

NOTES
1 With the exception of occasional emendations, I rely throughout this essay on Walter
Kaufmann's translations/editions of Nietzsche's books for Viking Press/Random House, and on
R.J. Hollingdale's translations for Cambridge University Press ..
2 Friedrich Nietzsche: Siimtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Biinden, hrsg. G. Colli
und M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter/Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), Vol. 6, p. 174
3 Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks from the Early 1870s, ed. and
trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990) p. 84.
4 KSA 6, 370.
5 KSA 6, 81.
6 The failure of Nietzsche's "abolition" to bring to an end the tradition of Western metaphysics
would appear to confirm Heidegger's famous interpretation: "This makes clear in what respect the
modern metaphysics of subjectness is consummated in Nietzsche's doctrine of will to power as
the 'essence'of everything real." "The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead," The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, William Lovitt, trans. and ed. (New York: Harper &
Row, 1977), p. 83. While Heidegger is surely right to point to the metaphysical residue of
Nietzsche's teaching of will to power, it is not likely that Nietzsche ever undertook the (Heideg-
gerian) project of bringing metaphysics to an end. If, as Nietzsche's symptomatology suggests,
metaphysical judgments are symptoms of advanced decay, then the "overcoming:"of metaphysics
would neces>.arily involve the eradication or remission of decadence itself. On the question of
Nietzsche's vexed relationship to metaphysics, see Wolfgang Miiller-Lauter, "Nietzsche's
Teaching of Will to Power," trans. Drew Griffin, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 4/5,
Autumn 1992-Spring 1993, pp. 37-101.
7 In an alternate statement of his symptomatological turn, Nietzsche explains that "All those bold
insanities of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the value of existence ... lack
any grain of significance when measured scientifically, [but] they are the more valuable for the
historian and psychologist as hints or symptoms of the body, of its success or failure, its plenitude,
power, and autocracy in history, or of its frustrations, weariness, impoverishment, its premonitions
of the end, its will to the end" (GS P2).
8 KSA 6, 200-01.
9 KSA 6, 78.
10 KSA 6, 79.
II KSA 6 98
12 KSA 6: 25S.
122 DANIEL CONWAY

13 For an insightful treatment of Nietzsche's realism within the context of his understanding of

science, see Babette Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground
o[ Art for Life (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), especially pp. 109-119.
I KSA 6, 131
15 KSA 6, 258.
16 KSA 6, 86-87.
17 KSA 6, 181-82.
18 Nietzsche says explicitly '"cause' and 'effect'," but his discussion suggests that he means all
such metaphysical categories, including "sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number.
law, freedom, motive, and purpose" (BGE 21).
19 For this interpretation of Nietzsche's "perspectivism," I am indebted to the discussion by

Maudemarie Clark in Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1990), pp. 144-150.
20 Alexander Nehamas argues that an account of perspectival engagement with the "world'' would

require us to use terms that perspectivism effectively disallows: "But in order to say what [the
world] is, beyond saying that it is what our perspectives are perspectives of. we must use terms
that every point of view must acknowledge; and this is either to dispense with points of view
altogether or to claim that one of them is inherently superior to the rest and represents the world
as it really is" (Nietzsche: Life as Literature [Camb1idge: Harvard University Press, 1985). p. 49).
This is a curious argument, however, insofar as it appears to yoke our philosophical investigation
of the real world to the "use [of] terms that every point of view must acknowledge." As I have
attempted to demonstrate, Nietzsche's writings from 1888 defend a perspective that "is inherently
superior to the rest and represents the world as it really is."
21 Nietzsche claims that Jesus "accepted only inner realities as realities, as 'truths"'(AC 34),
thereby suggesting that a distinction between subjective reality and reality is in fact epistemically
meaningful.
22 The following discussion of Nietzsche's "perspectivism" draws from my essay, "The Eyes

Have It: Perspectives and Affective Investment," International Studies in Philosophy, Volume
XXIII, No.2, 1991, pp. 103-113.
23 See Babich, pp. 175-79.
24 Clark persuasively demonstrates that Nietzsche "overcomes his denial of truth" in the books

of the post-Zarathustran period (pp. 109-117). Clark also astutely points out that Nietzsche's
"perspectivism" makes little sense as a reductionist version of anti-foundationalism (pp. 150-158).
 BARRY ALLEN

ALL THE DARING OF THE LOVER OF KNOWLEDGE IS

PERMITTED AGAIN

We philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news

that "the old god is dead," as if a new dawn shone on us; our
heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, ex-
pectations. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even
if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out
again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover
of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open
again; perhaps there has never been such an "open sea."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science 343

Is the lover of knowledge a lover of truth? Is that not why he is a lover of

knowledge, because he is more profoundly a lover of truth? Yet what if these
two aims conflict? What if one had to choose between knowledge and truth?
The question may seem confused. Knowledge, to be what it is, has to be true. 1
Or so long prescription has it. But is it true? Do we know that truth is a
necessary element of knowledge? How was that decided? What authority could
establish the truth about knowledge, and why should a philosopher credit it? Is
there anything honestly self-evident about knowledge, or the concept of
knowledge, or the meaning of the term "knowledge," which proves its necessary
presupposition of truth? Have we reliable knowledge about knowledge, or just
a lot of doctrine, a theology?
Certainly knowledge cannot be false. But "true" and "false" are contrary
terms, not contradictory; something may not be false without necessarily being
true. According to A. J. Ayer, it is a "linguistic fact" that "what is not true
cannot properly be said to be known." 2 The ability to construct a masonry wall
is "not true"; it is, of course, also "not false." Yet it is an excellent example of
knowledge. To say that it is a case of "knowing-how" and therefore somehow
does not count or must take second place to propositional "knowing-that" begs
all of the questions that need to be raised about this tendentious dichotomy
between skillful know-how and true propositional knowing-that. And true in
which sense, exactly? Must knowledge "correspond with reality," so that
knowledge stands or falls with a "correspondence theory of truth"? Or is the
connection between knowledge and truth nothing more profound than the

123
B. Babich (ed. ), Nietuche, Episterrwlogy, and Philosophy of Science: Nietuche and the Sciences II, 123- I40.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
124 BARRY ALLEN

proposition, derived from Tarski, according to which knowing that p is logically

equivalent to knowing that the sentence "p" (or a translation) is a true one?
I hesitate to pick between the alternatives. Both presuppose that the principal
instance of knowledge is propositional "knowing-that." It may be that such
knowledge and so-called knowing-how are not as different as is sometimes
supposed. The propositions of propositional knowledge are artifacts of the
production of knowledge. Propositions begin in performances. Propositional
knowing-that is knowing how to perform in an appropriate way, how to know
that p, how to assess its evidence, justify it, maintain it through trials of
strength. The knowledge it takes to know that some proposition is true is not
itself propositional knowledge of the truth. The seeming centrality of truth to
knowledge should begin to fade in proportion to the clarity with which we grasp
the practical, performative character of all knowledge. Let us therefore not beg
the question by supposing either that knowledge generally, or the best or most
important knowledge, is knowledge of the truth. And if we do not beg this
question, it becomes clearly apparent that the good of knowledge, or what
makes it desirable, may have very little to do with its "truth." So there may be
a choice after all between knowledge and "that famous truthfulness of which all
philosophers so far have spoken with respect" (BGE 1).

EXPERIMENTAL KNOWLEDGE

Two ideas of knowledge have competed throughout our history, offering two
conceptions of what the best knowledge is and why it is desirable. One is the
contemplative ideal of Greek philosophy from Parmenides to Aristotle to
Plotinus. The best knowledge is an impassive, contemplative state, with the
things known clearly and distinctly present to the mind. Such knowledge is self-
evident truth of self-evident, intrinsic value. The other idea of knowledge, which
may be traced to the Greek idea of metis or cunnin3 or, to reach back further, to
the Egyptian culture of magic, understands the best knowledge to be powerful,
operational knowledge, knowledge that can be tried and works. Such knowledge
is not contemplative knowledge of truth, but experimental knowledge, a
capacity for a reliable performance, tested by trials and perfected through
experience. It is valuable partly for the effects it allows an operator to produce,
and partly for the effect of such effectiveness on the lives and environment of
those who know, enhancing their existence, making their environment at once
more expansive and more coherent.
The contemplative ideal prevailed in Western philosophy through the
sixteenth century, though never so exclusively that the experimental, magical
idea of the best knowledge was lost; instead, it remained a dark undercurrent,
the forbidden, irrational, heretical "constitutive outside" of philosophical,
scientific, rational, orthodox knowledge. The pursuit of this other knowledge is
furtive, esoteric, the very desire for it morally suspicious, as the cautionary tale
of Dr. Faustus and, before him, of Simon Magus and Noah's son Ham con-
firmed.3 From the sixteenth century, however, the relationship between these
two ideas of knowledge begins to change. Sixteenth-century thinkers such as
 ALL THE DARING OF THE LOVER OF KNOWLEDGE 125

Della Porta, Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, and John Dee prominently
advanced the "magical" idea of the best knowledge. For their trouble each one
became infamous as a "magician." Yet by the seventeenth century, the Lord
Chancellor of England was openly calling for experiments, for the perfection of
an operational knowledge that even he called "magic," at the expense of "the
contemplation of truth" and "the quielt and tranquillity of abstract wisdom." And
since, on his view, it is the ignorance of causes which produces the failure of
works, the "truthfulness" of the best knowledge is not some abstract formal
adequation to beings in themselves, but only the completeness of someone's
working knowledge of causes. 4
Bacon, Boyle, and other early-modem philosophers of experimental
knowledge endeavored to relieve the conception of knowledge they took from
the esoteric tradition of everything that had long linked the pursuit of forbidden
knowledge to deviant ritual, heresy, and morally dubious secrecy. 5 Their
demystification of magic also disembeds the pursuit of experimental knowledge
from the ethical context of a self-fashioning "aesthetics of existence" in which
esotericism had maintained it, and gives such knowledge over to a political
institution, the social embodiment of correct scientific discipline. A bureaucratic
administration replaces the ethical work of individuals, and a magus-figure like
Agrippa, Dee, or Faustus becomes increasingly difficult to take seriously. The
inductive labor of the new experimental philosophy is not performed for
"selfish" or self-fashioning motives, but "selflessly," from charity, for the good
of society, or the future perfection of humankind (Boyle called the experimen-
talist a "priest of nature," and approved of laboratory work performed, like
divine service, on Sundays). 6
Nietzsche implicitly declares his "Baconianism" when, in a variation on
Bacon's trademark trope of departing beyond the Pillars of Hercules, he paints
the picture of "a new dawn ... At long last our ships may venture out again ... all
the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again" (GS 343). What had
been holding them back? The "old god." The one that Bacon, Boyle, and many
other enlightened experimental philosophers still worshiped: the utilitarian
pieties and mythological methodology with which they endeavored to discipline
the experimental life and disengage knowledge from ethical self-fashioning.
Nietzsche claims the modern virtues of the experimental life for his own; it
is the experimental knowledge of a Galileo, Boyle, or Franklin which presup-
poses and discloses that "world of dangers and victories" of the lover of
knowledge (GS 324). This interest in the experimental life leads Nietzsche, as
it led early-modern philosophers from Bacon to Kant, to offer a critique of the
contemplative or what I shall call "representational" philosophy of knowledge.
Yet there is a difference between Nietzsche and the experimental philosophers
of the Enlightenment, and we shall see how he goes beyond their assumptions
about knowledge. First, however, let us turn to Nietzsche's "anti-
representationalism."
126 BARRY ALLEN

NIETZSCHE'S ANTI-REPRESENTATIONALISM

Any attempt to interpret Nietzsche's thought on the topic of knowledge must

deal with the problem of its seeming lapse into self-contradiction. For instance,
Nietzsche writes: "We simply lack any organ for knowledge (das Erkennen), for
'truth': We 'know' (wissen) (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be
useful in the interests of the human herd, the species" (GS 354 ). One may want
to ask, "How does Herr Nietzsche know so much about knowledge- if there is
no organ for knowledge?" Either his claim is a piece of knowledge and
Nietzsche is inconsistent, claiming to know there is no knowledge; or his claim
is not knowledge, is non-knowledge, and nothing that a philosopher should be
expected to take seriously.
The objection may be superficial but it points to a real problem. What exactly
does Nietzsche deny when he denies an "organ for knowledge"? I suggest that
he denies we have an organ for "representation." As I shall understand it, a
representation is a logical, propositional sign that can be evaluated for its
mimetic, quasi-pictorial adequacy to the "thing" or "fact" or "state of affairs"
whose actuality verifies it or makes it true in the sense of correspondence with
reality. Wittgenstein called such a proposition a logical picture, and said it
"depicts reality by representing a possibility of existence and non-existence of
states of affairs ... A [logical] picture agrees with reality or fails to agree; it is
correct or incorrect, true or false." Whether belief in the proposition is useful,
or whether the proposition coheres with some body of knowledge are at most
secondary symptoms of its adequacy to fact or reality. 7
The idea of representation is the Achilles' heel of this classical "onto-logic"
of truth; for, as John McDowell points out, "the very idea of representational
content brings with it a notion of correctness and incorrectness; something with
a certain content is correct, in the relevant sense, just in case things are as it
represents them to be." 8 If knowledge has to be "made true" by its re-
presentational adequacy- if precisely this "truth" distinguishes knowledge from
subjective belief or mere opinion- then knowledge stands or falls with a tenable
correspondence theory of truth. Without representations we can make sense of
neither "mimetic adequacy" nor "correspondence." Supposing, then, that the
essence of truth is correspondence with reality, there is no truth apart from
representations, and since truth is supposed to make the difference between
knowledge proper and all pretenders, the only conclusion to draw is that without
representations there is simply no such thing as knowledge.
Many of Nietzsche's ideas about knowledge cease to seem inconsistent when
they are interpreted from the perspective of what Richard Rorty calls "anti-
representationalism."9 To say that we have no organ for knowledge is to say that
we have no organ for mimetically adequate representations. But why think we
lack that faculty? To support a correspondence interpretation of truth, represen-
tations have to be "seriously dyadic" -that is, their true-making correspondence
with reality is supposed to depend on nothing but what re~resentation it is
(propositional content, truth condition) and what the facts are. 0 The problem is
that no relation in this world is so seriously dyadic, chiefly because there is
nothing that simply "is what it is" regardless of its relations to anything and
 ALL THE DARING OF THE LOVER OF KNOWLEDGE 127

everything else. Or so Nietzsche seems to believe. He calls it a "quite idle

hypothesis ... that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a thing"
(WP 560). The world "apart from our condition of living in it" does not exist "as
a world 'in-itself'; it is essentially a world of relationships; under certain
conditions it has a differing aspect from every point; its being is essentially
different from every point; it presses upon every point, every point resists it"
(WP 568). Every atom "affects the whole of being" (WP 634); there is "a
continuous and concurrent dependence" of each part on all the rest (WP 638).
Hence Nietzsche's repudiation of the idea of the thing-in-itself. "The
properties of a thing are its effects on other 'things': if one removes other
'things,' then a thing has no properties, i.e., there is no thing without other
things, i.e., there is no 'thing-in-itself"' (WP 557). The thing-in-itself "is
nonsensical. If I remove all the relationships, all the 'properties,' all the
'activities' of a thing, the thing does not remain over" (WP 558). Hence too his
idea of the "innocence of becoming": "In the actual world, in which everything
is bound to and conditioned by everything else, to condemn and think away
anything means to condemn and think away everything" (WP 584); "there is
nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or sentence our being, for that
would mean judging, measuring, comparing, the whole. But ... the world does
not form a unity ... - that alone is the great liberation; with this alone is the
innocence of becoming restored" (TI Errors 8). A further consequence of
Nietzsche's "pan-relationism" is his perspectival, anti-representational
interpretation of knowledge:

Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against ... such contradictory concepts as
"pure reason" ... [or] "knowledge in itself': these always demand that we should think of an eye
that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and
interpretive forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be
lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective
seeing, only a perspective "knowing." (GM Ill: 12)

Even this perspectivalism is "valid" only from one perspective, a broadly

human one. Contrary to those who would hastily conclude that Nietzsche's
perspectivalism implies a self-reflexive contradiction, it is not offered as the
absolute, Platonic "truth" about knowledge and truth:

How far the perspective character of existence (Dasein) extends or indeed whether existence has
any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation (Dasein ohne Auslegung),
whether "sense," does not become "nonsense"; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not
essentially actively engaged in interpretation- that cannot be decided (nicht ausgemacht werden)
even by the most industrious and most scrupulous conscientious analysis and self-examination of
the intellect; for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its
own perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner: it is hopeless
curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be. (GS
374)

"The demand for an adequate means of expression is senseless." 11 If

"adequate" means "accurate representation of beings-in-themselves," the reason
is obvious. Nothing "is what it is" apart from the relations under which it falls,
128 BARRY ALLEN

yet under what relations a thing falls depends on the perspective from which it
is considered. There is no non-relational, transcendent, god's-eye view on a
world of unlimited relations. Nothing is "substantial," nothing "identical to
itself." Having dissolved substance into an infinite plexus of relations and made
"identity" relative and perspectival, Nietzsche must repudiate the classical
conception of the being of beings (EH 273). "The criteria which have been
bestowed on the 'true being' of things are the criteria of not-being, of naught"
(TI Reason 5). "Nothing is" (WP 570); "a kind of becoming must itself create
the deception of beings" (WP 517).
With nothing but relations and relations of relations, "what a thing is" or "the
way the world is" gives way to an interpretation of things, a partial, interested
cross-section or perspective texture of its relations. If representationalism or
truth-as-correspondence are axiomatic for knowledge, or necessary conditions
on its existence, then Nietzsche must say that there is simply no such thing as
knowledge. But those "axioms" hold, if at all, only in the brain of a few
Platonizing philosophers. It would be more realistic to think of "knowing" not
as any sort of passive, mimetic contemplation of true being, but as an active,
interested, situated, circumstantial activity, its product (knowledge) a selection,
a map, a partial cross-section of a relational plexus tailored to an exigent human
context. Knowing is not copying but interpreting, not passively contemplating
things in themselves but actively constructing an artifact, a "reading," whose
value consists not in its vicegerent mimetic fealty but in the capacity with which
it endows the knower for a reliable performance. 12
When knowledge is thought in terms of representations, "error" is a discrep-
ancy between proposition and fact. To ensure the dignity and purity of truth's
essence, whether a belief or statement enjoys the requisite correspondence must
be independent of any performative success, which can at most be inconclusive
evidence of correspondence. In other words, whether a belief corresponds with
reality might vary even though nothing else varies, or vary in a way that makes
no difference to anything else. That is one problem with the idea of truth-as-
correspondence. It gives no account of why we should value the truth, why it is
preferable to error. Supposing the essence of truth were correspondence, it
would be a wide-open question which is better for life, truth or error, truth or
myth, truth or systematic misrepresentation.
These are, of course, Nietzsche's own questions. Yet apart from the assump-
tions of "representationalism" which he seems to reject, it is unhelpful to
suggest that "the conditions of life might include error" (GS 121 ), or that "we
must love and cultivate erring (das Irren): it is the motherwomb of knowl-
edge." 13 If knowledge is an interpretative, circumstantial artifact and not the
imitation of being, the conclusion to draw about error is not that it is "just as
good" as knowledge, but that its difference and specific disvalue lies not in a
formal discrepancy between representation and true being but in a practical
discrepancy between expectation and performance. An error is some disruption
(or latency for disruption) in somebody' s performance; it is unexpected,
disturbing, and not attributable to chance. 14 It is not plausible to say that that
 ALL THE DARING OF THE LOVER OF KNOWLEDGE 129

might be useful for life, least of all for the life staked on a successful perform-
ance.
If reading Nietzsche as an anti-representationalist makes fair sense of what
he says about knowledge, it risks his assimilation to the pragmatism in whose
name Rorty introduced his critical anti-representationalism. 15 Nietzsche might
agree with the pragmatists that truth is not any sort of intrinsic, final good-in-
itself, yet he goes much further than they do in rethinking its value. A principal
aim, from Peirce to Dewey, of the so-called pragmatic theory of truth is to
establish a new rationale (or rationalization) for truth's superior value. For
Platonists, what is not true cannot be good to know or good at all (except as an
expedient lie for the wise). For pragmatists, on the other hand, if a belief,
statement, or theory were not of some definite practical good, it just wouldn't
be true. Pragmatists and Platonists thus agree that "of all things good, truth
holds first place," while they differ over the terms in which to understand its
presumptive, taken-for-granted value. 16 For Pragmatists, the good of truth is
wrongly understood as the intuitive contemplation of Being, but when under-
stood by their lights as the greater practical grasp, to which inquiry conduces,
of whatever concrete good any situation promises, truth retains its place among
the highest values.
Nietzsche might be preemptory with this pragmatism. Once philosophy
outgrows conceptions like Being and God, the idea of truth's superior worth
becomes more strangely difficult than pragmatists seem to see. "Consider on
this question both the earliest and most recent philosophers: they are all
oblivious of how much the will to truth itself first requires justification; here
there is a lacuna in every philosophy" (GM III: 24). Pragmatists make a show
of questioning truth's supposedly intrinsic value, but at no point is there a
serious doubt that truth is and must remain among the highest goods. "The
conclusions that ought to be the result of their most rigorous reflection were
always settled from the start" (BGE 188).
Rorty is especially careful not to exaggerate the value of truth, yet in doing
so he backs away from the pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey (and Quine
and Putnam), and takes a step in Nietzsche's direction. Whatever their differ-
ences, Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey were far from sharing Rorty's view that
truth "is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically
interesting theory about." 17 In a surprising swerve from any normative philo-
sophical discourse about truth, Rorty sets aside their interest in advancing a
theory, or telling a story, that newly rationalizes truth's place among the highest
values. In his view, that is too much, or the wrong thing, to ask of philosophy.
An exaggerated evaluation of knowledge and truth is a metaphysical stumbling
block in the way of the "post-Philosophical" culture Rorty envisions.
Rorty's pragmatism may, as he says, consist "very largely in the claim that
only if we drop the whole idea of 'corresponding with reality' can we avoid
pseudoproblems"; it may be less a "theory of truth" than "an explanation of
why, in this area, less is more- of why therapy is better than system-building."
But he combines this theoretical minimalism about truth with a quite substantial
and properly controversial understanding of knowledge. To have not mere belief
130 BARRY ALLEN

or opinion but knowledge is to have the belief plus the agreement of some
community. Knowledge is not "a relation between mind and an object," but
merely "the ability to get agreement by using persuasion rather than force."
Insofar as Rorty's pragmatist makes a distinction between knowledge and
opinion, "it is simply the distinction between topics on which such [unforced]
agreement is relatively easy to get and topics on which agreement is relatively
hard to get." Having reduced knowledge to nothing more than a socio-political
"right, by current standards, to believe," Rorty is only being consistent when he
declares that "we are well on the way to seeing conversation as the ultimate
context within which knowledge is to be understood." 18
This colloquial conception of knowledge disables any "philosophical" or
"epistemological" criticism of anything that manages to elicit unforced
agreement and pass for knowledge. None of this is any more or less knowledge,
and, as Wittgenstein said, philosophy must leave everything as it is. Rorty does
not so much revive the pragmatic tradition as overcome what, from a
Nietzschean perspective, are its limitations, and then take a step from Nietzsche
to Wittgenstein, to the idea of tradition as pseudoproblem and philosophy as
therapy. Any idea of what else (if not epistemology) philosophy could be
disappears in the swirl of Rorty' s debunking of what philosophy has been since
the Enlightenment. In the process he transforms pragmatism into something its
founders never dreamed of: A philosophy for those who have lost confidence
in the value of philosophy. The result is less a new pragmatism than an
unintentional demonstration of Nietzsche's observation that "all great things
bring about their destruction through an act of self-overcoming: (GM III: 27).

THE DARING OF THE LOVER OF KNOWLEDGE

"Life has not disappointed me," Nietzsche muses in a mid-life reverie:

On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year- ever since the day when
the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for
knowledge (Experiment des Erkennenden)- and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery.- And
knowledge itself: let it be something else for others; for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to
such a bed, or a diversion, or a form of leisure- for me it is a world of dangers and victories in
which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. "Life as a means to knowledge"- with
this principle in one's heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too. And
who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and
victory? (GS 324)

Hans Blumenberg reminds us that for the Greeks of the classical period
knowledge was not supposed to make practical life possible; it was to perfect
the happiness of a life lived in retirement from the need to make a living. "That
life was pleasanter for one who knew than for one who sought knowledge was
a premise Aristotle took for granted; it corresponded to his concept of God, and
especially to his physics of finite space, [which implied] finite natural motions
justified only by- and ending in- a goal-state of rest." The promised connec-
tion between purely theoretical knowing and happiness was predicated on the
assumption that truth discloses the self-identity of beings-in-themselves, and
 ALL THE DARING OF THE LOVER OF KNOWLEDGE 131

that the good of that disclosure somehow goes without saying (why the
sojourner in the cave ventures beyond the shadows in the first place Plato never
explains). To make a coherent break with Aristotle, the new experimental
natural philosophy of the seventeenth century "had to reconstruct the connection
between cognitive truth and finding happiness in a different way." Bacon, for
instance, carefully separates the pursuit of knowledge from both ethical
excellence (virtue) and existential fulfillment (eudaimonia, flourishing,
happiness). Bacon's inductive drudge need not and indeed should not have any
coherent ethical understanding that connects the knowledge he seeks as a man
of science with the "selfish" (or sellf-fashioning) happiness that he naturally
seeks for himself. In Bacon's imaginary institution of science "it [is] sufficient
if the combination of everyone's theoretical achievements guarantee[s] a state
of stable domination over reality, a state of which the individual could be a
beneficiary even without having insight into the totality of its conditions. The
subject of theory and the subject of the successful life no longer need to be
identical." 19
Another early-modern revaluation concerns error, which is relieved of its
moral taint; no longer a sign of viciousness, error is as it were decriminalized.
Having cast off the moral inhibitions that used to connect the pursuit of
operational knowledge with the ethical life of the knower, error can no longer
make sense as a sign of moral fault. The motto of Enlightenment, Sapere aude!
(Dare to know!), implicitly also means Dare to err! Dare mischance! The
marked nervousness about method among natural philosophers in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries corresponds with an equally marked repudiation
of all the old fixed points. "Method" is the only compass for those who depart
on Bacon's new seas. The more reassuring the philosophical blather about
method, the more careless, daring, risky, and potentially enlightening experi-
mental knowledge was free to become.
Alchemists, innocent of correct methodology, were in their way far more
rigorous about error than any practitioner of modern experimental science.
According to the West's most authoritative Arabic source, the eighth-century
Shi'ite Jiibir ibn Hayyiin ("Gerber"), the alchemist's art "is reserved in the
divine will of God, and is given to, or withheld from, whom he will."

And perhaps for the punishment of your sophistical work God denies you the art, and lamentably
thrusts you into the by-paths of error, and from your error into perpetual infelicity and wretched-
ness; for he is most miserable and unhappy to whom, after the end of his work and labor, God
denies the sight of truth. For such a man is doomed to perpetual labor, beset with misfortune and
infelicity, loseth the consolation, joy, and delight of this life, and consumes his whole time in grief
without profit. 20

The esoteric traditions of Western knowledge (including alchemy, natural

magic, astrology, and books of "secrets") sustained an ideal of the best
knowledge as operational, technical, how-to knowledge, with ironically few real
examples of it. This same subterranean line, the "subjugated knowledge" par
excellence, also maintained the ancient connection between knowledge and
ethics, in the form of what Foucault has called an aesthetics of existence.
132 BARRY ALLEN

Sophisticated practitioners of magic and alchemy work upon themselves as

much as any material. Besides impressive effects, or even with indifference to
them except as signs of grace and spiritual progress, they seek perfection,
salvation, perhaps self-divination, but in any event a spiritual, ethical goal that
cannot be pursued through corporate inquiry disengaged from private, self-
fashioning motives. 21 To cite but one example, the diary of the English adept
Thomas Vaughan (1622?-66) recounts an alchemical work of mourning for his
late wife:

a
On the same day my dear wife sickened, being Friday, at the same time of day, namely in the
evening, my gracious God did put into my heart the Secret of extracting the oyle of Halcali, which
I had once accidentally found att the Pinner of Wakefield, in the dayes of my most dear wife. But
it was again taken from mee by a most wonderful! judgment of God, for I could never remember
how I did it, but made a hundred attempts in vain. And now my glorious God (whose name bee
praysed for ever) hath brought it again into my mind, and on the same day my dear wife sickened;
and on the Saturday following, which was the day shee dyed on, I extracted it by the former
practice: soe that on the same dayes, which proved the most sorrowfull to mee, whatever can bee:
God was pleased to conferre upon mee ye greatest joy I can ever have in this world, after her
death 22

Galileo is another early-modem experimentalist who makes a sharp break

with the ethos of esotericism while accepting its ideal of operational knowledge.
It has been observed that Galileo "considered himself as having the right to
proclaim philosophical truth as he saw it, and was utterly unconcerned with the
possible social effects of his unsettling doctrines. It is probable that he was sure
that God's truths, which he was announcing, could not be harmful; but in
practice he was demanding the influence over men's minds resulting from his
pronouncements, while denying responsibility for the consequences of his
actions." 23 In fact, though, he was in one respect deeply concerned with the
"social effects" of the new knowledge he produced. He fashioned his identity
as a philosopher on a courtier-model, and circulated his results as delightful
gems for his cultivated and curious patrons.
In this respect Galileo resembles other ambitious artisans of the Italian
Baroque. Driving his effort to discover new things was the demand for
philosophical novelties in the court-culture where Galileo's identity as a
philosopher (rather than a technician-mathematician) was constituted and his
stature confirmed. His goal was not to replace error with truth, but to come up
with something new, bold, memorable, spectacular, and sure to generate the
lively controversies which his cultured patrons followed with pleasure. To
mention one example, Mario Biagioli has described how Galileo's "commitment
to Copemicanism and his self-fashioning as a successful court client fed on each
other." The Medici were as uninterested in practical usefulness as they were in
pure science, but they prized exotic marvels, especially ones "that fit the
discourse of the court and contributed to legitimizing the Medici image."
Galileo understood this discourse well. He "presented the satellites of Jupiter to
the Medici not as Copernicus-supporting astronomical discoveries but as
dynastic emblems." Copemicanism barely played a role in his argument in
Sidereus Nuncius (1610) or in the first controversy it sparked. Yet because of
 ALL THE DARING OF THE LOVER OF KNOWLEDGE 133

the court position he obtained though his discovery of the Medician stars,
Galileo "was expected to maintain a high profile by producing new philosophi-
cal claims and engaging in controversial debates." A "realist" (or non-
hypothetical) interpretation of Copernicus helped Galileo sustain his effort to
refashion himself from a mathematician, good for casting horoscopes and
erecting fortifications, into what he most wanted to be - philosopher to the
Grand Duke of Tuscany. 24
Bacon also shares the esoteric idealization of operational knowledge, but
instead of perpetuating the facade of its awesome power, he published the only
real secret of "secret knowledge": that it does not work. He thereby forces an
issue that the esoteric tradition had been able to evade in its old argument with
the Church: Can the magical operator really operate? Christian theologians
called the pursuit of "forbidden knowledge" vain, not because they thought such
knowledge was impossible or could not do what it claimed to be able to do, but
because they thought that whatever powers the operator may win from the black
arts would eventually cost him his eternal soul. Unlike these theologians, who
implicitly confirm the magus's supposed power, Bacon calls the magician's
bluff; the fact is, he cannot operate. Yet the experimental knowledge Bacon
seeks is exactly what the esoteric tradition promised: The capacity to "disclose
and bring forward (though it has never yet been done) things which neither the
vicissitudes of nature, nor the industry of experiment, nor chance itself, would
ever have brought about." Such knowledge, the pinnacle of Baconian science,
merits the name of magic "in its ancient and honorable sense," namely, "that
science, which leads to the knowledge of hidden forms, for producing great
effects, and by joining agents to patients setting the capital works of nature to
view"- though it has never yet been done. 25
Bacon carefully strips away all links between the desire for magical knowl-
edge and the furtiveness of the heretic or the esoteric secrecy of the magus. His
experimentalist is an inductive drudge, the very anti-type of a Renaissance
magus. "My way of discovering sciences goes far to level men's wits, and
leaves but little to individual excellence." Reorganized as he proposes, the
pursuit of natural knowledge "leaves but little work for genius and mental
abilities." "We have greater hopes from our constant concentration with nature
than from our force of genius." 26 Bacon's "liberation" of the desire for once-
forbidden knowledge also displaces responsibility for the consequences of
effective, operational knowledge from individuals to an authoritarian institution.
It is no longer the responsibility of those who pursue knowledge to see to its
right use; use, or application, is to be a political responsibility discharged by the
bureaucracy assigned to oversee the production of experimental knowledge.
Bacon did not envision the publicity of experimental knowledge, for which, on
the contrary, he suggested a new and more rigorous mode of secrecy: Not the
ruses of hermetism but a more stringent codification of the language of
knowledge. Bacon's is a vision of the experimental life disciplined by a method
designed to bore the amateur, silence the heretic, and reorganize the production
of knowledge along corporate lines within an institution whose walls cannot be
broached by the undisciplined outsider. 27
134 BARRY ALLEN

Nietzsche's idea of the best knowledge is also entirely "magical," which is

not to say that he overlooks the difference between an incantation and an
empirically valid formula. He takes his idea that "knowledge works as a tool of
power" (WP 480) from the experimental philosophers of the Enlightenment,
who themselves took it over from the esoteric tradition. For Nietzsche as much
as Bacon, audacity, curiosity, and the desire for a capacity to operate- vices the
medieval Church linked to disreputable magicians like Ham and Simon Magus
- become enlightened virtues. Nor is it merely a far-fetched conjecture to
connect the daring of Nietzsche's lover of knowledge to the esoteric pursuit of
"forbidden knowledge."

Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not
been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and witches whose promises and pretensions
first had to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely
more had to be promised than could ever be fulfilled in order that anything at all might be fulfilled
in the realm of knowledge. (GS 300)

When Nietzsche calls for philosophers who have reconquered their "courage
for error, for experimentation, for accepting provisionally (D 501), he makes a
mix of the "modern" imperative to dare mischance with the classical Greek idea
that knowledge is not supposed to make everyday material life possible but
rather to perfect the happiness of the happy few. However catastrophic error
may be, it could not be worse than the life of unknowing complacency of
Nietzsche's "last men," men who do not, will not, depart from themselves,
question themselves, or dare knowledge. A life in which nothing is tried,
nothing dared, is wasted, worth nothing. Knowledge is not knowledge unless it
is in continual flux, contested, threatened with error, leading and misleading
alike. Knowledge and error are not opposites; knowledge is the refinement of
error (BGE 24 ). They are a necessary pair, and mischance a necessary risk, if
one is enticed by the prospect of life as an experiment of knowledge. We have,
if anything, been deficient in errors; "the greatest sacrifices have not yet been
offered to knowledge" (D 501 ). The way of wisdom leads not to last things but
new contests, new seas. "Unconcerned, mocking, violent- thus wisdom want
us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior" (Z Reading and Writing).
Experimental knowledge need not imply a strict and rigorous methodology.
The myth of methodology was one of the ways seventeenth-century thought
tried to discipline the experimental life. But experimentation can be disciplined
(rigorous) without being disciplinary, without dressage. Nor must the passion
for knowledge be a passion for the truth, conceived as the terminus of inquiry,
where the labor of knowledge comes to rest. Nietzsche also refuses to let the
good of knowledge disappear in a utilitarian abstraction. Instead of seeking its
fulfillment elsewhere, in something that knowledge is good for, life itself
becomes an experiment of knowledge (GS 324 ).
In this way Nietzsche reintroduces the aesthetic-existential dimension to the
pursuit of knowledge that Bacon, Boyle, and other Enlightenment thinkers
anxiously omitted when they appropriated the esoteric ideal of experimental
knowledge. The experimental life becomes what it had been before the
 ALL THE DARING OF THE LOVER OF KNOWLEDGE 135

seventeenth century, before a certain epistemic Protestantism, a spirit of worldly

austerity or secular asceticism, crept into the production of new knowledge at
the expense of the self-fashioning aesthetic of existence in which the Renais-
sance had enveloped it. The pursuit of knowledge is once again a matter for
daring, for risks, a Faustian gamble with error and mischance, undertaken not
for some impersonal, abstract "good of society" but for the most personal,
selfish, or self-fashioning (ethical) motives: "to give existence (Dasein) an
aesthetic meaning, to increase our taste for it, is the ground condition of every
passion for knowledge."28 If Socrates was right and knowledge is the best thing
there is, that is not because it leads to an intuition of Truth but because the
unexperimentallife is not worth living.

A MORE LAUDABLE TRUTHFULNESS?

"Perhaps nobody has yet been truthful enough about what 'truthfulness' is"
(BGE 177). Truth, as classical philosophy conceives it, subordinates the pursuit
of knowledge to the contemplative telos of an intuitive representation. Conse-
quently it must have the experimental conscience against it. A true representa-
tion is not the ultimate goal of experimental knowledge but only a chimera and
a specious limitation. The experimental life is not a search for truth, not if truth
is something that should stop the contest, stop the arguments, the agon, and risk
of mischance. Hence Nietzsche's "experiment" with truth, suspending the
presumptive value of "that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers so far
have spoken with respect" (BGE 1).

The will to truth requires a critique- let us thus define our own task- the value of truth must for
once be experimentally called into question. (GM III: 24)

After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most
striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the
question "what is the meaning of all will to truth?"

And here again I touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet I know
of no friend): What meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will
to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem? (GM III: 27)

A philosopher may suppose that the knowledge most worth having is

essentially knowledge of the truth, and as such places the knower in contact with
something transcendent, some Being or power not ourselves which cognition
truly, that is, transparently re-presents. Call this the "onto-logical" account of
the best knowledge, whose value is said to consist in some truthfulness of the
knowledge (the cognition, representation, theory, or science). For Nietzsche,
truthfulness is an ethical virtue first and solely. It has nothing to do with
representations or propositions, ontology or epistemology. The truthfulness not
of knowledge but of its lover is nothing but the ethical truthfulness with which
one conducts an experimental life. "I think well of all skepsis to which I may
reply: 'Let's try it' (versuchen wir's). But I no longer want to hear anything of
136 BARRY ALLEN

all those things and questions which do not permit experiments. This is the limit
of my 'truthfulness'; for there courage has lost its rights" (GS 51).
Unlike the onto-logical truthfulness of knowledge, the ethical truthfulness of
the knower concerns not final perception but evolving conception, presupposing
constant change rather than eternal order, its circumstantial mutability, not its
eternal permanence, being partly what confirms a conception as knowledge
rather than dogma or doctrine.

The view that truth is found and that ignorance and error are at an end is one of the most potent
seductions there is. Supposing it is believed, then the will to examination, investigation, caution,
experiment is paralyzed. 'Truth" is therefore more fateful than error and ignorance. because it cuts
off the forces that work toward enlightenment and knowledge. (WP 452)

The "more laudable truthfulness" of the knower (rather than the knowledge)
primarily consists not in the beliefs one holds, nor in the sincerity with which
one communicates them, but in the questions one asks, in incertitude and
intellectual restlessness, in the daring with which one experiments and loves the
search for new knowledge.

Take care, you philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering
"for the sake of the truth"! ... [A]s though "the truth" were such an innocuous and incompetent
creature as to require protectors! and you of all people, you knights of the most sorrowful
countenance, dear loafers and cobweb-spinners of the spirit! ... you know that no philosopher so
far has been proved right, and that there might be a more praiseworthy truthfulness (preiswiir-
digere Wahrhaftigkeit) in every little question mark that you place after your favorite words and
favorite theories (and occasionally after yourselves). (BGE 25; cf. GM III: 8)

We therefore understand Nietzsche badly if we think that he mocks truthful-

ness or would disenchant or deconstruct it, nor is the idea that truth "is a word
for the 'will to power'" (WP 552) his final word on the subject. And while
Nietzsche's "lover of knowledge" is the genius of Enlightenment experimental
natural philosophy, the "death of God" (GS 125) is not the mere atheism of
Diderot, Halbach, or Feuerbach. Mere atheism is the idea that there is some
tremendously important truth to the proposition that God does not exist, and that
we should embrace this proposition because it is the truth. 29 From Bacon and
Descartes to Voltaire, Diderot, Feuerbach, and Marx (though they were not all
atheists), the voice of European Enlightenment is compromised by its pose as
a higher truthfulness:

the scientific method was grasped and promoted by those who divined in it a weapon of war- an
instrument of destruction - To make their opposition honorable, they needed, moreover, an
apparatus similar in kind to that used by those they were attacking: - they adopted the concept
"truth" just as ostentatiously and unconditionally as their opponents - they became fanatics, at
least they posed as such, because no other pose was taken seriously. What remained to be done
was accomplished by persecution, passion and the insecurity of the persecuted- hatred grew and
consequently the precondition for remaining scientific was diminished. Ultimately, they all wanted
to be right in the same absurd fashion as their opponents- ... As martyrs they compromised their
own deed. (WP 457)
 ALL THE DARING OF THE LOVER OF KNOWLEDGE 137

The mere atheism of the Enlightenment is a typical example of this compro-

mise. Such atheism is most comprehensible as a Platonic heresy - the Platonic
Truth that there is no Platonic God; or as an eremitic renunciation of the God-
idea in the name of the Truth. Such atheists are far from Nietzsche's free spirits,
for "they still have faith in truth," faith in its unconditional value, "a faith
millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato's, that God is truth, that
truth is divine" (GM III: 24)? 0
The death of God may remain an event too distant for many ears, especially
the ears of our atheists. If there is no God, there is no Being, no created world,
no "world--in-itself," no self-identical "beings-in-themselves" for knowledge to
represent, imitate, or correspond with. Knowledge must have as little to do with
truth in the sense of correspondence as the good of the best knowledge has to
do with some Being not ourselves which makes for truthfulness. Knowledge is
not essentially knowledge of the truth, and the good of knowledge does not flow
from the good oftruth "itself." Truth contributes to the good of knowledge only
in the truthfulness of the knower, which requires not the adequacy of a
representation to a being-in-itself, but only consistent dedication to "the idea
that life could be an experiment of the seeker of knowledge" (GS 324).
I close with two questions. First, is the "daring" of Nietzsche's lover of
knowledge permitted today? What was supposed to make such daring "permit-
ted again" was the death of God, that is, not mere atheism but Nietzsche's more
consistent rejection of the Platonic exaggeration of truth's "intrinsic value," an
exaggeration Christianity shares with Enlightenment atheism. Today, however,
it is neither the God-idea nor some residue of Greek metaphysics which
threatens the freedom of experimental knowledge. Far more troublesome are the
very institutions which ostensibly make the pursuit of such knowledge their
primary aim. The innovation apart from which there is no chance of new
knowledge is far more effectively discouraged by the disciplinary structure of
present-day technoscience, including the bureaucratic administration of
research, the institution of peer-review, and the role of the Ph.D as a source of
legitimation and a necessary licence to produce knowledge.
A second question is whether we should really want such "daring" as
Nietzsche calls for in the production of new knowledge. Apart from romanti-
cally being true to oneself, he seems to see no further conditions or limitations
on experimental practice. Sapere aude! "Anything goes." Yet experiments have
consequences, and they are not always good. Nietzsche tries to evade this point
and the need for something like ethical responsibility, as if concern about the
consequences of errant mischance were a mere failure of nerve. It is not. The
God-idea may be dead, but consequences still matter. Error, that is, a non-
accidental discrepancy between expectation and performance, is really nothing
to be careless of. Yet precisely that carelessness is what Nietzsche mistakes for
daring. "In the past," he says, especially when people believed in an immortal
soul, any knowledge that could save one's life "possessed a frightful impor-
tance." He thinks we can go beyond that now. "We have reconquered our
courage for error, for experimentation, for accepting provisionally- none of it
138 BARRY ALLEN

is so very important! ... The greatest sacrifices have not yet been offered to
knowledge" (D 501).
Here I think we see an ancient prejudice that Nietzsche did not know how to
question: that the best knowledge belongs to the lucky few whose freedom to
live an experimental life is sustained by those who must work to get their living.
Nietzsche's conception of the best knowledge as that won from the risk of
(possibly fatal) mischance reflects this assumption that the knowledge he seeks
is somehow higher, better, truer than the workaday knowledge of practical
material-technical culture. In a silly passage, he says that it is "we thinkers who
first have to determine the palpableness of things and, if necessary, decree it.
Practical people in the end take it from us, their dependence on us is incon-
ceivably great and the most ludicrous spectacle in the world, however little they
may realize it and however proudly they may love to ignore us impractical
people; indeed, they should deprecate their practical life if we should choose to
deprecate it: - a thing to which a little desire for revenge might now and then
incite us" (D 505). It is probably safe to say that this idea gets matters exactly
backwards. The "relativism" that one hears so much about today is the work of
this spirit of revenge, as are other recent fads in philosophy, including decon-
struction and postmodemism. These tendencies are not, however, merely silly;
for we need the knowledge they pretend were no different from any arbitrary
"hegemonic" doctrine or mythology. Despite their sophistry, knowledge and
doctrine, knowledge and opinion, knowledge and consensus, knowledge and
what passes for known are not the same, nor will they ever be so long as human
beings have a serious future on this planet.
Nietzsche may think that because truthfulness is an ethical matter first and
last, because it is a question of ethos, of self-fashioning, or an aesthetics of
existence, that means the only "being" there is to be true to is oneself. This
romantic egoism is pale and limited beside the more challenging goal of erotic
truthfulness to another. The freedom to experiment, to risk error, has to be
tempered by a profoundly "unNietzschean" respect for consequences, and for
the consequences of consequences for others. Another disturbing quality of our
"academic-technoscientific complex" is that it does very little to limit our
exposure to such risks, while living off our willingness to alienate the produc-
tion and circulation of powerful, technical, how-to knowledge to self-certified
academic and professional experts, on the false assumption that this division of
epistemic labor makes us safer and smarter.

McMaster University, Canada

NOTES
1 Bertrand Russell probably speaks for many philosophers when he says, "what we firmly
believe, if it is true, is called knowledge ... what we firmly believe, if it is not true, is called error."
The Problems of Philosophy (London. 1912; Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1978), p. 81.
' A. J. Ayer. The Problem of Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), p. 25.
3 On Faustus, see Michael Keefer, Christopher Marlowe ·s "Doctor Faustus": A 1604-version
Edition (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1991 ), pp. xxxvii-xlv; and loan P. Couliano. Eros
and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. M. Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). chap.
 ALL THE DARING OF THE LOVER OF KNOWLEDGE 139

10. On Simon Magus and Ham, see Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 337-338, 341-342. On forbidden knowledge,
my "Forbidding Knowledge," The Monist 79 ( 1996): 294-310.
4 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum I, CXXIV; Paolo Rossi, "Truth and Utility in the Science of
Francis Bacon," Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. S. Attanasio
~New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 160-161.
On magic and religious deviance, see C. A. Faraone and D. Obbink, ed. Magika Hiera: Ancient
Greek Magic and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. vii. On magic and the
Royal Society, see Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of
Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and William Eamon, Science
and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994 ), pp. 332-350.
6 See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century
England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994 ), pp. 158, 173.
7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness
~London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961 ), 2.201, 2.21.
John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 162.
I describe the Greek, or classical interpretation of truth as "onto-logic" because its fundamental
assumption is that a logically consistent predication owes its possibility of being true to the antic
possibility of the entity whose being (existence and identity) makes it true. Logical possibilities
of truth and ontic possibilities of being are therefore exactly coextensive. See my Truth in
Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. chap. I.
9 See Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, vol. I (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 2-12.
10 "Talk of 'representation of the facts' ... incorporates a philosophically correct- as we might

say, seriously dyadic- perspective on the truth predicate." Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 83.
11 Nietzsche, Nachlafi; cited in Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science (Albany:

State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 119.

12 See Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, pp. 230, 233; and Eric Blonde!, Nietzsche: The

Body and Culture, trans. S. Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1991), p. 146.
13 Nietzsche, NachlajJ, cited in Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy, p. 103; see also GS 107, BGE 24,

and WP493.
14 James Reason, Human Error (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 9.
15 Some of the first German thinkers Nietzsche stimulated were aware of an affinity with

pragmatism, which Georg Simmel is supposed to have described as "the part of Nietzsche which
the Americans adopted." Rorty suggests that Nietzsche is "the figure who did most to convince
European intellectuals of the doctrines which were purveyed to Americans by James and Dewey."
Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 2. On
Nietzsche and pragmatism, seeM. A. Weinstein, The Wilderness and the City: American Classical
Philosophy as a Moral Quest (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), esp. pp. 129-
137; and my 'Truth in America," Cohesion and Dissent in America, ed. C. Colatrella and J.
Alkana (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
16 Plato, Laws 730c.
17 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p.

XIII.
18 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, pp. 132, 128, 88, 23; and Philosophy and the Mirror

of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 389.

1 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 232,239-240.
°
2 Cited in E. A. Hitchcock, Alchemy and the Alchemists (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Co.,
1857; rpt. Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Society, 1976), p. 122; see also E. J. Holmyard,
Alchemy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957; rpt. New York: Dover, 1990), p. 158. On Jiibir, see
Eamon, Secrets of Nature, p. 42.
21 On esotericism and self-fashioning see Eamon, Secrets of Nature, p. 355. On "aesthetics of

existence," see Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics," in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow,
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983); and my "Foucault and Modern Political Philosophy," The Later Foucault, ed. J.
Moss (London: Sage, 1998).
22 The Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan, ed. A. E. Waite (Kila, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing
Co., 1992), p. ix.
140 BARRY ALLEN

23 Jerome R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1971), p. 63.

24 Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism

~Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 5, 100, 105, 156, 149.
5 Bacon, Novum Organum II. 3 (my emphasis); and The Advancement of Learning III, 5; cf.

Novum Organum II, XI. The eleventh-century Byzantine philosopher Michael Psellus defined
magic as natura/is philosophiae absoluta consummatio. The definition was repeated by nearly all
of the philosophical defenders of magic from Ficino and Pico to Agrippa, Gasper Schott, and
friends of the Royal Society, including Elias Ashmole and Seth Ward.
26 Bacon, cited in R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific

Movement in Seventeenth-Century England, revised ed. (St. Louis: Washington University Press,
1936, 1961; rpt. New York: Dover, 1982), p. 55; and Advancement of Learning, Preface.
27 See J. C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1989), pp. 8-9, 41; and Bacon, New Atlantis (Kila, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing
Co., 1992), pp. 303, 321, 330, 331-332.
28 Nietzsche, Nachlaj3, in Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, p. 104
29 It is perhaps doubtful that Diderot would subscribe to this characterization of atheism. In a

letter to Voltaire (1749) he writes, "It is ... very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but
to believe or not to believe in God is not so important at all." SeeM. J. Buckley, At the Origins
o[ Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 225.
3 On Nietzsche and Enlightenment atheism, see my "Atheism, Relativism, Enlightenment, and
Truth," Studies in Religion 23 (1994): 167-177.
 JUSTIN BARTON

HOW EPISTEMOLOGY BECOMES WHAT IT IS

For Nietzsche, philosophy is an intensification of fields of thought. Showing

what it means to say this, and what it is for philosophical work to be an
expression, in part, of this idea ("philosophy is an intensification of fields of
thought") are two main aims of what follows. Each of the elements in the idea
is complex -- is itself an idea- and is so in large part because it is articulated in
a complex way with the others (as with an aphorism). The way forward is
through explorations of genealogy (involving a very brief assessment of some
interpretations of Foucault and De leuze) and of Nietzschean critique, and in the
process an account will emerge of the relation of his thinking to the domains of
epistemology and the philosophy of science.
Philosophy is an intensification of fields of thought. Which is to say that
philosophy is also (noch einmal) thought, but thought taken to a different level.
And immediately it also has to be said that thought, here, is the whole field of
the generation and solving of problems, and therefore it is what can be called the
"edge" of science, religion, art and politics (it is because of this that Nietzsche's
work spreads far beyond the conventional domains of activity of epistemology,
metaphysics and logic, in a way which is intrinsic to what he is doing).
Secondly, it also has to be said that as an intensification of thought, philosophy
is being reconceived in terms of its greatest potential both as radically and
disturbingly productive, and as dance, in the sense of a generative free-play of
experimentation, a fluently non-programmatic activity (even though it still
involves a very complex and continually broadening array of strategies).
Nietzsche says that maturity is "to have rediscovered the seriousness of a child
at play" (BGE 94). Philosophy here appears as a diagramming, and a critiquing
of thought which takes place beyond certain constricting criteria and frame-
works for the selection and handling of problems (what is meant here by the
terms "diagramming" and "critique" will be explained later, but for now it can
be said that the idea being explicated is a diagram, and that the widened,
explicated form of this diagram is also - in passing - explicitly a critique).
Because the domain of application of philosophy is the problem-generation and
problem-solving of all activity, and because its functioning is the intensification
of these, its importance - as the meta-level art or science of thought - comes
into focus as being very great. But before this is taken as a charter for the
arrogance of "official" philosophers it is necessary to point out that philosophy

141
B. Babich ( ed. ), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 141-149.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
142 JUSTIN BARTON

in this sense is mostly done by people who are not called philosophers - by
artists and scientists and social theorists (Nietzsche would have used Goethe as
an example at this point, and he would have added that some philosophers have
to some extent been refused acceptance as was the case with Schopenhauer).
Very obviously it is also the case that the non-philosophical domains and micro-
domains of creation/development of problems (which are also ideas) continually
undergo intensifying transformations that have nothing to do with the function-
ing of philosophy.
For Nietzsche, the central issue that can illustrate what is at stake here would
be the problem of what lines of transformation of human thought/activity can
be opened up (and are being opened up) in the context, and in part through the
analysis of, the decaying constricting functions of concepts such as the divine,
teleology, transcendent morality and truth, representational negation, and
identity. To explore these issues - in relation always to specific domains of
constitution - is to diagram the relations between the elements at work
(functions of constriction and tendencies toward transformation) and it is to
critique in the sense of breaking open directions that are in excess of those being
accessed by the current framework of constitution of activity. This is not so
much to be seen as revealing what is the case - partly because what is the case
is in principle utterly in excess of any level of constitution - it is to intensify the
thinking involved, and this in tum means to intensify activity, because there is
no excluding distinction between thought and activity (thought is the term that
gets used for one end of the spectrum of creative activity, which is another way
of saying that creative activity is the term that gets used for one end of the
spectrum of thought ... ).
Up to a point, nothing has changed here in relation to the issue of truth. It is
still a question of rigorous analysis, and it is still for now a question, from a
certain unimportant perspective, of there being elements, continually being
added to, and continually being removed, functioning as constants within fields
of thought ("Are they new friends of 'truth,' these coming philosophers? In all
probability: for all philosophers have hitherto loved their truths" [BGE 43]).
And moreover it is a question, in part, of an intensifying of the process of the
realisation, the bringing into effect, of new problematics, and new solutions,
which was what was always at stake in any non-reactive discussion of truth.
However in relation to the issues of philosophy and of thought in general the
role of truth has been displaced. Truth is no longer pivotal for understanding
processes of knowledge, because it is only a background stabilising aspect of
what these processes do (in a similar way to the way in which grammar is only
a stabilising aspect of the functioning of language). Knowledge processes
(which include philosophy) can no longer be seen as dedicated to truth, any
more than a human body can be seen as dedicated to its kidneys. And what is
more, it is important to realise that the vigilant constitution of philosophy and
the acquiring of knowledge as dedicated to truth has been nothing other than a
constriction of its activity. This is what Nietzsche means by his aphorism in
Beyond Good and Evil: "'Knowledge for its own sake'- this is the last snare set
by morality: one therewith gets completely entangled in morality once more"
 HOW EPISTEMOLOGY BECOMES WHAT IT IS 143

(BGE 64). The other way of coming at the displacement is the fact that thought
is not about representation in any sense other than constitution. The "moment"
of positing something is a point in the constitution of a field of problems, or of
a set of strategies for handling problems, or of a field of activity in the widest
sense. It makes sense to talk about, say, the representation of a thing as x, but
only in this sense of constitution. Philosophy for Nietzsche is generative, rather
than representational. Philosophy diagrams and critiques, employing (initially)
a thought of a continual excess of constitutability over constitution, involving
continually escalating circuits of the realisation of new forms of thought, that
is, new escaping forms of activity. Truth remains the same as it was, only
something more extraordinary (which was always the heart of the process) has
emerged to the point of explicitly shaping strategies, and it is into this new
conception that truth has been inserted. Everything that was at stake is now
taken up into the idea of an accelerated wave of actualisation that refuses the
classical distinction between appearance and reality, because it has recognised
that the thought of new domains of constitution pressing toward mobilisation
from an "immanent noumenon" is in fact the thought of the continual emerging
of an intensified reality - "reality once more, only selected, strengthened,
corrected." 1 The outside as part of the inside. Immanence.
Taking up the problem of genealogy is a crucial way of extending the main
ideas at stake here. Genealogy is the study of the tensions and of the field of
functioning problems at the inception of an institution or a discipline, and it is
the study of the overall trajectory, on the part of the institution/discipline, of
external struggles, assimilations, and exclusions. Genealogy is not directly about
disproving institutionalised metaphysical claims. Nor is it helpful to think about
it simply in terms of uncovering origins, partly because there is more to the
basic process than this (development beyond the inception is crucial as well),
but mostly because genealogy is about breaking open new lines of thought, and
new lines of transformation, through rigorously taking the whole of the past as
a resource of important exclusions and of forgotten or suppressed initial aims.
Genealogy is therefore coming into focus as, in part, a modality of critique. If
a scientist begins to look at long buried "heretical" work, or work which no-one
could see an application for (as with the physicist Fiegenbaum tracking down
Goethe's work on coloud they are beginning to practice genealogy. A
mathematician studying the manifestations of mathematics that were abandoned
with the instigation of calculus is doing genealogy. It becomes obvious that
genealogy is an idea which has been functioning at a relatively low level of
subtlety. This is partly because Nietzsche made only occasional direct refer-
ences, which have failed to generate a widened scope. It is also because the
work which uses the idea in the title has a project which is easily interpreted as
simply negative - rather than being seen in terms of the self-overcoming of
morals. The Genealogy of Morals has recurrently been seen as simply a
methodologically aberrant set of proofs of the falsity of certain metaphysical
positions. So far as this last issue is concerned, it is important to recognise that
the whole of Nietzsche's engagement with the history of philosophy is geneal-
ogy, and here it is perhaps more obvious that the aim is to create new directions,
144 JUSTIN BARTON

in part through the taking up into the circuit of what has been left behind or
suppressed. Nietzsche has Zarathustra say "He who has grown wise concerning
old origins, behold, he will at last seek new springs of the future and new
origins." 3 This leads on to the problem of thinking of genealogical method only
in terms of origins. The point here can be made by reference to the fact that in
his preface to The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche says that what is needed in
relation to the issue of morals is "knowledge of the conditions and circum-
stances in which they grew" and "under which they evolved and changed." 4
Genealogy is an intricately relational method which stresses the complexities of
the inception of the institution studied, but is also dedicated to analysing the
pressures and internal rifts of its overall development. Deleuze is perhaps failing
to capture this point in Nietzsche and Philosophy when he says "Genealogy [... ]
means origin or birth, but also distance or difference in the origin." 5 However,
it can be said at this stage that including the whole 'trajectory' in a way gives
you the same idea, only at a higher level of effectiveness. This is because in
terms of their past the current manifestations of an institution (or a social
practise, a discipline, an art medium. .. ) have the whole line of their development
as their origin. And Deleuze does incorporate the crucial point about the
intensificatory nature of genealogy when he writes about the "differential
element" of both genealogy and critique, and then goes on to say "The differen-
tial element is both a critique of the value of values and the positive element of
a creation." 6 Foucault also goes a long way in this direction in his essay
"Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." He says that the "search for descent [... ]
shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself'7 and later
he goes on to say:

History becomes "effective'" to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being- as
it divides. dramatises our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. "Effective'" history
deprives the self of the reasuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be
transported toward a milennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly
disrupt its pretended continuity.
This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. 8

The problem is that this account is built around the idea of differentiation
within genealogy, but it fails to concentrate on the intensificatory circuit that
genealogy is as a process. Which is partly to say that it fails to see the process
properly as the generation of new lines of thought (new dimensions of becom-
ing); as the production of new problematics, new ideas. Foucault is on the edge
of this way of thinking, but the problem is that a reaction against thought being
conceived in terms of identity has lead to it being conceived in terms of
differentiation. This is partly right, but thought is also generation of problems,
constitution of fields of problems, and interpretation within these fields. And
Foucault's concentration on "cutting" and on "dividing," in the absence of any
strong account of the overall circuit, is liable to allow his thought to be taken
back into a structure of the revealing of static lines of originary, suppressed
difference, as opposed to the idea of the production of mutant lines of thought
through the heightened contact between the "present" and that other part of the
 HOW EPISTEMOLOGY BECOMES WHAT IT IS 145

present known as the past. There is an important contrast between Foucault

saying that knowledge "is for cutting" and Nietzsche saying about "actual
philosophers," in Beyond Good and Evil, that "they reach for the future with
creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an
instrument, a hammer. Their 'knowing' is creating... " (BGE 211). It could be
said that the difference is between the residually pious and the thoroughly
pompous, but behind Nietzsche's stylised bravado (and his irritating emphasis
on "great" individuals) there is an extremely important issue. The idea is of the
past being part of the present, and of it being part of a positive feedback of
production in general. In this essay Foucault is on the threshold: he has just not
properly connected up the idea of heterogeneity with the idea of an "untimely"
circuit of emergence.
It is important however that the idea of philosophy as the intensification of
fields of thought is not seen as merely a vague value statement aimed at those
who are making claims of some kind about the centrality of truth. Instead it
should be seen as a concrete description which is one starting point for thinking
about philosophical strategies that demonstrate and complicate (amongst many
much more important things) the initial idea of intensification. When Nietzsche
writes about the "untimely" he is initiating this line of thought. The crucial path
that leads from here goes by way of an analysis of Nietzschean critique. This is
because critique is thought turned upon itself- the untimely turned upon the
timely. Critique is here being defined as a strategy that demonstrates (in
passing) a structural excess in relation to that which is being constituted in a
particular domain ("structural" in that the framework of the domain requires a
fundamental transmutation in order for the new range of aspects to go into
effect).
An important manifestation of Nietzschean critique is used by him in relation
to the domains of morality and of the representation of knowledge. It is a
strategy which works by separating the domain into, on the one hand, the field
of practises or phenomena that is being engaged with (the 'material'), and on the
other, the field of concepts that are at work in this engagement, by showing the
necessity for are-articulation of the field of material, of forces, and by showing
that aspects of the field of concepts are inhibitory for the development of the
domain. Perhaps a better way of making this point is to say that Nietzsche starts
by asking the questions "what is at stake?" and "what is the .field offorces being
encountered?" In the case of the domain of the representation of knowledge
(epistemology), Nietzsche's answer to the first question is that what is at stake
(i.e. that which is the most important aspect of the material) is the generation
and transformation of lines of thought (lines of becoming, creative incorpora-
tions). His answer to the second question is that the field of forces is the
available spectrum of human activity from that which exhibits almost no
processes of learning, to that which exhibits an unrestrained tendency to enter
into lines of incursion/constitution with that which is encountered. And his
further contention is that there are aspects of the field of concepts at work
(involving concepts which are rigidly oppositionally structured) which suppress
the development of the furthering and creation of lines of thought in general,
146 JUSTIN BARTON

rather than assisting it through analysis (even though this will not always have
been true in many of the cases). Among the suppressively functioning concepts
here (to give another non-inclusive list) are identity, negation, the subject, the
object, purpose, universality ...
Some subtle shifts have taken place now. The contention in relation to the
inhibitory functioning of concepts in the domain (concepts functioning not as
instigators of lines of thought, but as blocking elements) is a first piece of
diagramming. It lays out an empirically testable and alterable relation between
the functioning of certain concepts in the domain and the development of the
field of the generation of knowledge. In part this is to say that in order to
understand knowledge better it is necessary to take part in a critique of the
representation of it (it is important to point out that that this is not the illusion
-which Nietzsche explicity attacks- of a critique of knowledge as a whole, 9 but
the critique of a particular knowledge institution) but, more importantly, it is to
say that epistemology is in part responsible for a negative aspect of what it
studies - knowledge in general. Clearly this negative aspect is not something
that can be regarded as external to the field of epistemology - the first aspect of
an excess in relation to the ideas of the domain appears here. This is therefore
not a weak claim to the effect that some of the concepts of epistemology are in
need of modification: in fact the claim is that the representation of knowledge
is not only caught up to some extent in inneffective ways of thinking, but is a
"dark workshop" that functions in many ways as an inhibitor of what it studies
(the question as to how this happens also becomes important at this stage:
Nietzsche's account of this centres around the reactive, transcendence values of
Christianity).
Another crucial shift is at work in there-articulation of knowledge in terms
of a generative (creative) process which does not involve unified subjects.
Instead, the account Nietzsche advances of what had been called the "subject"
involves an immanently interacting multiplicity of centres or drives, which
make up the constituting "ends" of a radiating zone of relations of incur-
sion/constitution. And the crucial aspect of the domain of knowledge here is its
genetic aspect: the aspect which in the case of the generation of new lines of
thought involves an encounter which takes the form, in part, of a transformation
of the faculties and concepts at work so that the encounter can become an idea
rather than just a fascination. What this means is that the "subject" is not just
multiple, it is is also such that it can undergo a shift in its faculties and concepts
as a result of the incursion of something new, so that the knowledge o.fwhat is
the problem being worked on will only appear at the point where the initial
solution appears. And what this means in turn for Nietzsche is that less time
should be spent on looking for a criterion of certainty, and for fixed. justifiable
categories (given that the whole field of knowledge is constantly altering) and
more time should be spent studying the fields of conditions under which
thinking takes place. The intensifying of this element of the genetic, of the
creative, is what Nietzsche holds to be at stake here: it is what causes him to say
that "the question of certainty' is "a dependent question, a question of the
 HOW EPISTEMOLOGY BECOMES WHAT IT IS 147

second rank," (WP 587) and it is what lies behind this attack- "The desire for
'solid facts"- epistemology: how much pessimism there is in it!" (WP 591)
This overall account of the representation of knowledge, and of that with
which it is engaged, forms a very complex diagram, a diagram with different
kinds of dimensions (it is heterogeneity of dimensions which is here being used
as the defining aspect of what are being called diagrams). The dimension of
networks of faculties, the dimension of interactions/capacities, the dimension
of suppresive institutional conceptual systems, the dimension of encounters, the
dimension of lines of becoming. Here, in the lines of thought through which this
diagram is manifested, is the crucial, immense, excess in relation to the ideas of
the domain of conventional epistemology. The diagram is a set of strategic,
methodological coordinates. What Nietzsche has instigated here is not episte-
mology in any conventional sense of the word. But then atonal music was also
villified in a way which is structurally the same as the way in which Nietzsche
is dismissed- as "not really being music."
The issue of values has not been left behind. It has been at work in the form
of a process of comparison of modalities, strategies, and methods ("The most
valuable insights are arrived at last, but the most valuable insights are methods"
(WP 469) ), and this process has been bound up with the idea that there are
assumptions of unity, regularity and identity that express themselves as
strategies of thinking and living that are constrictive, relative to other modes.
This is what Nietzsche is arguing towards in this note: "The question of values
is more fundamental than the question of certainty: the latter becomes serious
only by presupposing that the value question has already been answered" (WP
588). What is being shown to be that which must be "passed by" is an ultimately
religiously sustained privileging of regularity, which hampers experimentation,
and which treats the analysis of, or of how to attain, algorithmically functioning,
fixed elements (truths, certainties) as the key to understanding and furthering
knowledge processes, rather than this key being the analysis and fostering of
networks of ideas and strategies which have (as a whole, and individually) a
plasticity and non-transparency of functioning which is a response to the
plasticity and complexity of the "Dionysian" world of which they are a part, and
with which they are engaging. The immanent play of functionally non-specific
elements, with its mergings and emergences, and with its predominant absence
of the mechanistic constriction of governing codes (the immanent play which
Nietzsche calls the "will to power"), engaged with in turn by the play of an
extension of itself in the form of the irreverent experiments, and diagrammings
of processes of knowledge. It is not a question of fields of knowledge converg-
ing on the truth, it is a question of institutionalised (and non-institutional)
methods coming to have more in common with the vast majority of that which
they study., and therefore, of an intensification of the mutual becoming between
the two.
What is it to say that Nietzsche is writing through the untimely perspective
of an immanent "outside"? To use one of his own terms, it is to say that he is
writing beyond "gravity," beyond the gravitational fields of particular domains
of conceptual articulations. More broadly, the 'outside' is an aspect of all
148 JUSTIN BARTON

exuberant experiences of the intuitive upsurging of a new line of constitution.

It is the moment of emergence or encounter, when a new direction appears,
when a new desire (line of becoming) appears, a new joy. The outside is the
other side of the encounter (a field of fascinating elements, of practises, of
people, or a single person), but it is also the appropriate name for the escaping
"between-ness" of the becoming, which is beyond the domain from which it
escaped. This is a material (but distributive and differential) phenomenon, a
zone/line of space-time, or an aspect of one. Which leads to the recognition that
the spectrum of creative activity is the spectrum of generative activity as a
whole. Chemical arrays and species also break into lines of becoming, lines of
desire (will to power). So do societies, despite the best attempts of governing
social systems to religiously stigmatise many of these social becomings as
immoral, or unstructured, and therefore non-viable. The form of these becom-
ings is in fact absolutely more "intelligent" and more ordered (it is immanently,
fluidly, ordered) than the manifestations of the "code" paradigms of systematic-
• 10
Ity.
It is not in any way that codes, or relatively fixed structures of constitution,
are a problem as such. Very much on the contrary, modelling techniques and
procedural systems are to be acquired, extended and experimentally re-applied
to as great an extent as possible- the point instead is that the breakaway lines
of new developments, that express themselves in part as the overcoming and
transmutation of codes, are to be worked with as the most important and
extraordinary aspect of processes involving such systems. 11 When a composer
or an improvising jazz musician continually transmutes the framework with
which they are working they are at the peak of their skill. If a species continu-
ally modifies itself by entering into symbiotic relationships or by picking up and
transmuting elements of code from the environment it has achieved something
of extraordinary importance. It is a question here of favouring modes of activity
that maximise the chance of the emergence of a transmutation: it is a question
of having "the seriousness of a child at play," only at a far higher level of
complexity than that of a child. Or, to use some examples, it is a question of
exploring the border zones of disciplines, and of exploring the inceptions and
trajectories of disciplines (genealogy); it is a question of developing a fascina-
tion for the exceptional, the pathological and the paradoxical in the field of the
material of the domain, of collecting and re-ordering singular aspects of this
field of material without necessarily having any over-arching explanations or
theories. It is a question (as examples, in neuro-psychology, and in the study of
societies) of continually deepening a pragmatically functioning mapping-out of
"internal" networks of faculties and "external" networks of capacities, in a way
which rigorously finds relations of dependence and co-dependence, and
approximate patterns of development subsequent to a particular "encounter." It
is a question of putting into practice the recognition that the patterns of basic
conceptual articulations and (connectedly) of selections of problems and
methods in a domain may embody an intrinsic and very damaging set of
constraints (critique). Finally, at the limit of this account, it is a question of
being an aspect or element of the production of a singular framework of
 HOW EPISTEMOLOGY BECOMES WHAT IT IS 149

constitution- of a new successful type of theory, or of a new (heterogeneously

dimensional) diagram of a form of becoming. A question therefore of being an
aspect of an intensification of a field of thought.

The University of Warwick, England

NOTES
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans.
R.J.Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 49.
2 For an account of this, see James Gleick, Chaos: The Making of a New Science (London:
Abacus, 1987), p.l64.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J.Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1961), in "Of Old and New Law-Tables," p. 228.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy Of Morals, trans. W.Kaufman and R.J.Hollingdale
~New York: Random House, 1967), Preface, section 6, p.20. My Italics
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (London: Athlone, 1983), p.2.
6 Ibid. p.2.
7 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (New York: Cornell Univ. Press,
1977), p.147.
8 Ibid., p. 154.
9 "A critique of the faculty of knowledge is senseless: how should a tool be able to criticize itself
when it can use only itself for the critique?" (WP 486).
10 The works of Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari) are a very influential presence behind many

of the ideas at work in this essay, although not so much the Deleuze of Nietzsche and Philosophy.
A crucial coordinate is the brilliant chapter "The Image of Thought' in De leuze's Diffe renee and
Repetition" (London: Athlone, 1994). For Deleuze/Guattari's indispensable (and more complex)
versions of the ideas of lines of becoming and diagrams see Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone, 1984)
and A Thousand Plateaus (London: Athlone, 1988) (only A Thousand Plateaus for diagrams). It
needs to be said, following from this, that the works of Nietzsche are in turn a strong presence
behind those of Deleuze and Guattari, and therefore it is not surprising that their writings are
valuable in trying to give an account of Nietzsche's thought.
11 See BGE l88.
 DUNCAN LARGE

HERMES CONTRA DIONYSUS:

MICHEL SERRES'S CRITIQUE OF NIETZSCHE

Michel Serres is one of the most prolific and increasingly influential contempo-
rary thinkers who has analysed developments in philosophy, literature, and
across the arts against the backdrop of the history of science in a series of highly
original interdisciplinary studies which collectively represent one of the most
illuminating contributions to bridging the divide between "the two cultures."
One of the many ways in which Serres stands out among philosophers of his
generation in France is by his antipathy to Nietzsche, for where Nietzsche styles
himself "the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,"' Serres places his own
work under the sign of a different deity, Hermes, and devotes five volumes to
his celebration, the first of which (1968) concludes with an opposition of the
two gods- respectively, "the father of Tragedy" and "the father of Comedy" 2
- which sets Serres programmatically at odds with "Nietzsche's French
Moment." 3
Serres continues to engage with Nietzsche thereafter, and references and
allusions to Nietzsche are in fact scattered throughout his writings: he occasion-
ally uses a word "in a Nietzschean sense," 4 his writings are peppered with
Nietzschean dicta quoted en passant; 5 and he is best known to Nietzschean
commentators through a full-length article which first appeared in Hermes IV,
"Corruption- The Antichrist: A Chemistry of Sensations and Ideas."6
In general, Serres refuses to be swayed by Nietzsche's rhetoric of radical
novelty and consummate self-promotion. Approaching Nietzsche's philosophy
from the perspective of the history of science, Serres reads it as an interesting
but ultimately misguided historical document, merely an episode in the
dissemination of scientific ideas across nineteenth century culture, a typical late-
nineteenth century reaction to the truly innovative theoretical work which had
been carried out at least fifty years before, in the natural sciences in general and
the field of thermodynamics in particular. There is something deliberately
provocative about Serres's brand of scientistic reductivism, which sees the death
of God and the eternal return precisely prefigured in the schemas of Poinsot, for
example. 7 [n one sense it is an extremely Nietzschean reading of Nietzsche -
Serres plays Nietzsche at his own game by reading his philosophy in a sympto-
matological, genealogical, and ungenerously iconoclastic fashion, predating his
supposed "innovations" to distant predecessors and reducing this self-declared
151
B. Babich (ed. ), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 151-159.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
152 DUNCAN LARGE

"untimely" philosopher to the status of all-too-timely epigone. Responding to

Serres's provocation, my aim is to re-establish the case for Nietzsche's
continuing relevance: to do so I shall deal in turn with the two fields in which
Serres concentrates his critique, thermodynamics and medicine.

THE SAME OLD ETERNAL RETURN

"Philosophers sing Nietzsche's praises for having suddenly linked back up with
the Greeks through his dazzling intuition of the Eternal Return," 8 Serres writes
in a short article in Hermes IV entitled simply "The Eternal Return,"9 but these
philosophers are wrong, or else short-sighted, he argues here, since Nietzsche
is in this respect merely a belated heir to a tradition which dates back, in its
modern form, to the end of the eighteenth century, to Laplace and Kant. 10 The
eternal return has about it what Serres calls elsewhere a "transhistorical
perenniality"; 11 with "his" theory of the eternal return, Nietzsche is merely
"recapitulating" an argument which is ultimately pre-Socratic in origin:
"Nietzsche rose at mid-day and his predecessors at dawn." 12 Across his work,
Serres repeatedly notes the ubiquity of "this universal form of the Return" 13 in
Nietzsche's age: the eternal return "remains a constant and a kind of tonality
maintained behind the philosophies of history"; 14 "it is the whole adventure of
the nineteenth century." 15 The lineage which Serres usually traces leads from
Kane 6 through Comte and Engels 17 up to Nietzsche- and beyond: "Nietzsche
would be more or less the last, had he not had imitators, Gustave Le Bon, Abel
Rey." 18 Outside of Serres's strictly philosophical and scientific genealogy, the
return is to be found also in Zola (above all in Doctor Pascal) and in Michelet
(The Sea), and it is an "essential idea" in Jules Verne (Hermes!).
If one wonders why this idea assumed such a central position in the ideologi-
cal complexion of the nineteenth century, Serres leaves one in no doubt: the
catalyst which led to its expanding into every corner of culture is the formula-
tion of the principles of thermodynamics: "the constancy of the eternal return
in the 19th century is a response to the theoretical and superstructural fact that
everyone was just constructing motors." 19 Nietzsche and thermodynamics?
Nothing could be more natural for Serres: "thermodynamics inaugurates a
history of gestures and metaphors, concepts and operations, from which I do not
see that we have yet emerged." 20 Nietzsche is thus inserted into the "serried"
ranks of philosophers, theoreticians, novelists, and painters who find inspiration
(for the most part an unconscious, subterranean inspiration) in the scientific and
technical revolution inaugurated in 1824 by Sadi Carnot, subsequently general-
ized by Mayer, Helmholtz, and Clausius: those who "no doubt did nothing but"
sketch out this new sptem, with its thermodynamic model, 21 those who "all
assembled a motor," 2 or in whose writings "the reservoir is expressed really
everywhere." 23 For Serres, the impact of Carnot's principles on culture in
general can be encapsulated in three key words which sum up the whole
ideology of the industrial revolution: "difference, reservoir, and circulation." 24
It is these "three fundamental notions" which "make their appearance with Sadi
Carnot and then spread everywhere into work, the world, and texts." 25
 HERMES CONTRA DIONYSUS 153

So Nietzsche may well be feted by Deleuze and Derrida as the philosopher

of difference par excellence; to Serres he remains in this respect merely
derivative. 26 In Serres's vocabulary, the eternal return is an "isomorphic
representation" 27 of the Camot cycle; its circulation is the perfect expression of
the first law of thermodynamics, the law of the conservation of energy. 28
However, Nietzsche- who, as Serres acknowledges, read Clausius, Mayer, and
Thomson 29 - would not face up to the second law and rejected its conse-
quences?0 He abhorred the irreversible increase of entropy, the levelling of
thermal difference, the qualitative erosion of energy and its capacity to produce
motive power, the spectre of the heat death of the universe. As Deleuze reminds
us, Nietzsche's version of heat death is nihilism- indifferentiation, the abolition
of any individual perspective, any superior evaluation, any active force. 31 He
strives to maintain a differential hierarchy and to preserve at its summit, on top
of the mountain, his ideal of negentropy called Ubennensch whose avatar is
"Zarathustra," parodic double of an ancient Persian predecessor, a name which
in Nietzsche's mouth means "the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his
opposite." 32 Nietzsche proclaims a philosophy "beyond good and evil," but for
Serres his topology is typical of a religious fanatic, his system (his motor)
remains mired in the old metaphysics, the old thermodynamics: "the antimotor
is a motor." 33 For Serres, Nietzsche's parody is but a confirmation, his would-be
post-Zoroastrianism is but a neo-Zoroastrianism: by his "Persian atavism" 34 he
shows himself to be still a fire-worshipper, an acolyte of the "Solar father" who
merely replaces the God of Christianity. Even here, in his idealistic resistance
to the second law, Nietzsche remains a typical case, to be compared to Comte
and Sfencer, 35 Engels, 36 or Zola, who "was unaware that the Sun [... ] could
die." 3 And what has occurred since then- the formulation of stochastic laws,
Poincare's equations, 38 theories of information and chaos- has only confirmed
the misguided character of all these intellectual endeavours superseded by the
advance of scientific knowledge. "The great invariables are adrift, the world has
lost the eternal return." 39
For Serres, Nietzsche's motor has long since ceased functioning, but is
Nietzsche's speculation really so discredited? "Out of ignorance of ethics or
incom~rehension of the general shape which this thesis takes in his philoso-
phy,"4 Serres reduces the eternal return in Nietzsche to a vision of the world,
whereas I would argue that in Nietzsche it is not primarily a Weltanschauung,
a cosmological or cosmogonic theory, and strictly speaking it is not even a
thesis. In his unpublished notes from the 1880s, Nietzsche seeks to establish the
cosmological validity of the eternal return as "the most scientific of all possible
hypotheses" (WP 55) "the world as a work of art that gives birth to itself' (WP
796) or a "new world-conception" positing the world as something that "lives
on itself' (WP 1066)- but he was obliged to abandon this attempt, 41 which is
why in the published works the eternal return remains a provisional hypothesis,
expressed in the subjunctive mood, and Nietzsche emphasizes above all the
ethico-existential response it calls forth. 42
Even if one treats the eternal return in Nietzsche as a scientific theory, even
if it were possible to distinguish its enunciation clearly amidst all the "back-
154 DUNCAN LARGE

ground noise" of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 43 is the eternal return not in any case
once more the order of the day, plat du jour in the restaurant at the end of the
universe? The heat death of the universe is far from being a given in contempo-
rary cosmology, which presents us instead with a variety of possible eschato-
logical scenarios. These include the spawning of a near-infinite number of
"parallel universes" by quantum events, the eventual contraction of our
currently expanding universe towards a terminal singularity (the "big crunch"),
but also an infinite cycle of cosmic regeneration as the oscillating universe
"bounces back" from the brink into a phase of renewed expansion. 44 Cosmology
is currently a more open field than ever before, and there are too many variables
for the question of the ultimate fate of the universe to be definitively settled one
way or the other. Although Nietzsche's theory of eternal return purposely spurns
scientific validation, it might yet be vindicated by the very scientists whose
"mechanistic world-view" he so roundly condemned (GS 373 ).

PASTEURIZED PHILOSOPHY

Not only is Nietzsche's (meta)physics outdated in Serres's book(s), but so, too,
is his medicine, even if he introduces a new inflexion into the struggle against
entropy (and here Serres grants him a certain unwonted originality, if only as an
intermediary), since "it is Nietzsche who will introduce Pasteur into cultural
life." 45 The text in which Nietzsche performs this "pasteurization" of culture is
The Antichrist (1888), to which Serres devotes his most detailed analysis, his
article "Corruption- The Antichrist." Here he argues that, in this late text, "the
couple good-evil has rotated a quarter turn onto the couple healthy-sick, " 46 and
the archetypal sickness is Christianity perceived as "decay, decomposition,
contamination, and corruption."47 The Antichrist is thus "a handbook of
medicine [... ] -and dated medicine at that. [... ] The age of Pasteur dates this
text." Nietzsche here shows an obsession with purity and cleanliness; he recoils
before "the horror- puritan, Victorian, ascetic, phantasmatic- of dirtying one's
hands"; 48 he seeks to separate the sheep from the goats with the aid of a cordon
sanitaire. So he has become a decadent malgre lui: 49 in spite of the tenacious
criticism of the ascetic ideal which he has just carried out in the Third Essay of
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), he has become its servant, and his oft-
vaunted overcoming of decadence is but an expression of it: "he writes a holy
book, a sacred text like any other." 50 When Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo:
"there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion- religions are affairs of the
rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with
religious people," 51 this denegatory gesture of Pontius Pilate is precisely what
makes him ... a founder of a religion.
Now Serres acknowledges that Nietzsche was not always this "partitioning
puritan," 52 and that previously he was even the very first to recognize the
(caseous) form of feedback which renders this kind of monomaniac frenzy
absurd. Was it not Nietzsche who previously sang the praises of hybridity,
heterogeneity, and heterogeny? 53 Let us not forget that the ''new world-
conception" which he was sketching out as late as the Spring of 1888 envisages
 HERMES CONTRA DIONYSUS 155

a universe whose "excrements are its food" (WP 1066). So one must ask
whether The Antichrist really does mark a definitive volte-face, an absolute
denial of the "philosophy of mixed bodies" of before. To judge from his
hypothetical tone, Serres himself is not entirely sure: "if, without recomr,ense,
The Antichrist reverts to dichotomies, it indeed marks the breakdown." 4 It is
true that the characteristic physiologico-medicallexicon of The Antichrist55 is
an innovation of the period 1887-1888 which attests to Nietzsche's readin~ of
French theoreticians of decadence such as Paul Bourget and Charles Fere, 6 a
reading which at last gave him the means to become the "philosopher as cultural
physician" which he had been contemplating since 1873. Yet I would argue that,
even at the end of the last year of his philosophical career, Nietzsche continues
to recognize the tonicity, the necessity of sickness. His ideal is not the total
extirpation of Christianity, for excision is merely the weapon of the weakest
who have no other means of defending themselves - it is the speciality of the
Christians themselves. 57 No, Nietzsche recognizes right to the end the impor-
tance of having enemies and respecting them. "Whatever does not kill me makes
me stronger" (TI, Maxims 8) is a maxim he uses not only in Twilight of the
Idols, written immediately before The Antichrist, but also in Ecce Homo, written
immediately afterwards. "Michelet [... ] asserts in La montagne that one should
live in Sils--Maria. High, cold, pure places. Microbes are contracted at Genoa,
at Genoa where impurity takes the form of the treponema pallidum," 58 but it is
nevertheless "not far from Genoa" 59 that the mountain-loving philosophy of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is born, a book which is "not only the highest book
there is, the book that is truly characterized by the air of the heights," but also
"the deepest. " 60 "Great health" needs always to be opposed, or else it is
dissipated and lost: even the Ubermensch has dirty hands (in Sartre's sense); the
"blond beast" is a beefeater, and, appropriately enough, he likes his burgers
Swiss. 61 Nietzsche's medical model, I would argue, is not Pasteur but Jenner;
his solution to the corruption of culture is not pasteurization but inoculation. 62
It should be noted that Serres persists in reading the title of The Antichrist
perversely because of a misunderstanding caused by its French translation as
L'Antechrist: "The Antichrist [L'antechrist]: ante has never, to my knowledge,
meant 'contrary to,' but, rather, 'in front of,' 'in face of' [... ]. The Antechrist
comes before Christ [L'antechrist est avant le Christ]. [... ]Antichrist, before the
sacred [Antechrist, avant le sacre]."63 Now the German title Nietzsche chooses
is Der Antichrist, which means both "The Anti-Christ" and "The Anti-
Christian," but there is no escaping the fact that he uses a prefix which means
"contrary to," just as in the last words of Ecce Homo, "Dionysus versus the
Crucified:' (EH, Destiny 9), or in the title of his last text, Nietzsche contra
Wagner. Serres's favourite preposition is "between"; 64 Nietzsche's is undoubt-
edly "against," and one cannot so easily despatch his "Iranian" (or Heraclitean)
inheritance, with the aid of a false etymology. Nor with the aid of an imaginary
itinerary such as this: "Having started off in Greece, Nietzsche remains for a
long time in Persia before ending up with Buddhism, in The Antichrist."65 In my
opinion one must acknowledge that Nietzsche's rhetoric of purification in the
final period is itself mixed with a continued rhetoric of war. The polemos and
156 DUNCAN LARGE

agon of the Greeks remain his most profound sources of inspiration, and till the
very end, right up to the "great declaration of war" which is his "little work"
Twilight of the Idols, 66 right up to his very last unpublished text, the declaration
of "Deadly War against the House of Hohenzollern."67 And Serres makes
perfectly plain his distaste for polemics, 68 for science's "agonistic model," 69 for
"the occupation of places by the soldierly," 70 for disciplinary regi-mentality and
critical "strategies,"71 for the "martial" spirit, 72 for war tout court, the "eternal
.
return of d1spute.
,73

CONCLUSION (PACE SERRES)

"Formed by war, by all wars, I love and seek peace, which seems to me the
supreme good" 74 - with such repeated declarations of "irenism,"75 Serres
positions himself at the furthest remove from Nietzsche, from "the philosoph);
of the fragment" 76 and the "genuinely police-like" philosophy of suspicion. 7
His reading of Nietzsche, and of The Antichrist above all, seems to me never-
theless to be motivated by a paradoxical critical "strategy" which seeks to
defuse the dangerous polemics of this self-styled "explosive" philosopher,n and
diminish his importance in the history of western philosophy by resituating him
in the context of a different history, that of the natural sciences. Serres refuses
to consider this master of suspicion in relation to the usual suspects: not for him
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer or Nietzsche and Wagner, Nietzsche and meta-
physics or Nietzsche and music; he prefers to write of Nietzsche and cosmology,
mathematics, thermodynamics, medicine, of Nietzsche and Laplace, Carnot,
Poinsot, Pasteur, Poincare. It is a deliberately reductive, even humiliating
context, and he does not always escape condescension. 79
Serres assures us that Hermes, the god who unifies his work, 80 is the "god of
the 20th century" who succeeded in supplanting "Prometheus, the outmoded
demi-god of the 19th,"81 but did he also succeed in supplanting Dionysus? Have
we really left behind us the tragic age in Nietzsche's sense? Is Nietzsche himself
condemned to remain a prisoner of the old thermodynamics without gaining
access to Serres's "hermodynamic" age? "Laughter is the human phenomenon
of communication (reciprocal definition)": 82 Serres defines Hermes as the father
of Comedy, but Dionysus also knows how to laugh, and his laughter is still
infectious. 83

University of Wales- Swansea

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is derived from a longer French version published as: "Hermes contra Dionysus
(Serres et Nietzsche)." Horizons philosophiques. 811 (Autumn, 1997: Le Monde de Michel
Serres"): 23-39.
 HERMES CONTRA DIONYSUS 157

NOTES
1 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. RJ. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968), Ancients 5, pp. 110-111.
2 Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell
~Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), hereafter cited asH, p.l3.
Cf. Vincent Descombes, "Le moment fran<;ais de Nietzsche," in Alain Boyer et al., Pourquoi
nous ne sommes pas nietzscheens (Paris: Gras set, 1991 ), pp. 99-128.
4 H, p. 4. Cf. Hermes Ill: La traduction (Paris: Minuit, 1974), hereafter cited as H3, p. 76.
5 Serres, H3, p. 45; Hermes V: Le passage du Nord-Ouest (Paris: Minuit, 1980), hereafter cited
as H5, p. 150.
6 "Corruption- The Antichrist: A Chemistry of Sensations and Ideas," trans. Chris Bongie, in
Nietzsche in Italy, ed. Thomas Harrison (Stanford, CA: ANMA Libri, 1988), hereafter cited as CA.
7 Serres, Hermes IV: La distribution (Paris: Minuit. 1977), hereafter cited as H4, p. 46.
8 Serres, H4, p. 115.
9 Ibid., pp. 115-24.
10 H4, pp. 115-116.

II H3, p. 26.
12 H4, p. 116.
13 Ibid., p. 163.
14 Ibid., p. 69; cf. H4, p. 222
15 H5, p. 65.
16 H4, p. 69; H5, p. 65; Eclaircissements: Cinq entretiens avec Bruno Latour (Paris: Flammarion,

1994), hereafter cited as E, p. 103

17 H4, pp. 49-50.
18 Ibid., p. 164; cf. H3, p. 26; Feux et signaux de brume: Zola (Paris: Grasset, 1975), hereafter

cited as FSZ, p. 77.

19 H4, p. 50.

°
2 FSZ, p. 71.
21 Ibid., p. 27.
22 Ibid., p. 211.
23 H4, p. 60.
24 FSZ, p. 210; cf. H4, p. 62.
25 H4, p. 282.
26 Serres thus goes further than Prigogine and Stengers who attribute this generalization of

difference to Nietzsche, citing Deleuze: cf. Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature
(London: Flamingo, 1985), p. 111. Harari and Bell read this argument as a not-so-veiled attack on
Derrida himself (H, xxxviin. 49).
27 H4, p. 52.
28 Cf. KSA 12, 205/WP 1063: "The law of the conservation of energy demands eternal

recurrence."
29 FSZ, p. 79, p. 109.
3 °
For Nietzsche's response to Mayer and Proctor, cf. KSA 9, 451; for Thomson, cf. KSA 13,
375/WP 1066. For Nietzsche's intense interest in the scientific theories of his day, cf. Karl
Schlechta and Anni Anders, Friedrich Nietzsche: Von den verborgenen Anfiingen seines
Philosophierens (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1962), and Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche's
Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: SUNY Press,
1994).
31 Cf. especially the critique of scientism in GM, III: 23-25, and Deleuze, "Nietzsche and

Science," in Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press; New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 44-46.
32 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1992), p. 128.
33 H4, p. 72.
34 Serres, Jouvences: Sur Jules Verne (Paris: Minuit, 1974), p. 278; cf. CA, p. 43.
35 H3, p. 60.
36 FSZ, p. 77; H4, p. 69.
37 Ibid., p. 113.
38 Serres, Eloge de Ia philosophie en langue fran(:aise (Paris: Fayard, 1995), pp. 89-90.
39 Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit (Paris: Fran<;ois Bourin, 1991), p. 213.
40 H4, p. 115.
!58 DUNCAN LARGE

41 Cf. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 3rd edn (New York:

Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 326-28; Bernard Pautrat, "Position de l'eternel retour," in Versions du
solei/: Figures et systeme de Nietzsche (Paris: Seuil, 1971), pp. 348-58; Alain Juranville, Physique
de Nietzsche (Paris: Denoel/Gonthier, 1973), p. 85.
42 Cf. GS 341; Z, III, "Of the Vision and the Riddle"; and Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential

Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

43 Cf. Gary Shapiro, "Parasites and their Noise," in Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and

Women (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991), pp. 53-107.

44 Cf., for example, Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, pp. 115-17; Paul Davies, "The

End of the Universe," in God and the New Physics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 199-213
and The Last Three Minutes: Conjectures about the Ultimate Fate of the Universe (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994); William Poundstone, The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity
and the Limits of Scient(fic Knowledge (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985);
Stephen Hawking, "The Origin and Fate of the Universe" and "The Arrow of Time" (in A Brief
History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), pp. 127-
70), and "The Future of the Universe" (in Black Holes and Baby Universes and other Essays (New
York: Bantam Books, 1993), pp. 127-41).
45 H4, p. 156. Even this originality of Nietzsche's is nevertheless qualified in Jouvences: Sur

Jules Verne, where Serres traces the pasteurization of culture back to Lucretius: seep. 259.
46 CA, p. 42. I have modified Chris Boogie's English translation, which is confusing: "the couple

~ood-evil has rotated a quarter turn in relation to the couple healthy-sick."

Ibid., p. 32.
48 Ibid., p. 38.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., p. 46.
51 Nietzsche, EH, Destiny 1.
52 CA, p. 38.
53 FSZ, p. 239.
54 I have modified Boogie's English translation, which is seriously misleading: "If, without

recompense, The Antichrist reverts to dichotomies, it marks nonetheless their breakdown." The
Pleakdown Serres means is clearly Nietzsche's.
CA, p. 31.
56 Cf. my forthcoming Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan

Large (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

57 Nietzsche, TI, Morality l-3.
58 CA, p. 37.
59 EH Z 1
60 EH: "Pr~face," 4. For the symbolism of Genoa in Nietzsche, cf. my article "Nietzsche and the

Figure of Columbus," Nietzsche-Studien, 24 (1995): 162-83.

61 On the health risks of cheese, cf. Harold J. Morowitz, "The FromagifiLation of America" and

"Killer Cheese," in Entropy and the Magic Flute (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993), pp. 67-74.
62 "Nietzsche discovers that it is in his becoming-sick, in his 'blood-poisoning,' that human
promise is to be found," notes Keith Ansell Pearson in his remarkable recent book Viroid Life:
Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London and New York: Routledge,
1997), p. 15. In my article "Nietzsche and the Figure of Copernicus: Grande Fantaisie on Polish
Airs" (New Readings, 2 (1996): 65-87), I attempt to demonstrate that this notion of "mixed blood"
persists even into the phantasmatic delirium of Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche (in the version
restored in 1969) declares himself to be "a pure-blooded Polish nobleman" (p. 41 ).
63 CA, pp. 46-48. I have modified Boogie's translation, which tidies up this misreading by

introducing an extraneous additional step into Serres's argument: "The Antichrist is an Ante-
Christ" (CA, p. 47).
64 E, p. 99.
65 JV, p. 279.
66 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "Preface"; cf. EH, Wise 7.
67 KSA 13, 643-46. In this context one can note that the Camot of whom Nietzsche writes is not

Sadi but his father Lazare, "the soldier and republican." (Nietzsche, Daybreak, 167.)
68 H3, p. 71; H4, p. 148; E, p. 58.
69 H, p. 21.
70 H4, p. 53.
71 H, p. 28; H4, pp. 288-90; HS, p. 22.
 HERMES CONTRA DIONYSUS 159

72 H4, p. 290; La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrece: Fleuves et turbulences

~Paris:Minuit, 1977), p. 236; Le Contrat nature/ (Paris: Frans:ois Bourin, 1990), p. 31ff.
3 E, p. 78.
74 Ibid., p. 41.
75 Ibid.,p.195.
76 Ibid.,p.177.
77 Ibid., p. 195.
78 EH, Destiny 1.
79 JV, p. 208, p. 278.
80 E, p. 164.
81 Eloge de Ia philosophie en langue franraise, p. 52; cf. Les Cinq Sens: Philosophie des corps
meles I (Paris: Grasset, 1985), p. 349.
82 H, p. 14; cf. H2, p. 236.
83 Cf. David Farrell Krell, Irifectious Nietzsche (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana

University Press, 1996).

 BELA BACS6

THE WILL TO TRUTH

"Nietzsche, perpetuellement seismal, cadastre

tout notre territoire agonistique."

- Rene Char, Baudelaire mecontente Nietzsche

There are interpreters of Nietzsche's work who artlessly fit the philosophy of his
last period under the unifying or equalizing umbrella of hermeneutics - which
I regard as unjust. Such a seemingly infinite extension of hermeneutics
generates manifest uncertainty and disquiet on the poorly protected margins of
philosophical hermeneutics. The best tactical move for hermeneutics is to leave
other fields of interpretation open while yet simultaneously preserving its own
territory. Nietzsche's interpretive philosophy, providing us with the opportunity
to reconsider the problems of interpretation, language, consciousness, etc., thus
offers an essential challenge.
Since Schleiermacher, hermeneutics has been designated the art of interpre-
tation (Auslegungskunst), and thus, given Nietzsche's words quoted in the title
above, the will to truth would be nothing but an art of this interpretive kind.
Consequently, we could say "the will to truth" is hermeneutics. With this initial
statement, we immediately confront a serious problem of interpretation, for
Nietzsche gives us to understand that "the will to truth" is "merely the desire for
a world of the constant" (WP 585). What kind of interpretation results if the
interpreter, in understanding himself and his world, merely longs for a familar
and imperishable world? Such an interpretive approach to the world would
attempt to stabilize it as a world of "identical cases," 1 and, with this familiarity,
move farther and farther away from the truth. Nietzsche, like Heidegger in his
early lectures on hermeneutics, obviously took "the history of the decline of
truth" 2 as his starting point. The articulation of the world into the knowable and
enduring ultimately effects the elimination or annihilation of the human world
that is to be understood, and thus the world turns squarely into its own opposite.
"Man seeks 'the truth': a world that is not self-contradictory, not deceptive, does
not change, a true world- a world in which one does not suffer ... " (WP 585).
Humanity is inclined [die "Verfallensgeneigtheit" des Menschen] to fall back
upon an enduring, consistent world representing reality as ultimate, a reality
which, for Nietzsche, could be described in terms of "'unworldliness,' 'unsen-
suality'" (BGE 62). This unwordly metaphysical reality is the anti-truth. In its
161

B. Babich (ed. ). Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 161-167.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
162 BELA BACS6

search for "truth," humanity annihilates the not-always-as-such-existent, the

recurrent world which is ever and always still to be understood.
Nietzsche's critique of modem metaphysics and epistemology turns against
the unworldly supremacy of a consciousness longing for truth, and critiques
philosophy focussing on the self in its foundations. Describing the epochal
importance of Nietzsche's philosophical exposition, Gadamer says:

For his critique involves the most extreme, radical alienation which affects us with regard to what
is our ownmost [Eigensten], namely consciousness itself. That conciousness and self-
consciousness gives no unambivalent witness concerning itself, that that which it reveals as what
is meant perhaps masks, perhaps inverts what is really in it, is so hammered into modern thought
through Nietzsche that we now recognize it everywhere, not only in that excessive, self-destructive
disillusionment with which Nietzsche tore one mask after the other from the ego, until finally no
mask but also no ego remained?

What does this unmasking of the consciousness of the self mean concerning
the vanishing, estranged "ownmost" [Eigenstes] of the man of understanding,
if future thinking strives to approach this, and what does thinking without a self
look like? Can humanity's "ownmost" be saved at all? Or, to ask, with Heideg-
ger: how can we retrieve from Nietzsche's philosophy "what thought cannot
bear to have lost"? 4
It has been pointed out that the will to truth is the art of interpretation which
ultioately simulates the world as uniquely true and, "at this stage," discards all
the lively and challenging elements of life accordingly: "In summa: the world
as it ought to be exists; this world, in which we live, is an error- this world of
ours ought not to exist" (WP 585). Nietzsche used the term reversal (Umke-
hrung)5 for the formula by which he unmasks the anti-true, simulated world. In
this reversal, he pursues self-contained, metaphysical thinking to its furthest
limit where catastrophe ensues. The arbitrary deliberation of metaphysics, the
attempt at a humanistic self-liberation from metaphysical preposessions is
clearly insufficient. There is one recourse: releasing ourselves in tragic reversal.
It is in this sense that Nietzsche's interpreters are right to call this a tragic way
of thinking. Moreover, the "new way" of thinking the world (mere negation
would only mean relapse into a false metaphysics of truth), follows the world
affirmatively up until its own reversal, where, in this most extreme being-
beyond-itself, it can no longer deny itself. Standing before ourselves is
cathartic; it is to glance, purified, at erroneous-errant life. Assuming this
interpretive position without reserve, we shudder knowingly at what Rene Char
called the "territoire agonistique," and here stepping before and skipping up to
it, we nonetheless retreat, intruding upon inner tremors already too well
understood, deprived of their liveliness (and superficially dead). The philoso-
pher mapping the movements of the Earth with a seismographic sensibility
almost unintentionally destroys the world as he interprets it. The world,
stiffened into a solid crust, is beheld as familiar by the interpreter who believes
that in the articulation (legomenon) simulating certainty he pronounces the
ultimate truth qua logos of the world. "Rather has the world become 'infinite'
 THE WILL TO TRUTH 163

for us all over again" (GS 374)- becomes comprehensible, as approached from
the tragic reversal of interpretation.
Nietzsche obviously has misgivings concerning the world expressed qua
legomenon in linguistic interpretation. This way of interpreting the world tends
to limit the varying-multifarious world of becoming. That is, it wants to make
the world, first and foremost, superficial and graspable. 6 Interpretation
accomplished through the art of schematisation and abbreviation means no more
than "signification for the sake of understanding" and deliberately aims to
"discard" all life's painful occurrences. 7 The suspicion of a painless interpreta-
tion of philosophy, that is a future of interpretation poised to mistrust itself
restores the infinity of pain in the world: "I doubt that such pain makes us
'better'; but I know that it makes us more profound."8 To Nietzsche's mind, the
ideal of painless interpretation is an ascetic ideal which, as a result of an
unworldly nai"vete, believes that life can constantly be improved, while through
the "reductive art" [Abkiirzungskunst], it attains the finite-truncated interpreta-
tion of Dasein: an interpretation which poses values. The ascetic ideal "permits
no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms, and sanctions
solely from the point of view of its interpretation ... " (GM III: 23). Ascetic
interpretation conceals the highest degree of will to power, and wants to imagine
"its absolute superiority of rank over every other power." (Ibid.) In other words,
for Nietzsche, the destruction of the ascetic ideal is the disclosure of the ascetic
ideal as sheer will to power, which reveals the antimetaphysical character of his
philosophy. This, however, does not allow us to step freely beyond the
metaphysical era. As Heidegger says, one can recover only temporarily from
metaphysics; one can never overcome it conclusively: one can never be cured
once and for al1. 9 Or as Nietzsche put it, "we, too, still derive our flame from the
fire ignited by a faith millenia old," and "from the moment faith in the God of
the ascetic ideal is denied, a new problem arises: that of the value of truth" (GM
III: 24). Nietzsche's philosophy reaches a crossroad where, destroying the
absolute, it chooses to regard the problem of truth. And could it really be that
with this decision, Nietzsche is unable to sidestep "an inextricable entanglement
in metaphysics," as Heidegger maintains? 10
Let us return to the fragment I took as the title for this essay where Nietzsche
clearly takes up a position against ocular metaphysics. About this opposition he
says: "The senses deceive, reason corrects the errors; consequently, one
concluded, reason is the road to the constant; the least sensual ideas must be
closest to the 'true world'" (WP 585). On the one hand, Nietzsche holds that the
purpose of reason is to rid the world of its mutable vitality - an ideal world, a
fundamentally non-true world projected by the subject. On the other hand, this
immediate, seemingly "true" world can only prevail via "the hyperbolic naivete"'
of man. 11 In this naivete, Nietzsche discovers the ever prevalent devaluation, the
modern nihilistic tendency of our world-interpretation. Every postulation of
values is related to "a purely fictitious world." 12 Indeed, Nietzsche criticizes this
union with being, a union pretending immediacy, intimacy with humanity. This
was the radical turning point in his antimetaphysical philosophy. And Heidegger
only seems to replay Nietzsche's radical turn: "Man remains mired in narvete
164 BELA BACSO

as long as he does not really act on the knowledge that he alone is the one who
posits values, that only through him can values ever be the conditioned
conditions of the preservation, securing, and enhancement of his life." 13
For Heidegger, Nietzsche remains enmired in Cartesian thinking: "that Being
means 'representedness,' being established in thinking, and that truth means
'certitude. "' 14 Yet by taking anti-true "categories" to their extreme, Nietzsche
effects a destructive reversal of metaphysics. Perhaps we may ask- precisely
with Heidegger- whether Nietzsche's critique does not offer a comprehensive
explanation of "the forgottenness of Being" which Heidegger described as "a
complete insensitivity towards the ambiguous?" 15 Nietzsche was just about to
"invert the perspectival glance" 16 in order to intensify sensitivity for the
multiply explicable. Instead, he dismantled or deconstructed perspectival truths
simply to reduce all groundless "foreground philosophy" (BGE 289). Beyond
this reduction of "foreground philosophy," we know that the nearest nearness
of the familiar world and of all our perspectival truths restrict our openness to
the strange. "We are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend
ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves, for us the law 'Each is furthest
from himself' applies to all eternity - we are not 'men of knowledge' with
respect to ourselves" (GM Preface 1). Is there really a "metaphysics of
subjectivity," 17 - or is this not rather an heroic preparation for the overcoming
of metaphysics? It is not suprising that Rodolphe Gascht\ for one, emphasises
a different interpretation of this fragment: "Take, for instance, Nietzsche's
critique of reflection and self-consciousness, which places a necessary gap
between knowledge, on the one hand, and, on the other, self-cognition .... Here,
self-reflection loses all foundational capacity with respect to knowledge." 18 If
this is true, how are we to trace such a recurrently groundless, self-destructive
interpretation? We already know that all interpretations seek to obscure this
"necessary gap." To this end, we apply whatever means are applicable to reduce
the world to be understood to its surface appearance. 19 This foreground
philosophy uses words as masks and pretends or makes a fiction of an ultimate
understanding of there-being (Dasein), able to achieve the "truth." But
Nietzsche supposes another understanding not inclined to conceal this same
chasm: "logic and mechanics are only applicable on the most superficial level:
indeed, no more than an art of schematisation and reduction, mastering
multiplicity through an art of expression - not understanding but signification
for the sake of understanding. To think the world reduced to its superficial level
ultimately means to render it 'comprehensible. "' 20
I would like to refer to a useful possibility for building a bridge from
Nietzsche's philosophy to a recent, and, I believe, relevant, kind of hermeneu-
tics. In his early lectures on Plato's Sophist, Heidegger underlined the indispen-
sable destruction of fundamental "word-knowledge" [WortwissenJ. What is
important in his approach is an understanding "on the basis of the uncovering
of the thing" ["auf Grund des Aufgedeckthabens der Sache" e.g.: dia logon],
which offers a strong critique of vacuous word-knowledge. 21 With such an
"insight with regard to surplus understanding," Heidegger goes against the
superficial interpretation that suppresses the world beneath conceptual machin-
 THE WILL TO TRUTH 165

ery. Or, with Gadarner: "there is no "language of metaphysics: 'There is only a

metaphysically thought-out coinage of concepts that have been lifted from living
speech. "'22 What, then, for Nietzsche, could work as a radical reversal?
Nietzsche sees the indispensability of the art of schematization in interpretation.
Thus there is no interpretation, only will to power, but this simultaneously
shows all interpretations as necessary abbreviations and negations functioning
as hostile to the multiply explicable. "In so far as the word 'knowledge' has any
meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no
meaning behind it, but countless meanings.- 'Perspectivism."'
Nietzsche rightly reflects upon the negative consequences of perspectival
knowledge: he knows that this familiarity with meaning is only a temporary
truth of what is multiply interpretable. Here we must recognise the clear
distance between projective somehow-established Being on the one hand, and
the never establishable becoming resembling Being on the other. "Knowledge
and becoming exlude one another." 23 We move directly and purposefully toward
projective-pretended Being and all explanations fictitiously affecting a
meaningful identity, i.e. deliberately eliminating the distance between knowl-
edge and becoming. As Nietzsche himself remarked: "the fictitious world of
subject, substance, 'reason,' etc., is needed-: there is in us a power to order,
simplify, falsify, artificially distinguish. 'Truth' is the will to be master over the
multiplicity of sensations." 24 Predicative truth as a seemingly full identification
on the basis of "word-knowledge" is a groundless "holding to be true" which
only effects a stasis in the dynamic of life. After the rupture which took place,
factic life as understood loses its systematic schematic character, which was
capable of ordering everything contradictory. I have emphasised the contrary
order of life in Nietzsche's description: such an "understanding" strives for a
completely arranged conceptual schema of world without contradiction. "The
conceptual ban on contradiction proceeds from the belief that we are able to
form concepts, that the concept not only designates the essence of a thing but
comprehends it- In fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) applies only to
fictitious entities that we have created. Logic is the attempt to comprehend the
actual world by means of a scheme of being posited by ourselves; more
correctly, to make it formulatable and calculable for us ... " (WP 516).
Nietzsche unequivocaly criticizes the epistemological bias of philosophy that
wants to make credible an agreement between the signifier (Bezeichnende) and
the thing, and according to this conceptual schema provides for an annihilation
or for a cessation of the ceaseless movement in the understanding of Being. In
philosophy it would be, after all, inevitable not only to endeavor to cease
rendering contradictory elements, but also to reduce distance. 25 "Actio in
distans" (GS 60) is a distantive and seductive movement (Ent- und Veifiihrung)
into the incalculable. We draw away from ourselves but we are nearer to
ourselves. Derrida rightly notes in his book on Nietzsche: "One is forced to
appeal here to the Heideggerian use of the word Entfernung: at once divergence,
distance and the distanciaiton of distance, the deferment of the distant, the de-
ferment, it is in fact the annihilation (Ent-) which constitutes the distant itself,
the veiled enigma of proximity." 26 This distantive nearness carries out the
166 BELA BACSO

incalculable inconceivable beyond- Being without any schema. In this reversal,

the interpreter overcomes himself: transcending what he seemingly is. It is in
this being-outside that Being, returning and interpretable in many ways, is
demonstrated. Thus, it makes no sense to ask: "who interprets then?" In
Nietzsche's tragic thinking, modem philosophy of consciousness reverses, or
in other words, recedes into the distance from itself, just because in nihilism it
achieves its most extreme form: "There is just no willing." 27 For Holger Schmid,
"It is the 'art of mistrust' which marks the foundational formula of the esoteric
in the light of which the question of interpretation may be developed: 'There is
no willing. "' 28 According to this formula, interpretation is an activity of
suspicion and such a permanent suspicion - as Schmid explicates - is an
increasing openness to the bodily affectful Being-there (Dasein). Simultane-
ously it painfully abolishes the horizon that intended to be a substantial unity for
the interpreter. In our interpretation, we offer only a unifying ultimate inter-
preted world as a liminal horizon which seems to pull everything together. 29 The
affirmation of the never fully actualised simply means to hold ourselves "in the
pathos of distance." 30 An interpretation regarding Being-there allows us to see
the unbridgable gap between a thought oriented to truth on the one hand and
Being on the other: "We can hardly think anything, in the measure that it is." 31
To understand anything we use veiled words, in terms of their presumed unity,
but this actualised understanding emerges simultaneously, or rather it equi-
primordially reveals action, showing what was somehow already understood in
its drawing-away [Ent-femung]. All understanding embraces the actio in distans
and the spatial-temporal tension [Spannweite] between Being and thinking that
grows with any understanding.
In this wise, Nietzsche might plausibly be seen as the "true predecessor of
Heidegger in raising the question of being." 32

University of Budapest, Hungary

NOTES
1 KSA 12, 418.
2 Martin Heidegger, Platon: Sophistes ( Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992), p. 27.
3 Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Die philosophischen Grundlagen des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts" in
Gesammelte Werke Bd. 4 (Tiibingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1987), p. 11.
4 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row,
1968), p. 23.
5 See Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990),
"The Four Great Errors, § 2," p. 58. KSA 6, 89.
6 See KSA 3, 190.
7 Cf. GM III: 24.
8 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 'Preface for the Second Edition, § 3,' KSA 3, p. 350.
9 Heidegger, "Uberwindung der Metaphysik," in Vortriige und Aufsiitze (Pfullingen: Neske,
1978), p. 75.
10 Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead," in The Question Concerning Technology,

and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 61.
11 See KSA 13, 49.
12 Ibid.
13 Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volume Four: Nihilism, trans. D.F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row:
1982), p. SO. Heidegger, Nietzsche II (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), p. 122.
 THE WILL TO TRUTH 167

14 Ibid., p. 129; ibid., p. 181.

15 Heidegger. Beitriige zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989),
P.·6 117.
Cf. KSA 12, 91.
17 See Heidegger, Nietzsche ll, p. 199.
18 Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 80-81.

19 "Welt auf die Oberfliiche ... ",see KSA 12, p. 190.
20 Ibid.
21 See Heidegger, Platon. Sophistes, p. 258.
22 Gadamer, "Destruction and Deconstruction" in D.P. Michelfelder and R. Palmer, eds.,

Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1989) p. 107.
23 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 517: KSA 12, 382. See Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche's

Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1994) p. 264.
24 Ibid.
25 See KSA 12, 494.
26 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. B. Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978), pp. 49-51.
27 "Es giebt gar keinen Willen." KSA 12, 187.
28 Holger Schmid, Nietzsches Gedanke der tragischen Erkenntnis (Wiirzburg: Konigshausen &

Neumann, 1984), p. 73.

29 See KSA 12, 106.

°
3 KSA 6, 138.
31 KSA 12, 107.
32 Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1975), p. 228.
 DAVID OWEN

SCIENCE, VALUE, AND THE ASCETIC IDEAL

ON NIETZSCHE AND THE VALUE OF TRUTH

This essay approaches Nietzsche's reflections on science- understood broadly

as "rational knowledge-that" - by way of his reflections on the relationship
between science and the ascetic ideal. The complexity of this relationship is
disclosed by the fact that in the fifth book of The Gay Science and the third
essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, we can discern an explicit or implicit
(logically entailed) commitment to the following theses: 1) Science cannot tell
why scientific knowledge is worth knowing. It needs an ideal to serve which
secures its right to existence, its claim to value. 1 2) This ideal situates science
within a system of purposes which governs our understanding of the meaning
of scientific activity, of the legitimate scope of scientific enquiry and of the
nature of scientific method. 2 3) Science is a tool in the service of the ascetic
ideal? 4) Science is the driving force in the historical development of the ascetic
ideal; the intellectual conscience which maintains and refines the ascetic ideal
as it evolves from one particular instantiation of the ascetic ideal to another. 4 5)
Science is the latest and noblest form of the ascetic ideal. 5 6) Science is the
kernel of the ascetic ideal. 6 7) Science is an ally of the ascetic ideal but it could
be otherwise- it could be an opponent. 7
How are we to understand this list of theses and the apparent contradictions
contained within it? The first part of this essay will show how these theses
combine as elements of a coherent argument by way of an account of the ascetic
ideal. The second and third parts of the essay will explore the philosophical
cogency of some elements of this argument and its relationship to the episte-
mological and ethical aspects of Nietzsche's philosophical reflections on science

The pivotal place occupied by the ascetic ideal in Nietzsche's philosophy is

readily grasped by reflecting on the problem to which, Nietzsche claims, the
ascetic ideal is one solution. The problem is this: - Human beings are creatures
who are necessarily subject to suffering in their relations with nature, other
human beings and their own bodies. -- With the development of consciousness,
human beings seek to account for suffering - "suffering for what?"- as a central

169
· B. Babich (ed. ). Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 169-177.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
170 DAVID OWEN

element in articulating the meaning and value of human existence. The urgency
of this task is grounded in the fact that human beings confront an awareness of
their own mortality- of the inevitability of ceasing to be- and are, thus, driven
to seek a purpose in, and for, human existence. - Consequently, the task of
accounting for suffering, of assigning a meaning and value to suffering, is a
necessary condition of being able to provide an account of the meaning and
value of human existence and, more particularly, of one's own existence.- If
this task is not accomplished, if human existence is characterised by inevitable
suffering from the meaninglessness of inevitable suffering, the question "why
be?'' finds no answer- and suicidal nihilism follows.
The ascetic ideal is an accomplishment of genius, for Nietzsche, precisely
because it provides a meaning and value for suffering and, concomitantly, for
human existence: "Within it [the ascetic ideal], suffering was given an interpre-
tation; the enormous emptiness seemed filled; the door was shut on suicidal
nihilism" (GM III: 28). Given that this is the case, why does Nietzsche seek to
attack the ascetic ideal?
The crucial issue, for Nietzsche, is how the ascetic ideal provides an answer
to the problem of the meaning of suffering- namely, by making life itself an
ascetic procedure:

The ascetic ideal has a goal, - which is so general, that all the interests of human existence appear
petty and narrow when measured against it; it inexorably interprets epochs, peoples, man, all with
reference to this one goal, it permits of no other interpretation, no other goal and rejects, denies,
affirms. confirms only with reference to its interpretation[ ... ] it believes there is nothing on earth
of any power which does not first have to receive a meaning, a right to existence, a value from it,
as a tool to its work, as a way and means to its goal, to one goal ... (GM III: 23)

What is this goal? In the final section of the third essay of the Genealogy,
Nietzsche offers an answer:

It is absolutely impossible for us to conceal what was expressed by that whole willing, which was
given direction by the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animalistic,
even more of the material, [... ] this longing to get away from appearance, transcience, growth,
death, wishing, longing itself- all that means, let us dare grasp it. a will to nothingness, an
aversion of life. a rebellion against the most fundamental prerequisites of life, ... (GM III: 28)

In other words, the goal of the ascetic ideal is the denial of the tragic
character of human existence, the refusal of chance and necessity - and this
hated of fate, Nietzsche contends, is a denial of life itself. How, though, does the
ascetic ideal construct its goal as the one goal?
Abstracting the general features of the specific instantiations of the ascetic
ideal presented in the third essay of the Genealogy provides the following
general mechanism: 1) A metaphysical distinction between "real" and "appar-
ent' world in which the "real" world is conceptualised as the unitary source of
value. 2) A metaphysical realist account of truth as characterised by finality and
completeness, and, concomitantly, of the value of truth as inestimable. 3) A
commitment to the unconditional authority of truth and to the will to truth as an
absolute (categorial) imperative. 4) The expression of this commitment through
 SCIENCE, VALUE, AND THE ASCETIC IDEAL 171

a single form of truth-telling such that those qualified in this form of truth-
telling can claim legitimate authority over any and all others. 8
In other words, the ascetic ideal seeks to secure its goal as the one goal by
positing it as the transcendent goal - in which the unity of value is expressed in
the idea of truth as final, complete and inestimable- and, thereby, ruling out the
possibility of tragedy. However, the general structure of the ascetic ideal can be
manifested through a variety of specific ascetic ideals and this point is crucial
to an understanding of Nietzsche's theses on science- to which we now return.
Nietzsche's first thesis is the pivot on which his account turns. The point is
simply this: even if one could provide a scientific account of the prudential
value of science with respect to the satisfaction of human needs, such an account
would not be sufficient to ground the value of science - it would not tell us, for
example, why we ought to value the satisfaction of human needs. An implica-
tion of this thesis is elaborated in the second thesis in that our understanding of
the meaning of science is governed by the system of purposes in which this
activity is embedded and the direction of science is governed by the telos
expressed in this system of purposes. Thus, for example, under the aegis of the
Christian ascetic ideal, the meaning and direction of scientific activity is given
in an understanding of science as a pathway to God. As Karl Li:iwith notes:

Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton were all equally convinced that God had ordained the
world mathematically and that they could come to know Him by reading from what, by analogy
with the Bible, they termed the "book" of Nature. The biologist Swammerdamm's triumphant
declaration "I bring you here proof of God's Providence in the anatomy of a louse," gives an
indication of the confidence with which a belief in natural science as a pathway to God could be
assumed before Kant produced his critique of physico-teleological arguments for God's existence. 9

The third thesis is established by combining the first and second thesis with
Nietzsche's general claim concerning the ascetic ideal: "Except for the ascetic
ideal: man, the animal man, had no meaning up to now" (GM III: 28). In other
words, science is a tool of the ascetic ideal simply because this has been the
only ideal thus far. 10
However, science is not just any tool of the ascetic ideal - and this brings us
to the fourth thesis. Nietzsche's point is this: the ascetic ideal's construction of
the will to truth as categorically imperative entails a commitment to truthfulness
- to intellectual cleanliness - which is expressed in science as a ruthless paring
away of forms of argument which fail to satisfy the requisite criteria of
coherence, comprehensiveness, simplicity, etc. In this respect, Kant's critique
of physico-teleological proofs of the existence of God is entirely compatible
with Nietzsche's account of Kant as an advocate of the ascetic ideal. As
Nietzsche somwhat caustically comments:

Do people in all seriousness still really believe (as theologians imagined for a while), that, say,
Kant's victory over theological conceptual dogmatism ("God," "soul," "freedom," "immortality")
damaged that [ascetic] ideal? - [... ] What is certain is that every sort of transcendentalist since
Kant has had a winning hand- they are emancipated from the theologians: what good luck! -he
showed them the secret path on which, from now on, they could, independently, and with the best
scientific decorum, pursue "their heart's desires." (GM III: 25)
172 DAVID OWEN

In other words, science's "contradiction and struggle are, on closer inspec-

tion, directed not at the ideal itself but at its outworks, its apparel and disguise,
at the way the ideal temporarily hardens, solidifies, becomes dogmatic" (ibid.).
Thus far Nietzsche's theses (1-4) have referred to science as an activity,
however, in theses five and six Nietzsche moves to a consideration of science
as a world view, that is, a consideration of scientism. 11 This shift is made clear
when Nietzsche remembers to distinguish between science and faith in science.
On these occasions, Nietzsche argues that faith in science as such (scientism)
'is faith in the ascetic ideal itself' because it involves a metaphysical faith in the
inestimable value of truth (GS 344, GM III 24). Given Nietzsche's first three
theses, this is surely an accurate diagnosis of the character of scientism - but
what sense does it enable us to make of theses five and six? Recalling the fourth
thesis, the recognition that theses five and six address scientism makes it clear
that thesis six is simply a stronger version of thesis five. On the one hand,
scientism is the latest and noblest form of the ascetic ideal because it is the
product of the overcoming of earlier forms of the ascetic ideal accomplished by
science as the intellectual conscience of the ascetic ideal (thesis five). On the
other hand, scientism is the kernel of the ascetic ideal because science as the
intellectual conscience of the ascetic ideal has pared away everything inessential
to the ascetic ideal; all that is left is the naked metaphysical presupposition of
the inestimable value of truth (and, concomitantly, of the unity of value) which
is both a necessary and sufficient condition of the ascetic ideal as such (thesis
six).
Finally, we arrive at Nietzsche's seventh thesis: science is an ally of the
ascetic ideal but need not be. He comments:

[Science's] relationship to the ascetic ideal is certainly not yet inherently antagonistic; indeed it
is much more the case, in general, that it still represents the driving force in the inner evolution
of that ideal. [ ... ] Both of them, science and the ascetic ideal are still on the same foundation - ...
(GM III: 25, my emphasis)

This thesis follows from the first thesis combined with the additional claim
that an alternative to the ascetic ideal is possible. I will address this issue further
in the third section of this essay.
We can conclude this section by noting that Nietzsche's theses can be
plausibly reconstructed as an internally coherent set of claims which structure
his engagement with science. However, the philosophical cogency of this
argument hangs on the sustainability of these claims. For reasons of space I
cannot provide a full analysis; consequently, I will restrict myself to those which
are most significant for the purposes of this essay. Thus, in the next section I
will address the cogency of the first thesis which I take to be pivotal to
Nietzsche's account, while in the third section I will return to Nietzsche's final
thesis and elaborate its significance in terms of his epistemological critique of
metaphysical realism and his ethical reflections on the fragmentation of value.
 SCIENCE, VALUE, AND THE ASCETIC IDEAL 173

II

Can science provide a (reflexive) ground for its own right to existence? What
would be required to respond affirmatively to this question? It seems that such
an account would have to satisfy two criteria: first, it would have to show why
we do value science and, second, it would have to show that that why we ought
to value science is reducible to why we do value science. The first of these
criteria does not seem especially problematic; indeed, Nietzsche's own account
can be grasped as an attempt to provide a naturalistic account of how we have
come to value science. It is the second criterion in which the central issue of
contention is contained.
Nietzsche's position is this: we can provide a naturalistic account of how
human beings come to reflect morally on themselves and to pose the question
of the meaning and value of human existence, and we can even provide a
naturalistic account of how different styles of moral reflection emerge -but this
does not entail that "ought" -statements are reducible to natural facts about
human beings. This requires an additional step. However, to take this additional
step is to become enmired in a grammatical confusion, namely, to treat the
causal origin of values in natural facts about the world as identical to the
reasons for holding these values. The nature of this confusion is illustrated by
reflecting on the fact that while I may recognise that I have come to hold certain
values as a result of various causal processes (evolution, socialisation, etc.), this
recognition is only disturbing if I am unable to offer reasons as to why these
values are worth holding. Thus, I may start asking myself questions such as
"why do I (as a rational being) value science?"- and a causal account cannot
not provide the appropriate sort of answer to this query precisely because it is
the recognition that I seem only able to provide this type of account which
promotes this kind of question. Consequently, we may conclude that science
cannot ground its own value and that Nietzsche's thesis that science requires an
extra-scientific ideal to secure its right to existence is cogent.

III

In this section, we return to Nietzsche's implicit claim that science need not be
in the service of the ascetic ideal. To grasp the implications of this claim for the
philosophy of science, we need to focus briefly on Nietzsche's critique to the
ascetic ideal as a "closed system of will, goal and interpretation." This critique
takes the form of an epistemological and ethical critique of metaphysical
realism; an appropriate starting point is Nietzsche's critique of the idea of the
thing-in-itself.
The idea of the thing-in-itself expresses a condition of possibility of the
distinction between the "real world" of truth and being which is the unitary
source of value and the "apparent world" of appearance and becoming which is
the site of diverse embedded and embodied desires. But what is the sense of this
distinction? Nietzsche comments: "What is 'appearance' for me now? Certainly
not the opposite of some essence: what could I say about any essence except to
174 DAVID OWEN

name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could
place on an unknown x or remove from it!" (GS 54)
Nietzsche's argument is that the idea of the thing-in-itself "contains a
contradictio in adjecto" (BGE 16) because "we can have no conception, or only
a contradictory one," of something independent of any description (appearance)
of it "because to conceive of something is always to conceive of it as satisfying
some description or other." 12 However, it might be argued that this is "compati-
ble with understanding its essence as independent of its possible appearances to
human beings, thus insisting on the possibility of a metaphysical world." 13 Yet,
as Maudmarie Clark goes on to point out, 14 this argument is also incoherent.
This is because while we may cheerfully admit that beings with greater
cognitive powers than our own might discover our best theory to be false and
present a better theory, the only way to make sense of this idea- without being
thrown back onto the incoherent idea of truth as independent of all possible
knowers - is that this "alien" theory gives us more of what we want, that is,
better satisfies our cognitive interests (comprehensivess, coherence, simplicity,
etc.). Consequently, the metaphysical realist claim that truth is independent of
the cognitive constitution of human beings (our capacities and interests) is
identical with the incoherent claim that truth is independent of all possible
knowers. Thus Nietzsche remarks that the idea of a view from nowhere which
is expressed in the idea of the thing-in-itself demands "that we should think af
an eye that is completely unthinkable" (GM III: 12)- and goes on to draw the
appropriate conclusion: "We have abolished the real world: what world is left?
the apparent world perhaps? ... But no! with the real world we have also
abolished the apparent world!" 15
Where does this leave us? Perhaps with two initial thoughts: first, that the
concept of truth does not entail any conceptual commitment to the categories of
finality and completeness, and, second, that the value of truth is estimable.
This second thought can be drawn out by noting that the critique of meta-
physical realism entails that no goal can secure itself as the one goal by claiming
to be the transcendent goal; the plethora of diverse goals manifest in the various
ways in which human beings engage purposively with the world are freed from
their subordination to the ascetic ideal. The question of value enters this
discussion in two ways, both of which are relevant to question of the value of
truth: firstly, via the topic of the value of a perspective and, secondly, via the
topic of the values immanent to a system of purposes.
On the question of the value of a perspective, we can note that the incoher-
ence of the idea of a view from nowhere entails that truth-claims are necessarily
always the product of a view from somewhere, that is, the product of our
purposive activity in the world 16 . In other words, a condition of possibility of
any given kind of truth is a system of purposes within which this kind of truth
is sought - and the value of this kind of truth is dependent on the value of the
purposes that this kind of truth is sought for. More precisely, the value of
knowing that p is true is that value of knowing that p - and the value of knowing
that p is dependent on the value of knowing that p for a given system (or
systems) of purposes which is, in tum, dependent on the value of that (or those)
 SCIENCE, VALUE, AND THE ASCETIC IDEAL 175

system(s) of purposes. For example, consider the value of knowing that "X
survived the car crash" from the following perspectives: friend, business rival,
parent, para-medic and fellow human being - and then consider how this value
is estimable and variable depending on the value that one or more of these
perspectives/systems of purposes holds for a given person (it is obviously the
case that considerable contextual detail would need to be filled in to make an
actual estimation of the value of knowing this but hopefully the main point is
clear).
Nietzsche's recognition of the estimability of the value of truth is expressed
in the account of 'objectivity' which attends his doctrine of perspectivism. This
account involves two elements. The first is presented as part of his general
presentation of perspectivism as an analytic of knowledge:

There is only perspective seeing, only perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to
speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we use to observe one thing, the more
complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be. But to eliminate the will
altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this - what would that
mean but to castrate the intellect? (GM III: 12)

In this passage, "objectivity" involves being able to conceptualise an issue

from a variety of perspectives. However, the purpose of this element of
"objectivity" is not to constitute a synoptic perspective. On the contrary, as the
second feature of Nietzsche's account of "objectivity" indicates, it is to rank
these perspectives:

["Objectivity"] understood not as "contemplation without interest" (which is, as such, a non-
concept and an absurdity), but as having in our power our "'pros" and "cons": so as to be able to
engage and disengage them so that we can use the difference in perspectives and affective
interpretations for knowledge. (GM III: 12)

To use the differences between perspectives for knowledge in general is to

be able to discriminate between perspectives in terms of their appropriateness
in particular contexts. "Objectivity" in this sense is a virtue precisely because
the value of truth is estimable and such estimation requires a practical judgment.
Turning to the issue of the values immanent to a system of purposes, we can
note that this topic also has implications for the value of truth. Consider that
sincere engagement in a given system of purposes entails a threefold commit-
ment qua this system of purposes to values: a) the values expressed in the
standards of rationality characteristic of this practice, b) the values which
characterise the ethics of this practice, c) the values which constitute the telos
of the practice.
Thus, for example, the scientist as a scientist is committed to the values of
coherence, comprehensiveness, simplicity, etc., which are constitutive of the
standards of scientific rationality; to the values of rationality, truthfulness, co-
operation, etc., which constitute the ethical norms of scientific activity; and to
the value of truth as the internal telos of scientific activity. By contrast, the
politician is characterised by a very different set of value-commitments. 17
176 DAVID OWEN

The significance of this aspect of Nietzsche's argument is twofold. On the

one hand, it suggests that the value of the will to truth is contingent on its place
in the practices in which we engage and to which we are committed. On the
other hand, the fact that distinct forms of activity involve different value
commitments suggests that we cannot eliminate the possibility of tragic conflicts
because it is not true that for each conflict of values, there is some value which
can be appealed to (independent or not) in order rationally to resolve the
conflict. 1
This point is integral to Nietzsche's critique of the ascetic ideal: the dis-
placement of value monism by value pluralism. On the one hand, "sane and
honourable people can attach different importance to different values, so that
they will not agree on the resolution of many different cases." 19 On the other
hand, as a matter of chance, distinct identity-conferring commitments may clash
-perhaps acutely and with appallingly damaging effects. 20 The value of this
truth is the value of being human.
But what is the value of being human? of living a life characterised by chance
and necessity? While a tragic conception of human existence blocks suicidal
nihilism by providing a meaning for suffering (i.e., chance and necessity), it is
not clear that this truth is itself consistently bearable. This raises a final point
concerning the value of truth, namely, that to hold consistently to the value of
li:ing one's life may require significant. doses of self-dece~pon. Thus
Nietzsche's test of strength: how much of this truth can you bear?- Thus also
Nietzsche's ideal: the figure of the Ubermensch as amor fati incarnate. 22 But let
us return to science at this point and conclude with some observations on the
implications of Nietzsche's epistemological and ethical reflections.

CONCLUSION

Nietzsche's account of science and the value of truth poses an effective

challenge to the predominantly scientistic character of contemporary philoso-
phy. This account recognises that science may serve plural ideals, that is, while
the scientist as scientist is committed to the value of truth, the scientist as human
being situates this commitment within the agonstic ethical economy of the soul.
Thus the estimability of the value of truth entails that the judgement of when
various scientific procedures for producing truth involving other ethical values
(such as care for animals) are or are not justified (as well as judgements
concerning the use of scarce resources to fund science rather than other
activities) are ethical and political judgements. This is Nietzsche's position:
science in the service of life.

University of Southampton, England

NOTES
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality in On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. K.
Ansell-Pearson, trans. C. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Henceforth cited
as GM. Cf. GS 344, GM III 24.
 SCIENCE, VALUE, AND THE ASCETIC IDEAL 177

See GM III: 24.

GM III: 23 combined with GM III: 24 and GM III: 28.
GM III: 25, GS 335.
GM III: 23.
GM III: 27.
GM III: 25.
Note with respect to the Christian form of the ascetic ideal that Protestantism does not negate
this last feature, it simply claims that all human beings as human beings are qualified in the
appropriate manner insofar as they satisfy various general criteria of competence.
9 Karl Lowith, "Max Weber's Position on Science." P. Lassman and I. Velody, eds., Max
Weber's 'Science as a Vocation.' (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 142.
10 However, the status of this claim is not as clear as this bald statement might lead us to think,

given Nietzsche's remarks on the good( -bad) conscience of the ancient Greek nobility which is
expressed in Greek tragic drama (at least prior to Euripides).
11 For some cogent observations on this aspect of Nietzsche's thought with respect to popular

scientism, see H. Cay gill, "Drafts for a Metaphysics of the Gene," Tekhnema Vol.3, 1996, pp. 00-
00.
12 M. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 1990) pp. 46-7
13 Ibid., p. 100.
14 Ibid., pp. 49-50
15 Twilight of the Idols in Twilight of the ldolsfJhe AntiChrist, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (H

armondsworth: Penguin, 1968.) TI 'How the "Real World" at last became a Myth' 6.
16 For some further pertinent reflections on perspectivism, see B. Leiter "Perspectivism in

Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals" in R. Schacht (ed.) Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1994).
17 Compare Max Weber's essays on Science and Politics as vocations.
18 Bernard Williams, "Conflicts of Values," Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1981 ), p. 77.

19 Ibid., p. 80.
20 Ridley, "Tragedy and the Tender-hearted," Philosophy and Literature, vol xx, 1993.
21 Ridley, Nietzsche's Conscience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
22 D. Owen, Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 105-19.
 DAVID B. ALLISON

TWILIGHT OF THE ICONS

In a way that strikingly anticipates the recent work of Jean Baudrillard,

Nietzsche seems continually preoccupied with the questions of error, distortion,
falsification, and how the conceptual system results in a world which is hardly
represented, so much as fundamentally constructed, by virtue of our discourse
about it. 1 In short, Nietzsche attributes the hyperreality of our traditional world
to the simulation ingredient in rationality itself- specifically, to the vehicle of
rationality, the signifying medium of language. Nietzsche's account is perhaps
more historically comprehensive than Baudrillard's four-staged evolution of the
hyperreal, since Nietzsche discusses at length how the relation of reference, or
conceptual representation, gets elaborated in the first place - such that the
concept or the idea can be asserted, to stand for, the real. 2 Nietzsche analyzes
this derivation in the section entitled "Reason in Philosophy," in his work of
1888, The Twilight of the Idols. 3 Then, in the following section of the same
work, he sketches out what he calls "The History of an Error," namely, a
genealogy of reversion - a devolution, as it were - of the very pretense of such
a simulation as the real, the true. He subtitles the account, "How the 'True
World' Finally Became a Fable." This devolution closely anticipates Baudril-
lard's own account, and for all purposes, it is from Nietzsche's analysis that
Baudrillard devised his own. Nietzsche goes on, however, to show the specific
content of what such a hyperreal world entails, and in doing so, directs his
critique against Christianity- a frequent target for Nietzsche. More importantly,
the critique is directed against the foundational terms of Western thought itself,
which terms, or ideals, or "idols" traditionally served to explain and lend
meaning to the human condition, thence to address that condition, and ostensi-
bly, would help enable us to improve it. 4 Finally, in The Antichrist, 5 Nietzsche
proposes to explain what he sees as an entire set of motivations which subtend
the terms and the initial construction of this hyperreal world.
For Nietzsche, the tradition of Western thought, beginning with the preso-
cratics, made its first mistake when it distrusted the testimony of the senses,
distrust having been predicated on the supposed autonomy of reason, that is to
say, on the capacity of reason to ascertain the truth about the real. Parmenides
thereby argued against the senses, since the senses seemed to give us no access
to the real, the true, to the permanence of Being. Heraclitus also cast distrust
upon the senses since he claimed - precisely to the contrary - that while they do

179
B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 179-185.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
180 DAVID B. ALLISON

show us the unity or permanence of things, this must necessarily be wrong,

since it is only impermanence that is real, not stability, not immutable Being.
Nietzsche's observation?

They [the senses] do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for
example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. "Reason" is the cause
of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing
away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that
Being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world [die "scheinbare" Welt] is the only one; the
"true" world is merely added by a lie. 6

Reason thus distorts and falsifies the testimony of the senses. It imposes a
demand that the real be other than what the senses yield, and furthermore,
reason demands that this other, Being itself, substance and permanence, be
understood conceptually. 7 Thus, the real world, or Being, stands opposed to the
merely apparent world of sense experience, which discloses only change and
passing, i.e., becoming. In this respect, Nietzsche likens traditional philosophers
to iconolators, or as he says, idolaters: whatever is real can only be admitted or
grasped to the extent that it is first transformed into a concept, the concept of
Being. The actual world thus is judged lacking in Being, and is dismissed as
impermanent, transistory, aleatory, as false - it consists in mere appearance,
becoming. Or, as Nietzsche quite simply says, they mummify it:

All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing
real escaped their grasp alive. When these honorable idolaters of concepts [Begrif.fs-Gotzendiener]
worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship.
Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds objections - even
refutations. Whatever has Being does not become; whatever becomes does not have being. Now
they all believe, desperately even, in what has being. But since they never grasp it, they seek for
reasons why it is kept from them. 8

The actual world thus becomes represented to the philosopher by its

purported sign, namely, by the concept of being. Thus, the concept of being on
the one hand is claimed to refer to the domain of the real, the metaphysically
real itself. But, precisely due to its conceptual nature - either as a discursive
construction of language, or as a set of mathematical axioms and postulates: the
Platonic-Aristotelian and Cartesian traditions, respectively - it imposes
significant requirements as to what this reality is.
In such a fashion, actuality becomes displaced by the simulacrum, which is
none other than the "concept of being" - and it thereby loses its claim of
adequation to the concept, to the concept of being. Since the reference is thus
broken between the experienced world and the concept of Being - which is
supposed to yield the "true world" - the "true world" is itself only a concept,
indeed, an abstraction predicated upon the very rejection, the very antithesis of
actuality. And this antithesis further devalues the actual to another hyperreal
domain, to that of "mere appearance," "becoming," and "non-being."
For the tradition, then, actuality is never grasped as such. In this case, it is
doubly dissimulated - as Being and as mere appearance, both of which are
 TWILIGHT OF THE ICONS 181

conceptual predications which testify to no actuality at all. To follow Baudril-

lard' s usage, both Being and mere appearance are "resurrections of the real by
signs," i.e., they are two forms of simulated hyperreality. 9
What, for Nietzsche, is at the source of this dispossession of actuality by
signs? At first, he claims it is "the prejudice of reason," which "forces us to
posit unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being," so that
we are "ourselves somehow caught in error, compelled into error. So certain are
we, on the basis of rigorous examination, that this is where the error lies." 10
But Nietzsche quickly makes an analogy with the perceptual order, and
specifies that it is the operation of language which itself governs rational
thought processes, and it is this which underlies the fiction, the affabulation, the
simulation, of Being:

It is no different in this case than with the movement of the sun: there, our eye is the constant
advocate of error, here it is our language. In its origin, language belongs in the age of the most
rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before
consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language - in plain talk, the
presuppositions of reason. Everywhere, it sees a doer and doing; it believes in the will as the cause,
it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the
ego-substance upon all things - only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing."
Everywhere "being" is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being
follows, and is derivative of, the concept of ego .... Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive
power of persuasion than the error concerning being ... After all, every word we say and every
sentence speak in its favor. .. "Reason" in language- oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am
afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar! 11

Nietzsche then goes on to sum up his account of this genesis of the double
simulacrum, i.e., of the merely "apparent world," and the so-called "real world,"
that of "true being," in two brief propositions:

1) The reasons for which "this" world has been characterized as "apparent" [scheinbar ] are the
very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.
2) The criteria which have been bestowed on the "true being" of things are the criteria of non-
being, of naught- of nothing; the "true world" has been constructed out of the contradiction to the
actual world; indeed [this is] an apparent world [eine scheinbare Welt], insofar as it is merely a
moral-optical illusion [eine moralisch-optische Tiiuschung ]. 12

Fine: genesis of both the "apparent" and the "true" worlds, each deriving
from our inordinate faith in discursive rationality, or in short, our grammar. An
inherited grammar subtends our capacity to reason, which, as a universal- or,
at least Western - characterization of human understanding, serves as the
foundation for our belief in a true world. Yet that belief, as expressed in the
concept of being, is already in Nietzsche's words, an illusion, a fable. As such,
Nietzsche's paradigm is even more complex, perhaps more sinister, than that of
Baudrillard, since Nietzsche begins his account - "How the 'True World'
Finally Became a Fable," or "The History of an Error," which corresponds to
Baudrillard's "successive phases of the image"- with the prior suspension of
the reference relation.
182 DAVID B. ALLISON

It's interesting then, to see the elaboration of Nietzsche's account as both the
exhaustion of the very semantic content of the image, sign, or concept - i.e.,
"the true world" - as well as a reaffirmation of the broken reference. Thus,
reference emerges as but a dream, an idyll: but even more so, the concept,
image, idea, or sign, which is described as "the true world," is itself shown to
be evacuated of sense. The history, then, is of an error, which is the evolving
development, the genealogy of an Idea. And as Nietzsche frequently remarked,
some ideas or concepts, simply become effaced: they lose their distinctive
signifying marks, their power or place, in a signifying system. Ideas, in this
sense, are precisely like icons, images, or as he says, idols, in that they are
fetishes. As such, they are significantly overinvested. Or, as Baudrillard would
have it: hyperreal.
Deflated, thence devalued - no longer even a medium of exchange - of
exchange value or symbolic value, they are dis-invested, divested. Let us follow
this very curious and picaresque itinerary of an error:

1) The true world- attainable for the sage. the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it. (The
oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the
sentence, "1, Plato, am the truth.")
2) The true world- unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man
("for the sinner who repents"). (Progress of the idea; it becomes more subtle, insidious.
incomprehensible- it becomes female, it becomes Christian.)
3) The true world- unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it- a
consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and
skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Kiinigsbergian [i.e .. "Kantian"j.)
4) The true world- unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown.
Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate
us? (Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cock-crow of positivism.)
5) The "true" world- an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating- an idea
which has become useless and superfluous- consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright
day; breakfast, return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarassed blush; pandemonium of
all free spirits.)
6) The true world- we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps~ But
no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest
shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) 13

What the so-called "true world" entailed or embraced, what it ostensibly

signified, was, for Nietzsche, practically a catalogue of Western metaphysics:
it included the domain of causality, religion, will, being, science, psychology,
morality, and purposiveness. Such a "true world," which effectively defines the
Judeao-Christian universe itself, the lives and habits of individuals and their
culture, as well as the very discourse of the West, for some two millennia·- this
entire apparatus of our intelligibility itself, Nietzsche attacks with his celebrated
"critique of pure fiction." Such a fictional world, he would remark, in The
Antichrist, one not even attaining to the status of a dream world, finds its initial
motivations in precisely a hatred of the actual, the sensible, world of nature. 14
 TWILIGHT OF THE ICONS 183

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

Baudrillard' s own self-professed "nihilism," often qualified, is precisely his

affirmation of Nietzsche's critique. This is not just to invoke the Death of God
in a narrow sense, but rather, to point in agreement to the entire apparatus which
generated, sustained, and oversaw the repeated atavistic reincarnations of the
divine (e.g., the exhaustive theoretical enterprise of Western scientific thought,
together with its political nationalisms, its utopian ideologies, and its seemingly
interminable series of improbable moral causes), in short, everything that lent
purpose and meaning to a world and to a humanity which found itself con-
structed through the disposition of that meaning. What for Baudrillard would
result in the oversaturated world of hyperreality, was for Nietzsche, precisely
the entire symbolic of the "religio-moral idiosyncracy," or what Heidegger
would later term the Western tradition of "ontotheology" (perhaps revising
Nietzsche's own ironic term, "monotonotheism"). If Baudrillard oversees the
social imploding into the masses, so Nietzsche likewise saw the progressive
emergence of "the herd individual" as consequent to the intellectual and moral
encoding of the tradition. For both thinkers, the individual would find his or her
own value and significance in function of this encoding, just as Plato had
defined the very essence of the human to be discursive rationality itself. While
Nietzsche would regard the Platonic metaphysical edifice to be a "pious fraud,"
constructed either to advance the interests of the state, or to preserve the
semblance of a universal ground (the good, true, beautiful taken up into a
supraessential One - which would foreshadow the Trinitarian god of being,
truth, and goodness) against his adversaries, the sophists, or, even as a hyper-
bolic response to his other adversaries, the Protagorean academics, he nonethe-
less did so by cleverly manipulating the sensible image, or icon, in the account
(which was itself specifically advanced as an icon) of the "divided line" in the
Republic. That sensibility should so intrude upon, and indeed, surreptitiously
condition, the fenesis of "true world" only serves to reaffirm "Plato's embar-
rassed blush" 1 - at the return of "good sense," and at the very superfluity of
such a "true" world (much less, in response to Alcibiades's erotic advances in
the Symposium).
If such a world would be invoked to assuage our suffering by lending
meaning (precisely, the metaphysical-moral investment oftradition) to it and to
humanity, Nietzsche saw all too clearly that such meaning was precisely the
cause of so much of our suffering in the first place: it placed all suffering under
the metaphysical-moral structure of sin and guilt, thereby only intensifying its
domain and rendering impossible the elimination of our ressentiment against
reality, i.e., the actual world of human existence. Hence, Nietzsche would
invoke Zarathustra to repudiate the entire tradition, arguing instead, that the
world is an immense play of eternally recurring forces, in constant metamorpho-
sis and transfiguration - a Will to Power whose only "truth" consisted in the
dynamics of its appearing, i.e., our experiencing it as the infinitely mutable
domain of sensible objectivity (of which we are ingredient). Of itself, Will to
Power is meaningless: it has neither origin, moral purpose, finality, nor
184 DAVID B. ALLISON

significance. But, for all that, it is nonetheless the repository of all possible
forms, events, history, and future- humanity included.
Like Nietzsche, Baudrillard would locate the nihilism of his own age - our
age - in the hyperreal world of simulation, which would resurrect the real in the
form of exclusively and universally determining codes of signification:
precisely, as the hyperreal. With the sublation of reference and signification,
however, the real is short-circuited, and the system becomes infinitely orbital
and refractory, ever changing its values and significance by virtue of its
governing operationalism. Hence, Baudrillard's charge that the system of
meaning kills, that all value is sundered by it, rendered into its opposite,
negated, and ultimately, left indifferent. 16 All this facilitated by the unas-
similable speed of the electronic media, which effectively mediates nothing, but
can explain everything according to an infinity of symbolic axes, such that
everything becomes transparent, neutral, inconsequential, without effect or
affect. This would be the terrorism of the system itself, its capacity to render
everything indifferent, adiaphorous, a series of images which, in their effulgent
succession, no longer refer to anything - of communication, which endlessly
circulates information, only to be transformed, reversed, countered, debated,
rearticulated politically, economically, aesthetically, ideololgically, according
to yet another symbolic index. Handguns don't cause crime, public assistance
causes welfare, ketchup is a vegetable, God must be brought back to the schools,
sex education causes teenage pregnancies, condoms promote AIDS, dictator-
ships are emerging democracies, everyone profits from the globalization of
trade, the free market will restore human rights, equal opportunity is racist and
sexist, etc. Mindless saturation, meltdown, indifference.
Yet, just as Nietzsche had concluded his "History of an Error" by invoking
Zarathustra - indeed, Twilight of the Idols itself ends with a quotation from
Zarathustra - so does Baudrillard sound much the same call at the close of his
discusssion of nihilism ("Sur le nihilisme"), concluding Simulacres et Simula-
tion.17 Instead of "Incipit Zarathustra," his final remark in the book is "C'est la
ou commence Ia seduction." 18 Seduction would in large part constitute Baudril-
lard' s return to the actual, to the primacy of the objective domain in its sensible
integrity, its objective necessity. Expressed in terms quite reminiscent of
Zarathustra's account of Will to Power, such an objective dimension is framed
to challenge the original sin of a significant and purposive "world order," one
so transparent in its hyperreality as to leave practically no clue that the entire
order is itself what he would come to term "the perfect crime." 19 Baudrillard's
inquiry into the transfiguring and transforming play- the seductive game- of
objective appearances would serve as a modest beginning to counter the
totalizing systems of purposive interpretation, whose legitimate agency, we
finally and fatally come to realize, may be largely nominal. The interminable
age of this "moral-optical illusion" may well be returned, as Nietzsche had
hoped, to the domain of bon sens - of good sense - where chance and necessity
would give rise to the fatality of a tragic wisdom, a joyous wisdom. And this
was Zarathustra' s "secret":
 TWILIGHT OF THE ICONS 185

... and I whispered something into her [Life's] ear, right through her tangled yellow foolish tresses.
"You know that, 0 Zarathustra? Nobody knows that."
And we looked at each other and gazed on the green meadow over which the cool evening was
running just then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever
was. 20

The State University of New York at Stony Brook

NOTES

For an extended discussion of these issues in the works of Nietzsche, Plato, and Baudrillard,
see D. Allison, "lconologies: Reading Simulations with Plato and Nietzsche," in Recherches
semiotiques I Semiotic Inquiry, Vol. 16 (1996), nos. 1-2, pp. 89-111.
2 In his Simulations, Eng. tr., P. Foss, P. Patton, P. Beitchman (New York: Semiotexte, 1983),
Baudrillard ostensibly models his genesis of the hyperreal according to the terms of the
Iconoclastic Controversy. At its first instance, the image or icon was held to represent or to reflect
the divine referent. In this case, the real (A) is represented by the image or icon of the real (A').
Thus, A = A'. In its second instance, the image or icon masks or distorts the real. Thus the real is
represented by an image which is a disfigurement of the real. Let X = additional signification and
-X= reduced signification. Restated: A= A'(XV-X). In its third instance or "phase," the image
or icon masks the absence of a basic reality, in which case dissimulation occurs. Thus, A'= -(-A).
Finally, the image or icon bears no relation to any reality whatsoever. In this case, the reference
relation is dropped altogether, and the image or icon emerges as pure simulation , as the hyperreal
. For such a situation, A' = -A. Baudrillard's discussion is to be found in Part One, "The
Precession of Simulacra," Chap. 1, "The Divine Irreference of Images," pp. 5-13.
3 F. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. by W. Kaufmann
~New York: Viking, 1968), pp. 463-563.
Nietzsche would briefly summarize this account in his work of 1888, Ecce Homo: "The last
thing I should promise would be to 'improve' mankind. No new idols are erected by me; let the
old ones learn what feet of clay mean. Overthrowing idols (my word for 'ideals')- that comes
closer to being part of my craft. One has deprived reality of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness,
to precisely the extent to which one has mendaciously invented an ideal world. The 'true world'
and the 'apparent world' -that means: the mendaciously invented world and reality .... What is
called idol on the title page is simply what has been called truth so far. Twilight of the Idols - that
is: the old truth is approaching its end" (Ecce Homo, in F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
and Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann [New York: Vintage, 1969], pp. 217-18, 314).
5 Nietzsche, The Antichrst, in The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 565-656.
6 Nietzsche, Twilight, pp. 480-81.
7 Somewhat analogously, when Descartes in the Meditations, has reduced the contents of the
imagination to the analytical simples (out of which he can reconstruct the world according to his
mathematical mechanics and dynamics), he sees no reason not to doubt the existence of the world.
God may always be conveniently invoked as a guarantor that the world exists, but the claim that
the Mathes is Universalis corresponds to the world is an assertion at best, and not a troubling one,
since the "nature" of Cartesian bodies is defined mathematically, in any case, as magnitude.
8 Twilight, pp. 479-80.
9 Baudrillard, op. cit., pp. 4, 12.
10 Twilight, p. 482.
11 Ibid., pp. 482-83.
12 Ibid., p. 485.
13 Ibid., pp. 485-86.
14 The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 581.
15 Twilight, p. 486.
16 J. Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation (Paris: Galilee, 1981), p. 234.
17 Ibid., pp. 229-36.
18 Ibid., p. 236.
19 J. Baudrillard, Le Crime parfait (Paris: Galilee, 1995).
20 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, op. cit., p. 339.
 GREG WHITLOCK

ROGER J. BOSCOVICH AND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE:

A RE-EXAMINATION

INTRODUCTION

Though almost entirely overlooked, the influence of Roger Joseph Boscovich1

on Friedrich Nietzsche's thought began early in Nietzsche's years at Basel and
lasted until his mental eclipse in early 1889. One would certainly include Arthur
Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Michel de Montaigne, Jacob Burckhardt, Benedict de Spinoza, David
Friedrich Strauss, Blaise Pascal, and the French moral psychologist Paul Ree
among those most often named as dominant figures in Friedrich Nietzsche's
intellectual development: Roger Joseph Boscovich plays a role of comparable
importance to any of them, however, for his theory of natural philosophy
supplies the basis for Nietzsche's theory of the will to power. Nietzsche's
interest in Roger Joseph Boscovich survived the eventful Basel years, even as
the former overcame strong influences from Wagner, Schopenhauer and others.
Soon Nietzsche discovered another "predecessor," Benedict de Spinoza. Thus,
over the years, Boscovich and Spinoza became increasingly important to
Nietzsche as intellectual forerunners.

When I reflect upon my own philosophical genealogy, I feel kinship to the antiteleological, i.e.
spinozistic, movement of our time, yet with the difference that, I also consider "purpose" and
"will" in us an error; and as well, to the mechanistic movement [ ... ], yet with the difference that,
I do not believe in "matter" and consider Boscovich one of the great turning points like Copernicus
[ ... ].2

Boscovich's theory of force in Theoria Philosophire Naturalis 3 allowed

Nietzsche to invert Spinoza's pantheism by providing the theoretical supposi-
tions of both the doctrine of eternal return of the same and the theory of will to
power. In order to narrate this almost entirely overlooked chapter of intellectual
history, I will show that the Nietzsche-Gast correspondence is the entry point
to this story (Part II). In a close analysis of the NachlajJ, I will then explain the
roles played by Roger Joseph Boscovich and Benedict de Spinoza in construc-
tion of proofs for the eternal return of the same. Four important consequences
of Boscovich' s theory will be specified (Part III). In a final note, I shall adopt

187
B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 187-201.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
188 GREG WHITLOCK

a more speculative, less rigorous, stance and interpret the Spirit of Science from
Thus Spoke Zarathustra in light of Roger Joseph Boscovich (Part IV).
Karl Schlechta and Anni Anders first discovered the existence of a Bo-
scovich-Nietzsche connection in their collaborative work, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Von den verborgenen Anfiingen seines Philosophierens (1962). 4 But from there
the track goes cold, until George Stack gives Boscovich a central role in
creation of the theory of will to power in his Lange and Nietzsche (1981). 5 But
none of these authors accurately evaluated the real range of influence Boscovich
had on Nietzsche.
Gunter Abel masterfully places Boscovich and Spinoza in an extensive study
of the theoretical foundations of Nietzsche's worldview, 6 but he did not find
some of the connections and evidence presented here. And one can still lose
sight of Boscovich in the depth and breadth of Abel's work. A recent work by
Babette E. Babich entitled Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 7 rejects the
opinion that Boscovich is unimportant for Nietzsche, but the author does not
consider Boscovich or his ideas at length. And so it is still necessary to tell the
story of Nietzsche's profound debt to Roger Joseph Boscovich. Boscovich 's
theory of force is the parent theory to both the eternal return of the same and
the theory of will to power.
What I am suggesting here has a number of important implications for
Nietzsche studies. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this account is the
image of the young Nietzsche, seeking scientific support for the cornerstones of
a later philosophy. This image shatters the notion of a "positivist phase" which
some commentators have suggested, since my account traces a sustained
development of thought through every stage of the NachlajJ. My analysis also
casts the history of the notion of eternal return in a new light - one might say
that light is cast on certain aspects for the very first time. For the discovery of
finite force was the decisive moment in the "new world conception." Nietzsche's
new world conception consisted of the idea of eternal return and its theoretical
supposition, will to power. And the source of this scientific conception was
Boscovich's Theoria. This completely rejects Martin Heidegger's representation
of Nietzsche's relation to science. A final, very unusual, feature of this account
is the list of major figures here, most of 'Vhom otherwise remain invisible in
Nietzsche's corpus: Boscovich himself, Lord Kelvin, Balfoure Stewart, Johann
Carl Friedrich Zollner, Robert Mayer and many others.

THE NIETZSCHE-GAST CORRESPONDENCE

CONCERNING ROGER JOSEPH BOSCOVICH

Nietzsche's correspondence with Heinrich Ki:iselitz/Peter Gast offers an

irreplacable opportunity to estimate Boscovich's significance as a thinker to
Nietzsche. On March 20, 1882, Nietzsche wrote to Gast in order to argue
Boscovich's relative importance over the mechanistic physicist Robert Mayer,
Gast' s choice as the more important scientist.
 ROGER J. BOSCOVICH AND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 189

If anything whatsoever is well-refuted, it is the presumption of "matter": and indeed not by an

idealist but rather by a mathematician- by Boscovich. He and Copernicus are both the greatest
opponents of appearances: Since him, there is widespread relief that, there is no longer matter. He
has thought atomic theory to its conclusion. 8

And in August, 1883, Nietzsche writes to Gast of his first exposure to the Jesuit
Boscovich, "who first mathematically demonstrated that, the assumption of
solid [eifiillter] atomic points is an unusable hypothesis for the most rigorous
science of mechanics [... ]."9 It is clear from the correspondence with Gast that
the primary significance of Boscovich as a thinker, so far as Nietzsche is
concerned, lies in his rejection of the massy corpuscular atom of newtonian
natural philosophy and in his discovery of point particle atomic theory.
In understanding the correspondence between Nietzsche and Gast, one should
realize that, Boscovich represents "the dynamic view of the world" to Nietzsche,
whereas Robert Mayer represents what he calls "the mechanistic view of the
world." Also within this latter group one finds Eugen Diihring and Lord Kelvin,
according to Nietzsche. The mechanistic worldview believes in the massy,
corpuscular, "little clump-atoms" of Newtonian physics, "cause and effect,"
"laws of nature," and especially irritating to Nietzsche, the "law of entropy."
Ultimately Nietzsche chose Boscovich over Robert Mayer as the scientific
underpinnings for his own theory of reality. This caused Gast to write painfully
of the slight as late as November 29, 1913, lamenting that instead of Mayer,
Nietzsche had

brought Boscovich of Ragusan into play, a mere mathematical thinking astronomer, who, as a
consequence of his mistaken notion of the nature of force, has arrived at the point of denying the
existence of matter: there is only force. Boscovich arrives to this nonsense from his atomistic
speculations: and since method lies therein, he pleased Nietzsche that much more, as the
physicist's insights, having become instinctual for him, went out of control. 10

It testifies to Boscovich's influence on Nietzsche, that Gast writes here of

Nietzsche going out of control with the physicist's insights, to the point where
they had become second-nature. The idea that the there is no matter, but only
force, is one that Nietzsche will return to again and again in his notebooks. It is
clear from the Nachlaf3 that force is the central concept in Nietsche' s theory of
will to power, and it will become clear later that the origin of Nietzsche's
concept of force is to be found in Boscovich's Theoria Philosophia: Naturalis.
While Gast' s ideas of matter coincided with the currents of physics of their
time, Nietzsche's instincts in the matter proved more modern. Writing of Gast' s
enthusiasm for Mayer, Frederick R. Love comments that,

In the meantime his [Nietzsche's] speculations had become much more responsive to the physical
theories of the Dalmatian mathematician Roger Boscovich [ ... ]. Unprejudiced by a thorough
grounding in contemporary physics, Nietzsche's thinking was in fact much closer to the spirit of
the nuclear age than to the views of the day prevalent in the experimental sciences. 11

Indeed, Boscovich is, in Lancelot Law Whyte's words, a scientist "one

hundred and fifty years too early." Apropos of Peter Gast, Whyte comments,
190 GREG WHITLOCK

"Many prejudices had to be overcome before Boscovich's ideas could be fully

understood, for it is structural, relational, and kinematic, like the most advanced
ideas of our time." 12
That he instinctually sought out a theory whose true value could only be
appreciated a century beyond his own time, and two centuries beyond its
conception, is to Nietzsche's great credit. As will be seen later, Nietzsche's
reworking of Boscovich's atomic theory led to highly original and advanced
speculations of his own. And given the scientific atomism of his time,
Nietzsche's scientific ideas should strike one as "untimely" as those of
Boscovich.
It is important to note that his correspondence with Gast proves Nietzsche had
acquired an accurate idea of Boscovich 's scientific theories in their detail. In
his letter to Gast of March 20, 1882, Nietzsche writes,

He [Boscovich] has thought atomic theory to its conclusion. Gravity is certainly not a "property
of matter" at all, simply because there is no matter. Gravitation, as well as vis inertiae, is certainly
a manifestation of force (simply because there is nothing other than force!): only the logical
relation of this manifestation to the others, e.g. to heat, is not yet entirely clear. [... ] Kinematic
theory must minimally still grant forces of cohaesion and gravity, in addition to energy for motion,
to atoms. All materialistic physicists and chemists also do this!" 13

Such evidence proves beyond doubt that Nietzsche was thinking of Bos-
covich 's theory in its intricacies in 1882. Given this letter and other such
evidence, it no longer seems unlikely, but instead necessary, to link dozens of
previously unconnected, unexplained or cryptic notes in the Nachla~ of 1873-82
to Nietzsche's study of Boscovich. Further, it will be proven that notes of a
scientific nature directly related to Boscovich appear in the Nachlaj3 well into
the year 1888. I believe as many as one hundred notes may be clarified for the
first time in light of this discovery of Boscovich' s significance.
Gast' s comment that Nietzsche had "gone out of control" in his studies of the
mathematician, signifies not only that, Nietzsche was indeed intensively
studying Boscovich, but also that, Nietzsche did so without any mention of
Boscovich to his reading public, confiding only to the trustworthy Gast of his
intellectual struggle with Boscovich. Nietzsche's notes leave relatively few
mentions of his name, but his instinctual affinity to Roger Boscovich' s atomism,
once "out of control," resulted in the core of the massive Nachlaj3 of the years
1883-1888.
Gast was personally taken aback by the vehemence he found in Nietzsche's
attack on Robert Mayer. When Gast became editor of the Nachlaj3 for the
Groj3oktav-Ausgabe, he may have remembered the slight. Gast would have been
alerted from correspondence (SB 6 Brief 460), that Nietzsche discovered
Boscovich for himself during the early Basel years, when he had read a number
of atomic theorists. Purposely or not, Gast must have found the crucial
Boscovich study that Nietzsche left behind. This fragment, called the "Time
Atom Theory" ("Zeitatomenlehre"), appeared in the first edition of the GOA,
but not thereafter. Once the first, hurried and unsatisfactory, printing of the
GOA was withdrawn from the public and a more meticulous, carefully edited
 ROGER J. BOSCOVICH AND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 191

printing was prepared, Gast realized what he had found in the "Time Atom
Theory." Thus it was expunged without a trace, until Schlechta and Anders
reprinted the text with photocopies of the handwritten manuscript in 1962.

BOSCOVICH, SPINOZA AND CONSTRUCTION OF PROOFS FOR THE

ETERNAL RETURN OF THE SAME

What, as a first formulation, is the relation between Roger Joseph Boscovich,

Benedict de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche? In essence, Nietzsche uses
Boscovich's theory to construct a universe opposed in every way to Spinoza's
pantheism. Boscovich offered a scientific and potentially atheistic universe
which rejected the last semblance of substance, i.e. material atoms. Thus
Nietzsche wanted to use Boscovich's physical theory to construct a "new world
conception," which would constitute an advance beyond mechanistic theory in
its rejection of material atoms and also be totally void of metaphysical or
theological components. One may assume that Nietzsche wanted the new world
conception not as a metaphysical dogma, but as a justifying vision for free
spirits who seek non-theological perspectives.

Science- this has been hitherto a way of putting an end to the complete confusion in which things
exist, by hypotheses that "explain" everything- so it has come from the intellect's dislike of
chaos. -This same dislike seizes me when I consider myself: I should like to form an image of the
inner world, too, by means of some schema, and thus triumph over intellectual confusion. [... ]
Physics proves to be a boon for the heart: science (as the way to knowledge) acquires a new charm
after morality has been eliminated- and because it is here alone that we find consistency, we have
to construct our life so as to preserve it. This yields a sort of practical reflection on the conditions
of our existence as men of knowledge. 14

I am not suggesting that as early as 1872 Nietzsche intended to employ his

study of Boscovich in a project to invert Spinozism. I do suggest that Nietzsche
developed Boscovich's dynamic conception of the world" into his own "new
world conception," and that this latter conception was conceived of as diametri-
cally opposed to Spinoza's pantheism. Nietzsche's new world conception is
defined by finite force. This completely inverts the metaphysics of Spinoza.
Infinite force, a necessary postulate for Spinoza, entails infinite novelty, creation
ex nihilo, infinite extension and other remnants of theology. Finite force entails
finite novelty, conservation of energy and finite space. Finite force, but without
material atoms, was the new perspective Nietzsche sought and found in
fragmentary form in Boscovich's theory. This entire confrontation between
Boscovichian dynamism and Spinozistic metaphysics occurs dramatically in the
notebooks of 1880-1882. Boscovich's theory of a force-point-world has four
consequences that directly invert Spinoza's pantheism.

A FIRST CONSEQUENCE OF BOSCOVICH'S THEORY: NO SUBSTANCE

As has already been shown, Boscovich's primary significance as a thinker, to

Nietzsche and others, is that he has rejected the idea of solid, extended material
192 GREG WHITLOCK

atoms. In rejecting matter, Boscovich rejects extension altogether and views

space relativistically, in a Leibnizian sense. Nietzsche comments in many notes
that matter is merely one hypothesis drawn from the metaphysics of substance.
In the long march of reductionist science, the concept of matter constitutes the
final relic of the metaphysics of substance. By eliminating this holdover,
Boscovich completes the destruction of the metaphysics of substance. With his
victorious concept of force, substance no longer has its raison d 'etre.
The only explicit mention of Boscovich in Nietzsche's published works
occurs at Beyond Good and Evil, section 12. Although this mention stands
alone, it makes clear that Boscovich holds a special significance to the author.

As for materialistic atomism, it belongs among the best-refuted things there are: perhaps no
scholar in Europe today is so unlearned as to still grant it serious meaning other than as a handy
device (namely. as an abbreviated means of expression)- Thanks above all to the Pole Boscovich,
who, along with the Pole Copernicus, has been the greatest and most victorious opponent of
appearances. While Copernicus has persuaded us, against all senses, that the Earth does not stand
stilL Boscovich taught us to renounce belief in the last thing of earth to "stand fast." belief in
"substance," in "matter," in the last remnant of Earth, the corpuscular atom [Kliimpchen-Atom]:
it was the greatest triumph over the senses achieved on Earth to this time. 15

Aside from the fact that Boscovich was a Dalmatian, and not a Pole, it is clear
from this section that Nietzsche understands Boscovich's place in the history of
atomism; for the latter adopts point particles - unextended and dynamic -the
"first elements of matter" in his atomism. He rejects the solid, extended
corpuscles of all atomism hitherto - what Nietzsche calls the "Kliimpchen-
Atom." With his doctrine of atomism, which modified the massy corpuscles of
Newtonian natural philosophy into immaterial centers of force, Boscovich
helped emancipate physics from naive atomism's uncritical assumption that the
ultimate units of matter are small, individual, rigid pieces possessing shape, size,
weight and other properties.
Nietzsche's notebooks reinforce the impression that Boscovich' s significance
as a thinker, according to Nietzsche, lies in the former's rejection of any and all
materiality. Nietzsche credits Boscovich with annihilation of "superstition"
about matter (KSA 9, 643), and elsewhere he credits Boscovich with the idea of
"no matter" (KSA 11, 231). In tracing his own intellectual development,
Nietzsche writes, " .. .1 do not believe in 'matter' and consider Boscovich one of
the great turning points like Copernicus [... ]" 16
Before concluding this section, I should note that Nietzsche refers to Johann
Gustav Vogt 17 and African Spir, 18 including page numbers and quotations,
proving that Nietzsche was reading Vogt and Spir in 1885, twelve years after the
'Time Atom Theory." In direct proximity to these notes, one finds a series of
aphorisms concerning "force-atoms," "force-combinations," "atoms," "shape of
space," and then a reference to Boscovich so clear as to be undeniable, once
recognized. "Mathematical physicists cannot employ corpuscular atoms
[Kliimpchen-Atome] for their science: consequently, they construe a force-point-
world, with which one can reckon." 19
 ROGER J. BOSCOVICH AND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 193

Close to this aphorism are two more notes connecting Boscovich's dynamic
worldview to the idea of force and in turn connecting force to the idea of will
to power. 20 Also in this cluster is an aphorism entitled, "Following the trail of
the body" ("Am Leitfaden des Leibes"), a phrase Nietzsche used to describe
Boscovich's project. Notes crucial to the transformation of force into will to
power cluster in close proximity to these other important notes. This entire
series of notes decisively shows that Boscovich was foundational to develop-
ment of a theory of will to power, and that Nietzsche was employing the
former's concept of force while declining to note intellectual indebtedness. I
conclude from the evidence that every aphorism in the section designated,
"Presentation of the doctrine and its theoretical presuppositions and conse-
quences," in the 1885 notebooks, 21 relates directly to Roger Joseph Boscovich
and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that his concept of force is the parent
theory to the notion of will to power.

SECOND CONSEQUENCE OF BOSCOVICH'S THEORY: NO INFINITE FORCE

It will be shown soon that Nietzsche was contemplating a long work on the
eternal return and its theoretical assumptions. Although the project was never
completed, he still wants to make clear "Our presuppositions: no God: finite
force." This is the great divide between metaphysics of substance and his new
world conception. In his notebooks of 1880-1882, we find a number of
significant aphorisms arguing for the finitude of force. These notes constitute
forerunners to an aphorism of extreme importance for my interpretation. It poses
the question,

There are no eternally enduring substances, matter is as much of an error as the God of the
Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows
of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When
may we begin to "naturalize" humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed
nature? (GS 109)

Yet this section does not contain the full answer to its own question. That awaits
a note from 1885:

What, then, is the Jaw and belief with which the decisive change, the recently attained preponder-
ance of the scientific spirit over the religious, God-inventing spirit, is most clearly formulated? Is
it not: the world, as force, may not be thought of as unlimited, for it cannot be so thought of; we
forbid ourselves the concept of an infinite force as incompatible with the concept "force." (WP
1062)

This note explicitly identifies Spinoza with the notion that the world intention-
ally avoids a goal and even knows artifices for keeping itself from entering into
a circular course. These artifices are infinite power: the infinite modification of
an infinite number of attributes endlessly into time, Nietzsche evidently reasons,
would require infinite force for its duration.
194 GREG WHITLOCK

The world, even if it is no longer a god, is still supposed to be capable of the divine power of
creation, the power of infinite transformations; it is supposed to consciously prevent itself from
returning to any of its old forms; it is supposed to possess not only the intention but the means of
avoiding any repetition; to that end, it is supposed to control every one of its movements at every
moment so as to escape goals, final states, repetitions - and whatever else may follow from such
an unforgiveably insane way of thinking and desiring. It is still the old religious way of thinking
and desiring, a kind of longing to believe that in some way the world is after all like the old
beloved, infinite, boundlessly creative God - that in some way "the old God still lives" - that
longing of Spinoza which was expressed in the words "deus sive natura" (he even felt "natura sive
deus"). (WP 1062)

The metaphysics of substance requires infinite force to power its infinite

modifications; the physics of finite force always considers infinitude as
unimaginable, abstract and not actually found in nature. Nietzsche believes that
the metaphysics of substance logically entails infinite force: and he believes he
can produce an argument that the very rejection of substance entails finite force.
This argument he finds in Boscovich's Theoria Philosophice Natura/is. A
comparison of this note to BGE 12 and the notes mentioned above, proves that
it is precisely Boscovich who is the author of this new principle of finite force.
For Boscovich rejects the last remnant of substance when he adopts the point
particle atomic theory. Yet the number of such particles is finite and the
distances between centers of force finite. Thus force will form a finite universe.
Although the theoretical implications of this may not be obvious at first, the fact
that Nietzsche secures a scientific basis for a principle of finite force allows him
to construct a proof for another principle, whose line of reasoning is short and
direct.

THIRD CONSEQUENCE OF BOSCOVICH'S THEORY:

NO INFINITE NOVELTY

One finds in the notebooks of 1880-82 several notes which reason that infinite
force implies infinite novelty and finite force implies finite novelty. 22 Consid-
ering that this period is one of intensive study of Spinoza, and that he is one of
the few sources of this obscure phrase, it is reasonable to conclude that
Nietzsche is working here with a principle found originally in Spinoza.
Proposition XVI of Spinoza's Ethics (Book One) deduces an infinite novelty of
modifications of substance from its infinite power: "From the necessity of the
divine nature there must follow infinite things in infinite ways [... ]." And
Nietzsche likewise reasons that finite power entails finite novelty in the
umverse:

This notion - that the world intentionally avoids a goal and even knows artifices for keeping itself
from entering into a circular course - must occur to all those who would like to force on the world
the ability for eternal novelty, i.e., on a finite, definite, unchangeable force of constant size, such
as the world is, the miraculous power of infinite novelty in its forms and states. (WP I 062)

Nietzsche completes this crucial note with the conclusion, "Thus - the world
also lacks the capacity for eternal novelty."
 ROGER J. BOSCOVICH AND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 195

And so while it was Boscovich's reasoning that had lead from rejection of
substance to finite force, it is Spinoza's reasoning (albeit inverted) which leads
from finite force to finite novelty. And this makes sense, since any finite
universe will only be able to contain a finite amount of anything. Indeed,
Boscovich says that infinitude is not found in nature, even though there may be
an infinite insertibility of points in a finite space. Whether or not the scientific
spirit requires the postulates of finite space and force remains a peripheral
question to my inquiry. What is of import here is the fact that once Nietzsche
began his elucidation of the theoretical presuppositions of his notion of eternal
return, he correctly saw the implications of Spinoza' s proposition and its
converse. It is in the notebooks of 1880-1882 that this reasoning may be found.

FOURTH CONSEQUENCE OF BOSCOVICH'S THEORY:

ETERNAL RETURN OF THE SAME

In the first formulation of eternal return- dated to Autumn, 1881- Nietzsche

uses the concept of force to characterize his notion.

The world of forces never attains equilibrium, never has a moment of rest, its force and its
movement are equally great at all times. (KSA 9, 498)

The cycle is not something that has become, it is fundamental principle, just as quantitative force
is fundamental principle, without exceptions and violations. All beconting is within the cycle and
its quantitative force[ ... ]. (KSA 9, 502)

In such a world there is no matter, there is only force. From the notes of
1880-82 we may stitch together a worldview showing decisive contributions by
Boscovich. Dozens of notes in KSA 9 evidence the influence of Boscovich on
Nietzsche's vocabulary and ideas. In close proximity to this early sketch of
eternal return, one finds evidence of continued interest in pointal "sensation
theory" (KSA 9, 312). There is an important early shift from force to the feeling
offorce (KSA 9, 438-9). Continued interest in atomism is evident in many other
notes as well. 23 And there is an attempt to bridge the world of atomic force to
organic life (KSA 9, 493).
Strong echoes of the "Time Atom Theory" may be heard in various other
notes: "the instant as highest reality" " (KSA 9, 502); "states of force" (530);
"impact" (542); "currents of force" (548); "movement is time" (549); "absolute
flux" (554); "time point" (558); "force centers of the universe" (560); "timeless-
ness and succession" (565]); "force requires time" (603]); "Being is the sum of
all relations" (620).
There are a number of notes employing the concept of force (KSA 9, 11 [169],
KSA 9, 11 [ 184], KSA 9, 11 [20 1]) and a number of passages based on the
finitude of force in the universe (KSA 9, 11 [202], KSA 9, 11 [292] and KSA 9,
11 [345]), both representing legacies of Boscovich studies. 24
If one remains unconvinced that Boscovich is the source of the concept of
force underlying so many notes, Nietzsche's reference to "the last consequence"
of the mechanist idea of motion as "force in mathematical points and mathe-
196 GREG WHITLOCK

maticallines" should leave little doubt that he was meditating on Boscovich's

ideas, however critically, in this time period. But a decisive piece of evidence
comes from the forerunner note to BGE 12 which mentions Boscovich by name
in very close proximity to the citations roughly outlining a force-point-world
(KSA 9, 643). One note rejects matter (KSA 9, 686), and even experimentally
argues that, force itself is a contradiction.
These notes firmly establish that Boscovich is a major source of ideas for
Nietzsche in this period. All evidence points to an intensive rereading of the
Theoria Philosophia: Naturalis, along with Spir, Vogt et alia in this period.
Boscovich's force-point-world provides the basic topography of Nietzsche's
new worldview, and so when Nietzsche assembles the scientific principles for
a proof of eternal return, he relies upon the Boscovichian theory of force and
describes the Boscovichian dynamic worldview. In the period I 880-82, these
principles are still in the stage of assembly: it will not be until 1883 that
Nietzsche constructs a relatively detailed proof for eternal return. But Nietzsche
will continue to sketch proofs for eternal return through I 888, evermore exactly
spelling out its theoretical suppositions and consequences. These late formula-
tions show the most clearly Boscovichian phrases and vocabulary.
One may legitimately ask: if Boscovich furnished the crucial principle of
finite force, and if he also may be inferred to believe in endless time, why did
not Boscovich himself consider the consequence of eternal return of the same?
I would answer by suggesting that Boscovich did indeed consider the possibil-
ity, even the logical necessity of, eternal return, in Article 90 and its synopsis
in Theoria Philosophia: Naturalis:

Any interval whatever will be finite, and at least divisible indefinitely by the interpolation of other
points, and still others; each such set however, when they have been interpolated, will be also
finite in number. So that there is only an infinity of possible points, but not of existing points. [... ]
Further, in this way, by doin~ awa:S with all idea of an actual infinity in existing things. truly
countless difficulties are got nd of. ·

But most especially, they (non-extended points) do away with the idea of everything continuous
coexisting. [... ] Further, nothing infinite is found actually existing; the only thing possible is a
series of finite things produced indefinitely. 26

Yet Boscovich deduces not an indefinite repetition of finite things, but rather
an indefinite duration of forces in a finite space. This is possible without
repetition for Boscovich, because space has infinite componibility, allowing that
no point of matter ever occupy the same point of space occupied by another
point of matter, nor that the same point of space is ever occupied by itself at any
other time.
We come now to perhaps the strangest chapter in an already surprising
intellectual history. For in the Appendix on Mind and God to the Theoria
Philosophia: Natura/is, Boscovich argues from the finitude of force to infinite
novelty, and from there to the necessary existence of God, whom he calls "the
External Being." It will flabbergast even the casual reader of the Theoria to
come upon the sentence, "[ ... ] now, as regards the Divine Founder of Nature
 ROGER J. BOSCOVICH AND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 197

Himself, there shines forth very clearly in my Theory, not only the necessity of
admitting His existence in every way, but also His excellent and infinite Power,
Wisdom and Foresight [... ]," 27 since his theory explicitly rejects infinite force,
and since there is no necessity whatsoever for God in the physical theory of the
Thea ria. Indeed, Boscovich calls God the External Being, because He is the
Being perfectly external to force. In a letter to Gast, Nietzsche emphasizes the
fact that God is unnecessary to Boscovich's theory, whereas God is essential to
Robert Mayer's theory.
Now of course, as previously noted, Boscovich was a devout Jesuit and was
expected to include in any such major work some clear admission of orthodoxy.
Thus with his Appendix, Boscovich won the approval of the "Censors of the
College of Padua" and the "Inquisitor General of the Holy Office in Venice,"
and was then successfully "registered in the High Court for the Prevention of
Blasphemy" on September 18, 1758. It is a forgotten quirk of intellectual history
that Boscovich's "proof' of God's existence rests on actual infinity, a supposi-
tion that the entire Theoria Philosophice Natura/is rejects out of necessity and
accepts only here. But then the Censors of the College were not likely to read
any of the text, one assumes, and would instead go directly to the Appendix on
Mind and God.
I must conclude from this evidence that Nietzsche knew Boscovich followed
the logic of eternal return to the brink of its conclusion, but averted it by
denying his own tenets. In arguing for the necessity of God, Boscovich argued
against three counter-views: first, that the universe is fortuitous; second, that the
universe is the result of fate; and third, that the universe has existed through
time by laws of its own. All these positions play a role in the idea of eternal
return. In each of his arguments, Boscovich suddenly suspends a basic tenet to
introduce a necessary premiss for the Creator's existence. Thus we read with
completely new insight a passage from 1888:

We need not worry for a moment about the hypothesis of a created world. [... ] I have come across
this idea in earlier thinkers: every time it was determined by other ulterior considerations(- mostly
theological, in favor of the creator spiritus). 28

Boscovich could be relied upon to furnish a dynamic worldview that does not
require God in any meaningful way. Once Nietzsche gathered the scientific
principles he desired from the Theoria, Boscovich would not play a wider role
in his philosophy. This earns Boscovich the title of head engineer for the
construction crew of Nietzsche's "new world conception." For, although
Nietzsche knew of several atomists ·- Johann Gustav Vogt, Thomas Fechner,
Schmitz-Dumont, Otto Liebmann and of course Democritus - , it was only
Boscovich who had "die atomische Theorie zu Ende gedacht." In Nietzsche's
eyes, only Boscovich had disproven the notion of matter, and with it the last
semblance of substance and God. Nietzsche recognized the ulterior theological
motives of such smoke screens as the Appendix on Mind and God. In overcom-
ing Newtonian atomism, Boscovich achieved what even the great Spinoza could
not do: namely, to let go of the last metaphysical refuge of God.
198 GREG WHITLOCK

FINAL NOTE

Roger Joseph Boscovich may be interpreted as a Nietzschean free spirit, a

higher type not unlike the Spirit of Science in Part IV of Thus Spoke Zarathus-
tra. In his hundred or so scientific works Boscovich exemplified intellectual
conscientiousness. His will to truth drove him to employ mathematics as his
method and he allowed no personal convictions to taint his account of the forces
of nature. Zeljko Markovic summarizes corpus and man by saying,

All his work, finally, may be read as physical essays in the working out of an epistemology and
metaphysic that styled his career in a way, again, not at all characteristic of his century. 1... ] Sharp
in thought, bold in spirit, independent in judgment, zealous to be exact, BoskoviC was a man of
eighteenth-century European science in some respects and far ahead of his time in others. Among
his works are writings that still repay study. and not only from a historical point of view. 29

Boscovich was accomplished in the art of poetry, or gai saber. A sort of knight
of la gaya scienza, he lived his life in Mediterranean cultures (Dalmatia, Italy
and France), which Nietzsche closely associated with ')oyful science." Indeed,
Boscovich warned that, in order to reach the center of his untimely "medita-
tions," his readers would require acrior mentis acies atque animi audentior vis
(a great sharpness of mind and a high audacity of spirit) -how appropriate a
description of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche! Even though Nietzsche probably
knew little ofBoscovich's personal history, the latter's Theoria, well-known to
Nietzsche, was a tour de force of joyful science.
Not only was Boscovich a sort of higher type in the Nietzschean sense,
Nietzsche seemed to believe that his new scientific conception of the world,
with some alterations, would provide an alternative to superstition for all other
higher types, just as the Spirit of Science rescues higher mankind from the
Wagnerian Magician in Part IV of Zarathustra. While we may not be certain
that the Spirit of Science loosely characterizes Boscovich, consider that it was
only Boscovich' s new conception of "the force-point world" that cleared the air
for Nietzsche himself, immediately after his flight from Wagner's Bayreuther
Festspiel, just as, after an Ass Festival, the Spirit of Science rescues Zarathus-
tra's higher man from the Magician's Wagnerian spell in the chapter "On
Science." During his period as a publicist and enthusiast for Wagner at
Tribschen, Nietzsche's scientific interests were cloaked; after his break with
Wagner, however, Nietzsche wrote a series of books showing special interest in
science (and rejection of Wagnerian and Schopenhauerian ideas). By returning
to his early interest in science, Nietzsche rediscovered himself, as well as
Boscovich' s scientific spirit.
By comparing the Boscovichian Scientific Spirit to the other higher men, we
may get a rough estimation of Boscovich's importance to Nietzsche relative to
the latter's other intellectual predecessors. For example, although David
Friedrich Strauss had "killed God," Boscovich's "force-point world" goes still
further, in Nietzsche's opinion, to refute the last vestige of Substance meta-
physics; i.e. belief in the solid atom. Much like the Ugliest Man in Part IV of
 ROGER J. BOSCOVICH AND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 199

Zarathustra, Strauss became an apostate and confessor, whereas Boscovich

continued to enjoy the clear intellectual conscience of scientific method.
And though Arthur Schopenhauer was the first great German atheist, in
Nietzsche's eyes, Boscovich engineered a new world of force-points, rather than
the nihilistic "world as will and representation" dreamed up by that old
Soothsayer. If Schopenhauer was a pessimist, Boscovich practiced "joyful
science."
Like Zarathustra's Shadow, Roger Boscovich sometimes lived dangerously;
as, for example, when he ventured into crisis-plagued Poland apparently as a spy
for the Vatican at the Polish court. Yet Boscovich surpassed the Shadow by
becoming his own person, rather than a mere follower, even though he remained
human, all too human.
As an influence on Nietzsche's intellectual development, Boscovich also
easily surpasses Blaise Pascal, who perhaps appears reflected as the Last Pope
in Zarathustra; Pascal may have embodied the logic of Catholicism in
Nietzsche's analysis, but the Dalmatian scientist ventured far outside tradition
or authority altogether. Boscovich, for example, ignored Pope Clement XIV' s
dissolution of the Society of Jesus and continued his own scientific research
unchecked. His intellectual honesty pitted Boscovich against the Censors of
Rome, whom he treated with a certain humor. In a gesture to fellow members
of the scientific community, Boscovich supported and aided the removal of
Galileo's book from the Censor's List. Boscovich pursued celestial mechanics,
atomic theory and geodesy, scientifically studying Heaven and Earth, without
regard to hinderances from Church dogma or traditions. Indeed, Boscovich
pursued science as part of his own innocence of becoming, not as a mere
instrument for Rome.
And so, in one possible interpretation, when the other higher men succumb
to the perils of the wagnerian Magician, only the boscovichian Spirit of Science
saves Zarathustra's higher mankind.

Parkland College, Illinois

NOTES
1 Roger Joseph Boscovich (Rudjer Josef Boskovic) was born on September 18, 1711, in
Ragusan, Dalmatia. In 1744 he entered the Jesuit priesthood. Branislav Petronievic, professor of
philosophy at University of Belgrade, writes that "Boscovich was at once philosopher, astronomer,
physicist, mathematician, historian, engineer, architect and poet. In addition he was a diplomat and
a man of the world; and yet a good Catholic and a devoted member of the Jesuit order." Boscovich
published about one hundred scientific treatises (most in Latin) and had an academic scientific
reputation on the entire European continent and England. He finished his principal work, Theoria
Philosophice Naturalis Redacta ad Unicam Legem Virium in Natura Existenrium (A Theory of
Natural Philosophy Reduced to a Single Law c{ the Actions Existing in Nature), in Vienna in 1758,
issuing a definitive edition in Latin and English under the author's supervision in 1763. Boscovich,
in the words of L. L. Whyte, was "the first scientist to develop a general physical theory using
point particles," antedating modern atomic theory by one hundred years. [... ] Boscovich's work
marked an important stage in the history of our ideas about the universe, and his system will
remain the paradigm of the theory of point particles." In other words, Roger Joseph Boscovich is
the undisputed founder of one of the three families of atomic theory. Boscovich travelled
extensively and was highly esteemed in social circles in France, Italy and elsewhere. He met
200 GREG WHITLOCK

fellow free-thinker Benjamin Franklin in London and observed Franklin experimenting with
electricity. Boscovich knew Serbo-Croatian, Italian, Latin and French. Roger Joseph Boscovich
died on February 13, 1787, due to an extended lung ailment.
2 My translation of KSA 11, 26[432]: ··wenn ich an meine philosophische Genealogie denke,
so fuhle ich mich im Zusammenhang mit der antiteleologischen, d. h. spinozistischen Bewegung
unserer Zeit, doch mit dem Unterschied, daB ich auch ,den Zweck' und ,den Willen' in uns fur
eine Tauschung halte; ebenso mit der mechanistischcn Bewegung [... ] doch mit dem Unterschied,
daB ich nicht an ,Materie' glaube und Boscovich fiir einen der groBen Wendepunkte halte, wie
Copernicus [... ]."
3 Boscovich, Roger Joseph: Theoria Philosophia: Naturalis Redacta ad Unicam Legem Virium
in Natura Existentium. Chicago, London, 1922. Latin-English edition from the text of the first
Venetian edition published under the personal superintendence of the author in 1763.
4 Karl Schlechta und Anders, Anni: Friedrich Nietzsche. Von den verborgenen Anfiingen seines
Philosophierens, (Stuttgart, Bad Cannstadt, 1962), pp. 60-72.
' George J. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: De Gruyter, New York, 1983).
6 Gunter Abel, Nietzsche. Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr (Berlin:
De Gruytcr, 1984).
7 Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art
and Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).
s "Wenn irgend Etwas gut widerlegt ist so ist cs das Vorurteil vom "Stoffe": und zwar nicht
durch einen Idealisten sondern durch einen Mathematiker- durch Boscovich. Er und Copernikus
sind die beiden gross ten Gegner des Augenscheins: Seit ihm giebt es keinen Stoff mehr, es sei denn
als populare Erleicherung. Er hat die atomische Theorie zu En de gedacht." Nietzsche, Siimtliche
Briefe 6 Brief213; henceforth: SB.
9 " ... der zuerst mathematisch demonstrirt hat, daB die Annahme erfUllter Atompunkte eine fiir
die strengste Wissenschaft der Mechanik unbrauchbare Hypothese sei [... ]" SB 6 Brief 460.
10 Correspondence cited in Frederick R. Love, Nietzsche's Saint Peter. Genesis and Cultivation

of an Tllusion, (Berlin, New York, de Gruyter, 1981) p.l88. The German text reads: " ... den
Ragusaner Boscovich ins Feld fiihrt, einen bloB mathematisch denkenden Astronomen, der infolge
seiner irrigen Vorstellung vom Wesen der Kraft an den Punkt gelangt, die Existenz der Materie
zu leugnen: es gebe nur Kraft. Boscovich kommt von seinen atomistischen Spekulationen auf
diesen Unsinn: und da Methode darin lag, so gefie1 er Nietzsche urn so mehr, als diesem die
instinktgewordenen Physiker-Einsichten zur Kontrolle abgingen."
11 Love, Nietzsche's Saint Peter. pp. 187-188.
12 Lancelot Law Whyte, Roger Boscovich S.J.. F.R.S., 1711-1787: Studies of His Life and Work

o,n the 250th Anniversary of His Birth (London and New York, 1961 and 1964 ), p. 102.
1_, "Er [Boscovich] hat die atomische Theorie zu Ende gedacht. Schwere ist ganz gewif3 keine
,Eigenschaft der Materie,' einfach wei! es keine Materie giebt. Schwerkraft ist, ebenso wie die vis
inertiae, gewiB eine Erscheinungsform der Kraft (einfach wei! es nichts anderes giebt als Kraft'):
nur ist das logische VerhaltniB dieser Erscheinungsform zu andercn, z. B. zur Warme, noch ganz
undurchsichtig. [... 1 Die kinetische Theorie muB den Atomen mindestens auBer der Bewegung-
senergie noch die beiden Krafte der Cohaesion und der Schwere zuerkennen. Dies tun auch a lie
materialistischen Physiker und Chemiker 1" SB 6 Brief 213.
14 "Die Wissenschaft- das war bisher die Beseitigung der vollkomrnenen Verworrenheit der

Dinge durch Hypothesen, welche alles 'erklaren' -also aus dem Widerwillen des Intellekts an dem
Chaos.- Dieser selbe Widerwillen ergreift mich bei Betrachtung meiner seiher: die innere Welt
mochte ich auch durch ein Schema mir bildlich vorstellen und tiber die intellektuelle Verworren-
heit herauskommen. [... ]Die Physik ergibt sich als eine Wohltat ftir das Gemtith: die Wissenschaft
(als der Weg zur Kenntnij]) bekommt einen neuen Zauber nach der Beiseitigung der Moral- und
wei/ wir hier aile in Consequenz finden, so mtissen wir unser Leben darauf einrichten, sie uns zu
erhalten. Dies ergiebt eine Art praktischen Nachdenkens tiber unsere Existenzbedingungen als
Erkennende." (All emphases in original.) KSA 10, 24118]; WP 594.
15 My translation of Jenseits von Gut und Bose §12: "Was die materialistische Atomistik betrifft:

so gehort dieselbe zu den bestwiderlegten Dingen, die es giebt; vielleicht ist heute in Europa
Niemand unter den Gelehrten mehr so ungelehrt, ihr ausser zum bequemen Hand- und Hausge-
brauch (namlich als einer Abktirzung der Ausdrucksmittel) noch eine crnstliche Bedeutung
zuzumessen- Dank vorerstjenem Polen Boscovich, der, mitsammt dem Polen Kopemicus, bisher
der grosste und siegreichste Gegner des Augenscheins war. Wahrend namlich Kopernicus uns
tiberredet hat zu glauben, wider aile Sinne, dass die Erde nicht fest steht, lehrte Boscovich dem
Glauben an das Letzte, was von der Erde ,feststand,' abschworen, dem Glauben an den , Stoff,'
an die ,Materie, · an das Erdenrest- und K!Umpchen-Atom: es warder grosste Triumph tiber die
 ROGER J. BOSCOVICH AND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 201

Sinne, der bisher auf Erden errungen worden ist." Both translations of this section by Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale contain noteworthy flaws. Kaufmann alters Nietzsche's text
without so much as a footnote: in the German Nietzsche (mis)identifies Boscovich as a Pole,
whereas Kaufmann changes the text to identify Boscovich (correctly) as Dalmatian. While
probably attempting to save Nietzsche from error, Kaufmann misinforms the English reader about
the text and robs Nietzsche of his purposeful, if questionable, misidentification of the Dalmatian
as a Pole. Hollingdale mistranslates "Kliimpchen-Atom" as "particle atom," whereas Nietzsche
means by this term, more specifically, a solid-particle atom, or corpuscular atom.
16 " •• .ich nicht an ,Materie' glaube und Boscovich fiir einen der groBen Wendepunkte halte, wie

Copernicus[ ... ]." KSA 11, 26[432].

17 KSA 10, 24[36].
18 KSA II, 35[56]; KSA 11, 35[61]; KSA II, 40[12] and KSA 11, 40[24].
19 "Die mathematischen Physiker ki:innen die Kliimpchen-Atome nicht fiir ihre Wissenschaft
brauchen: folglich construiren sie sich eine Kraft-Punkt-Welt, mit der man rechnen kann." KSA
II, 40[36].
°
2 KSA II, 36[31] and [34].
21 "Darstellung der Lehre und ihrer theoretischen Voraussetzungen und Folgen." See KSA 124[4].
22 For example, KSA 9, II [213], KSA 9, II [269] and KSA 9, 11 [305].
23 For example., KSA 9, II [33], KSA 9, II [247] and KSA 9, 11 [264].
24 KSA 9, II [ 169], KSA 9, 11[184], KSA 9, 11[201]) and KSA 9, II [202], KSA 9, 11[292] and

KSA 9, 11[345].
25 Roger Joseph Boscovich, Theoria Philosophire Natura/is Redacta ad Unicam Legem Virium
in Natura Existentium (Chicago, London, 1922), p. 89.
26 Ibid. p. 21.
27 Ibid. p. 379.
28 Kaufmann's translation of KSA 13, 14[188] as Will to Power 1066: "Die Hypothese einer

geschaffenen Welt sol! uns nicht einen Augenblick bekiimmern. [... ] Ich bin auf diesen Gedanken
bei friiheren Denkern gesto~en: jedes Mal war er durch andere Hintergedanken bestimmt ( -
meistens theo1ogische, zu Gunsten des creator spiritus)."
29 Zeljko Markovic, Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Volume II. Charles Gillespie (ed.), (NY:
Scribner and Sons, 1970). See entry for Boskovic. Rudger J., pp. 326-332. Quotations are found
on pp. 328 and 331.
 PATRICK A. HEELAN

NIETZSCHE'S PERSPECTIV ALISM:

A HERMENEUTIC PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

INTRODUCTION

This paper discusses Nietzsche's epistemological perspectivalism as a herme-

neutical philosophy. As Babich has shown, 1 it is neither a form of relativism,
nor a form of classical skepticism, both of which suppose an agnostic realism.
Nor is it a form of social constructivism derivative from any of these. Among
possible forms of perspectivalism, one follows naturally from the principle that
theoretical scientific inquiry- Nietzsche's Apollinian approach- necessarily
presupposes something in the lifeworld for which scientific theory sets the
conditions or gives the explanation. Since the lifeworld is the world of human
culture and, therefore, of human will and purposes, scientific theory necessarily
serves what Nietzsche calls the "Will to Power." Absent this consideration,
scientific theory is detached from the lifeworld, and as Nietzsche proclaims, is
devoid of (objective) "truth." In this perspective, scientific theory is pure means,
and, since it lacks any dynamic moral or cultural end, it fails to serve human life
in its creative moral and cultural dimensions, and on this account falls into
sterility, meaninglessness or, what Nietzsche calls, "nihilism." Only if scientific
theory and cultural praxis are deliberately joined in historical, moral, and
cultural dialogue, will scientific theory avoid this human fate. This implies a
role for metaphor in discovery, and for the Dionysian approach in discriminating
among perspectives in multiperspectival inquiry.

NIETZSCHE AND THE CRISIS OF MODERNITY

Nietzsche was the first to draw attention to what was later to be called the crisis
of modernity. 2 This he saw as a moral challenge flowing from the metaphysical
commitment of German- and all Western- culture to the Platonic-Socratic or
Apollinian myth of science (and all scholarship) as giving absolute privilege to
theoretical knowledge. 3 This created a false optimism based on the theoretical
notion of human equality and the human conviction that through science the
social and physical environment could be managed in the interests of human
fulfillment. It also implied the rejection of the tragic Dionysian myth of human
existence that alone, according to Nietzsche, made possible the life-enhancing

203
B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 203-220.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
204 PATRICK A. HEELAN

virtues of creativity and freedom or (what he called) the Will to Power. 4 The
special scientific Apollinian (alternatively, Alexandrian) metaphysics sustaining
this culture5 is to be rejected, because it has lost or forgotten the implicit role of
the human subject in the constitution of all theoretical knowledge- of both facts
and concepts. The inquiring theorizing spirit characteristic of "modem man" or
"theoretical man" claims in the name of this metaphysics to "explain" or
"clarify" the life world by substituting for a practical understanding of nature and
culture a theoretical explanatory system, that is, a system of abstract, objective
-usually mathematical- representational models. 6 While the practicallifeworld
revealed to human knowers the environment constituted by human action, and
thus by (what he called) the Will to Power, the explanatory scientific models
that took its place in the metaphysical order were (in his view) mistakenly
presented as "truth," that is, representational truth (in the objective sense) as the
picture of reality as it is independently of human culture. What our culture then
takes to be scientific "facts" are not so: "No, facts are precisely what they are
not, only interpretations," (WP 481) and what it takes to be "truth," is not truth,
but an "illusion of truth" (cf. BT 14-18; GS 112 and 354; BGE 24; TL 84).
In his view, then, Apollinian metaphysics or the metaphysics of theory
identifies reality with a fixed framework of pure possibilities that explicitly
voids all moral and cultural ends while implicitly supporting the conservative
ends of (what he called) the "weak" or "mediocre [political] majority." This puts
the life-enhancing Will to Power, basic to authentic moral and cultural action,
at a metaphysical disadvantage within modern public culture. He concludes: a
society constituted on the metaphysical basis of scientific explanations is
doomed to sterility, meaninglessness, and nihilism.
Nietzsche's own judgment about scientific theories was that they function as
"over-simplified" and "error-ridden" 7 instruments of environmental control
implicitly oriented toward the same life's purposes that illumine the lifeworld
of modernity, and hence as conservative life-sustaining powers that are the
antithesis of life-enhancing powers (cf. BGE 21, 22, and 24; WP 610). He
concludes: a philosophy and epistemology of perspectivalism (WP 481) is
needed as the only way to ensure the return of theories to the service of
creativity and freedom, or the Will to Power.
Such a very anti-Kantian, anti-realist, now called postmodern, analysis of
science- and, of course, of all scholarship- is not as negative as it sounds. Nor
indeed is the option for perspectivalism as revolutionary about religion and
morality as one fears, no matter how one understands the ground for an
authentic moral cultural life which Nietzsche called the Will to Power. "The
illusion of truth," "the truth of illusion," "Will to Power," and "nihilism" - all
key terms for Nietzsche - need not be saddled with fearful and demonic
meanings pace Nietzsche's apocalyptic rhetoric. They are forceful terms used
to rock the boat of a very entrenched metaphysics, the metaphysics of modernity
and its moral failures, seen now in hindsight as it were prophetically in
anticipation of the European and global social and environmental tragedies of
this century. Nietzsche's charges were repeated in a more academically
acceptable rhetoric by later German philosophers, notably Husser! in his critique
 NIETZSCHE'S PERSPECTIV ALISM 205

of Galileo, and Heidegger in his critique of scholarly and scientific theorizing.

And in America, much of the substance - though not the rhetoric - of
Nietzsche's assessment was shared by the exponents of American pra~matism.
Let me say a word about Nietzsche's style of thinking and writing. Moder-
nity's life-world is dominated by a certain metaphor for the scientific mind. This
is the unblinking All-Seeing Eye in the triangle at the top of the sacred pyramid
that surveys the divine world-picture that science seeks by theory to define. 9
Nietzsche wanted to destroy more than the image of a single eye (WP 540), he
wanted to destroy vision as a metaphor for truth. His reason was not just that the
eye aimed to express the likeness of human knowing with the Apollinian divine,
but that vision connoted a kind of simple clarity and non-relational objectivity
that disguised the mutual dependence of knower and known. 10 Music associated
with the Dionysian divine is for him - and for us too - a better metaphor for
thinking and writing. 11 Music can be seen as involving two traditions, two
modes of interpretation -performance and reception. The interpretative arts of
performance saturate the environment with structured - numbered - sound and
listeners with various degrees of education and skill learn by means of the
interpretative arts of reception to distinguish diverse voices and relate them in
discerning ways "concinnously." 12 The outcome of these two arts is not "truth,"
or representational truth in the objective sense, but the construction, discovery,
re-construction and re-discovery of meaning - according to the capacities of the
performer and the receiver.
Nietzsche's perspectivalism is then a philosophy of meaning - not of "truth,"
but of true (or false) meanings (cf. BGE 14). Let us be clear that, as Babich has
shown, 13 perspectivalism is neither a form of relativism nor a form of classical
skepticism both of which suppose an underlying agnostic realism. Nor is it a
form of social constructivism derivative from any of these. What then is it? This
raises the question of truth and meaning, and their relationship.
To prepare us for a study and defense of an epistemological perspectivalism
after Nietzsche, let us look first for orientation at the responses of some other
philosophers to the same charges. Husserl' s critique of Galilean mathematical
thinking in the Crisi/ 4 led him to the following resolution: to bring thinking
back to an awareness of the origins of Greek and Galilean philosophy and
science in the practical activities of the life-world, for example, in the art of land
surveying and, particularly, in practices of measurement. An examination of
these origins uncovers the role of human subjectivity and constructivity at the
heart of theoretical inquiry. From them theory drew its original - but later
forgotten- cultural meaning. We will discuss this at length below.
As for the goal of restoring by recollection Greek intellectual ideals to
contemporary science and philosophy, Husser] and Heidegger disagreed. For
Husserl, forgetfulness of origins, though a sure sign of civilizational breakdown,
was fully recoverable, and Husser! attempted to re-direct philosophy (and
history) to the recovery of such origins. Philosophy's part would in his view
become a supreme Science, "transcendental phenomenology." But for Heideg-
ger philosophy was less a supreme Science than a reflective awareness of
possibilities - and limitations - inherent in the temporality of human life and
206 PATRICK A. HEELAN

thought. 15 The temporal nature of the human inquirer as Dasein 16 followed from
the fact that Dasein was "thrown" into the life-world at a particular time and
place with a basic orientation of "circumspection" or "care," and from Dasein 's
awareness of the inevitability of death. These seem to limit the possibilities of
recollection, and to permit no more than the limited ability and responsibility of
Dasein 's living authentically in the midst of inauthenticity. This implies that in
all human projects handed down by tradition the disclosedness of Being is
conditioned by the partial hiddenness or forgottenness of a background only
revealed by and partially recoverable from the texts and other cultural legacies
of tradition. 17
While Husserl and Heidegger knew of Nietzsche's work and were to some
extent responding to it, American pragmatism was responding to its own sense
of dissatisfaction with British and German idealism and home-grown religious
dogmatism. While fundamentally "realist" (committed to an objective, progres-
sively knowable, order of things), pragmatists would nevertheless have been
sympathetic toward Nietzsche's criticism of the "metaphysics" of scientific
theory- Dewey named it critically, the "spectator theory of knowledge"- and
for reasons other than those that motivated Nietzsche's pessimism, they coopted
scientific method with optimism as a willing partner in the life-enhancing
transformation of public values and culture.
Returning to Neitzsche, it would be a great mistake to think that Nietzsche
undertook the task of refuting physical or scholarly theories in general. Like any
German professor he was used to intellectual debate, accepting challenges, and
making counterchallenges in the society of his academic peers - hence his
exclamation, "Long live physics!" (GS 335). What he meant was, "Long live
Wissenschaft in all the faculties!" But he wanted to distinguish what properly
belonged to science, namely, that it should promote - or, at least, not offend
against - moral life and cultural freedom, and what did not, namely, the
imperialistic and morally decadent tendency to use scientific knowledge in the
interests of universal social and environmental management. 18 It is within this
context that he addressed the epistemological and ontological foundation of
scientific theorizing in the life-world.
The discussion that follows attempts to address this question in a contempo-
rary way. 19 The views expressed here are not proposed as a historical recon-
struction of Nietzsche's own (insofar as scholars are able to reconstruct his
views historically), but as a contemporary philosophical answer to Nietzsche's
challenge that surely derives from his work (I will indicate relevant textual loci
in the notes) and from the reflections of others, particularly, Heidegger, who in
a similar spirit have confronted this challenge.
Let me start with a discussion of meaning and its production by henneneutic
methods.

MEANING

Meaning is not a private mental entity but a shared social entity embodied in
language (understood always to include other language-like inscriptions,
 NIETZSCHE'S PERSPECTIVALISM 207

whether passive, such as road signs, or active, such as performances) and a

cultural environment embodying community purposes.
Perception is the part of life-world public experience in which things, their
relationships and movements, are displayed as bounded objects in a perceptual
space an d tlme. 20
0

Meanings are not fully complete unless incorporated in a linguistic utterance

used to affirm or deny some content that finds itself fulfilled in public experi-
ence.
Meanings fulfilled in public experience are not just private mental represen-
tations of something, but are by intention identical with what is presented in
experience and they give access to the antic and ontologicaz2 1 character of that
referent under the aspect of what is in truth on this occasion given to under-
standing22 This is sometimes put: whatever we know experientially, we know
under some "as-"aspect that connects the experientially presented object with
human life and culture. This aspect includes but is not exhausted by whatever
can be reached by a reflective and hermeneutical study of the constitution of
fulfilled meanings (implying a certain non-transparency of human habits and
culture to those who live through them and with them).
To the extent that language and other public expressive signs are the only
means through which we articulate our public world and come to understand
one another, the meanings that these signs convey are construals of human
cultural communities and cannot be attributed to non-human sources except by
metaphor. Aristotelian or Platonic essences and various forms of "objective
realism" such as the metaphysics of scientific theory must then be regarded as
suspect of having mistakenly confused human historical and cultural meanings
with ahistorical culture-independent "natural" forms. This is not to say that we
do not possess truth, but the truth we possess, even scientific truth, is always
mediated by meanings derived from human language and culture that are in the
flow of human history? 3
Within this flow knowledge is handed down from generation to generation
by the medium of inscriptions and the cultural forms of life in which they find
fulfillment. Phrases, however, that once meant one thing come to mean another
with the passage of time, for language and culture change. As historians of
science well know, this is as true for natural science as it is for literature and
politics. Of special interest then are the circumstances of continuity and change
in the historical transmission of scientific meanings via the media of language,
mathematics, laboratory praxes, and the culture of the scientific community. Just
as music may be performed and recorded at one site and listened to at another,
so meanings originating at one (linguistic, historical, cultural, geographic) site
are received and interpreted at different and distant sites. Textual meanings are
adopted from traditions of interpretation or constructed or re-constructed in
keeping with the responsibilities, constraints, and presumptions of rational
hermeneutical inquiry. One of these responsibilities is that each legitimate
meaning be appropriately fulfillable in the reader's experience. 24 One of the
constraints is the cultural resources available to the reader. 25 One of the
208 PATRICK A. HEELAN

presumptions is that there is no single legitimate meaning relevant to all readers

of such a text no matter how close or distant they are from the source.
Perspectivalism then implies that there are many legitimate meanings
depending on the reader's linguistic abilities, interests, and cultural ambience
and on what the reader knows and considers relevant about the distant source,
its language, and ambient culture.Z6 Like a hammer or any piece of equipment,
a text can be used successfully for several meaningful cultural purposes. As in
the case of the hammer, for each useful purpose there are lifeworld criteria as
to how well it performs this purpose. The uses are not arbitrary, for nothing but
nonsense would be gained by arbitrary use, but this does not imply that there is
just a single legitimate meaningful use. As in the case of the hammer, there may
be a conventional priority of uses depending on how according to cultural
tradition "ownership" is shared - hammers are primarily for construction,
scientific results are primarily for scientific research communities- but no one
use or "ownership" need go unchallenged either by logic or by experience nor
should any one use become the sole property of just one interested group.Z 7
Perspectivalism acknowledges the existence of traditions of interpretation
that give today' s readers and inquirers a culturally privileged version of past
sources (shaped to the goals of the linguistic and cultural environment of the
community having special "ownership" rights in the subject matter). 28 Kuhnian
paradigms are examples within the sciences of such traditions of interpretation.
In addition to meanings construed on the basis of a common tradition of
interpretation (with its presumption of continuity), other meanings can be
legitimated that are independent from any presumption of the existence of a
continuity of meaning with the source through a common tradition of life,
action, and interpretation. Such discontinuities of meaning within the sciences
are exemplified by Kuhnian "revolutions" in which old paradigms are replaced
by new ones. 29 In the work of perspectival hermeneutics, however, a radically
new meaning need not expel the old but can be "concinnous" with it, because
each, though different, may be a valid historical and cultural perspective.
Indeed, despite some sense of discomfort, we often find in the sciences the old
flourishing side by side with the radically new, quantum mechanics with
Newtonian mechanics (though these are formally incompatible with one
another), statistical thermodynamics with phenomenological thermodynamics,
and so on. Each acting within its own horizon of research purposes is in
dialogue with confirming or disconfirming data through its own empirical
processes of testing and measurement.
In conclusion, henneneutic method, the method appropriate for perspectival-
ism, is an art- and a difficult art it can be -performed by a current inquirer who
is challenged to construct a contemporary meaning for a distant source event,
such as, for example, Galileo' s observations on the phases of Venus, originating
in a different linguistic and cultural environment and possibly at a different
geographic place and historical time. It is also called the method of the herme-
neutical circle. 30 Interpretative work of this kind is clearly historical, cultural,
and anthropological, multidisciplinary in character and in need of a philosophi-
cal foundation which hermeneutical philosophy (to be taken up below) tries to
 NIETZSCHE'S PERSPECTIVALISM 209

provide. In this work lies the significance and power of hermeneutic philosophy
or perspectivalism for the history and philosophy of science. And not just for
these, but also for understanding how quantitative empirical methods function
in science to give meaning to empirical contents, in particular, how measure-
ment equipment plays a double role creating two concinnous perspectives,
theoretical and cultural, and how through these joint perspectives theory-laden
data depend on the successful public self-presentation in measurement of the
measured entity as a public cultural entity.
As a prelude to our attempt to address these topics further we need to
consider the nature of philosophical inquiry.

HERMENEUTICAL OR PERSPECTIVALIST PHILOSOPHY

For Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and classical pragmatism, inquiry is

connected with a breakdown of intelligibility. For Nietzsche, inquiry begins on
the moral plane, 31 when moral and cultural values implicit in theory fail in
practice. For Husserl, inquiry begins when the noetic structure of the imagina-
tion fails. 32 For Heidegger and for pragmatism, inquiry begins when purposive
action in the world fails to achieve its goal. 33 Husserl's approach is the more
logical, conceptual, and abstract. However, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and pragma-
tism are more existential, more action and value oriented. Since Nietzsche's
perspectivalism is more closely related to Heidegger's philosophy than to
Husserl's or pragmatism's, we will turn prefentially to his work to fill out our
account of perspectival or hermeneutical philosophy.
To understand scientific inquiry hermeneutically, we begin with Heidegger's
analysis of the genesis and process of any inquiry. 34 He directs his attention to
what happens when in the middle of a task, a tool, say, a hammer, breaks. To
cope with the situation, we ask ourselves, perhaps for the first time in our lives,
what kind of thing is a hammer, for we want to finish the job, and for this we
need a replacement or maybe a temporary substitute for the hammer, and if we
can't finish the job, well! .... We begin by a study aimed at finding a theory for
the physical specifications of a hammer- this initiates a study that has theoreti-
cal and practical dimensions - then we look for something that fulfills these
specifications, and when we find it, we try it out. Does it work? If it does the job
- if the theory is fulfilled in experience - we are satisfied for the moment. We
may still need a new hammer, but for the moment the job can go on. But if the
trial fails, we next revise the theoretical specifications in the light of the
previous outcome and try again, modifying the conditions of the experimental
trial if necessary. If this leads to another failure we repeat the process with a
revision of the previous theory in the light of the new understanding gained
from past results followed, by a new experimental trial modified to take account
of the previous failures. This phase is repeated until we have a physical theory
that works, or if we fail, we give up the search for something to replace the
broken hammer and re-assess our options (getting the job done in a different
way, say, by hiring a carpenter or turning to a different technology), or we just
fold our tent for the time being.
210 PATRICK A. HEELAN

This process of inquiry is hermeneutical because it is a search for a theoreti-

cal meaning to be fulfilled in experience. The process has a repetitive pattern,
from theory to experience, then back to theory ... and so on. Analysed in this way,
the process is one of the hermeneutical circle. Many are confused by the word
"circle" taking it to mean "return to the starting point," but that is not what it
means. The "circle" of hermeneutics indicates the repetitive methodological
cycling between theory and experience from which comes the progressive
character of the inquiry. Some prefer the term "hermeneutical spiral" which
indicates both the methodological cycling and the progressive character of the
process. Every inquiry then moves in a forward spiral toward a resolution, as
governed by a conscious if revisable goal.

THEORETICAL UNDERSTANDING

By focusing his discussion initially on equipment and the like, Heidefger makes
a special and highly critical point about theoretical understandini . Since the
characteristic goal of all scientific or scholarly inquiry is theoretical under-
standing, it is important to understand what theory does. The theoretical
perspective, as in the case of the broken hammer, is always connected with
some piece of equipment -not excluding words, sentences, and representations
- designed to fill some social or cultural function. Theory-making arises then
out of some public need and the requirement of learning how to fulfill that need.
In this respect, Nietzsche and Heidegger are in parallel with pragmatism. 36
Heidegger would remind us that, when presented with a real piece of equipment,
say, a hammer, we must realize on the one hand that the physical theory of a
hammer does not assign to it an exclusive or "objective" essence, for that which
can function as a hammer can function in other ways too, as door stop,
nutcracker, etc., and on the other hand that old shoes and wooden mallets can
also be used to hammer nails. 37 All real tools or equipment are (as Heidegger
says) no more than a mere resource 38 unless they are in actual use or designated
for use, when they become dedicated (or designated) resources. Equipment is
a dedicated resource when it is pragmatically related to the fulfillment of its role
within a cultural function-as-meant. 39 The distinction is significant because only
dedicated resources belong to the furniture of the lifeworld and so have antic
status.
These distinctions are reflected in the use of words. The sentence, "I want a
hammer," can be used in a theory-laden 40 perspective where the sentence refers
to the physical structure that makes hammering possible, or in a praxis-laden
perspective where the sentence refers to something that is in actual use or
designated for use in construction. Words and sentences about tools or equip-
ment take on different meanings according to whether they are used in one or
other of these perspectives.
Returning to the cultural praxis-laden perspective: what is the meaning of the
hammer in this perspective? It is what ties a thing- the hammer- to construc-
tion or building projects. This is different from its meaning in the theory-laden
perspective which relates the hammer to its specifications as a tool and
 NIETZSCHE'S PERSPECTIVALISM 211

"explains" the thing qua hammer by specifying the physical conditions under
which it can be the host of the cultural meaning of a hammer. There are then
two c:oncinnous perspectives inseparably joined in dialogue, a theory-laden
perspective and a cultural praxis-laden perspective. They are concinnous
because the theory-laden meaning makes sense only if the real hammer is
praxis-laden within the function of construction.
Despite the fact then that (hammer-) theory "explains" (hammering-) praxis,
the language of theory and the language of praxis belong to different concinnous
perspectives. Concinnity does not imply that there is a one-to-one correlation
between the two perspectives,41 for the (hammer-) theory-ladenness of a thing
is just a mere possibility of serving as a real hammer (it could alternatively serve
as a nutcracker), and the (hammering-) praxis-ladenness of the thing in the
context of construction could be served by means other than the use of ham-
mers.42 Theory can inaugurate revolutionary changes at the practical and
cultural level such as, for instance, when theory-based research makes available
new plastic construction materials that can be shaped into complex ready-made
units by molding, bypassing (let us assume) the need for carpentry. And
practical inventions can inaugurate revolutionary changes in theory, such as, for
instance, when the practical development of steam power in the nineteenth
century called forth a new calorific science, thermodynamics. 43
Moreover, when new measurement-based technologies are added to the
life-world, scientific terms, such as "temperature," can be introduced into
everyday descriptive language endowed with new non-theoretical and practical
life-world meanings which can be used to create, designate, employ, and control
new classes of entities, such as thermometers, in the lifeworld. With the help of
these increased resources, it is possible for the old cultural environment to be
changed in significant, even revolutionary, ways. In the quattrocento during the
Italian Renaissance, for example, perceptual space came to be subjected to
universal measurement and to analysis according to the principles of the newly
discovered mathematical perspective; in this process public space was trans-
formed from one with variable, local geometries into one with a single Euclid-
e.an ~ometry, thus preparing the way for Galileo and the Copernican revolu-
tion.
In any case, to be theory-laden means to "explain," that is, to lay out the
conditions, why something can play a particular socio-cultural role, but it does
not explain whether, or if so why, it is in fact playing that role or has been
designated to play that role. "To be theory-laden" then always implies an
implicit cultural hypothetical, "provided the real (individual, historical)
explanandum has been chosen for the appropriate role." Otherwise "to be
theory-laden" implies no more than "to be a mere resource,"- and this no more
entitles it to be included in the furniture of the world than every old shoe under
the category of hammer.
What kind of entity then is a hammer as a dedicated resource? It is a public
cultural reality, a physical reality constituted by a socio-cultural meaning. 45 It
has a theory-laden meaning that conceals (renders tacit/implicit) but does not
replace (say, by a reductive move) the cultural perspective of construction and
212 PATRICK A. HEELAN

its practical underpinnings in architecture and engineering. Also, the cultural

perspective of construction practices conceals (renders tacit/implicit) but does
not replace (say, by a reverse reductive move) the theoretical instrumental
perspective of the hammer. 46
Now, to the extent that nothing- or almost nothing- in our experience is
without a human purpose, everything in our experience bears some resemblance
to a tool or instrument. We can have then (at least) two perspectives on (almost)
anything: a praxis-laden cultural perspective and (subject to the successful
completion of a scientific inquiry) a theory-laden explanatory perspective. The
thing in question may even play different roles in multiple socio-cultural
functions. But for each such perspective, we could inquire - of course, with no
antecedent guarantee of success - into the corresponding specifications that
would constitute a theory-based scientific "explanation" of the thing within this
cultural perspective.

MEASUREMENT

These conclusions have important consequences for understanding measurement

in the praxis of scientific inquiry. They illuminate the binary valence of
empirical "facts," a degree of complexity not given by the usual empiricist
accounts. 47 The process of measurement in science fulfills two different but
coordinated functions. It presents the object-as-measurable; this is the
praxis-laden cultural function. And it takes the data from the presented object;
this is the theory-laden data-taking function. 48 There is then a binary valence.
The data-taking is usually called "observation"; but one must not forget that
there is no "observation" without the prior preparation and presentation of the
object-as-measurable, that is, as a system open to the data-taking process. The
measuring process does both jobs, and in a well designed experiment presenting
the object and recording the data are ontologically one but involve two
perspectives, a praxis-laden cultural one (which belongs to the strategy of
experimental culture in laboratory environments) and a theory-laden (or
explanatory) one. In measurement, both perspectives suppose systems open to
interaction with the environment. Though ontologically one, the two functions
of the measurement can be logically and semantically distinguished 49
Since it is the function of theory to oversee the experimental design, the antic
referent of theory as such is the measuring process viewed from the construction
or engineering or technical point of view. 50 When standardized off-the-shelf
models of measuring apparatus are available, they do their job automatically by
virtue of their theory-laden structure. It is experimental design then that is
formally theory-laden.
What about experimental observations and Nietzsche's critique of the
positivist account of (experimental) "facts" 51 ? Experimental observations are
public cultural events praxis-laden in the scientific culture of the laboratory and
deriving meaning from a research program. They are then, as Nietzsche
recognized, not "facts" in the positivist sense, but presentations loaded with
interpretation. They also come "dressed" in sensible "clothes" provided by the
 NIETZSCHE'S PERSPECTIVALISM 213

experimental strategies used. Under this analysis, experimental observations

should not be called semantically "theory-laden" -this should be reserved for
experimental design52 - but semantically praxis-laden like all dedicated or
designated cultural objects of the lifeworld presented as fulfilling experience.
The data - or better, the "raw data" or "proto-data" - that are produced
belong hypothetically to the (narrow) perspective of measurement but affinna-
tively to the (broad) perspective of some cultural forum. Such a forum is, for
example, scientific research strategy or the research "narratives'' that Rouse 53
mentions. But there are also other public fora: technological applications,
finance, political power, religion, or some other aspect of general culture. All
of these belong to Nietzsche's Will to Power. Only in such public fora are the
data real -given "in truth" as die Sache selbst. There the data can witness to the
presence of individual scientific entities, say, electrons or atoms, as public
cultural realities in some scientific or other public forum, and they can take on
the value of dedicated resources in one or more of these fora, becoming thereby
part of the furniture of the world. In any one of these fora the meaning of data
and the scientific entities they exhibit are, at least, bivalent- perhaps, multiva-
lent- and emulate the relationship between real hammers and real construction
projects in being implicitly - while not explicitly - theory-laden. Outside of
such fora the "raw data" or "proto-data" are not data at all; and, unless the goal
of the inquiry changes, they are no more than functionally meaningless marks
(non-entities, junk, etc.) with all the indeterminacy of (positivism's) sense
data. 54
In summary: scientific or theoretical entities, such as, for example, atoms and
electrons, are not theory-laden without qualification, they are first explicitly
praxis-laden (as public cultural entities) in the world of scientific research and
only on that condition are they implicitly theory-laden (because of necessary
reference to the structure of measurement).

TRUTH
Nietzsche's "illusion of truth" and "truth of illusion" find a partial clarification
in this analysis. But it was Heidegger who embodied this multiplicity of
meaning in his choice of the Greek term, aletheia (literally "uncovering") for
truth. 55 It signaled a change in the notion of truth from the classical model of
full transparency to the human mind 56 - what Nietzsche called the "illusion of
truth"- towards one of only partial, practical, or perspectival transparency-
which Nietzsche called the "truth of illusion." 57 Let us reflect on the history of
this transformation of the notion of truth.
People everywhere and always have lived in a socially, linguistically
represented, action-oriented world in which what a thing is must be derived
from what it comes to mean within human life, that is, from (what Nietzsche
called) the Will to Power. This is what Husserl, Heidegger, and the pragmatists
called "the lifeworld,"58 and for which W. Sellars coined the term "manifest
image of the world." 59 Within this perspective, many things are first grasped as
having fixed essences dedicated "by nature" (as it were) to a single function.
214 PATRICK A. HEELAN

Such was the opinion of the Platonic Socrates and Aristotle, Aquinas and
Descartes, Bacon and Newton, and it is a view that continues to be shared by
many scientists and philosophers today.
With the advent of modernity, however, the world changed, adopting as its
defining characteristic an inquiring theorizing scientific spirit. 60 This declares
open season for scientific inquiry into whatever is given in human experience;
not just hammers, but also political society, perception, food, athletics,
emotions, love, and even religion, all present themselves as possible subjects for
scientific scrutiny. From each study, a theory emerges that "explains" a
socio-cultural phenomenon by a set of (physical or cultural) theoretical
parameters. Modernity took its metaphysics from this set of parameters and
embraced it as the independently objective real, to know which was to possess
"truth."
This, as Nietzsche, Husser!, and Heidegger saw, was a radical rnistake. 61 As
in the case of the hammer, the theoretical set of parameters addresses just one
aspect of the real exemplars, the explanandum, namely, the aspect what was
chosen for explanation. Other aspects of these are overlooked and generally
forgotten. Moreover, in the search to explain the explanandum, the theorizing
process discovers the extent to which the function of the explanandum can be
taken over by different things or artifacts from the exemplars studied. One
(surprising?) outcome of this process is that it shows: what makes this or any
real hammer to be a hammer - or what makes this or any real thing in human
experience to be what it is perceived to be - is not a defining essence but a
movable contextual set of properties that can be found or engineered in many
different ways in many different physical hosts.
In summary, the hermeneutic- and Nietzschean - truth about things in the
lifeworld is: their meanings are not essential but cultural (and historical) and
disclosed by implicitly theory-laden praxes, which, when (under successful
scientific inquiry) their theory-ladenness is made explicit, can be re-engineered
with a consequent transformation of cultural meaning. This cycle of meaning
change takes place under the Will to Power and it can and does repeat itself
endlessly within the historicality of Being resulting in a diversity of new
perspectives and a possible loss of some of the old ones through (inevitable)
62
cultural forgetfulness.

TECHNOLOGY

Nietzsche's fear, shared strongly by Heidegger, was that to the extent that
theorizing scientific inquiry is successful, it turns the focus of inquiry away
from "life-enhancing" moral activity toward "life-preserving" "calculative"
thinking within an assumed "objective" frame of "reality" congruent with
today's modernity and aimed at management and control. 63
This is not to deny, however, that great benefits can and do flow from
scientific theories, not just in tradition-bound domains, such as, for example,
agriculture, housing, and construction, but in every domain from health care to
astronomy, even to human fertility and sexuality, for there is no domain that
 NIETZSCHE'S PERSPECTIVALISM 215

cannot be addressed and transformed by successful scientific inquiry. Never-

theless, Nietzsche, like Heidegger after him, foresaw that such changes could
have a human cost, for they affect the way cultural life teaches people to be
human and communicates to them the sense of the meaning of life and espe-
cially its tragic side. Changing the traditional vehicles by means of which these
core meanings are maintained and handed on inevitably changes how people
regard themselves, their neighbors, and the world around, with consequent risks
of cultural instability in all three areas. Whether, like Gianni Vattimo, 64 one
takes an optimistic view of the postmodern effects of the dismantling of
Enlightenment culture, or like Robert Bly, 65 a pessimistic view, Nietzsche saw
human life in terms of Dionysian tragedy, not to be avoided but to be embraced.
He would have approved the surface meanings of David Bromwich's words, 66
" ... progress for [Americans] means almost exclusively technological improve-
ment ... But all the new tools a people master cannot assure their generous use.
Technology travels a different road from political stability, moral well-being or
aesthetic achievement..." - while holding suspect some of the deeper moral
implications of these words.

IMPLICATIONS OF PERSPECTIV ALISM FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF

SCIENCE

Two aspects of Nietzsche's perspectivalism call for special notice. The first is
the indispensability of metaphor to the pursuit of perspectival insights. 67
Theoretical inquiry, as Nietzsche declares, always embarks on a project whose
goal is to construct a theory about a starting point that is anchored in the cultural
life of people. Scientific research is one such cultural forum. The creative
discovery process then is always at once constrained and promoted by the
condition that a meaningful relationship to some public, scientific or
non-scientific, often shifting cultural forum be maintained throughout the
inquiry. Here the role of metaphor is fundamental. 68 The history of science is
full of such examples where discovery is mediated by metaphors, from images
of billiard balls, elastic bands, aethers, mechanical devices, and molecular bench
models, to mathematical models like computer simulations, harmonic oscilla-
tors, ten-dimensional spaces, and hermetic religious concepts about the
cosmos. 69 Nor is it possible for a youthful scientist to come to understand
modern physics, biology, or any science without passing through stages of
metaphor. As in the search for theory, so in its application, theoretical instru-
ments apply to real situations in socially negotiated ways usually mediated by
metaphors, because these instruments of knowing function of necessity in a
cultural milieu that, being praxis-laden, does not need or support unlimited
univocity, fixity, or precision. 70
The second is the role of the Dionysian myth in the discovery process of
scientific research. Epistemological perspectivalism as a hermeneutic philoso-
phy treats science (and in general all scholarship) as a form of human culture
constituted by the search for and eventual discovery and articulation of new
meaning. From the viewpoint of Heidegger, meanings emerge into public
216 PATRICK A. HEELAN

expression from a deep pre-predicative pre-categorized understanding of the

life-world, characterized by historicality, circumspection, facticity, and
temporality. This is the level of understanding shaped by human action and its
goals, where meanings springing from moral choices and the Will to Power -
more generally, from culture- have priority over theoretical knowledge. This
is the place where inauthenticity resides within and among individuals and
communities of researchers, where scientific paradigms are embraced only to
be rejected later on, where technologies play their part in transforming the
cultural basis of human meaning, and where a multiplicity of cultural and
scientific perspectives are harmonized (if they are harmonized at all). It seems
to be what Nietzsche alludes to as the "Mothers of Being."71 If so, it is then the
arena where choices are made, not in accord with the Apollinian approach and
the "plastic [representational] arts," but rather in accord with music (concinnity)
and the myth of the tragic dismemberment of the god Dionysos-Zagreus. 72

Georgetown University, Washington, DC

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This essay contains parts that were later elaborated in two essays: "Why a Hermeneutical
Philosophy of Natural Science?"' Man and World ( 1997): 271-298 and "Scope of Hermeneutics
in the Philosophy of Natural Science," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 29 (1998)
273-298.

NOTES
Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1994) and "Continental Philosophies of Science: Mach, Duhem, and Bachelard," in
Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume VIII, Continental Philosophy in the Twentieth-Century
Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 175-221.
2 Since Nietzsche wrote from multiple and varying perspectives, the interpretion of Nietzsche's
writings is best left to Nietzsche scholars and I have relied greatly on their work. I give special
thanks to Babette Babich and David Allison for their help. I have relied particularly on Babich,
Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science.
3 Within the German context of Nietzsche's writing, the term "science" applies not just to the
natural sciences, but to the goals of all scholarship. The orientation of the present paper is more
toward the natural than the human sciences.
4 Nietzsche's orientation is best seen in the Birth of Tragedy (New York: Vintage Books, 1966).
There he develops his critique of the Platonic Socrates and of the Apollinian - or alternatively,
Alexandrian - approach to culture which seeks theoretical explanations and logical clarifications.
There he also expounds the Dionysian approach to culture which is through myth, tragedy, and
music.
5 The word "culture" has many meanings. In this paper, I mean it in the cultural anthropological
sense defined by Clifford Gertz in "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,"
in Geertz, Local Knowledge, (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3-30.
6 See, for example, BT, Preface 2. Nietzsche's notion of theory was much influenced by the
positivists. For him, theory making is characterized by the organization of empirical facts under
clear, unambiguous, abstract, and universal concepts. Theory in a narrower sense is mathematical
and best exemplified in physics. The term "model" is taken as synonomous with "theory."
7 Referring to the inescapable divergence between abstract. particularly mathematical. purity and
precision, and real exemplars.
I was greatly helped here by Babich's discussion of Nietzsche's style in Nietzsche's Philosophy
of Science, Chap. I.
 NIETZSCHE'S PERSPECTIVALISM 217

See Martin Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. by William
Levitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 133-134. Hereafter abbreviated as QCT.
10 In BT 14-18, Nietzsche compares scientific thinking associated with Socrates and Apollo to

the plastic arts and great moral thinking associated with the "mystical cry of Dionysus" to the art
of music. The sections referred to are important for understanding Nietzsche's suspicion of the
false optimism of scientific rationality and his opting for the pessimism of Dionysian multiper-
spectival thought.
1 See Babich, "On Nietzsche's Concinnity: An Analysis of Style," Nietzsche-Studien, 19, 1990,
Pf· 59-79 and EH, Z.
See Babich "On Nietzsche's Concinnity'"' where the notion of concinnity is explored as
describing Nietzsche's musical metaphor for perspectivalism in philosophy and culture.
13 See Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, chap. 2.
14 Edmund Husser!, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Philosophy. Trans. by

David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1954/1970).

15 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. from the German by John Macquarrie, (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1962). Originally published as Sein und Zeit, 1927. Hereafter abbreviated as SZ.
16 Heidegger's term for the human being; see SZ 27.
17 See BT, 43.
18 In this regard, Nietzsche saw parallels between science and Christian theology: in his view both
provided no more than theoretical enlightenment which led to weak and decadent moral
leadership; see GM, 25.
19 See the author's "Why a Hermeneutical Philosophy of the Natural Sciences?" for a more

detailed exposition of these views, Man and World, 30 (1997): 271-298.

2° For the possible plurality of perceptual spaces, see Heelan, Space-Perception and the
Philosophy of Science, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983/1988).
21 The terms "ontic" and "ontological" are used in Heidegger's sense; "ontic" applying to any

distinct categorial being in the world, "ontological" signifying the background of Being in which
human life is lived and which defines what people are as Dasein or Being-in-the-World antecedent
to all descriptive categories.
22 This is what Husser! and Heidegger call the return to "die Sache selbst." This is, as it were, a

return to the Cartesian Cogito with a new and critical look. Husserl's return brought forth the
Cogito cogitatum as a correction of the Cartesian Cogito, and thereby introduced contextuality into
the analysis of experience. Heideggger probed deeper into the Cogito to discover the role of
fore-understanding - this is the active inquirer working with circumspective care within
experience before categories are formed or used to assert what is disclosed in experience. This is
the hermeneutical pre-predicative dimension of the Cogito cogitatum as "die Sac he selbst."
23 See the essays in C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973) and

Local Knowledge.
24 The process of hermeneutic inquiry involves on the part of the receiver/interpreter what

Heidegger calls the Vorhabe (or background) and Vorsicht (clues to meaning) before moving to
the Vorgriff(data or outcome) of the inquiry. The clues to meaning can spring from many sources
- metaphors, analogies, models and, of course, the traditions of the researcher's discipline. See
SZ 191 on the "hermeneutical circle."
25 For the term "alchemy," our current resources may be poorer than the past; for the term

"disease," our current resources may be richer - or, at least, different.

26 See, for example, Thomas Nickles, "Philosophy of Science and History of Science," Osiris,

Volume 10, Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science, (1995): 139-163 for the difficulties
that philosophers and historians of science have in understanding one another.
27 There is a vibrant and copious cross-disciplinary literature about historical, religious, ethical,

political, and other cultural meanings of topics ranging from Big Bang Cosmology to ethical and
environmental aspects of science. Contributors include both scientists such as Stephen Hawking,
Steven Weinberg, Paul Davies, and Richard Dawkins, and ethicians, historians, sociologists, and
cultural anthropologists of science, and feminists.
28 Such traditions of interpretation tend to possess a rigidity of interpretation and an inauthenticity

that has to be overcome for the growth of knowledge; cf. BT, p. 29.
29 Paradigm revolutions are also associated with the temporality of Dasein and human communi-

ties. Also cf. SZ 424-425.

30 See SZ 191.
31 See GS, 335, 354ff.
32 See Husser!, Experience and Judgment, ed. by Ludwig Landgrebe, trans.by J.S. Churchill and
Karl Ameriks, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1948/1973), pp. 340-356.
218 PATRICK A. HEELAN

33 See SZ 409.
34 See SZ 95-107.
35 For the purposes of this paper, "theories" and "categories" are taken to be reflexively defined

abstract objects such as scholarship and science provide; they have more or less clarity, more in
physics than in biology, and more in biology than in the human sciences. Theories are "explana-
tions" because they attempt to determine the (physical or cultural) pre-conditions sufficient
(perhaps, necessary) for an entity to fulfil its cultural function. An explanatory theory is
descriptive when it captures the cultural pre-conditions necessary for an entity to fulfil its cultural
function. Thus, among theories about hammering, we can distinguish an "explanatory" (hammer-)
theory that gives the physical specifications of the hammer as a tool, from an "explanatory and
descriptive" (hammering-) theory that describes the architectural and engineering environment
within which hammering plays a functional role. In neither case, however, does the theory refer
to a culture-independent entity.
36 Cf. BGE, 42; and SZ 408-415. "Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of

Science," Synthese, 115 (1998): 269-301.

37 See SZ 115.
38 "Mere resource" is usually translated by "present-at-hand." Heidegger's terms are ··vorhan-

den," and later "Gestell." Okrent (1988), p. 74, translates it as " the extant (non-equipmental,
natural beings)." Mere resource is opposed to dedicated resource which translates Heidegger' s
Zuhanden, the difference being in a social choice.
39 See SZ 410.

°
4 For the notion of "theory-ladenness," see Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discoven·
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 19-30, and its source in Pierre Duhem, The
Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1914/1954 ), Part
II, chaps. IV and VI. Among commentaries on observables as theory-laden, see also Heelan,
Space-Perception, pp. 202-204, and Ragnar Fjelland, 'The Theory-ladenness of Observations. the
Role of Scientific Instruments, and the Kantian A Priori," lnternat. Stud. in the Philosophy of'
Science, 5, 1991, pp. 269-280.
41 These two perspectives result in two ways of speaking, two context-dependent languages. about

the same thing that are related among themselves within a lattice structure which includes a least
upper bound (lub) and a greatest lower bound (glb) as well as complements. See Heelan, Space-
Perception, chaps. 10 and 13, where this thesis is presented. See also SZ 405-415.
42 Construction itself could be theory-laden; if so, its theory is not at the level of assigning

specifications for construction tools but rather at the level of architecture and engineering which
comprise the goals of construction.
43 Cf. SZ 29.
44 See Heelan, Space-Perception.
45 Cf., for example, "Common Sense as a Cultural System," pp. 73-93, in Geertz, Local

Knowledge.
46 The socio-cultural meaning then is not something that can be dropped, like slag from ore when

a metal is refined, but essential to the intelligibility of the meaning.

47 Empiricist accounts of measurement are legion; many of them have purposes that are not

strictly philosophical but methodological. Philosophers of science have also written on measure-
ment but mostly from the viewpoint that empirical measures are grounded on ideal. objective, and
realistic values. For a hermeneutic view on measurement and data, see Heelan, "After Experiment:
Research and Reality," Amer. Philos. Qrtly., 26, #4, 1989, pp. 297-308. For its background in
Heidegger, see SZ 408-415.
48 In physics, these are sometimes called "preparation" or "measurement of the first kind" and

"observation" or "measurement of the second kind" respectively.

49 Cf. BGE 14; WP 481; and SZ 409-410.

°
5 Cf. BGE 42.
51 Cf. WP 481.
52 It is also applicable to the representation of, what is called, a "closed" system, one that is not

interacting with its environment. The notion of a "closed system" needs further analysis within thi'
context - as indeed does its counterpart, "open system." Such an analysis would also include a
study of the space/time notions of "body," e.g., a body's "spatial boundaries," its "size," "mass.''
"quantity," etc. and how the notions of "macroscopic" and "microscopic" apply. Some of these
have been partially addressed in recent literature, e.g., see Paul Needham, "Macroscopic Objects:
An Exercise in Duhemian Ontology," Philosophy of Science, 63, 1996, pp. 205-224 and the
references he gives, but these studies are against a philosophical background that is object- and
 NIETZSCHE'S PERSPECTIVALISM 219

concept-oriented. None of these studies addresses satisfactorily how the meaning of these terms
relate to a body's use, particularly, in measurement.
53 Joseph Rouse, Engaging Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 27 and in chap.

9.
54 There is an alternative strategy: the researcher may re-evaluate the interpretative context of the

experiment and pursue another goal. For a more detailed study of data, see Heelan, "After
Experiment", also Space-Perception.
55 See SZ 256.
56 Such as the Tarskian notion of truth.
57 See SZ 58-63. Polanyi says the same in different terms: the focal meaning conceals a tacit

meaning; see Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964).
58 See Husser!, The Crisis, Alfred Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality. Vol. I of Collected

Papers (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), and SZ 91-94.

59 See Wilfred Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge, 1963), p. 6. Sellars

in contrast took the "scientific image" to be the real or noumenal world, while he relegated the
contents of the manifest image to mere phenomena.
°
6 Cf. Nietzsche's BT 14-18; see also, for example, Heidegger's Discourse on Thinking:
Translation of Gelassenheit. Trans. by John Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and
Row, 1966), p. 46 and What is Called Thinking? Trans. by J.G. Gray (New York: Harper and Row,
1968), p.8; QCT 133.
61 Pragmatism, however, takes an ambiguous stand preferring not to see it as a radical mistake.
62 These conclusions prepare the ground for Babich's reading of Nietzsche's philosophy of

science in which the author explores with elegance Nietzsche's perspectivalism or musical
"concinnity" in relation to truth, morality, and the critique of science. Cf. also BT 29.
63 See, for example, BT 15; GS 347. Cf. Heidegger's QCT 3-35 and Discourse on Thinking, p.

46.
64 Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
65 Robert Bly, The Sibling Society (Addison-Wesley, 1996).
66 The New Republic, Sept. 9 # 23, 1996, p. 34.
67 See, for example, GS, 300, 355. In particular, see TL, p. 84: "What is truth? a movable host of

metaphors, metonyns, anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been
poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which after long usage
seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten
are illusions, they are metaphors that have become worn out and have lost their sensuous force,
coins which have lost their image and are now considered as metal, and no longer as coins."
68 See Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, chap. 1, for an excellent account of Nietzsche's

views. For metaphor and discovery, see Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Metaphoric Process:
Connections between Language and Life (London: Routledge, 1996); Mary Hesse and Michael
Arbib, The Construction of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
69 In Alistair C. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: A History of

Argument and Explanation in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and the Arts. Vols. 1 -
III (London: Duckworth, 1994) these topics are excellently covered. Marta Feher, "The Role of
Metaphor and Analogy in the Birth of the Principle of Least Action of Maupertuis ( 1698-1759),"
Internal. Stud. in the Philosophy of Science, 2, 1988, pp. 175-188, contains an interesting historical
discussion of the surprising absence of references to current hermetic literature in Galileo's work
which indicates that Galileo, unlike Newton, deliberately set aside or consigned to "forgetfulness"
a large part of the then-current scientific literature and praxis in order to establish his "new
sciences." See also Mario Bagioli, Galileo, Courtier (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993).
°
7 Cf., for example, Mara Beller, "The Rhetoric of Antirealism and the Copenhagen Spirit,"
Philosophy of Science, 63, 1996, pp. 183-204 and Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity.
The Physical Philosophy of Werner Heisenberg (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965). Some brief reflections
on the limits of precision: the chaos situation in physics is an anti-Cartesian phenomenon that
arises when the unlimited precision of a theory in mapping inputs and outputs breaks down (fails
in relation to the cultural scientific goal of control), as when small changes in practice produce
large and uncontrollable outcomes. Perhaps, a like anti-Cartesian phenomenon occurs in dielectical
discourse when unlimited clarity is pursued to a point where the overall cultural point of the
discourse (better understanding? ideological control?) is no longer attainable. On the side of the
social studies of science Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press) seems to be most aware of this impasse.
220 PATRICK A. HEELAN

71 BT 16, where Nietzsche makes this allusion to Goethe's Faust, lines 6216ff.
72 See BT 10, for music, art, and the myth of Dionysos.
 CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSACKER

NIETZSCHE: PERCEPTIONS OF MODERNITY'

When I was young, everyone read Nietzsche.

It is a part of Nietzsche's understanding of philosophy that the philosopher
present his own subjectivity in a shamefully-shameless way. After all, his
subjectivity is the organ of his perception, the medium of "his truth." It is more
objective to reveal it than to cover it up. I have been asked to comment on
Nietzsche "as a physicist," that is, with respect to the present shared state of
knowledge of a field of inquiry. Of course, my goal is to make my observations
acceptable to my scientific peers. But what strikes me with Nietzsche and what
strikes me in physics are mediated by my nature and by my life story. Therefore
I first take the liberty of being shamefully-shameless in recalling my reactions
to Nietzsche.
For the generation of our teachers, Nietzsche was the philosophical and
artistic upheaval - inasmuch as they took any notice of him in the first place.
This upheaval reached me after it had already been attenuated - had become
classical in some sense. As a sixteen year old high school senior in 1928, I paid
27 marks for a second-hand copy of the nine-volume Kroner Nietzsche edition
I found on a book cart alongside the Landwehrkanal in Berlin: a clean,
untouched version. I had earned the money for it by tutoring a classmate in
math.
I began my reading with Zarathustra. As reaction I noted: "If Nietzsche is
Caesar, then I would surely want to be Augustus." That was even more
immodest than it sounded. In the circle around Stefan George, a strong
formative influence on us, Caesar was one of the honored greats: George
himself appeared at one Schwabing pre-Lenten costume party as Dante, as
Caesar at another. I respectfully rebelled in favor of the Augustus who had
created a stable order that would last for centuries.
Not much later, I twice wrote poetry incorporating, with variations, some of
Nietzsche's words. I plead my nai"vete for taking the liberty of quoting them
here, despite their qualitative inferiority to Nietzsche's verses:

Touched by a breath of new seas,

we could no longer honor you,
bursting open the constricting hurdle,
not shield, but only scorn for our dignity.
Jubilant shouts rang into the red dawn of morning:

221
B. Babich (ed.). Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 221-240.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
222 CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSACKER

The pure fire of a new humanity is flaming

and God is dead.

The light of day has long died down

and a grey night has arrived

Now. from the depths of despair a cry is rising,

there is no savior where destruction looms
for God is dead.

And:

"Only he who changes remains akin to me."

Only he who in his depths is still like the ocean,
may change forever. Forever young as he
the wind and waves rage about the land.

The stanzas about "God is dead" were not original. They reflected the sense
prevailing around 1930 of a fundamental crisis, perhaps subjectively colored by
the instinctive anticipation of a second world war, a war which in our anticipa-
tion would not be the last. The distancing moves in the four-liner on change are
more personal. Here one egocentric person differentiates himself from another,
claiming for his part the living water rather than consuming fire as the element
of his soul; a soul that believed itself never to have been tempted to steal away
from Apollo's followers to join the party of the Bacchants.
Re-reading Nietzsche today, five decades later, I see that the themes which
drove his philosophy of morality and history have in the seventh decade of my
life, only now, pushed me- without any direct influence from him- beyond the
phase of instinctive reaction into one of systematic reflection. It took my
encounter with physics, classical philosophy, and political responsibility and a
lifelong effort at working through religious experience. Now, if time remained
for me, I could begin the task of unders•anding Nietzsche critically and in this
way learn from him.
I have one further reservation, reiterating what others have previously
observed. I state it at this point to avoid a jarring interruption when we turn to
the issues themselves. For me, now that I am able, as I believe, to appreciate his
style more fully, Nietzsche the great stylist of language is as a stylist even more
unbearable than to the na"ive youth of fifty years ago. Zarathustra which I then
read innocently as prophesy, I today experience as an artistic product through
and through: the product of a great philosopher, of a genuine poet, with a
Wagnerian defenselessness against the temptation of the discordant notes of an
exaggerated pathos. The very flight into the world of Christian religiosity of
which Nietzsche accused Wagner's Parsifal is realized here at even more
unfathomable depths as he usurps the language that characterizes the sayings of
Jesus,- a kind of flight from despair of a profound visionary. Another variant,
this time in the aphoristic-systematic writings, is the overstated intellectual
brilliance of an author of intellectual brilliance. He shouts witticisms at us like
 NIETZSCHE: PERCEPTIONS OF MODERNITY 223

someone who cannot be led back into human dialogue. For friends I wait, come,
'tis time, 'tis time.

NIETZSCHE: SCIENCE, ART, POWER

Nietzsche's philosophy proclaims the victory of science over religion and

metaphysics. At the same time, it seems to me that he proclaims Art as the
essence of Science, Power as the essence of Art, Life itself, the world, as the
essence of Power. A sequence of steps into the unknown

"I teach you the Ubermensch. Man is something that must be overcome ... All beings thus far have
created something beyond themselves ... What is the ape for man? An occasion for derision or a
painful pang of shame. And that is exactly what man shall be for the Ubermensch: an occasion for
derision or a painful pang of shame."

Anyone beginning his prophesy with sentences like these declares the
intellectual victory of evolutionary doctrine, that is: of the natural sciences, the
hard core of modernity. Everything else in Nietzsche's philosophy is unthink-
able without this premise. Here I use the word "declare" advisedly, as in the
term "declaration of war." War exists by its declaration.
But "declared" evolutionary doctrine is not merely a postulated theoretical
statement but an invocation. Theory and evaluation are inseparable for
Nietzsche. Such inseparability is perfectly natural to his mind, it is their
distinction that would require explanation. Georg Picht brought to my attention
the fact that Nietzsche read Darwin early on and very soon interpreted him in
Lamarckian fashion. Seen in this Lamarckian way, his call for the Vbermensch
is theoretically consistent, and positing this invocation is itself a historical act.
Just as you shall, for generations, live according to the Will, so your descen-
dants shall at some point be born according to Nature. The Ubermensch is the
image which is to guide your artistic will in a fashion that is formative of man.
Similarly, Zarathustra's second thought, that of the Eternal Return, is based
on causal-scientific thinking. "Souls are as mortal as are bodies. But the knot of
causes into which I am bound up itself returns - it will create me anew. I myself
belong to the causes of the Eternal Return? Granted, a thought of this kind
cannot have arisen from such weak arguments. Thus its affirmation is primarily
evaluative. Nietzsche first experiences it as a horrifying revelation; later, its
affirmation becomes his expression of his own affirmation of Being: for all joy
wants eternity. But as is the case for so much of modem thinking, for Nietzsche
too, I seek to retain the thesis of the natural sciences as the central core.
Scientific facts or opinions remain invariant in the turbulent whirl of passions
and interpretations.
For a physicist, however, both of Zarathustra's thoughts are unproven from
the scientific point of view and in their most extreme expression have an
overwhelming probability of being false. They are the dreams of a poet made
up of the material of the dreams of natural science. Nietzsche could not evaluate
their strong claims. But the same inability to fully penetrate them applies as well
to his most able contemporaries in the natural sciences, such as Darwin and
224 CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSACKER

Boltzmann. In the following two sections I will briefly provide some scientific
discussion of these two questions. At this point, however, permit me to note
that, at best, we can consider Lamarckianism only if it is reinterpreted;
furthermore, we presuppose that the history of the cosmos is irreversible. Both
observations lead to subtleties which are, presumably, of no import for assessing
Nietzsche. Here I merely note that the doctrine of an Eternal Return stands in
contradiction to unlimited evolutionism. Almost without exception Nietzsche's
arguments refer only to human history, a brief second on the cosmic clock; they
are legitimate only historically-evolutionary. Structurally, the doctrine of the
Eternal Return remains without consequences for him; what matters is only its
pathos focused on eternity.
The victory of science for Nietzsche, in turn, refers not only and not primarily
to the natural sciences. The critically interpretive sciences, philology and
history, celebrate the victory of science as well. Nietzsche justly delighted in
referring to himself as a philologist. Even the two Zarathustra-thoughts deliver
proof to that effect: Lamarckianism is the altogether sensible reaction to Darwin
of someone who believes in the power of education, of the good teacher of
Greek; the Eternal Return is a philosophical tenet of antiquity, hailing from the
Stoics, perhaps even earlier from Pythagoras. 3
The humanities and social sciences of the nineteenth century taught us textual
criticism and perspective. Textual criticism forever destroys the possibility of
an orthodoxy bound by the letter (wherever it still exists today it makes its
appearance with the fury of a bad conscience precisely for that reason). What
is more important is that we acknowledge the role of perspective, that we learn
to see many people, many ages, and many cultures from their own respective
premises. Perspective dissolves subtle moral, cultural, and philosophical
orthodoxies. In the preamble to Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche lays claim to
"the Perspectival" (his italics) as the "central condition of life," in contrast with
the dogmatism of Plato's metaphysics. And, indeed, he attains his mastery not
in the pathos of a Yes! or a No!, but in a perspectivalist way of seeing, the
special virtue of a scholar in the human sciences.
With this begins the strength of Nietzsche's philosophy, its headlong assault
into the unknown. Nietzsche is enough of a philosopher to apply the perspecti-
valism which hails from the sciences to the sciences themselves. The dogmatic
concept of truth does not hold up: our truths are really our perspectives. What,
then, honored professor, is science? Nietzsche proclaimed Art as the essence of
Science, as I noted earlier on. More than any other philosopher since Plato or
perhaps Schelling, Nietzsche incorporates the experience of the artist into his
reflections about truth, but now with a perspectivalist orientation. Our philo-
sophical dogmas, even those of "positive" science, are works of art, images of
our gods, the work of our hands.
But what does the artist aspire to? I said earlier that Nietzsche proclaimed
Power as the essence of Art. And what is Power? For Nietzsche, Schopenhau-
erian Will is the-thing-in-itself. "Overcoming" the denial of Will, he maintained
the doctrine of Will.
 NIETZSCHE: PERCEPTIONS OF MODERNITY 225

"The world seen from within, the world described and defined according to
'intelligible character' -it would be 'will to power' - and nothing else- ." In
this phrase "and nothing else," repeated elsewhere, lies the pathos of this
teaching. Why the questionable addendum "to power"? It is not merely the outer
symbol for his having learned to affirm Will. Power has a specific meaning.
Power is Possibility. Possibility is Future. Future is Time.

ON LAMARCKIANISM

The doctrine of evolution since Darwin excludes the notion of inheriting

acquired characteristics (in brief referred to as "Lamarckianism"). Two
theoretical reasons are given: l. We can hardly imagine a physical process that
would guarantee such a hereditary transmission of traits. 2. Given Darwin's
reflections on variation and selection, the Lamarckian assumption of heredity
seems superfluous. It is doubtful whether this question can be decided directly
in an empirical fashion and whether it has in fact been so decided.
Both reasons are strong.
Beginning with the first, since the advent of molecular genetics we know
what a mechanism of heredity might look like. Genes, that is: molecules must
replicate themselves identically in an environment containing their building
blocks. The chemical requirements are clear, the mechanism for its realization
is transparent. Physical influence proceeds only from the gene toward the
development of the phenotype; influence in the reverse direction can only occur
via selection of those genes which produce survivable phenotypes. How should
heterogeneous influences on the phenotype physically translate themselves into
genetic structures?
Yet there is a possible objection. We know of a storage mechanism for
acquired phenomena: memory. The tradition of culture mediates the contents of
memory from generation to generation. That is why hereditary transmission of
acquired traits seems so plausible for all cultural traditionalists. Yet a Darwinist
will counter that they don't understand the difference between education and
physical heredity; can one bear educated children? The Neo-Lamarckian must
respond: surely an individual's memory is also a physical repository. Therefore,
organic mechanisms that are specifically constructed for storing external
information do exist. We can simulate them with a computer. Perhaps what is
being stored does not reside in the genes but in the cytoplasm; perhaps such
cytoplasm can be passed on to offspring. The impossibility of imagining a
Lamarckian mechanism is thereby overcome; now the question is simply
empirical.
Without a doubt memory is a high-level accomplishment that, genetically,
emerges at a relatively late point. But why should Darwinian selection not have
influenced the slower early stages of evolution, while a Darwinistically derived
Lamarckian storage mechanism could have participated in subsequent,
accelerated phases, that is, approximately, over the last 500 million years?
As for the second point, Lamarckianism becomes superfluous precisely if
Darwinistic selection can produce the present state and at a sufficiently rapid
226 CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSACKER

pace (approximately within 4112 billion years) and not only in principle. I have
repeatedly argued against the claim that one can prove this time span to be too
short. 4 Due precisely to the process by which the "fittest" are selected, the real
path of development is that which is the fastest given sufficient probability.
Consequently, any recalculation which follows another possible developmental
path results in a (much!) overstated time period. Naturally, this argument does
not exclude the previous reflection, namely that the actual speed of development
could have resulted precisely from a Lamarckian mechanism.
I end with non liquet and enduring skepticism vis-a-vis current neo-
Lamarckian explanations. For the time being I would not bet on a Lamarckian
development of the Ubermensch in a few thousand years. Much rather, as was
formerly done via the mores of marriage in aristocracies, one may well
undertake to breed humans with a clear conscience.

COMMENTS ON THE ETERNAL RETURN

At best one can say that contemporary physics is unable to exclude with
complete certainty the notion of an Eternal Return. However, there is no positive
argument for the hypothesis of the Eternal Return.
Astrophysics teaches us a cosmic past of approximately 10 billion years. All
dates regarding age, often obtained in very different ways, fall completely
within the framework of these assumptions, namely constant irreversible
development and uniform expansion of the total system. True, cosmological
models do exist which, after a finite time, contract again and therefore admit
periodic return. However, in two senses these present little evidence for an
identical return of individual events. First, these models neglect irreversible
thermodynamic processes; if these were in fact included they would, presuma-
bly, not yield a strictly symmetrical contraction of the previous expansion and
therefore would not constitute strict periodicity from the cosmological stand-
point. Secondly, quantum theory suggests that individual processes like the
generation of a Zarathustra and even the accumulation of an earth with its
present characteristics are subject to statistical laws and would not repeat
themselves in a generally strongly periodical cosmos.
Around 1900, in the field of abstract theory, Zermelo raised objections to the
statistical interpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the so-called
Recurrence Objection. That is, the present condition of a system of n mass
points can be represented as "a point" in its 6 n-dimensional "phase space"; the
6 n-coordinates of the point represent respectively the three locational coordi-
nates and the three momentum coordinates of n mass points. That part of the
phase space accessible to a system otherwise sufficiently isolated from its
environment, the so-called "energy envelope" (the totality of all points of a
given energy constant), is compact; it possesses a large, but finite "volume" in
the phase space. Within it moves the phase point. Because of the finiteness of
the volume the phase point must, in finite time, approach arbitrarily close to its
initial position ("arbitrary" inasmuch as one can arbitrarily specify how minimal
be the desired distance from the original position; from this specification one
 NIETZSCHE: PERCEPTIONS OF MODERNITY 227

can calculate how long it will take for the near coincidence to take place). Due
to the determinism and the continuity characteristic of the presupposed laws of
classical dynamics the point will, starting with this "Return", follow a trajectory
that deviates by an arbitrarily preassigned small amount from the original
trajectory.
This argument does not refute the statistical interpretation of the Second Law
where this interpretation describes developments contradicting normal progno-
ses not as impossible but only as highly improbable occurrences, i.e., admitted
only after very long intervals. As can be easily calculated, the length of time in
question is an indefinitely large multiple of the currently known age estimates
for the cosmos. Furthermore, the argument presupposes the finiteness of the
cosmos. Finally, it can be presumed to be "softened" by quantum theory. It
would be difficult to base an affirmation of Existence on this kind of Return.
Thus far in my reflections I have tacitly assumed that time is described by a
real linear coordinate. I believe, however, that a substantive discussion of the
meaning of the symbolism of the Return must begin with a critique of that
premise.

NIETZSCHE: WHAT IS TRUTH

The first part of Beyond Good and Evil critiques the "Prejudices of the Philoso-
phers."5 I do not recall when I first read it but I assume it did not disturb me too
much. A physicist who, before the age of 20, had met Werner Heisenberg and
Niels Bohr as life-shaping scientific-philosophical personalities, who had as a
young man read Ernst Mach and had found the Vienna School insufficiently
critical, could not be startled by Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics. My
problem was not whether substance existed, be that the substance of atoms
(which Boscovich, a Croat, who was as far away from being Polish as
Nietzsche, had understood not as space-filling but just as points in space, a
modest step for today's physicists; cf. BGE 12) or of the soul (cf. the superb
critique of "I think," BGE 16, and the appropriate Kant interpretation, BGE 54).
Instead, my problem was to ascertain what exactly we mean when we say that
substance does or does not exist, what we mean when we assert or deny
knowledge a priori. I had to read the Greeks in order to begin to understand the
phenomena behind words like ousia or idea. In short, I was already infected
before Nietzsche's virus reached me, and had been so infected by a school from
which he himself had learned.
Even so, Nietzsche's critique contains two aspects which should have caused
me to reflect further: the search for moral motives behind the dogmatism of
metaphysics and his critique of the notion of Truth itself. Both issues take aim
at his Big Brother, Plato.
The view that the secret aim of an ontological metaphysics is the stabilization
of the rule of the Good and of good people today strikes me as an original
contribution by Nietzsche to the critique of knowledge and as one of the most
important. I do not know the eighteenth and nineteenth century Enlightenment
authors he read, particularly the French authors. But it seems to me that the
228 CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSACKER

Enlightenment (otherwise critical of religion) steadfastly maintained a moral

stance and for that reason never pushed the critique of knowledge to the point
of questioning the validity of morals. Yet, in another regard, I was not ready for
Nietzsche's critique. If two times two make four, I held the motives for
believing or doubting that statement to be quite irrelevant. I had to be driven
from this sense of security by my own experience, my reading of Plato, and
Nietzsche's critique of the notion of Truth.
Indeed, rereading Beyond Good and Evil, I found Nietzsche's critique of
Truth disappointing because insufficiently radical in its presentation. It begins
with the moralist-vitalist critique of the "Will to Truth." Why not rather
Untruth? (Nietzsche's italics). That truth can be dangerous and that one should
therefore opt for a life-affirming untruth might seem surprising from a moral
perspective, but it is hardly startling from an epistemological standpoint.
Moreover, the "free spirit" apparently does no more than fling itself into a
feverish passion of striving to know more and more deeply than others. When,
in conjunction with my studies of American pragmatism (Emerson, the father
of which, Nietzsche revered), I began to interpret the posthumous sentence
"Truth is that error without which a certain species cannot live." I took the word
"error" to be a witticism (for the unity of nature, for the notion of the healthy
and the sick ... ). I did not read it as a critique of the traditional prejudices of
other philosophers, but as a self-referential critique of the sense of the notion of
Truth. Its radical nature is partially supplied at the end of BGE 34: "Indeed,
what compels us to assume there exists any essential antithesis between "true"
and ·'false"? Is it not enough to suppose grades of apparentness and, as it were,
lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance- different valeurs, to speak
in the language of painters? Why could the world which is of any concern to us
not be a fiction?" In the very way in which we express them, the notions of
appearance and fiction continue to presuppose what is here in question, namely,
that there might be such a thing as an unattainable Truth- in-itself that might not
concern us. What is interesting is not the replacement of the truth/falsehood
dichotomy by gradations of appearance, but the question whether we know what
we mean when we presuppose something like Truth.
It seems to me that Nietzsche discovered a genuine problem of thought here
which, like the consistency of thinking in general, exceeded his powers and
would also have fallen short of his vocation.
Nietzsche saw the very problem of truth in shifting perspectives. Perhaps the
artist comparison, here the painter's valeurs, is the most insightful. That is why
I suggested that for Nietzsche, the essence of Science is Art.
Immediately thereafter, in BGE 36, we find Nietzsche's own metaphysical
hypothesis, that there is only one reality, that of the Will, only one causality,
namely that "Will operates on Will." Here I, a physicist, am being challenged
as a physicist, and I have no objection to make. It is impossible for any monism
to give an unassailable name to the One which it presupposes. Monism is close
to the thinking of physicists. Personally, I do not recall a period of my life where
I experienced Cartesian dualism in any other way than as alien, actually as
totally incomprehensible. Using physics one cannot to this day prove anything
 NIETZSCHE: PERCEPTIONS OF MODERNITY 229

of the kind. My analysis of quantum theory, though, is consistent precisely

under the condition that quantum theory applies as well to my own "conscious-
ness" (whatever that may be). Will, particularly when interpreted as the Will to
Power, is the most basic behavior in time. I developed an approach to the
structure of quantum theory which uses as its basis not the notion of object but
that of flux (Strom). 6 The claim that flux should operate on flux is physicalist
language for Will working on Will, as Nietzsche has it.

MY PROPOSAL: THE SCAFFOLDING

If I aspire to take up Nietzsche's combined critique of theory and of morality in

a systematic fashion I must at this point sketch out my own approach to this
problem. It is incomplete and its contents make clear why it has no chance of
being completed. For instance, in my lecture "Time and Knowledge" (on the
occasion of Georg Picht's 65th birthday), I presented it as a scaffolding to be
deconstructed. Without doubt, its mode of thinking is influenced by Nietzsche,
though that is not true in a conscious way of its content.
The starting hypothesis for erecting the scaffolding is that basic philosophical
terms, such as theory and morality, are in need of and amenable to a type of
explanation which relates them to the specific cultural-historical context of three
thousand years of one particular world culture, namely that of the West. In its
current form the scaffolding includes four levels.
The foundational level contains a number of what look like very general basic
terms which seemingly describe "human nature." The Unity of Perception and
Movement (to use Viktor von Weizsacker's expression) is arranged in terms of
four components: sensory perception, judgment, affect, and action. I see a figure
moving toward me, I judge: "A car on the wrong side of the road," I am afraid:
"Collision!" I steer to one side. The purpose of this analysis is not the differen-
tiation into four components suggested by traditional thought but rather to
emphasize their fundamental interrelatedness, that is, the unity of perception,
judgment, affect, and movement. Perception is predicative: I see a car. It is also
affective: I see danger. Judgment is affective: the purely asserting sentence is
the product of education - according to Marcel Granet it does not exist in
Chinese. Affect is immediately transposed into action. With regard to the affects
that catch our attention as (emotional) affect, Victor von Weizsacker observes:
"Affects are actions not taken." Viewed ethologically, animals manifest the
normal and sensible union of affect and action. By contrast, the separation of
these components is a human achievement and must perforce remain incom-
plete. Such separation is accomplished by an act of reflection, an achievement
of asceticism. How does it come about?
The second level sheds some light on this problem from the layer of func-
tional rationality. A judgment no longer burdened by the requirement to act, the
ascetic release from immediate action in order to be able to judge- it is these
aspects which enable man not merely to react to circumstances, but to act with
regard to them. Incidentally, that structure provides the basis for modern
theories of language (Austin, Searle) which distinguish the propositional content
230 CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSACKER

from the illocutionary force of a sentence. As can be seen, a special light is

actually thrown on two of the four components: judgment and action. This- it
seems to me - is the kind of emphasis that befits a culture of the will and
intellect such as modem Europe. The intellect can think what the will can want,
and vice versa. Sensory perceptions and affect, in this kind of interpretation,
become residual categories into which is thrown whatever is unaccounted for by
the judgment-action schema: these residues are subsumed under such question-
able categorial names as "facts" and "values." But what is hidden in this
construal?
Perhaps some light is shed on this problem by the third level, that of the
Western cultural accents. Among these I distinguish three: Theory, Morality,
and Art. In other contexts I have used the Aristotelian term praxis for "moral-
ity," but my current formulation is suggested by Nietzsche's word choice. What
counts as judgment, theory teaches. What counts as action, morality defines.
Art, however, appears like the accentuation of an affective residue lost in a
world divided into theory and practice. These accents have, much like the entire
culture of the Christian West, a dual heritage, Greek and Jewish. In my previous
sketches of this approach I have argued from the perspective of the Greek
provenance of my scaffolding, as that is closer to me. Theory is a unique and
admittedly Greek invention in cultural history. Though also developed else-
where, this type of wisdom encounters the possibility of apodictic (that is,
indisputable) certainty such as found also in deductive mathematics, another and
simultaneous Greek invention. I claim that mathematics does not constitute the
essence but the "hard" core of theory. Praxis, by comparison, is already a
residual category: that which is not theory. It is refashioned in the image of
theory: for moral judgments ought to be true. Art is once again an artificial
accentuation. It is true that artistic productivity is co-originary with humanity
itself. But to subsume song and dance, architecture and sculpture, poetry and
prose under the rubric of art, that is the thought of clever theoreticians.
This viewpoint on my part obviously arises from a theoretical scepticism vis-
a-vis theory. It may well be that morality as understood by philosophers is
practical reason, i.e., regulatory action according to standards of judgment, that
is, of theory. But what is Theory? What is Truth? I only became acquainted with
the whole notion of the self-referential justification or final justification of
theory through comments by colleagues in philosophy, and then with a sense of
bewilderment. It seems to me to be essentially unthinkable that theory can say
what theory is; perhaps it can see it Platonically (nous, not dianoia). One
attempt at expressing this is a pragmatic theory of truth: judgment is the
imagining of an aggregate sum of possible actions, its truth the reliability of its
success. Here seeing consists in "presentation" because the multiplicity of
implicit possibilities is not expressed; and the continuing problem lies in the
word "possible". Possibility, to use traditional terminology, is the concept, or,
from the Platonic standpoint, the figure, the eidos. Possibility is also, in terms
of Nietzsche's modernity, Power. If I move around the third tier of my scaf-
folding in search for help I happen upon art. What is Art? Perhaps it is the
elemental, blissful seeing of figure through the creation of figure. Following this
 NIETZSCHE: PERCEPTIONS OF MODERNITY 231

definition mathematics is an art, and art is the hard core of theory. I am moving
toward my interpretation of Nietzsche.
But Nietzsche, the Greek, is also capable of recognizing the Jewish figure of
our culture. He sees the irresistible force of a moral imperative, of moral self-
criticism, of moral subtlety which to this day shapes the Jewish people. To the
believing Jew and, following in his heritage, to the believing Christian it is
absurd to wish to base morality on rationality or on a rational concept like
Nature. The Law has been given by God. Herein is mirrored a historical fact,
and Nietzsche notes that. The covenant at Sinai, the history of the Jewish people
from Moses to Elijah, created this figure of morality. The Law is given, the
Covenant made. Nietzsche recognizes in this what had to remain forever veiled
to the believer, what an Enlightenment enamored with rationality saw and hated
to the core: the Will of the Law-giver, his Will to Power. It is not for the
feelings of the obedient, but for the Will of those who command that
Nietzsche's heart beats faster, even where he is convinced that he, Nietzsche,
must give a new and diametrically opposed commandment.
On the third level, such reflections make the mind spin. Is rational morality
the victory of theory over practice? Or was the Good invented in order to enable
the rule of the good people? Theory and moral law are works of art, but what is
Art? If it is a creating of Gestalt (figure, eidos), is it not then theory alone that
tells us what constitutes a Gestalt? Phrasing the issue in terms of cultural
accents, however, should clarify from the beginning that theory, morality, and
art are products of history and can only be understood in light of history. As
accents they leap out from the unity of the whole, at times laying claim to (but
incapable of) guaranteeing that unity.
On the fourth level I have in previous presentations of this scaffolding located
religion and only religion. This is the airiest construction at the loftiest heights.
Here I draw on a lecture on Bonhoeffer and a subsequent reflection about
Luther, where both dealt with Christian theology. 7 The question of the fourth
level is the question about the unity behind the accents. For Plato philosophy
itself stood on the fourth level of the line- and cave-parable, a non-hypothetical
theory, a seeing movement of ideas through ideas to ideas, of eidos through
eidos to eidos. For us time is not, as for Platonism, the circularly advancing
image of an Eternity that remains in the One. Time appears to us as open. An
existing Gestalt is the result of creation, a new Gestalt will appear. Accents are
historically created configurations. Should we want to find unity for them, we
are remanded to history, to their origins or possible goals.
Historically, unity has indeed appeared to us only in the form of religion. In
the Bonhoeffer lecture I "rhapsodically united" four aspects of religion: religion
as the carrier of culture, as radical ethics, as inner experience, and as theology.
Subsequently I came to realize that these are the very accents that mark the
scaffolding. Theology is theory, radical ethics is morality, inner experience here
as so often is an undefined residual category within which we lodge the
forgotten essentials, such as was done for affect on the first level and values on
the second, both of which can at best express themselves in the third level in art.
Religion as carrier of a culture, however, refers to its status as the historical
232 CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSACKER

figure of a unity. But I also observed that this unity actually appears only to that
kind of reflection which can see it from the outside looking in, because it has
lost it.
This is Nietzsche's situation as well. But his reaction is unique. He does not
mourn lost unity, and he most certainly does not wish to restore it. But he sees,
in its full weight, the enormous sacrifice its loss constitutes. Beyond Good and
Evil, Section 55, the three sacrifices: the human sacrifices of ancient religions,
the sacrifice of the Self in ascetic religions, the sacrifice of God in our time:
God is dead, we have killed him. Nietzsche sees himself and the philosophers
he heralds as those who must form a new unity by willing it. Truth is not
recognized, it is willed.
I have never been able to accept this in the form in which it was stated. Do
not Nietzsche's experiences of inspirations express that he is not the one who
wills but the pen in someone else's hand? The historicity of truth is not thereby
eliminated. What do we learn from Nietzsche in that regard?

THEORY AND MORALITY

From among the many vibrations which Nietzsche registered as a kind of

seismograph, it is possible to select only a few, an approach which itself is
seismographically motivated, through sympathetic and non-sympathetic
vibrations. Let me focus on the thesis of theory's dependence on morality. ''The
fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in antithetical values."x This
thesis is substantive, that is, amenable to debate, because it explicitly defines the
contents of a metaphysics by the contents of morality.
I begin with a distancing observation so as to be able to express my agree-
ment more easily in subsequent remarks. Nietzsche is a type of philosopher who
was not enlightened by the light which shines upon the concept of truth in
general from the incredible rigor of mathematical truth. Yet it is only in that
light that one can understand Plato as well as Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz and
Kant not to mention the philosophical physicists of our century. None of these
philosophers confused mathematical truth with truth in general; but each in his
own way incorporated it into his conceptualization of truth. To the philosophers
of the other type, however, the rigor of mathematics is mostly a challenge from
which they all too often seek to extricate themselves with philosophically half-
true distinctions (e.g., "Truth" versus "Correctness"). By declaring the victory
of science, Nietzsche takes his bow before that which only became possible
because of mathematics. But what he himself is capable of and, consequently,
what he experiences, is not mathematical but interpretive thinking. However, the
distant flashes of his lightning bolts shed light even on the dark side of his
summit.
Even though the great metaphysical philosophers rightly paid tribute to
mathematics, - the claim that the truth of metaphysics has mathematical force
was obviously false. Perhaps truth is a woman? Perhaps she subjects herself to
the strong will of the moralists? Again, I am only following one thought.
Nietzsche- of all authors!- recommends the "good taste" (Beyond Good and
 NIETZSCHE: PERCEPTIONS OF MODERNITY 233

Evil, 186, his italics) "which is always accustomed to choose the more modest
expressions." Most convincingly, and with a great potential for inspiring prose
writers, he recommends "assembly of material, conceptual comprehension and
arrangement of a vast domain of delicate value-feelings and value-distinctions
which live, grow, beget and perish- and perhaps attempts to display the more
frequent and recurring forms of these living crystallizations - as preparation of
a typology of morals." Even so, his critical but also critically-admiring affect is
fixated on only a single type of morality which we can call the ascetic. That is,
Platonism, in high style, that is the demand of the Jewish God, Christianity or
"Platonism for the People" (Beyond Good and Evil, Prologue). I will not now
address Nietzsche's broad casuistry and polemic against such morality. I ask,
instead, about the consequences of this moral background for the philosophical
interpretation of the phenomenon of theory.
A belief in opposing values is indeed the expression of an ascetic disposition.
You must avoid one thing in order to be able to attain the other. Nietzsche sees
with great clarity asceticism's aristocratic provenance: self-control is demanded
of those who rule, self-restraint of those being ruled; and those who engage in
such denial, who model this strict renunciation, socially hail primarily from the
aristocratic class. 9 What Nietzsche despises most deeply is the democratization
of the ascetic world view, the victory of those who came up short, whose
modesty thereby is automatically false modesty: a modicum of wealth is
permitted since everyone can achieve that today, but aristocracy and being
different are strictly prohibited. According to Nietzsche what is thereby lost is
precisely the culture-generating force of asceticism: a voluntary renunciation of
that which we all possess because he who renounces can attain, in this way
alone, to a good which no one who consumes can even remotely imagine.
What does this view of asceticism teach us about theory? In my discussion
of functional rationality above, I treated asceticism by opposing it to immediate
action, as a way of enabling judgment which thereby replaces the reacting of the
animal with the acting of man. Theory is at all times an ascetic act, often a very
joyous one. Thinking (according to Plato) is a soliloquy, speaking is acting; the
asserting sentence, however, is a kind of acting that explicitly does not wish to
act, which states and does not change. How noble! -in the Nietzschean sense.
However, in order for the quiet asserting judgment to be able to interrupt the
flow of sensations, of the emotional affects and of reactions, there must be
something upon which judgment can rest. In my analysis of temporal logic and
the physics on which it is based, this is the irreversible fact, an axiom of
thermodynamics. Facts exist, as it were, only for us; our own hypothesis
regarding a reversible fundamental theory makes the irreversibility of facts into
a merely statistical phenomenon, a foreground.
Perhaps we can more easily approach the analysis of such relationships and
do so with fewer emotional reservations if we, along with Nietzsche, clarify for
ourselves the Will to Power that has enjoined the world view of classical
physics with its ontology. Of course one cannot solely conduct such an analysis
with this kind of affective material. Only conceptual work on concepts can help
us here. For the contemporary physicist neither the truth nor the illusions of
234 CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSACKER

appearance, of metaphysical positions, can serve as a starting point. At least in

my own way of thinking about this, the scientist knows himself to follow a
historical path which he must traverse before being able to comment responsibly
on such big questions. In order to be able to follow that path, however, the
wisdom of the stars, that is, the interpretations of the metaphysical traditions and
motives which mark the path, is surely indispensable.
Admittedly, the metaphysical dualism of being and appearance, constitutes
a guiding light, a basis for meditating on the moral ascetics. This is what
constitutes its psych-agogic significance. The apprenticing disciple will believe
the image which the teacher offers to him; it is an act of learning to come to
understand that this image, too, is an appearance. In this way, dualism in Plato's
philosophy of the way of ascent supplies the language which keeps alive the
pathos of the continuing upward climb. In the philosophy of the way of descent
it will then become clear to what extent appearance too is being, and becoming
and passing away is an idea. In my estimation, Nietzsche's critique of Plato
primarily orients itself according to the philosophy of the way of ascent; I do not
know the extent to which he worked through the problems of the late dialogues.
I sometimes ask myself whether the Plato of the late writings would not have
looked upon Nietzsche as the Parmenides of the dialogue named after him
looked upon the young Socrates: well, well, look how much he has already
figured out! He has already learned that ideas are beyond morality.
Yet the co-opted tranquility of this wisdom does not do justice to Nietzsche's
place in history.

NIETZSCHE'S PLACE IN HISTORY

I venture to comment on Ecce homo.

A principle of interpretation for a philosophy at all deserving of interpretation
is that the author is right. This does not mean that we could not, much less
should not, challenge the author. But any opposition becomes fruitful only after
we have understood what we are contradicting. And how can I understand
without taking the guiding hand and being led by it? Again, contradiction and
understanding are lifelong processes. When we reread a philosophical text after
a year has passed, or perhaps ten or fifty years, then the formerly appropriate
understanding which we have held thus far peels off like layers of an onion,
thereby revealing another layer which is hardly the last one.
Ecce homo, just like all the writings of 1888, of the Finale in Presto, is
particularly irritating for its extremes of expression: in this instance, self-
glorification. In regard to that quality, the author might well be more honest than
the rest of us who do not drop the cover of good behavior even in front of
ourselves; but to what extent is he right? The piece culminates in the chapter
"Why I am a destiny." "I know my fate. One day there will be associated with
my name the recollection of something frightful - of a crisis like no other before
on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked
against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sacrificed.
I am not a man, I am dynamite." ... "For when truth steps into battle with the lie
 NIETZSCHE: PERCEPTIONS OF MODERNITY 235

of millennia we shall have convulsions, an earthquake spasm, a transposition of

valley and mountain such as has never been dreamed of. The concept politics
has then become completely absorbed into a war of spirits, all the power-
structures of the old society have been blown into the air - they one and all
reposed on the lie: there will be wars such as there have never been on earth.
Only after me will there be grand politics on earth. - "
I have called Nietzsche a kind of seismograph. Would we find easier access
by granting to the seismograph, with perhaps inappropriate magnanimity on our
part, the illusion that he creates the earthquake that he merely registers? That
Nietzsche is registering an earthquake should, one hundred years after the
decade of his major writings, be quite beyond doubt.
Only now do we have big politics. There will be wars of unprecedented
proportions. All power structures of existing society are blown to pieces. For
truth is entering into battle with the lies of millennia.
The seismic prophecies can be sensed since the time period 1914 to 1945. But
they have not yet been fulfilled. We feel it in the air that they might soon fulfill
themselves. If Nietzsche is right, the earthquake is not the consequence of
machine guns or of armies of tanks or the nuclear bomb, rather these are the
products and tools of the war spirit. It is for that reason that one cannot escape
them through arms control.
What is the content of the war of spirits? The battle of truth against the lie of
two Christian millennia. What is the lie? It is morality. The immoralist had to
appear in order to dissolve it. For morality is the enemy of man, and is that
enemy in the form of humiliation as well as in the form of the revolt of those
who are incapable offreedom. The immoralist's view, however, is the view of
goodness. Like many critics of the Church. Nietzsche sees Jesus as the carrier
of the revolt against the Church, as he does in The Antichrist, 27-35. Nietzsche
deeply identifies with Jesus, all the way to usurping his style in Zarathustra and
the title Ecce homo. Nietzsche views Christianity as the victory of those forces
which Jesus did not want. His criticism goes deeper than customary objections
because it does not attack the failure of the Church vis-a-vis its own ideal, but,
instead, criticizes the ideal itself, not its immorality, but its morality. The
connection between Nietzsche and Jesus is the expectation of an imminent total
historical change.
Our crisis today is the crisis of the world of the will and the world of
rationality, that is, of theory and morality. To some extent it is the victory of
theory, that is, of science, over morality. Belief in a moral world order was
always a compromise in Christianity. The moral world order, be it in terms of
a natural order or a social order, preserves that which, according to Christian
hope, is to pass away: this age. Science teaches us to see nature causally rather
than in ultimate terms, to see man psychologically and sociologically, and to
view morality as a function of society. It provides us with the means to
transform the world without morality and this is how we do change it. However,
the legitimate revolt of morality against such an approach, as in socialism,
glaringly exposes the moral problem of morality. Accents are nullified. Theory
as pure theory becomes untrue, morality as self-righteous morals is evil to the
236 CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSACKER

core, art as aesthetic value is without essence, becomes irrelevantly private. The
stability of a culture which derived from these accents is overburdened, topples,
and collapses.
What will replace it Nietzsche does not know any better than we do, but he
saw earlier than "we" did what is no longer tenable. His pathos is that of truth,
he takes his symbol of Zarathustra from the treasure of images in the history of
religion. The Persian sage, historically so distant from us, the inventor of moral-
metaphysical dualism, might in Nietzsche's view also be the first to vanquish
it.

WHAT DOES "GOD IS DEAD"' MEAN?

Georg Picht has written an essay about this question which is not available to
me as I write this piece. Thus I am quoting imprecisely from memory. A story
from late antiquity tells of Mediterranean seafarers who heard the following
lament on an island: "The great Pan is dead!" Gods can die, they are part of
history. The god whose death Nietzsche experienced is the god of the philoso-
phers who made his epiphany in Parmenides' didactic poem. If I climb the
scaffolding, I can follow that thought. It is the god of the philosophers who
makes theory possible, the lofty summit of which is the concern of metaphysics,
who guarantees the unity of being with the good, oftheory with morality. This
is most particularly the god of the European Enlightenment. If this god is dead,
then the Enlightenment is dead. Just take a look at our contemporary world!
Obviously that does not mean that thinking is dead. Science and scholarship
are not dead. What is dead, however, is the claim that these can sufficiently
orient us in the world. They become what they have always been, namely
research. However there are two diseases from which such research cannot
escape: the ideologizing of its "basic research" procedures caused by its
dependence on financing and the loss of an orientation with regard to the moral
value of its consequences. Not that alert scientists don't realize that. But
"Science," the ideal, does not answer these questions.
Nietzsche, however, would have protested against the misinterpretation of
those apologists who say that the god of the Christians, the god of the Bible, is
not dead as well, merely the god of the philosophers. Every reading of his works
makes it evident that this runs contrary to his personal opinion. I believe it is
impossible to limit his resonant sensitivity exclusively to the god of the
philosophers. Theology, as manifested in historical Christianity, is theory; a
radical Christian ethics, where it appeared at all, was morality. Understood like
that, Christianity was the carrier of a culture coming to an end.
What survives conceals itself on the scaffolding within the dark residual
category of "religion-as-inner-experience." Interpreters have pointed out the
mystical element in the Zarathustra figure and in the history of its creation
("Inspiration," Ecce homo). Zarathustra's solitude is a kind of mystical retreat.
The doctrine of the Eternal Return is interpretable only as a type of mystical
experience of eternity. We associate Dionysus with ecstatic mysticism. The
history of religion tells us that visions, auditions, and the "themes" of mystical
 NIETZSCHE: PERCEPTIONS OF MODERNITY 237

experiences normally derive from the cultural context and the religious
traditions of the mystic in question, while the presumed substance of the
experience is almost totally indistinguishable from one mystic to the next. Was
this the reason why a musician, poet, ethicist of the science-beholden 19th
century had to clothe his experiences in the Zarathustra-Dionysus garment?
But Nietzsche is simultaneously a philosopher of history and points us toward
a historical task that yet awaits. The task of the future is not self-preservation
of traditional religions in their respective isolation - all will fail in that respect.
Likewise, the task to be accomplished is not their syncretic amalgamation, the
watering down of their differences. What will be necessary for survival is a
fruitful wrestling with their contents.

CONCLUSION: NIETZSCHE AND NATURAL SCIENCE

My task as I conceived it was to contribute the opinion of a natural scientist

about Nietzsche: an example of perspectivalist philosophizing.
I see a corroboration of the thesis that Nietzsche's philosophy proclaims the
victory of science. The same holds tme of the connection between science and
the will to power. Seemingly more difficult to prove is the component I inserted,
of Art as the essence of Science. I did not sufficiently emphasize Nietzsche's
anti-Socratic stance. It may well be that one could say that the early Nietzsche,
as artist, distanced himself from science's plebeian sobriety, that the Nietzsche
of the middle years as a citizen of the Enlightenment rebuffs metaphysics, and
that my interpretations suggest a direction which Nietzsche's late philosophy of
necessity had to take. But I am certainly open to being corrected if I should have
attributed my own prejudices to Nietzsche.
Let me begin stating my position as a scientist on Nietzsche with an observa-
tion from the history of science. In the foregoing remarks I have scarcely
mentioned Nietzsche's interpretation of the complex Greek developments.
Nietzsche's real love belongs to early Greece and to the philosophy of the pre-
Socratics. Wherever he attributes positive value to the physical sciences he sees
the pre-Socratics as its foundation. "What are the causes for the intermption of
a favorable experimental physics in antiquity after Democritus?" 10 "With moral
values all antiscientific instincts were united for the sake of the exclusion of
science ... How to explain the unbelievable scandal which morality represents
in the history of science ... " 11 It seems to me that, in this instance, Nietzsche
reiterates a myth in the history of science that continues to this day to prevail in
the history of science, particularly in its Anglophone variety, but which
disintegrates upon closer inspection. Just as Bertrand Russell declared false
everything in Greek philosophy (including its logic!) which exceeded his
understanding, that is, which derived from a perspective different from his own,
we have failed to see the compelling logic in the development of Greek science
in those instances where the rigor of its mathematics, the empirical precision of
its astronomy, and the curiosity of its descriptive sciences were not taken into
consideration. Added to that is the inability to give credit to the origins of
experimental practice in early modem times from a theoretical (anti-descriptive)
238 CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSACKER

project. I do not know where Nietzsche gets his opinion. In any case, no other
great Greek cultural accomplishment should be presumed to have attained its
zenith as late as did the natural sciences. It was not a moralizing interest that
killed the natural sciences in antiquity; at best moralization was what remained
once science was dead.
So much for historical details, in themselves perhaps not totally irrelevant.
But how will a contemporary natural scientist react to Nietzsche's conceptuali-
zation of nature and science?
Would a natural scientist today look upon nature as a sphinx? Looking at the
majority of my colleagues, I suspect the following: not during the work week,
but perhaps when a glass of wine loosens the tongue on Saturday night. In the
work-a-day activities of the biological sciences physicalism today reigns
supreme. However, to biologists and medical professionals physics represents
the medium of rationality precisely because the basic problems of physics are
beyond them. The same applies to most physicists. One senses the sphinx, but
even with good will it is beyond one's powers to get it to speak.
When I confront my view of physics with Nietzsche's thought I stumble upon
the passage: "Much like mathematics and mechanics were for a long time
considered to be sciences possessing absolute validity and the suspicion only
now cautiously surfaces that they are nothing more and nothing less than applied
logic which proceeds from the specific and provable assumption that there is
such a thing as "identical cases" - logic itself being a consistent symbolic
language based on that shared presupposition (that identical cases do exist) ... "
Yet: "Even now the genuine critique of concepts or (as I once called it) an actual
history of the development of thought totally eludes most philosophers. One
should uncover and evaluate anew the value judgments which surround logic:
for instance, 'certainty is worth more than uncertainty'; 'thinking is our highest
function'; likewise one should investigate the optimism in logic, the sense of
victory in each conclusion, the imperative quality of judgment, the innocence
o~ a faith ~n the ap~rehend~bil~~?; of the concept [die Unschuld im Glauben an
dze Begreifbarkezt zm Begrif./]. -
I could place the first half of this quote as motto above my attempt of a
reconstruction of quantum theory. Nietzsche could not have perceived the extent
to which his insight in that regard could be put into practice. However, he
precisely designates the critical point: the possibility of speaking of identical
cases. With insightful irony the second half suggests a contemporary pathos
which today holds a tragic political future ("after World War III one will hang
the physicists," a physicist said to me in 1944). From the epistemological
standpoint my subjective pathos is the exact opposite. Knowing full well that
there are no identical cases, I am amazed at how well a procedure works which
nevertheless makes that assumption. Nietzsche does not enlighten me in this
regard.
But I would surely not be able to describe the task of a natural philosopher
any better than Nietzsche describes his own: "the dehumanization of nature and
then the naturalization of man, after attaining the pure concept of "nature." 13 Hie
Rhodus.
 NIETZSCHE: PERCEPTIONS OF MODERNITY 239

POSTSCRIPT

Georg Picht and Enno Rudolph pointed out Nietzsche's knowledge of Kant and
interpreted Nietzsche's philosophy as a radicalization of Kant's problem
statement. We dream- such is life. The philosopher awakens, but only to the
point of knowing that he is dreaming. With that knowledge it becomes possible
to continue to dream, that is, to continue to live. Dream here becomes the
metaphor for life in time. That is, this metaphor hails from the Platonic
differentiation which begins the Timaeus, to use one example: what always is
and never becomes, as contrasted with what always becomes and never is. From
the Kantian perspective, the dream qua dream is the necessary transcendental
appearance which we come to understand as appearance, but cannot discard.
How I would have to express that is the subject of another piece of writing. In
any case "error" is thereby proven as a legitimate term for any logical knowl-
edge, that is, any knowledge that is based on identities.
One must see the Eternal Return in this context as "the most difficult
thought." Picht points out that, not only in the conversation with the dwarf (E.
Rudolph) but also in the passage which I cite, it is not Zarathustra who utters the
doctrine of the identical return of individual events: but rather in the former it
is the dwarf, in the latter, the animals. To the dwarf Zarathustra says: "Don't
make it too easy for yourself," in the case of the "babbling" of the animals
Zarathustra begins conversing with his soul and in the end does not even hear
that they are silent. I insist that one should not carry the deep meaning of
Nietzsche's statement that "two times two are four" to the extreme of conclud-
ing that he cannot possibly have meant by that anything other than "two times
two are five." But I do admit that, for me, the absurd-sounding doctrine of the
Eternal Return gets meaning only in this fashion. The collision of the two
unending paths in the doorway of the moment, the irresolvable contradiction of
past and present, their puzzling reconciliation in infinity can be presented to our
thinking, in the eschatological vision of an Eternal Return of opposites, as a
puzzle, as a secret. Imagining this in linear time implies that it can appear only
as the identical return of the same; therefore the dwarf and the animals can talk
like that without receiving a reply. The paradox becomes palpable if one
considers that "Return" suggests a memory which differentiates the earlier
occurrence from the current one, whereby it simply does not constitute an
identical return. The structure of a "past that does not pass" is irreconcilable
with an identical return.
Philosophically, Nietzsche leaves us with meaningful puzzles. 14

Starnberg, Germany

- Translated by Heidi Byrnes

NOTES
1 This text was originally prepared as an oral presentation written for a conference on Nietzsche
at the Research Center of the Evangelical Student Organization, Heidelberg, 1981, with the title
240 CARL FRIEDRICH VON WEIZSACKER

"Notes of a Physicist on Nietzsche." Originally published in Carl Friedrich von Weizsiicker,

Wahrnehmung der Neuzeit, Hanser: Munich, 1983, pp. 70-106. [The translated text has been
minimally abridged for the present volume- Ed.]
2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra III, The Convalescent 2.
3 Hypothetically, Nietzsche assigns it to Heraclitus: in Ecce homo, "On the Birth of Tragedy,"
Number 3. See the translation by R.J Hollingdale, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1979.
4 See my The Implications of Science, Lecture 8.
5 Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1973.
1974: unpublished.
See my "Garden of Humanity", pp. 472-487: see also the last three essays for greater clarity.
BGE 2, Nietzsche's italics.
In "Are We Approaching an Ascetic World Culture," reprinted in "The Threatened Peace," I
have tried to pursue these questions: is there such a thing as democratic asceticism?
10 Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, Ed. G. Colli & M. Montinari, Berlin: Walter de

Gruyter, 1967-1977, VII. 23 [36]. 556. Hereafter abbreviated as KSA.

II KSA XIII, 14 [ 109], 286.
12 KSA XI, 40 [27], 643.
13 KSA IX, II [211], 525.
14 See Human, All Too Human, The Wanderer and his Shadow," 284.
 PAUL VALADIER, S.J.

SCIENCE AS NEW RELIGION

If Nietzsche's position concerning science is by no means simple, nor easily

classifiable in the categories of common sense, what can be said about his
thoughts concerning the relationship between science and religion? At first
sight, it seems as if Nietzsche adopted an attitude coherent with the perspective
of a certain rationalism inspired by the philosophy of the Enlightenment. From
this perspective, the scientific attitude is incompatible with the religious which
for its part is progressively replaced and dethroned by the former. The critical
spirit presiding over the development of the sciences renders religious belief
more and more empty and unreal - an illusion from which humanity, having
finally left its primitive fears and anxieties behind, will try to free itself.
Although this interpretation can be supported by a variety of aphorisms in the
Nietzschean corpus, I would like to show that it is fallacious, concealing an
infinitely more subtle position which far from regarding science as substitute for
religion, represents it instead as our new religion or the pursuit, in other words,
of the nihilist will to believe.

A POSITIVIST NIETZSCHE?

Considering the great Nietzschean project of developing a true genealogy of

values, one is brought to admit that by and large the implied critical enterprise
constitutes an ultimately demystified approach to human reality. Informed by
a vision stripped of illusions and of passions - such as the one that a rigorous
scientific method would progressively adopt - the critical enterprise also
promises a great deal more. The annexed remark concluding the first essay of
The Genealogy of Morals sets forth a vast project calling for an immense multi-
disiplinary work, namely, to undertake a "history of the evolution of moral
concepts." The goal explicitly given to the enterprise states that "every table of
values," and "every 'thou shalt' known to history or ethnology," first requires
"a phvsiological investigation and interpretation, rather than a psychological
one." 1 The sciences of psychology and physiology alone seem to be able to
operate this descent into the laboratory where moral judgments are born. This
requirement fulfilled, the elucidation of morality and religion are finally
possible. In other passages, which The Genealogy does not contradict, it is
history that is called upon to play an essential role in elucidating what until now

241
B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Epistenwlogy, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 241-252.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
242 PAUL VALADIER, S.J.

has remained hidden dominating our feelings and judgments. "So far," one reads
in The Gay Science, "all that has given color to existence still lacks a history.
Where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of
pious respect for tradition, or of cruelty?"; even, "the most industrious people
will find that it involves too much work." According to the final lines of this
passage only a vast ambition would render such a work possible: " ... centuries
of experimentation that might eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of
history to date." 2 And just so that no one overlooks the fact that the ambition is
strictly scientific, a seemingly unambiguous sentence concludes the section: "So
far, science has not yet built its cyclopic buildings; but the time for that, too,
will come. " 3
It is to such a plan Nietzsche that devotes himself and in the service of which
he engages all the friends of knowledge and all the "free spirits." Of course, this
seems to be advanced in complete coherence with what is usually called the
intellectual, or the "enlightened" philosopher, dating from the period of Human,
All Too Human - a work that in a highly symbolic manner is dedicated to
Voltaire, "one of the greatest liberators of the spirit." Nietzsche's perspective
there is to "bear the banner of the Enlightenment," a project Nietzsche thought
was betrayed by Schopenhauer (who in the name of "progress" only reinforced
"the reaction" to the Enlightenment, according to the title of the aphorism). 4 It
is necessary to go further in the critical unveiling of illusions, and therefore, to
complete the work initiated by "Petarch, Erasmus, and Voltaire," so that science
triumphs totally over the "old familiar 'metaphysical need'" (HH 27). This
program-text is worked out in a series of propositions that date from the period
of science's confidence in destroying religious needs, i.e., in proposing, "the
passage from religion to a scientific mode of thought." Such a passage would
not take place by a "violent and perilous leap": rather, it is first a question of
"weakening," then of "exterminating," so-called religious metaphysical needs.
Art can help "effect a transition," but in any case: "scientific man is the further
evolution of the artistic" (ibid.). No doubt is expressed regarding the capacity
of science to account for the origins of our religious sentiments, nor are there
any doubts about the results. Once this knowledge is obtained, humanity will in
some way be turned away from all quests of the religious type: knowledge as
such is liberating. The "victory of knowledge over radical evil" (the title of the
aphorism) will free man from "a host of tormenting ideas, the expressions 'pains
of Hell,' 'sinfulness,' 'incapacity for good' will no longer have any effect on
him," since he has learned "to know as fully as possible," that knowledge which
"will make him cool and soothe everything savage in his disposition" (HH 56).
With knowledge as the therapy for anguish and as the gravedigger of guilt-
ridden imaginations -the ancient home of religion - the diagnosis could not be
clearer.
The section, "Truth in religion," articulates science and religion once again
in antinomic terms, explicitly situated in the wake of the Enlightenment. It is
said that this century did not render justice to religion for it critiqued it falsely
or in untenable terms. But the romanticism that followed was hardly more
equitable in its reversed position towards religion, as it thought to have
 SCIENCE AS NEW RELIGION 243

discovered in religion "a profound, indeed the profoundest possible under-

standing of the world" (HH 110). While following out the work of the Enlight-
enment it is incumbent upon us to demonstrate, against such tendencies, one
overly odious and the other too favorable - that there is nothing which is not
"erroneous through and through" in religion. "A religion has never yet, either
directly or indirectly, either as dogma or as parable, contained a truth."
However, such a radical affirmation which identifies religion with error or
illusion seemingly brings the philosopher to confess that not even science could
succeed in destroying an illusion so deeply rooted in man. "In reality,"
Nietzsche proclaims, "there exists between religion and true science neither
affinity, nor friendship, nor even enmity: they dwell on different stars"(HH
110).
But such a judgment seems to open a breach in the interpretive system that
until now we have held to be clearly Nietzschean. If science and religion evolve
on two different stars, how can the attacks of one have any purchase on the
other? If the critical objective of science expects the critical dismantling of
religion, this is only because science is able to locate itself on religious ground
to demonstrate the vanity of religion's theses. However, if religion is dependent
upon entirely different processes (or instincts) than scientific knowledge, is the
expectation that science could give a clear and objective account of religious
need not doomed to failure? At the outset, doesn't science address something
very different than religion, to the very point that religion would not be affected,
far less weakened, by a scientific critique? The optimistic and commanding
expectations that up until now were thought to have been assumed are hence-
forth put into question during the period of Human, All Too Human. For
example, Nietzsche doesn't neglect to observe that we are interested in scientific
knowledge for reasons which have nothing to do with science, adding that if we
were only pure spirits we would have no interest in science: "to a purely
cognitive being, knowledge would be a matter of indifference" (HH II 98). The
effect engendered by "the book that speaks of Christ" is incomparable to the
"poor" effect that any scientific book produces, because "all influential books
try to leave behind this kind of impression: the impression that the widest
spiritual and psychic horizon has here been circumscribed and that every star
visible now or in the future will have to revolve around the sun that shines
here." What scientific book could ever rival such an influence? Therefore: "are
the honest men of science not 'poor in spirit' by comparison with that which
religious men proclaim their 'knowledge,' of their 'holy' spirit?" (ibid.). From
that point, what kind of convincing energy could critical analysis ever draw
from the austere and dispassionate universe of the sciences, as opposed to the
equivocal but bewitching prestige of religious books?
Such affirmations show to what extent the identification of the Nietzschean
position with a conquering scientism (which slowly vanquishes the religious
universe) would be misleading, even if some traces of this position are apparent
in certain texts. These traces suggest that beneath the "hammer blow" of
affirmations that one can easily identify and one believes to know well, the
"seducer" of Sils-Maria continues to employ his masks, misleading the hurried
244 PAUL VALADIER, S.J.

reader. Thus, we should resist hastily identifying the one who claims to adopt
new paths with the old tags of well-known positions, and, instead, try to
illuminate the untimely hidden purpose underneath such seductive appearances.
Yet, we must be cautious: after the period of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche
in fact identifies himself with "we knowing ones" (wir Erkennenden), naming
his task a "gay science" (jrohliche Wissenschaft). But if this science is truly a
form of knowing (Erkenntnis), should it not be asked if this knowledge is of the
same kind as the cold, sad, inert, devitalized understanding of those frogs
Nietzsche cruelly identifies as the modem wise men? 5

SCIENCE AND THE WILL TO BELIEF

The break we set out to expose continues to enlarge throughout the mature
works, notably the aphorisms of the fifth book of The Gay Science. It is difficult
to contest that Nietzsche there adopts very different positions than those noted
in Human, all too Human, as will be shown below. Should we thereby indict the
philosopher's inconstancy, attributing a break bordering on incoherence and a
lack of rigor to account for his well-known contradictions, or can we nonethe-
less advert to a continuity of thought and attempt to understand his reasons?
Nietzsche gradually comes to realize that at a certain point he had fully
expected science to unveil the truth and to expose humanity's millennium-old
illusions - soliciting from the scientific method the same requirements with
regard to truth as the believer had expected to obtain from religion. Just as the
believer thinks to penetrate the mystery of things, to understand the movement
of the world, so, too, a scientism naive in its presuppositions transposes the
quest for truth from the religious domain to the scientific domain. Now, through
the trial of suffering and the rending of the flesh from which was born the will
to believe, the will to know at any price, Nietzsche will attain to a presentiment
that the same illusion runs from religion throughout the sciences: that a similar
thirst for knowledge and for penetrating the foundation of things sharpens the
expectation of the believer (of old) and the scientist (of our day) and this same
attitude is destructive of man and his relation to the world- that, ultimately, this
attitude will bring humanity to a dissatisfaction which is none other than the
dissatisfaction rationalism has always embraced. An identical illusion is at the
root of the will to know, the desire to convert the unknown to the well-known,
as well as the ambition to descend into the depths of things in order to seize the
nature of the surface or appearances. This illusion is in part tied to the rationalist
illness which has never ceased to torment and torture mankind since the time of
Socrates' Greece. Already, from The Birth of Tragedy, a diagnosis was made
which will never be negated:

A profound illusion that first saw the light of the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakable
faith that thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and
that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it. This sublime
metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct ... 6
 SCIENCE AS NEW RELIGION 245

Seeking then to characterize our civilization according to the measure of

illusion each of us needs in order to lend structure to ourselves, Nietzsche
identifies this civilization with Socratism or Alexandrianism: "Our whole
modern world is entangled in the net of Alexandrian culture. It proposes as its
ideal the theoretical man equipped with the greatest forces of knowledge, and
laboring in the service of science ... " (BT 18). We would be altogether mistaken
if such a judgment were taken as favorable: the whole text shows the fragility
of a civilization based on an illusion, veiling the tragic reality of things.
What is it that we actually seek when we want to know objectively or
scientifically? Are we searching purely for knowledge or for truth? What
profound motive moves the will to know and to understand? Aphorism 344 in
The Gay Science explains that scientific research rests upon a postulate that
remains inexplicit but is always present and active: refusing to mislead
ourselves or others, we want to eliminate error or false appearances from reality,
we want to purify the real from all that misleads us in order to retain only that
which is assured, grounded, certain, identifiable by sound reasoning and
judgment. In doing this, we do not only implement a rigorous scientific method,
as the text says in pursuit of "policing" precipitation and prejudice; we also act
on a presupposition that is not itself of a scientific nature but which makes such
a thing as the scientific project possible. In reality, we speak metaphysically
when we postulate that the world must be such as we wish it to be, that the real,
the "really" real, must be discriminated from deceptive and misleading, false
realities. We thus want the world to be as our desire (for understanding, clarity,
transparency) wishes and we refuse the world as groundless abyss, or an
intertwining of forces or contradictory realities. What is presupposed then cuts
into the complexity of things in a dualistic fashion, since we hold true what
answers our expectations (or to categories of our understanding) and dismiss as
false, illusory, and fluctuating that which disturbs, troubles, worries, or destroys
us. The dualism is one with a unilateral metaphysics which retains from the real,
only what conforms to our expectations, rejecting that which displeases:
becoming, the ungraspable, evil, horror, and death. It is always taken for granted
(therefore, not up for discussion and not submitted to any critique) that we
should not allow ourselves to be fooled (which would contradict the critical
method) "because one assumes that it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be
deceived ... How is that? Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less
harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous?"7 What if the inverse were true? What
if we could not live without error and illusion and if reality itself implied error,
just as it implies violence, laceration, becoming, and death? For, since Socrates,
science goes hand-in-hand with optimism and the will to see in the world only
that which corresponds to what we want, rejecting what rejects us. As religions
do, the will to simplify the real - effectively, a kind of schizophrenia -
circumscribes man in a prime anthropocentrism. That is why GS 344 can be
entitled, "How we, too, [understood as 'men of science'] are still pious." Far
from being antinomic destroyers of the will to believe, the scientific method and
the metaphysical postulates subtending it are in fact the precise extension of it
246 PAUL VALADIER, S.J.

- but in a more subtle and perverse manner, perhaps, because they pretend to
serve as principles of liberation and emancipation from belief.
Similarly, when Nietzsche questions "What is the meaning of ascetic ideals?"
in the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals, he seeks to know what kind of
will do we have today that opposes the influence of such an ideal. 8 We will find
here a position identical toGS 344, which Nietzsche explicitly quotes in order
to emphasize the continuity of his analysis. Using the vocabulary of the ascetic
ideal, he does not say anything other than what he said with regard to the will
to believe: is there really an adversary to the ascetic ideal? "Where is the match
of this closed system of will, goal, and interpretation?" "But they tell me," he
adds in GM III: 23, the opposite " .. .is not lacking":

All of modern science is supposed to bear witness to that- modern science which, as a genuine
philosophy of reality, clearly believes in itself alone, clearly possesses the courage for itself and
the will to itself, and has up to now survived well enough without God, the beyond, and the virtues
of denial. [For] Such noisy agitators' chatter, however, does not impress me, [because[ science
today has absolutely no belief in itself, let alone an ideal above it - and where it still inspires
passion, love, ardor, and suffering at all, it is not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but rather the
latest and noblest form of it. (GM III: 23)

And if it seems to fight such a ideal (probably an allusion to the ideal of the
Enlightenment), it only opposes, "its exteriors, its guise, and masquerade" (GM
III: 25). In reality:

This pair, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same foundation- I have already indicated
it: on the same overestimation of truth (more exactly: on the same belief that truth is inestimable
and cannot be criticized). Therefore they are necessarily allies, so that if they are to be fought they
can only be fought and called into question together. (Ibid.)

Science and religion are thus dependent on the same system of asceticism that
takes shape in the will to truth at any cost, the essence of every will to believe.
One indication of this would be, according to GS 344, that in both cases
sacrifice is at work: what beliefs or values did we not sacrifice on the altar of
science? (Clearly the altar metaphor has weight!) Since we hold that there is no
higher value than knowledge, there is also no higher value than its quest and
therefore no higher value than the will to truth. A scent of sacrifice and blood
always surrounds the will to believe: science as well as morals requires the
shedding of blood. Indeed, it is in just such a way that, in the name of modern
science, we have precipitously shaken our system of values, our social relations,
our traditional conceptions as well as our very relationship to the cosmos. Thus,
the enterprise of science cannot owe its origin to a calculus of utility, a relative
and flexible value, "it must have originated in spite ofthe fact that the disutility
and dangerousness of 'the will to truth,' of 'truth at any price' is proved to us
constantly" (GS 344). The scientific project proceeds from a moral system, from
a will to not be deceived, or to better the human condition, but this moral draws
its incoercible force from a metaphysics and finally from a religion. This
religion holds that nothing is more valuable than the truth, that truth alone has
value, and that any other value should be sacrificed on its altar. One might as
 SCIENCE AS NEW RELIGION 247

well say that the religious postulate of science is identical with the belief that
truth is divine and, therefore, that it is an absolute and unconditional value. One
will have guessed that:

... What I am driving at. namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science
rests- that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our
fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was
also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. (GS 344)

Since science acquires its meaning and form from the long quest for
unconditional truth, science depends upon the somber history of nihilism. Far
from constituting a process that would be emancipated and delivered from
nihilism, science is the subtlest expression of it; indeed, science seems com-
pletely removed from any metaphysical conviction. At least this is what the
positivist or the scientist naively think, holding that a fact is a fact and that in
their case they are unencumbered by unjustifiable prejudices, unlike the
metaphysician and the believer. But they fail to recognize that they hold as
indisputable the fact that knowledge is more valuable than anything else and that
this knowledge will have beneficial and protective effects against the dangers
of life. The positivists and scientists thus fail to see that they support the secular
enterprise of impoverishing life, weakening its defiant vitality, even to the point
of declaring themselves against life itself since they effectively emasculate the
entirety of its darker and frightening components. In this sense, they corroborate
the petty expectations of "the last man," in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ever in
search of a small happiness as security against life's dangers. Nihilistic in its
dualistic and metaphysical origin (truth's idealism and unconditionality) modem
science furthermore is nihilistic in its very destiny. Just as Christianity collapses
under the weight of its contradictions, the scientific method collapses with its
demand for rigor against dogma and moralism. Once the scientific method is
brought back to the rigors of sober interpretation, it turns against "the will to
truth at any cost," which heretofore had resided within it. The scientific method
recognizes that it can at most produce revisable hypotheses, and thus, far from
penetrating the secret of things, it can only produce "useful illusions," transi-
tory, artificial and not at all the carrier of truth. Or, as is mentioned in a
posthumous note from the spring of 1888, "It is not the victory of science that
distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over
science" (WP 466).

RELIGION: MATRIX OF SCIENCE

Progression in the Nietzschean labyrinth thus leads to a sensible displacement

of perspectives: having broken with the scientistic hypotheses that science will
be able to dissolve the gloom and shadows of illusion, according to the first
reading of the genealogical method, the reader notes that, in reality, a common
ground can be found between science and religion. This is the case because both
maintain the same "will to truth at any price," which is by nature sacrificial and
thus ascetic and destructive of reality, even of humanity itself, all the while
248 PAUL VALADIER, S.J.

spurred on by its infinite quest for an inaccessible mirage. But, the exploration
of the labyrinth is hardly complete because we still have to highligt a veritable
reversal of the starting postulate. Not only is science not compelled to destroy
religion, not only do they share in the same nihilistic destiny, but science also
discovered the very conditions for its possibility and birth in religion - to the
extent to which it has to be said that without the mythical religious universe,
nothing like the scientific conscience would have been born, and nothing like
the rigorous method of control over nature could have been perfected.
Against "le petit faitalisme" (petty facticism) which holds that the grasping
of a fact requires nothing more than observation of the superficiality of things,
Nietzsche never ceased to affirm that the "objective" regard always supposes
more than itself (in which respect he broke from Spinoza, who was over-
confident about such objectivity). 9 Likewise, he never ceased to affirm that we
cannot understand science exclusively on its own terms, and that the imagina-
tion needs to anticipate and to apprehend what it grasps beyond the immediately
sensible. It is on this level that we can interpret the surprising aphorism GS 300,
justly entitled "Preludes of science." We needed that "avant-garde" of magi-
cians, alchemists, astrologers and sorcerers in order to give birth to the scientific
curiosity, for these men were able to "to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for
hidden and forbidden powers?" They opened a world of promise that fully
encroached upon the quotidian and sensible universe. Thus they grounded the
inquiry in the direction of those powers that excited the ardor to understand.
Moreover, the text adds, " ... would man ever have learned without the benefit of
such a religious training and prehistory to experience a hunger a thirst for
himself, and to find satisfaction and fullness in himself!" (GS 300). Not only do
religions evoke a thirst to penetrate the mystery of things, they also turn their
regard in the direction of man himself in order to render him ''interesting" to
himself- another condition of scientific inquiry that is often not fully appreci-
ated. Other texts, however, explicitly attribute the origin of this meticulousness
to the Christian moral practices of examining one's conscience, numbering and
recounting one's sins through confession. This same meticulousness is then
turned upon itself and is able to be extended to any exterior reality. 10 But, one
is surprised to find similar positions in the aphorisms of the first book of
Human, All Too Human, which at first seemed to be diametrically opposed.
Thus, for example, "in the age of barbarous primordial culture," the dream
enabled us to gain access to "a second, real world," to the origin of metaphysics
and thereby, to a deeper understanding. Magic, expressing a will to tame nature
and to direct it, "for the benefit of mankind," to "impress upon it a regularity
and rule of law which it does not first possess," is related to the scientific
enterprise, at least in the form of a preamble. With magic, man practices an
original relation to the real, even if the man of magic conceives nature as given
over to capricious and therefore unmasterable powers. 11 With these remarks,
Nietzsche situates himself at the antipodes of those moderns who believe they
need only thank themselves, thinking that they inaugurate an unprecedented era
-as if the past had not somehow prepared the present. Because he is attentive
to the conditions by which the human spirit matures and becomes educated,
 SCIENCE AS NEW RELIGION 249

Nietzsche forcefully insists upon the modem's debt to the ancient tradition, and
in this context he does not think that the birth and development of modem
science is wholly divorced from humanity's religious past. "The best in us," we
read again in the same book of Human, All Too Human, "has perhaps been
inherited from the sensibilities of earlier ages to which we hardly any longer
have access by direct paths; the sun has already set, but the sky of our life still
glows with its light, even though we no longer see it" (HH 111).
Religion has been a matrix of science in that it rendered possible the scientific
regard toward the world, in that it was born of curiosity, of ambition to see
beyond immediate appearances, that it was also made of the will to decipher, to
interpret the ways of the world - in this is implied a supplementary and
paradoxical argument for the kinship between modem science and religion with
nihilism. Far from being so opposed to each other that one could assert the
decline and the death of the other, science and religion go together, bound as
they are by an identical "will to truth at any price." Modern man in his superfi-
ciality however, simply regards himself as "emancipated." He does not notice
that under strikingly different surface appearances, science draws nourishment
from the same sources as religion and both find sustenance from the same feeble
will - a will which, unable to put up with the abyssal character of the world,
needs to correct it, needs to amend it, and bring it back to the dimension of the
well-known, the familiar. It should also be said that the effects of the scientific
enterprise are quite comparable to the effects religion has on man. Because of
its fundamentally unstable, i.e., nihilistic nature - furrowed by negation and
incapable of affirmation - science oscillates between blissful optimism and the
blackest pessimism. Thus, after having exalted our human powers and having
brought us to believe in the conquering power of the mind, science concludes
by dethroning the subject it once raised so high, just - inversely - as religions
needed to crush man as a sinner only to be able, afterwards, to exalt him as "son
of God," promised to eternal life. When Nietzsche affirms the kinship between
science, the ascetic ideal and the overestimation of truth, he notes that since
Copernicus, modern science has borrowed, "the same route" as Christianity, to
"the old ideal" (GM III: 25). Indeed:

All science, natural as well as unnatural- whlch is what I call the self-critique of knowledge- has
at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been
nothing but a piece of bizarre conceit. One might even say that its own pride, its own austere form
of stoical ataraxy, consists in sustaining this hard-won self-contempt of man as his ultimate and
most serious claim to self-respect (and quite rightly, indeed: for he that despises is always one who
'has not forgotten how to respect' ... ) Is this really to work against the ascetic ideal? (Ibid.)

Even Kant must have recognized that modern science "damaged that ideal."
But is this not the pursuit by other means of what nihilistic religion has always
done, what was impossible for it not to do? Another trait demonstrates a very
surprising kinship: after having dethroned man from his unique importance in
the universe and faced with the impossibility of achieving ultimate truth,
scientific deception transforms itself into the infinite and self-willed quest for
incertitude. Instead of adoring the divinity (or truth as divine), our contemporary
250 PAUL VALADIER, S.J.

agnostics, "as votaries of the unknown and mysterious as such, they now
worship the question mark itself as God." Hence, the syllogism Nietzsche sneers
at: '"There is no knowledge: consequently - there is a God': what a new
elegantia syllogismi! what a triumph for the ascetic ideal!" (ibid.). We no longer
believe the truth to be accessible, but we still believe that it is worth the trouble
to search at any cost- to search for the sake of searching: in vain and under the
dominion of what is not, or no longer: nothingness.
Does such an identification between modem science and religion, molded by
the same obsessive will for truth at any price, does this oblige us to put
Nietzsche among detractors of scientific modernity? Doesn't this identification
tend to relativize as well his plan of establishing a genealogy of morals, much
less to question his pretension of including himself among, "those who know"
(wir Erkennenden)? Indeed, haven't our conclusions overthrown our very
starting point?
If the proposed interpretation is correct, it at least warns us not be deceived
by a simple and obviously false identification between the Nietzschean project
of a "gay science" and some ambition of a scientific nature. The "understand-
ing" (Erkenntnis) in question here is surely a manner of comprehending reality,
not an irrationalism or a leap into the absurd, and in this respect Nietzsche's
insistence on calling his thought a "doctrine," as he says in Twilight of the Idols,
shouldn't be minirnized. 12 But the understanding we address does not occur by
means of the judgmental canons of comprehension or through the Socratic
dialectic, which embrace the real through a conceptual apprehension. Rather, the
understanding is explicitly described as "das Jasagen zu Realitiit," sajing yes
to reality as it is, not as the "ideal" of the weak would like to have it. 1 On the
contrary, this is:

A formula for the highest affirmation. born of fullness, of overfullness, a Yes-saying without
reservation, even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything that is questionable and strange
in existence. This ultimate, most joyous, most wantonly extravagant Yes to life represents not only
the highest insight but also the deepest, that which is most strictly confirmed and born out by truth
and science. Nothing in existence may be subtracted, nothing is dispensable. 14

This yes-saying, which is the genuine antinomy of the ascetic ideal, clearly
rejoins the objectives of science, but with the understanding that the latter is
thereby stripped of the temptation to correct "existence" and that it has
recovered from the temptation that truth be conquered solely according to the
categories of comprehension- all this in favor of the yes-saying which would
be a poetic benediction in the style of Zarathustra's songs. An understanding
so conceived would be more truthful than all understanding of comprehension
because it lets go and is willing to dance even over abysses without being afraid.
Such is the gay science: not a sad, i.e., always unsatisfied understanding, but a
joyful wisdom: since it is enough to say yes once in order that all be saved. " .. .If
our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once,
all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of
affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed" (WP
1032). 15
 SCIENCE AS NEW RELIGION 251

This "doctrine" also enables us to grasp the sense and import of what a
genealogy of values might be. Contrary to what certain texts give us to
understand and in opposition to a generally received opinion, genealogy does
not have a reductive or deterministic objective that tries to explain the superior
by the inferior, or the highest values by the lower instincts and drives. Even if
Nietzsche was able to lend some support to this theory, the coherence of the
doctrine as a whole obliges us to interpret the concept of genealogy otherwise.
In short, given the complexity and interwovenness of things, the attempt at
genealogy would be contradictory if it resulted in a clearly and fully certain
account about what is fundamentally complex - especially in the domain of
morality and, therefore, also in the subject of the will of the one who wills.
Rightly understood however, genealogy sets forth the positive or negative and
the affirmative or destructive forces (which are implied in every human act),
before the complex intertwining of instincts and drives and tries to measure
them. Genealogy advances a more or a less strong or weak will in place of a
more or a less strong or weak affirmation, or negation, of weakness or strength,
slavery or mastery. It makes us realize that there is no pure will, either in the
sense of weakness or in the sense of mastery. Thus genealogy does not pretend
to bring some fallacious clarity to the obscurity of the will. Rather, it allows us
better to accept the complexity and the ineluctable weight of the necessity of
what is as it is, and in so doing, to accept its "metamorphosis"
Furthermore, it should be added that genealogy is founded on interpretation,
not on an univocal and definitive diagnosis. It calls for the play of replay and of
rereading. Therefore, the same recourse to a reality which is itself caught up in
the becoming of a will that is never fixed - save for that point of falling back
into the web of the will to believe. These conclusions compel us to strongly
qualify the encyclopedic projects Nietzsche called for, for which he invoked a
multi-disiplinary collaboration. Did their initiator ever believe such propostions,
or did he only do it to mask an intuition which, he said often, cannot be
understood - neither by the first to arrive nor by "the last to come"? Thus
beyond the assimilation of modern science to religion - which, at first sight
seems strange if not scandalous - for those who have ears to hear the eminently
Nietzschean solicitation: be done with the will to confinement and self-closure,
which still goes by the name of the "will to believe," and that still proliferates
even well outside of conventional religion, and say yes to what is and, thereby,
find joy in eternally singing this yes-saying.

Paris, France

-Translated by Talia Welsh and Lysane Fauvel

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to David B. Allison for preliminary assistance with correcting this translation.-
Ed.
252 PAUL VALADIER, S.J.

NOTES

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufmann, ed., trans., in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche, (New York: Random House, 1968), end note to the First Essay, p. 491. Hereafter GM.
2 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Kaufmann, trans. (New York: Random House, 1974), section 7,
P· 82.Hereafter GS.
. Ibtd.
4 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, R.J. Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. 1986), Book One, Section 26, p. 26. Hereafter HH.
5 E.g., Section One of The Gay Science, or the Second Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. [Or GM
1: l-Ed.]
6 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Kaufmann, trans. (New York: Random House, 1967), 15, p.
95.
7 GS, Sections 281 & 344, pp. 221, 281.
GM, the title of the Third Essay, p. 533.
10
GM III: 24, p. 587.
II GS 357, pp. 304-310.
HH, 5, p. 14.
12 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche. (New York: Penguin, 1982), "The

Four Great Errors" 8, pp. 500-501.

13 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in The Portable Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy," 2, p. 728.
14 Ibid.
15 KSA 12, 307-308.
 WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLI

NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE:

A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH

The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche have never ceased to be controversial. Since

he first published The Birth of Tragedy his thinking has been the focus of
ongoing public and scholarly debates, and indeed rather heated ones. But
whereas in the nineteenth century it was mainly his seeming immorality and
agnosticism today his views on language, truth, rationality and science are
drawing most of the attention. And here - as always with Nietzsche - the
positions are incompatible once again.
On the one hand to look at his relation to the science of his day is not as
unheard of as it was 15 years ago. Especially since the unpublished writings of
Nietzsche have been edited by Colli and Montinari 1 an incredible amount of
scholarly work has world-wide been invested in efforts to elucidate the impact
the epitome of rationality, science, has had on the philosophy of the epitome of
"irrational" philosophizing, Friedrich Nietzsche. This, of course, is due to an
interest in historical sources. There is, however, something more to it which in
itself is rather twisted:
It looks as if some scholars were trying to somehow "save" Nietzsche's
"untimely" and insubordinate thinking by demonstrating that it loses all of its
annoying untimely and insubordinate character once it is unvealed as some kind
of science in disguise. Thus, some of the interpreters claim that philosophical
theorems like the "will to power" or the "eternal recurrence" or the "Overman"
could be reduced to science, be it thermodynamics, Riemannian geometry or
Darwinism.
Some interpretations, however, look at the whole issue from exactly the
opposite point of view: It's not the science that secretly influences the thinking
of Nietzsche, but it is his philosophy that anticipates scientific findings - and by
doing so in some respects is even capable of intuitively correcting scientific
ideas later proven wrong by the scientific development in the late nineteenth and
in the twentieth century. Therefore it doesn't come as a surprise when we find
Nietzsche having been made the predecessor of relativistic mechanics, space-
time-continuum and quantum mechanics.
On the other hand as a consequence of the poststructuralist and postmodem
rediscovery of Nietzsche it has become rather fashionable to look at his work
in terms of a perspectivist reflexive interpretation, i.e. in some kind of relativ-
253
B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 253-277.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
254 WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLI

istic "anything goes" attitude falling victim to two category mistakes at the same
time:
Many philosophers - erroneously - would consider it fatal to Friedrich
Nietzsche's philosophy if his obvious criticism of absolute truth-claims and his
advocating cognitive and moral perspectivism on an object-level would also
apply on a meta-level, implying that he himself held no claims as to the truth of
his thoughts or that he himself was of the opinion that his ideas represented just
one perspective among others. -I will be trying to argue that this is not fatal at
all.
Many - and in some cases even the same - writers nevertheless find
consolation in Nietzsche's apparent "irrationalism" inferring that if Nietzsche
was critical with respect to truth claims and was inconsistently advocating
cognitive and moral perspectivism both on the object- and on the meta-level
then, of course, they themselves were also entitled to inconsistency, to
irrationality and to abandoning all truth-claims in exchange for moral and
cognitive perspectivism.- In what follows I will be trying to demonstrate that
to take this stand is completely mistaken: Even if Nietzsche himself were
pragmatically inconsistent (which he isn't) this would neither ask nor even
allow for any inconsistency on the part of the interpretation.
Both of these mistakes are due to a lack of reflexive clarity. Reflection,
however, consists in revealing at least some of the previously unquestioned
presuppositions and preconditions of one's own thinking. Thus, to avoid falling
victim to one or both of these two category mistakes, systematically guided
reflection is needed. Trying to deal with Nietzsche's position as a philosophical
and consistent one in a philosophical and consistent way, I therefore have to
reveal my own presuppositions (I) and the ones of Nietzsche as far as his theory
of truth and his criticism of science is concerned (III) before I can go on
developing his semiotic theory of truth (III), his criticism of science resulting
in his theorum of eternal recurrence (IV) and finally his criticism of science
resulting in his theorem of will to power (V).

As philosophical hermeneutics teaches us that it is impossible to start reading

or understanding without being already preoccupied (or even prejudiced) with
some kind of previous understanding the only thing we could do to at least
attempt to objectify our understanding is to try to reflect on as much of our
preoccupations as possible. Therefore I will begin with making explicit what I
take for granted with respect to Nietzsche:
(1) As is already implicitly said in my previous remarks I am of the opinion
that the thinking of Nietzsche is, in the strict sense of the word, philosophical
and consistent. Although one of the first books on Nietzsche, published 1904 by
Arthur Drews, was already titled Nietzsches Philosophie, 2 Nietzsche was (and
by some people still is) estimated a poet and/or a madman rather than a
philosopher. As late as 1980 Arthur C. Danto could, in the preface to the
Morningside edition of his Nietzsche-book, tell that Lionel Trilling judged the
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE 255

title of his book (Nietzsche as philosopher) "the snottiest title I ever saw,"3 and
Danto himself confessed, that "the title was intended to be (mildly) offensive."
(2) It is furthermore one of my hermeneutical presuppositions that the relation
between the literary remains (i.e., the Nachlaj3), which include, e.g., the
aphorisms widely known by the infamous title of The Will to Power, and the
published writings, is neither crucial nor negligible. Now that the previously
unpublished or misleadingly published literary remains are available in the
critical edition by Colli and Montinari, they can serve as keys to the
understanding of difficult and enigmatic passages in the published writings. This
is what I would like to call the "hermeneutical iceberg-principle": diving under
the surface and take a look at the formerly hidden ten-elevenths may in some
cases help to get the right idea of the visible one eleventh and sometimes even
help to avoid catastrophes as well. Taking into account the, as it were, "esoteric"
part of Nietzsche's writings is nowadays an unavoidable necessity. It would,
however, violate some of the best-established rules of hermeneutics to look at
just a few randomly chosen parts of the previously unpublished texts.
(3) If one consistently confronts the published writings with the literary
remainings the philosophy of Nietzsche appears in quite different light. I take
it for granted that one of the decisive problems for Nietzsche, being a nineteenth
century thinker through and through, was the problem of science and humanities
(the German term Wissenschaft including both) and their influence on as well
as their debts to history, society and life as a whole. Given the fact that the very
notion of "philosophy of science" has softened its intensional characteristics and
therefore broadened its extension considerably since the early 1960s, one could
today even call Nietzsche a "philosopher of science."4 Not only the "esoteric"
writings let him appear as such, in all of the published writings the science
related topics arise as well; but they become visible and fall into place only if
you look at them from the angle of the Nachlaj3.
(4) His attitude towards science, however, is neither pure affirmation nor pure
negation; it is rather one of philosophical criticism. As Nietzsche himself says
in the fourth book of the The Gay Science: "When we criticize something, this
is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is, at least very often, evidence of vital
energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate
because something in us wants to live and to affirm- something that we perhaps
do not know or see as yet" (GS 307). And he concludes without leaving even a
chance of possible misreading: 'This is said in favor of criticism." So it is quite
plausible to expect at least two different types of attitude towards science in
Nietzsche. These two attitudes towards science, however, correlate rather neatly
with two different concepts of science. So it is not even necessary to stylize
Nietzsche either as a scientist in disguise or as a prophetic seer.
In what follows I intend to defend these presuppositions (which, having been
made explicit, are properly speaking not presuppositions any longer, but are
rather to be regarded as hypotheses) by narrowing them down to some
exemplary cases. I am especially interested in showing that the seemingly rather
metaphysical or obscure constraints in Nietzsche's mature thoughts, e.g. the
ideas of "eternal recurrence" and even of "will to power," can be consistently
256 WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLY

interpreted as elements of Nietzsche's encompassing criticism of science. I

know that by doing so I might expose one of the most misinterpreted German
philosophers to the danger of being stripped of his dark and seemingly deep
mysticism. But this is, in my opinion, not a danger or a risk, but rather a good
opportunity for a rehabilitation of his reputation. As he himself puts it in an
aphorism tellingly titled "Being profound and seeming profound":

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound
to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of
something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water. (GS 173)

In short: I agree with some of the more recent Nietzsche-scholars, 5 that to

relate his thoughts back to his original intentions of criticism of science could
prove the soundness and profoundness of his thoughts by revealing their
complex but consistent clarity. As a matter of fact, in his later "exoteric"
writings which were published during his lifetime, Nietzsche himself gave
several hints and leads. In his "Attempt at Self-criticism," for instance, which
served in 1886 as a preface to the second edition of the Birth of Tragedy, he says
that this book, which was considered to be a contribution to classics, to
aesthetics, to history of culture, to mythology, etc. had in actual fact dealt with
another problem:

What l then got hold of. something frightful and dangerous, a problem with horns but not
necessarily a bull. in any case a new problem- today I should say that it was the problem of
science itself; science considered for the first time as problematic, as questionable. (BT, Preface
2)

II

The years of Nietzsche's philosophically productive life are by the scholarly

literature on Nietzsche usually divided into three periods, the first ending in
1878, the second lasting until 1882, the third including the last seven years until
1889/90, and there have been numerous attempts by scholars, devoted to the
methods of a developmental approach, to give an adequate reconstruction of the
development of Nietzsche's thoughts by dividing it also in three different
subsets of ideas. Although I think indeed that a developmental approach can be
of some critical use in order to avoid misunderstandings, I do not consider it
necessary or even helpful to break Nietzsche's philosophy down into small
pieces. As a matter of fact, that would, in consequence, lead to an infinite
hermeneutical regress, because there is no reason to stop that process at a given
stage once it has been started. For it goes without saying that the legitimation
to do so (i.e. that people usually change their mind while becoming older) is
valid for every fraction again, and the operation of breaking it down into even
smaller pieces could be applied indefinitely often.
On the contrary, instead of being explained by the development of his
thinking Nietzsche's critical attitude towards science could in my opinion itself
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE 257

be capable of explaining the different developmental stages of his thought. The,

as it were, mechanism of this development would, according to this
interpretation, consist in a continuous exteriorization of previously esoteric
thoughts. I will therefore in what follows, without concentrating on the
developmental facet of Nietzsche's philosophical thinking; systematically listing
and classifying what I consider to be his most pertinent presuppositions, thus
reconstructing a hypothetical framework of Nietzsche's "esoteric and
transcendental" beliefs with respect to logic, epistemology, and methodology. 6
The only way a procedural approach like this can be justified is by its heuristic
success or failure.
(1) I begin with one of his main assumptions which turns out to be of both
logical and epistemological importance. I would like to call this the error-truth-
asymmetry-assumption. In his unpublished notes one frequently finds
considerations like the following one which originates from the early 80's
(between spring and falll881):

Without assuming a certain kind of being, opposed to the true reality, we should have nothing
for it to be measured against, compared with. and projected upon: error is a precondition of truth.
Partial inertia, relative solids, equal events, similar events - by those concepts we falsify the true
state of affairs, but it would be impossible to know anything about it at all without having it thus
falsified in the first place. For every cognition therefore is still false indeed, but at least thus some
kind of representing does exist and among the representations again many degrees of the false
exist. To find out the degrees of the false as well as the necessity of the fundamental error being
the condition of life for the representing Being - task of science. The question is not how error
could be possible, but: How is a certain kind of truth possible, despite the fundamental untruth? 7

In addition to this, he says: "It is not the cognition which belongs to the
essence of the things, but the error" (KSA 9, 566). The logical symmetry of
True and False as expressed in the logical function of contradiction and in the
related logical principles of Non-contradiction and of the Excluded Middle, is
to the eyes of Nietzsche nothing but an abstraction, whereas in our conscious
being among other beings, i.e. as far as knowledge is concerned, a fundamental
asymmetry between error and truth is to be observed or rather: to be
experienced. Not only is it the case that one can perceive that an opinion or-
scientifically speaking - a hypothesis was wrong, without being able to infer
from this what the true assumption or hypothesis might be - this quite
satisfactorily could be explained by the difference between contrariety and
contradiction. But it is also the case that, given the truth-value of a proposition
p would be F, not any contradicting sentence non-p would necessarily have the
truth-value T. It is quite evident, then, that such a logically irritating
epistemological assumption needs further explanation. At any rate: what needs
no explanation at all, however, is that an assumption of this kind would be of
greatest importance to the respective philosophy.
(2) With respect to methodological questions 8 Nietzsche quite obviously
holds that the methodological differences between the sciences and the arts and
humanities, extensively and intensely discussed in his day, are not decisive at
all. He locates the difference and the related difficulties at quite another place
and on quite another level. As he does not think of science and arts or
258 WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLI

humanities as isolated entities, systems of propositions or logical calculi with

certain semantical interpretations, he includes the social and psychic
environment in his critical philosophizing. Therefore he is of the opinion that
the attempt of 19th century historicism to cope with the sciences by imitating
their methods in order to achieve similar success must fail because it copies, as
it were, the wrong part of the sciences: Instead of imitating procedures and
methods, which in actual fact constitute the weakness of science (and therefore
of the humanities, imitating them, as well) the humanities should rather take
possession of the critical and almost crude attitude of the scientist and apply it
to the objects of the former arts and humanities. Historical methods, on the other
hand, are to be inversely applied to the realm of spirit, mind and morality, as
Nietzsche says already in the famous first chapter of Human, All too Human,
where he combines both, science and humanities, with both, historical and
scientific methods: "Historical philosophy," he says, is a method, "which can
no longer be even perceived of as separate from the natural sciences." 9 "All we
need, something that can be given us only now, is a chemistry of moral,
religious, aesthetic ideas and feelings ... " 10
(3) From this follow many consequent presuppositions as far as different
types and parts of science are concerned. In cosmology, for instance, Nietzsche
holds that thinking of eternal invariability is impossible. Already in his early
unpublished essay on 'The Philosophy in the Tragical Age of the Greeks"
(1873) and even before that in his lectures at the university of Basel (1872) on
the philosophy of the pre-socratic philosophers (whom he called "pre-platonic
philosophers"), Nietzsche emphasized that it was Heraclitus and not Parmenides
who formulated the adequate cosmological principle. In the section of the
lecture that deals with Heraclitus he says: "A rigid persistence can exist
nowhere, simply because one always finally comes across forces, the action of
which includes at the same time a loss of power." 11 This is a very interesting
and, at the same time, intriguing assumption because it will on the one hand be
used by Nietzsche as one of the premises in his cosmological argument of
eternal recurrence, 12 and because it on the other hand already includes a physical
(or better said, "metaphysical") presupposition as to the nature of energy and
forces, to which I therefore now proceed.
(4) Nietzsche is of the opinion- which he, by the way, shares with many
scientists of his as well as most of our day - that the total amount of energy is
constant. He uses the concept [Kraft] which in German can refer to both force
and energy, and he speaks of Kraftmenge (amount/set of energy), referring to
Julius Robert Mayer whose book Mechanik der Wiirme (2nd ed. 1984) he read
in 1881 in Genova. 13 One could, as for instance Martin Bauer has done, call this
physical presupposition a set-theoretical ("mengentheoretisches") principle. 14
It is, among other reasons, important because Nietzsche will use it as a second
premise in his argument of eternal recurrence.
(5) Finally, Nietzsche presupposes that there must be a certain creativity,
some kind of underlying drive which on the one hand has the structure of a
Spinoza-Goethean self-causation and which on the other hand is always
producing new qualities. This principle, analogous to the Darwin-principle,
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE 259

which I would like to call the principle of mutation is of uttermost importance

to Nietzsche and this is one of the reasons why he did not slacken in attempting
to formulate, beyond the physical theory of forces and energy and beyond the
biological theory of evolution, a what I would like to call "trans-physical"
theory of a will to power.
(6) Besides these ideas which Nietzsche took for granted, I should mention
a rather meta-theoretical presupposition which I would like to call the
"anthropomorphism assumption": Nietzsche holds that all human knowledge
must necessarily be anthropomorphic, due to the fact that there is no other
possibility for human beings to look at the world than to look with human eyes.
But that, again, does not mean that there is any other, as it were, more
"objective" way. On the contrary: anthropomorphism is in fact the asymmetrical
(see above) "truth" of the sciences . In fall 1872 Nietzsche writes down the
following (unpublished) note: "It has to be proved that all world-constructions
are anthropomorphisms: even all sciences if Kant was right. However, this
thought is based upon a circular syllogism- if the sciences are right we don't
stand on Kantian grounds, if Kant is right the sciences are wrong" (KSA 7, 459).
And obviously Nietzsche was of the opinion that- at least in this respect and
in his interpretation- Kant was right. -Therefore one always has to be aware
of the fact that every interpretation is anthropomorphic, and the same is true
even with Nietzsche himself. It therefore is to be expected, that his
philosophical criticism of science will attempt to demonstrate that every
scientific "truth" originally is anthropomorphic and that this demonstration itself
is anthropomorphic as well. But as to be anthropomorphic is the - asymmetrical
- definition of being (considered as) true, the fact that this anthropomorphism
equally applies to Nietzsche's own position could - as I said at the beginning
- prove to be not detrimental at all.
By listing these presuppositions I neither pretend that this list is complete nor
that Nietzsche was explicitely using them as premises of his argumentations. It
is rather the case that I am explicitly using them in order to re-construct both his
de- and his con-structive thoughts. (This might- in one way or other- provide
a more viable way of talking "deconstruction" 15 than the nonsensical academic
gibberish that used to be fashionably associated with this notion ... ).
As I said before I will not concentrate on the question of developmental
differences and periods of Nietzsche's work. Instead I will try to outline some
of Nietzsche's explicit critical arguments with respect to epistemology, the
humanities and the sciences. By doing so I will hopefully manage to avoid
falling victim to the "historistic fallacy" already mentioned: that Nietzsche's
philosophical thinking is either disguised or anticipated science. I rather hold
that his philosophical criticism of the scientific world-view of the second half
of the nineteenth century actually is the equivalent or maybe even the
complement to his affirmative ideas of a radical reformulation of epistemology
and ontology.
260 WALTHER CH. ZlMMERLI

III

What we could have known already from the work of Schlechta has been
confirmed by almost all of the recent scholarly writing on Nietzsche: One of his
main interests was to examine thoroughly the previously unquestioned ideal of
the pure scientific "drive for truth" which is both ascetic and self-referential.
Science and knowledge are thought of as being their own means and ends, and
mankind had to strive for (logical or empirical) truth for its own sake. The
presupposition of this idea again was a correspondence-theory of truth which on
its part presupposed both a realistic epistemology and an ontology of the
identity or analogy type.
To speak in rather historical terms, the ideal of scientific truth as it was held
by nineteenth century scientists was in Nietzsche's view an anachronism:
modem empirical science, backed up with a Platonic-Thomistic ontology and
a pre-Kantian epistemology! So Nietzsche, (at least in the first period of his
thinking) strongly influenced by Schopenhauer, decided to follow the Kantian
way of critical philosophy and to even outdo Kant in the question of the theory
of truth which, having allegedly not undergone any progress since Aristotle,
Kant had skipped as is well known 16 . The interesting way Nietzsche approached
this problem is again to be found in the NachlajJ, especially in different small
essays. 17 In the famous essay "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense"
which has almost become a "cult-book" for the French Nietzscheans, Nietzsche
most surprisingly did already anticipate the linguistic tum and its pragmatical
version. He there connects semiotics, logic and science in a theoretical frame
which I would like to break down into the following steps of argument:
(1) Traditionally one would, following the correspondence-theory of truth,
define truth as "adequatio rei et intellectus" (St. Thomas Aquinas), i.e. as
correspondence between concept and thing, respectively between proposition
and state of affairs. Belonging to the class of semantical definitions of truth this
definition presupposes that there is something like a definite relation, called
"adequatio" or "correspondence" between concept (sign) and thing (referent),
resp. between proposition and state of affairs. But - and this is what Nietzsche
claims in the first place - one cannot possibly name a non-circular or non-
tautological criterion for the adequacy of this relation. This would only be the
case if something like a natural signification existed as, for instance, the early
Plato in his dialogue "Kratylos" thought. Because, however, a natural
signification does not exist, the correspondence-theory of truth is not sufficient,
plausible as it may be. Therefore, Nietzsche claims that the relation between
signs and referents is originally an arbitrary, even aesthetical one, and the signs
are rather metaphors than copies or analogous images of the referents. And he
defines metaphors in a short note, written down in the fall 1872, as follows:
"Metaphor means to treat something as identical which has been recognized as
similar in one point." 18 But as the notion of "similarity between these two
levels" is not (or rather cannot possibly be) well defined, not even similarity is
to be found between signs and referents.
(2) That leaves the theory of truth with the formal criterion of consistency or
- linguistically speaking - with the syntactical criterion: True is a sentence if
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE 261

and only if it can be deductively inferred from another true sentence by means
of tautological transformation. But by using this criterion we obviously get but
"shallow tautologies" (Kant), and again the task of finding a non-circular or
non-tautological criterion of truth is not fulfilled. So the consistency-theory of
truth will not do either.
(3) The only possible way out would therefore be the - again linguistically
speaking - pragmatical criterion. Because, as later on Wittgenstein will put it,
the meaning of a sign is the use you make of it, what we mean by "truth" does
obviously also depend on use and the situation of the use as well. In short: we
have to name the criteria for truth by telling the story of the different situations
in which it turned out to be useful to distinguish some metaphors from others by
attributing "truth" to them. The resulting "theory" of truth consists therefore of
two parts: a) of the theory of metaphors and b) of the history of replacing the
knowledge that signs are essentially metaphorical, by the opinion that consistent
use of the same metaphors in the same situations is useful for human beings.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short,
a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified. transferred, and
embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.
Truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn
out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now
considered metal and no longer coins. (TL, 84)

The only criterion left is therefore the principle of usefulness; human beings
in actual fact desire not truth, but rather "the pleasant, life-preserving
consequences of truth" (PT, 65). 19
(4) Therefore the criterion for truth lies beyond reasoning and is connected
with the principle of self-preservation in a not individually restricted sense. The
invention of language being the invention of a reliable way for human beings
to communicate and live together is thus embedded in an evolutionary
framework, 20 and therefore, using language and knowing coincide in this
interpretation. In one of the five unpublished prefaces titled "On the Pathos of
Truth," Nietzsche formulates this evolutionary approach in rather poetical
language, expressing at the same time the marginal position of mankind sub
specie aeternitatis.

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of the universe which is dispersed into
numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.
It was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of world history, but nevertheless only a minute.
After nature had drawn a few breaths the star cooled and solidified, and the clever beasts had to
die. The time had come too, for although they boasted of how much they had understood, in the
end they discovered to their great annoyance that they had understood everything falsely. They
died, and in dying they cursed truth. (PT, 65)

Using his assumption of the asymmetry between error and truth Nietzsche
emphasizes here that just because of the metaphorical "lie" -character of
language, to totally rely on it (as the nineteenth century ideology of pure
scientific truth does) would tum out to be a completely false understanding of
262 WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLI

knowing. And this is exactly why- in Nietzsche's poetical language- "in dying
they cursed truth." The abstract idea of truth, in disregarding the ultimate
connection with the criterion of truth, turns out to be absurd and disfunctional.
(5) The issue of language and knowledge to construct a firm, reliable edifice
of concepts is, according to the anthropomorphism-assumption of Nietzsche, on
the one hand definitely in vain, but on the other hand even conquers its own
actors: the human beings. In the second part of "On Truth and Lies in an
Extramoral Sense," Nietzsche describes this connection by using the metaphor
of the Babylonian tower, thus evoking the idea of an encompassing chaos
caused by different languages, different types of knowledge and different
sciences:

We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction [in German: "Bau"
which could mean both "construction" and "edifice"] of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages
by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey. so science
works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions. It is
always building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and renovating the old cells; above
all, it takes pains to fill up this monstrously towering framework and to arrange therein the entire
empirical world, which is to say. the anthromorphic world. (TL. 88)

Although it is not our main concern, it should nevertheless be mentioned, that

Nietzsche in his early writings was of the opinion that myth and especially art
could be remedies against the, as he puts it, "sheltering" activities of science
which constructs "a regular and rigid new world [... ] as its prison from its own
ephemeral products, the concepts" (TL, 89). Myth and art are characterized by
their being "frightful powers which oppose scientific 'truth' with completely
different kinds of 'truths,"' thus embodying "the drive toward the formation of
metaphors" which now is called "the fundamental human drive" (ibid.).
To summarize: Nietzsche outlines a semiotic theory of truth, which connects
language, formation of concepts, knowledge and science with a fundamental
aesthetic act of creating metaphors. The only criterion of truth that remains after
the critical examination of both the correspondence- and coherence- (or
consistency-) theory of truth is the pragmatical criterion of usefulness, which
Nietzsche links to the evolutionary framework of cosmology as a whole and to
evolution of mankind and of knowledge in particular. Science, then, is
understood as a special kind of language, i.e. of regularly connected metaphors,
which are extremely rigid and seemingly never changing. But, by regarding
them in this evolutionary way, we notice that they are changeable and
metaphorically created like all other parts of language. So Nietzsche actually
challenges not only the epistemological but also the ontological presuppositions
by means of which nineteenth century science perceives itself: a criticism of a
realistic interpretation of terms deprives also the respective ontology of a "thing
in itself." Therefore, neither a materialistic nor an idealistic ontology in the strict
sense are compatible with Nietzsche's criticism of science proper.
But before turning to that I will have to deal with one possible objection
which- since the days of the ancient scepticism and the arguments against it-
has always been close at hand. I am of course talking about one of the more or
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE 263

less transcendental arguments of pragmatic inconsistency already mentioned:

How could Nietzsche possibly claim that there is no such thing like truth,
without manifestly contradicting himself pragmatically, because by the very act
of claiming that there is no truth he in actual fact is claiming that this claim is
true.
The standard (Russell-type) answer to this objection would distinguish
between object-level- and meta-level-use of language and prohibit to mix up
statements of these two levels; i.e. prohibit self-referential propositions on truth-
values. By doing so it does, however,- and this has been completely overlooked
by almost everybody - not confirm, but deny that there is something like a
pragmatic self-contradiction included in Nietzsche's claim. Looked upon from
this perspective Nietzsche could indeed claim that there is no such thing like the
truth of object-level-propositions without in actual fact denying the possibility
of meta-level truth. In the terminology of Leibniz and Tarski: Although it might
not be possible to name criteria for the truth of a proposition p, it still might be
possible to call the meta-proposition "p is false" true and name criteria for it,
and the same would be valid of the second-order meta-proposition "The meta-
proposition 'pis true' is true." But neither would it make sense to say that pis
false nor that the meta-proposition "p is false" is false.
A somewhat more sophisticated reply would deny the detrimental effect of
pragmatic self-contradictions: Why should it be harmful to Nietzsche's claim
that there is no such thing like truth if it applied to Nietzsche's own claim as
well? If there is no such thing like truth then of course Nietzsche's own claim
isn't true either. But due to Nietzsche's principle of error-truth-asymmetry the
fact that Nietzsche's claim itself isn't true does not necessarily imply that it is
false. It could be something of which we do not know (and probably even
cannot know) whether it is true or false.
By combining these two lines of argumentation another facet of the
asymmetry-assumption becomes visible: The above-mentioned priority of error
over truth on the object-level (which as a matter of fact is the epistemologically
relevant level) results in an inverse priority of truth-propositions over falsehood-
propositions. The extra-logical pragmatico-evolutionary criterion on the
contrary is applicable to both object-level and meta-level propositions, although
one should better speak of "utterances" than of "propositions": Whether
something is of use for somebody in order to survive or not can - at least after
the fact- easily be decided. Although there are different degrees in the answer
(because an utterance might not only be useful or not, but might be more or less
useful), as far as survival is concerned, however, a clearcut two-valued system
exists: he who is not dead, lives. But taken one step further still our deliberation
becomes irritating: It might be possible that it cannot be decided whether we
have survived because or despite of what we did because we could as well die
tomorrow. So, although the fact that a species had to die does- in evolutionary
terms - prove that what they did was not useful (= what they said or thought was
false), the fact that a species is still alive does not prove that what they did was
useful (= what they said was true)!
264 WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLI

IV

Having thus uncovered Nietzsche's semiotic theory of truth as making use of the
asymmetry-assumption and implying consequences for the understanding of the
historicity and anthropomorphism of science, I now will proceed to different
cases of criticism of the natural sciences in Nietzsche's philosophy and to their
connections with some of his cardinal ideas. As we know both from the records
of the university-library of Basee 1 and from notes Nietzsche took as well as
from letters he wrote, he was during the 70's and 80's very much concerned to
keep up with the development of new ideas in the sciences and to gain a proper
understanding of these innovations. His readings of the primary sources have
been guided primarily by rather popular authors: Johann Karl Friedrich Zollner
and Johann Gustav Vogt were two of the interesting ones. Nietzsche read
Zollner's book on the nature of the comets22 already in 1872; we know that he
borrowed it four times from the library (Nov. 6, 1872; March 28, Oct. 2, 1873
and April 13, 1874), and in the NachlaJ3 of the SO's (and once in the published
writings), he quotes Zollner obviously approving of his thoughts, whereas
otherwise Zollner was harshly criticized. 23 What seems to have impressed him
most were not Zollner's nationalistic ideas or his attacks on Helrnholtz 24 but his
epistemological contention that in the sciences much too many useless
experiments were put through. In the fall of 1873 Nietzsche notes:

The same deficiencies Zollner is deploring, the endless carrying through of experiments and the
lack of logical-deductive power, can be found within the historical disciplines- underestimation
of the Classical compared with the Antiquarian: in this way the sense of historical science is going
to be lost, everything becomes shallow. Similar to the fact that in the natural sciences the "image
of the world" is becoming increasingly mean and common, the "image of the past" decays in the
historical sciences 25

Closely connected with this criticism is the objection that general laws in
nature and in history are of no use for the individual case because they tell only
something about averages. Thus Nietzsche poses an even more radical
methodological question than Zollner.
From this sceptical point of view (as far as the value of experimental
confirmation and especially inductive methods is concerned), Nietzsche starts
to review different scientific theories. It goes without mentioning that he does
not just eclectically pick results which have been accomplished by reiterated
experiments. He speaks of the "abuse of knowledge by eternally reproducing
experiments and collecting materials whereas the conclusion would already
result from few experiments and materials." 26 He is rather interested in the
theoretical parts especially of physics, astrophysics, cosmology and chemistry.
One of the most fascinating scientific projects of his days was the ongoing
change of the foundations of theoretical physics. Nietzsche therefore took a
great interest in the discussions about e.g. the principles of thermodynamics. As
far as the principle of the conservation of energy is concerned we know that he
read Julius Robert Mayer's book Mechanik der Warme. 27 He quotes the title of
Helmholtz's essay Uber die Erhaltung der Kraft (1847), apparently without
explicitly referring to him. He probably knew Ernst Mach's essay on "Die
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQCE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE 265

Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit" (1872).
However this may have been, he certainly did use Johann Gustav Vogt's book
on Die Kraft. Eine realmonistische Weltanschauung (1878) which Overbeck
sent 1881 to Nietzsche who, after having read a critical discussion of this book
and other books in Otto Cas pari's collected essays titled Der Zusammenhang
der Dinge (1881), had asked for it. 28 Besides these books, Nietzsche also
possessed numerous books which dealt with the second principle of
thermodynamics and with the problem of entropy implied therein.
The traces of his persistent occupation with these theoretical debates within
the natural sciences can be found in the unpublished as well as in other
published writings, in the 80's turning from logical, epistemological and
methodological to rather content-oriented questions. His criticism of science
therefore changes its direction considerably: It is not scientific attitude and the
ideal of objectivity any more that are to blame, but the as it were "blinders" with
which each special scientific discipline equips itself. If one would combine
different angles or perspectives one could - genealogically - utilize them in
order to erect what he himself calls in an unpublished fragment of spring 1888
"the new world-conception." Incited by Johann Gustav Vogt's assumption that
Mayer's principle of the limited and constant amount of energy
[Konstanzprinzip] necessarily presupposes circularity, and using as an
unquestioned first premise his own assumption of the impossibility of rigid
persistence of power, Nietzsche develops his argument in a five-step-sequence
which I will analyze as follows:
(1) The world exists in the way of corning into being and fading, but it does
not itself originate or pass away; in coming into being it persists.
(2) The world has no beginning; the idea of creation uses not only the
undefinable concept of "creation," but it also tries to give an explanation by
using "nothing" (cf. "creatio ex nihilo") as explanans and "world" as
explanandum.
(3) It is neither impossible nor self-contradictory to think of an infinitude of
time in the future. "Finitude of time" would mean that the world could
temporally come to an end, i.e. become nothing or become rigidly persistent
without any change in it. But if this was possible, it would have already had
happened given that an infinite time had already passed.
(5) From this the theory of eternal recurrence follows as a logical
consequence. I quote the respective text literally:

If the world may be conceived as a definite quantity of energy [Kraft] and as a definite number of
energy-centres [Kraftzentren]- and all other conceptions remain indefinite and therefore useless
- it follows that it has to pass a calculable number of combinations in the great dice game of its
existence. In an infinite time every possible combination would be reached at some time;
moreover, it would be reached infinitely often. And because between any given "combination" and
its "recurrence" all other possible combinations would had to have run down and because every
one of these other combinations condition the whole sequence of combinations in the same order,
this would be the proof for a succession which has been repeated infinite times and which will play
its game in infinitum.
This conception is not necessarily a mechanistical one: for, if it were, it would not condition
an infinite recurrence, but a final stage. Because the world has not reached this final stage the
266 WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLI

mechanistical point of view has to be considered an imperfect and only preliminary hypothesis.
(KSA 13, 376)

The quotation outlines Nietzsche's basic thoughts in a highly-condensed way.

We will therefore have to look at it more closely in order to disclose the hidden
constraints of argumentation.
Already in the first sentence of it we find two non-analytical, i.e. non-
tautological assumptions of a pragmatic type which Nietzsche obviously takes
for granted, and he furthermore surprisingly enough offers a seemingly
tautological argument in their favour: Being assumptions of somehow definite
character they must be at least of some use, because he says that indefinite
assumptions concerning the world would be of no use.
It is obvious that in order to make this conclusive we would have to explicitly
introduce two additional presuppositions at which we in consequence have to
now take a closer look before we can answer the question as to the soundness
of his argumentation. I will call these presuppositions
a) the presupposition of quantitative definiteness of energy [Kraft], and
b) the presupposition of numerical definiteness of energy-centres
[ Kraftzentren].
As far as the quantitative definiteness of energy is concerned it makes perfect
sense to asume that Nietzsche utilizes in this respect a rational interpretation of
the first principle of thermodynamics. He could have dealt with the self-
preservation of an infinite amount of energy as well, but this would make no
sense within the scientific frame of reference he is using. In one of the later
fragments he recollects that this frame of reference is in itself a secularized
version of Christian belief:

By which statement and by which belief the decisive change best expresses itself which came
about because of the preponderance of the scientific spirit over the religious spirit that invents
fictitious gods? We insist that the world as energy [Kraft] must not be thought of as being infinite
-we prohibit ourselves from using a concept of infinite energy being incompatible with the very
concept of "energy." (KSA 9, 574)

Therefore the first principle of thermodynamics in Nietzsche's interpretation

has to be understood as a principle asserting not just definiteness, but also
finitude of the total amount of energy.
The numerical definiteness of what he calls "energy-centres" on the other
hand is a somewhat more difficult case. In other places Nietzsche talks about
states [Lagen] of energy by which he seems to understand different
configurations and combinations of energy. This is why I think we should better
speak of situations of energy. Given that every situation of energy has its own
energy-centre, then this second presupposition implies that there has to be a
definite number of energy-situations. In what I call "energy-situation" or
"energy-configuration," the idea of a pattern, i.e. of qualitative characteristics,
is implied. Therefore the assertion of numerical definiteness of energy-centres
asserts at the same time also the numerical definiteness of qualitative states. And
that corresponds to J.R. Mayer's idea of the Erhaltung des Kraftquantums. 29
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE 267

Nietzsche formulates this in a fragment from between spring and fall 1881 as
follows:

Consequently, the number of situations, changes, combinations and developments of this energy
("Kraft") is tremendously great and almost "immeasurable," but in any case definite and by no
means indefinite. But the time during which the universe exerts its energy is indeed infinite, i.e.
the energy is forever the same and forever active. 30

This fragment is only of importance if the German expression unbestimmt is

translated by using the word "indefinite"; it immediately loses all its
significance when translated with "infinite," as unfortunately e.g. A.C. Danto
did? 1 For what Nietzsche is discussing here are three different states: a) infinity
of time, b) definiteness of the number of energy situations, meaning a number
that is greater than calculable although not infinite, and c) finitude of energy;
and what he does is to combine them in a sort of post-Kantian transcendental
argument. He does not develop an ontology or a cosmology in a pre-critical
sense. Instead he gives an analysis of what can be thought without contradiction
according to his anthropomorphism-principle. So the argument could be
reconstructed as follows:
(I) If the amount of energy were finite and
(2) if the number of energy situations were definite, although greater than
calculable, and
(3) if time were infinite,
(4) then, applying the mathematical rules of combination, a consistent
conclusion could be
that every single energy situation could have to be considered as eternally
recurring.
Of course one would have to use the mathematical standard definitions of the
infinite and of the numbers that are finite, but greater than calculable, as well as
of the conception of the possibility of consistent argumentation. But under these
conditions the argument could prove valid as a counteifactual conditional-type
argument, and no other premises would be needed as again Danto was thinking
because of the reason just mentioned: If the difference between the finite and the
definite is blurred or even omitted at all, then it becomes necessary to introduce
quite a few additional premises. The above defined interpretation of Kraft-
Lagen, i.e. energy situations, does imply a spatial aspect, the concept "situation"
being defined as a coordination of elements in space at a given time. To speak
metaphorically: In any finite kaleidoscope, the number of possible "situations"
(configurations) is finite. So, in an infinite time, every situation has to recur
infinite times. Whereas in the kaleidoscope-metaphor we speak metaphorically
and counterfactually of something in space and time, the eternal recurrence-
theorum talks counterfactually of space and time, and every energy situation is
to be conceived as if it were a configuration of space-time-quantums. 32
This difference might also be revealing as far as our other question is
concerned. As we see now it is primarily not the difference between analytical
and empirical argumentation that makes the difference between two
presuppositions on the one hand and the argument Nietzsche uses on the other.
268 WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLI

It is rather a matter of distinguishing between pseudoempirical or "realistic" and

theoretical or "counterfactual" argumentation. If in actual fact, as Nietzsche puts
it, the criterion of the scientific approach to the world in comparison with the
religious approach is to be found in the definiteness as opposed to the infinitude,
then any indefinite world-conception would necessarily have to fail.
The result of this, as it were, case-study, therefore, is that Nietzsche made
critical use of the scientific results of his days. By "critical" I mean that he
neither simply, i.e. realistically accepted scientific results without questioning
them nor just utilized them by building them into his own thoughts. He rather
tried to find arguments in their favour or counterarguments in order to later
combine and rethink the ones he considered valid, and simply omitted or
reformulated the other ones. So his theory of eternal recurrence e.g. implies a
massive criticism of the second principle of thermodynamics if it is interpreted
realistically. Although he was well aware of the importance of the findings
connected with the names of Helmholtz, Carnot, Thomson, and Clausius he
considered them to be relevant only in a limited and finite system. Closely
following the ideas of Vogt's already mentioned first book Die Kraft, 13 or
maybe even Eugen Dtihring, Friedrich Albert Lange, Otto Liebmann, Carl von
Nageli or Kurt Lasswitz, 34 Nietzsche argues that if entropy should be possible
it would, according to the main thoughts of recurrence-theory, necessarily have
happened a long time ago. Therefore only the hidden but scientifically
unacceptable assumption of a creator could help; otherwise one would have to
admit that the whole process was circular.
By this example of a counterfactual rejection of scientific results we have
achieved another insight: If the idea of an end of the world-process was
contradictory in the same sense as the idea of a beginning of it, then neither
scientific explanations of the aristotelian teleological type nor scientific
explanations of the modern mechanico-causal type would really make sense.
This conclusion does not originate from some kind of naturalistic
methodological fallacy because it is not inferred from statements about an, as
it were, states of affairs "in themselves" but rather from a comparison of
perspectives or- semiotically - of the connection between metaphors: to think
of the world as being neither causally nor teleologically oriented is prohibitive
for even attempting to explain them causally or teleologically. 35

v
In the aforesaid, two thoughts need further explanation: the change of energy
situations and the consequences it has for the again inversely (and reflexively)
relevant question of the situation of the thinking human beings including the
scientists (as well as the philosophers) and therefore including the development
of science (and philosophy) as a whole. I hold that a good possibility to at least
approximating these explanations consists in discussing them in their relation
to both the concept of will to power and, again, Nietzsche's criticism of science.
Until now we have discussed the idea of eternal recurrence as a conclusion
drawn from hypothetically or counterfactually connected premises which, in
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE 269

their tum, have been demonstrated as the outcome of Nietzsche's critical

evaluation of scientific theories he was familiar with. I will not proceed to
accumulate evidence for his persevering interest in physics or even cosmology;
I will rather try to penetrate deeper into Nietzsche's philosophical "second
thoughts" by first of all asserting that - despite his manifest engagement in the
science of his days - it would be too short-sighted to interpret his idea of an
eternal recurrence as a mere physical or even "cosmological hypothesis." As I
said before, in my opinion this thought is a result of the attempt to
counterfactually combine different ways of looking at the world with some
aspects of a criticized scientific world-view and with the both semiotic and
functionalist approach to the problem of truth - thus representing in itself an
example of the theoretical perspectivism it talks about. But if this is the case,
then eternal recurrence is in some way or other the fundamental principle neither
of nature nor of culture and society, but of perceiving not only nature but also
culture and society. We do not have to question this consequence further; but we
need this thought in order to understand why Nietzsche could use such an
extremely misleading expression like will to power. Even if he would have used
it in a purely Machiavellian sense (which in my opinion he has not done) the
anthropomorphism-principle could help to explain that. 36
To my mind, however, the will to power was originally not conceived in this
sense as I said before. Although the concept "will to power" sounds both
Machiavellian and Schopenhauerian, these two names only give a historical hint
as to possible directions of interpretation. We therefore might better begin with
our analysis of the problems that still need further explanation. Nietzsche
himself mentioned his conviction that the existence of the world has to be
perceived as its constant internal change, a process of never-ending becoming
and fading. What we were talking about when we discussed eternal recurrence,
were, as it were, snapshots of this eternal movement, solidified instants of
motion, each of them showing an individual pattern of energy [Knift]. We know
that he understood by "energy" [Krafi] only manifest energy [wirkende Kraft]
whereas latent energy was not in his mind.
What is missing in this conception is therefore the principle of motion. This
is what Nietzsche calls "will to power" and he explains that in an elucidating
fragment from spring 1888, titled "Will to power in principle" with a subtitle
"Criticism of the concept cause":

I need the starting point "will to power" as origin of motion. Therefore the motion must not be
externally conditioned- not caused ... I need initiatory points and centres of motion for the will
to gain ground ... (KSA 13, 274)

And a few pages later he connects this concept explicitly with recurrence:
"As a matter of fact science has emptied the concept "causality" and has left it
as a simile for which it fundamentally doesn't matter on which side cause, on
which side effect. It is ascertained that in two complex states (constellations of
energy) the quanta of energy stay equal. The calculability of an event is not due
to the fact that a law has been followed, that something obeyed a necessity or
270 WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLI

that a law of causality has been projected in every event: it is due to the
recurrence ofidentical cases." (276)
The meaning of "recurrence," however, is somehow different here: to a
twentieth century reader familiar with epistemology and philosophy of science
this sounds less mystical. "Recurrence" now turns out to be nothing but a notion
for what we usually call a "case" of a "law." In Nietzsche's view, however,
there are no "laws" of nature. To think of laws is merely again another
anthropomorphism or- to put it differently- another counterfactual conditional.
By this rather semiotic and pragmatic argumentation the theory of eternal
recurrence and the concept of will to power are linked together.
So "will to power" becomes the conceptual mark for the already quantified
quality of the initiatory points or centres of motion, in the physical world as well
as in that of the spirit. Or rather: the difference between nature and spirit, being
in itself a product of a hypothetical counterfactual world-view in a given
perspective is overcome by this notion itself. Therefore the notion "will to
power" does not denotate anything in the "real world"; what it in actual fact
does, however, is to designate the universal function 37 and by doing so to
replace, on the side of natural sciences, what previously had been called "atom."
Nietzsche is not concerned with what the elements of the world are, but with
different ways of perceiving them; and to his mind they are to be perceived not
as small static parts of matter, but rather as immaterial and yet quantifiable bits
of energy, "power quanta" as Nietzsche calls them.
It has frequently been discussed that Nietzsche, in his early unpublished
manuscripts, was already trying to overcome the atomistic conception by an
elaborated "doctrine of time-atoms" outlining a possibility to introduce
temporality into matter. 38 In trying to do that he undoubtedly was strongly
indebted to the eighteenth century Jesuit astronomer and mathematician Robert
Boscovich? 9 Greg Whitlock has recently even called Boscovich' s theory of
force "the parent theory to both the eternal return of the same and the theory of
will to power." 40 Nietzsche probably, as is widely accepted by the relevant
scholarly literature41 , made the acquaintance ofBoscovich's "Theory of Natural
Philosophy" 42 by the mediation of Gustav Th. Fechner's book Uber die
physikalische und philosophische Atomenlehre. 43 In the second edition of his
book Fechner discusses Boscovich's theory to some extent44 because he was
surprised about the similarities between it and his own conception of force-
points without extension. It is the neo-kantian historian of materialism, Friedrich
Albert Lange, then who in turn discusses Fechner's theory of a "philosophical
atomism," and Lange is, as we know e.g. from the work of Salaquarda and of
Stack, 45 one of the main sources of Nietzsche's early discussions of atomistic
materialism. 46 These are the background ideas Nietzsche used when he replaced
the conception of material atoms by the conception of "power quanta."
In his later unpublished writings Nietzsche connects this idea with his
doctrine of anthropomorphism and universal perspectivism, i.e., with his theory
of truth, knowledge and science as discussed above. In the context of his
discussion of the will to power and the eternal recurrence we find a note which
he wrote also in spring of 1888:
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE 271

The physicists believe in their peculiar way in a "true world": a rigid systematization of atoms in
necessary motions, identical for all beings. The "apparent world" for them is therefore reduced to
that side of the general and universally necessary Being which is accessible to every being in its
own way (accessible and in addition adapted- made "subjective"). But by doing so the physicists
got lost: the atom that they take for granted is constructed according to the logic of the
perspectivism of consciousness- it therefore is itself a subjective fiction. This physicalist image
of the world which they thus project is not at all different in essence from the "Subjective-World-
Image": it is only constructed by our senses extended into thought, but still with our senses ... And
finally they omitted something in the constellation without being aware of it: just the necessary
perspectivism by virtue of which each centre of energy [Kraftzentrum]- not only man- constructs
the world by itself, i.e. measures it against its own energy, touches it, forms it... They forgot to
include this perspective-giving energy into the "true Being." To say it in the language of
Academia: they forgot the "Subject-being." (KSA 13, 373)

This line of criticism leads back to our second question: the role of thinking
human beings within the whole conception of will to power and eternal
recurrence. It has been commonly acknowledged by the Nietzsche-scholars'
community that the will to power is singular only as far as it is regarded as a
principle of knowledge. But insofar as it is considered to be a principle
concerning the appearance, however adapted it may be, it has to explain the
difference between single appearances without which no appearance could be
perceived at all. Because difference includes plurality, the appearing will to
power is to be conceived as being, in itself, pluralistic: Therefore we should
only speak of the "wills to power" in plural. 4
The wills to power could in their part again be dealt with under different
headings which correspond with our regular general concepts. Nietzsche himself
gives various examples in the form of lists. I quote for the sake of clarification
just one of them (also from the spring of 1888):

Will to power as "natural law"

will to power as life
will to power as art
will to power as morality
will to power as politics
will to power as science
will to power as religion. (KSA 13, 254)

Therefore science is in itself in Nietzsche's view one of the appearances of

will to power; in other places he speaks of logic as being a sort of will to power,
or of the soul as will to power. One could now, combining this thought with the
previously mentioned idea of an ever changing circular process of being,
conjecture that science in itself as well as the scientists as human beings and
their thoughts were conceived by Nietzsche anticipating e.g. the evolutionary
epistemology (Popper, Lorenz et al. 48 ). But this would be a mistake although
Nietzsche as early as 1876 writes in the first section of Human All Too Human
(published in 1878) that a history of human thinking be written and that this
could even turn out to be the ultimate success of science ("science" here in the
second meaning: genealogy).
272 WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLI

The steady and arduous process of science, which will ultimately celebrate its greatest triumph in
an ontogeny of thought, will deal with all these views. Its conclusion might perhaps end up with
this tenet: That which we now call the world is the result of a number of errors and fantasies,
which came about gradually in the overall development of organic beings, fusing with one another,
and now handed down to us as a collected treasure or our entire past- a treasure: for the value of
our humanity rests upon it. From this the world of ideal strict science can, in fact, release us only
to a small extent (something we by no means desire), in that it is unable to break significantly the
power of ancient habits of feeling. But it can illuminate, quite gradually, step by step, the history
of the origin of that world as an idea- and lift us, for moments at least, above the whole process.
(HH 16)

But this ontogeny of thought is not conceived as a naturalistic reduction to the

objectifiable evolution of mankind as species within the framework of a, as it
were, "synthetic theory." Nietzsche's main counterpart in evolution-related
questions is of course Charles Darwin, and his main counter-argument is that
Darwin's theory had incredibly overestimated the impact of external factors on
evolution of life, i.e. the mechanism of selection. He says explicitly in a
fragment from the time between the end of 1886 and the spring of 1887:

The influence of "external circumstances" is in D[arwin] overestimated up to the Nonsensical; the

essence of the process of life is just the immense intrinsic power to create forms and shapes - a
power which utilizes, exploits the "external circumstances." (KSA 12, 304)

Again it is the counterfactual presupposition of creativity, of "wills to power"

yearning to become better and more, and again one has to bear in mind that this
is not an ontological principle as e.g. the principle of appetitus in Leibniz, but
a hypothetical counterfactual principle of knowledge which in its part underlies
the conditions of perspectivism. Nietzsche again does not fall victim to a naive
objectivation here. He rather demonstrates the possibility of dealing with
evolutionary ideas without being trapped in realistic mistakes of categories as
e.g. the philosophers are who try to apply the theory of evolution immediately
to the realm of human knowledge. Evolution has to be dealt with as a
counterfactual scientific hypothesis among others which, as a matter of fact, is
in some respect very weak: it hast not yet - except in some small parts of
molecular biology - provided us with a sufficient theoretical analysis and
explanation of the "internal factors" of the creativity which is responsible for
what we call "mutation." 49 And here is a serious argument implied in
Nietzsche's philosophy, an argument against every categorically mislead
application of Darwinism to the evolution of human knowledge.
Nietzsche did obviously learn from the science he critically transformed into
his philosophy. It almost looks as if not just Nietzsche, but also we today could
learn from his criticism of truth and science ...

University of Marburg, Germany

 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE 273

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX OF WORKS AND ARTICLES ON

NIETZSCHE, TRUTH, AND SCIENCE

Abel, G., Nietzsche: Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr, (Berlin/New
York: de Gruyter, 1984).
Anderson, R.L., "Nietzsche's Will to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of Science," Studies in the
History and Philosophy of Science (1995) 25/5:729-750.
Babich, B., Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life,
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).
Boscovich, R., Philosophia Natura/is Theoria redacta ad unicam legem virium in natura
existentium ( 1759), trans!. by J.M. Child: A 1heory of Natural Philosophy, (Cambridge, Mass.:
M.l.T. Press, 1966).
Breazeale, D., Philosophy and Truth, (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979).
Bauer, M., "Zur Genealogie von Nietzsches Kraftbegriff. Nietzsches Auseinandersetzung mit J.G.
Vogt,"Nietzsche-Studien 13 (1984): 211-227.
Clark, M., "Nietzsche's Doctrine of the Will to Power," Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983): 211-227.
Clark, M., Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
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274 WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLI

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philosophischer Titel in Nietzsches idealer Bibliothek," Nietzsche·Studien 25 ( 1996): 394-412.
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1878).
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(Leipzig: Engelmann, 1872).
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niss, 2nd ed. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engekmann, 1872.
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE 275

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Inspired by some of the early critical scholarship on Nietzsche's indebtedness to the scientific
developments of his day, 50 I did my first lecture courses on "Nietzsche as a philosopher of science"
in 1982 at Georgia Augusta University in Gottingen, 1983 at Carola Wilhemina Technical
University in Braunschweig and at the University of Ziirich. Since then I have taught similar
lecture courses, graduate courses and seminars at Emory University (1985), Indiana University in
Bloomington (1991) and Philipps University in Marburg (1997). The occupation with this topic
has also resulted in some articles: cf. Zimrnerli, '"Alles ist Schein'. Bemerkungen zu einer
A.sthetik post Nietzsche und Derrida," in: W. Oelmiiller (ed.), Asthetischer Schein, (Paderborn:
Schoningh, 1982), pp. 147-167; W.Ch. Zimmerli, "Jenseits von Kunst und Wissenschaft. Wie
unzeitgemiiB ist Friedrich Nietzsche?" in: Mesotes, 411992, pp. 334-350; Zimrnerli, "Kombination
und Kommunikation. Zur Differenz des ewig wiederkehrenden Gleichen," (forthcoming).
Different versions of the present essay have been presented on different occasions at different
universities literally all over the world, including the Boston series on philosophy of science, the
University of Pittsburgh colloquium on philosophy of science, the philosophy colloquium at the
Australian National University in Canberra, and the philosophy colloquium at the University of
Stellenbosch, South Africa. I am most grateful to Babette Babich (New York) who first
commented on the paper, then encouraged, and later patiently but insistently urged me to write the
present new version and submit it for publication in this volume. Furthermore I should like to
thank Bob Cohen (Boston), Adolf Grunbaum (Pittsburgh), Rudolf Makreel (Atlanta) and
Alexander Nehamas (Princeton) who also were among the first to critically comment on earlier
versions of this paper, and Joachim Landkammer (Marburg) for his invaluable help in my 1997
Marburg Nietzsche seminar. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the Institute for Advanced
Study (lAS) at Indiana University in Bloomington, especially to Jim Patterson and Henry Remak
who kindly invited me to the Institute for Advanced Studies, now for the second time. Without this
opportunity I couldn't have spent a part of my 1997/98 sabbatical peacefully working on this
paper.

NOTES

Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by G. Colli and M. Montinari,

\BerlinfNew York: de Gruyt~r, 1969 sqq).[Cited fro~ the KSA.- Ed.]
- A. Drews, N1etzsches Phliosoph1e, (Heidelberg: Wmter, 1904).
3 Danto, op. cit., p. 9.
4 Cf. e.g. B. E. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of
Art and Life, (Albany: State University of New York Press), 1994.
5 Cf. e.g. G. Abel, Nietzsche: Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr,
Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1984; K. Spiekermann, Naturwissenschaft als subjektlose Macht?
Nietzsches Kritik physikalischer Grundkonzepte, BerlinfNew York: de Gruyter, 1992.
6 Cf. W.Ch. Zimmerli, 1992, op.cit., p. 335 sqq.
7 KSA 9, 567 f.: 11 [325], my translation in all citations to follow.
By claiming that Nietzsche, belonging- at least in this respect- still very much to the German
tradition, did not make a philosophically decisive distinction between the arts resp. the humanities
and the sciences I am not continuing the debate on the opposition of art and science in Nietzsche,
and especially not the learned discussion about whether or not, and to what extent he was
influenced by Friedrich Albert Lange in this respect; cf. J. Salaquarda, "Nietzsche and Lange,"
Nietzsche-Studien 7 (1978): p. 242 sq., 253; G. Stack. Lange and Nietzsche, Berlin: de Gruyter
1983; esp. pp. 316, 332 et passim; H. Seigfried, "Opposing Science with Art, Again? Nietzsche's
Project According to Stack," International Studies in Philosophy 21 (1989): 105-lll.
9 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. M. Faber with St. Lehmann, (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1984 ). p. 13. Hereafter cited as HH.
10 HH, p. 14.
11 Werke. GroBoktav-Ausgabe, 2nd. ed., (Leipzig: Kroener, 1901-1913), XIX, 174. My

translation, hereafter cited as GOA

12 See below p. 269.
276 WALTHER CH. ZIMMERLI

13 Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by. G. Colli and M. Montinari, (Berlin/New York:

de Gruyter, 1975) III/2, pp. 158ff). Hereafter cited as KGB.

14 M. Bauer, "Zur Genealogie von Nietzsches Kraftbegriff. Nietzsches Auseinandersetzung mit

J.G. Vogt," Nietzsche-Studien 13 (1984): 218.

15 With respect to the epistemological effect of a similar interpretation of deconstruction cf. A.

Schrift, "Language, Metaphors and Rhetoric: Nietzsche's Deconstruction of Epistemology,"

{ournal of the History of Philosophy, XXIII/3,3 (1985): 371-375.
' 6 I. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B VIII.
17 Most of these essays are included in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans!. by D. Breazeale,

New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979- and in a rather good translation too'
18 KSA 7, 498 (trans!. by Schrift, 1985, op.cit., p. 374):
19 KSA 1, 878 (trans!. by Breazeale, 1979, op.cit., p. 65).

°
2 Cf. C.U.M. Smith, "'Clever Beasts Who Invented Knowing': Nietzsche's Evolutionary Biology
of Knowledge," Biology and Philosophy, 2 (1987): 65-91; G.J. Stack, "Nietzsche's Evolutionary
Epistemology," Dialogos. Revista del Departemento de Filosofia Universidad de Puerto Rico,
XXVII/59 (1992): 75-101.
21 Cf. L. Crescenzi, "Verzeichnis der von Nietzsche aus der Universitatsbibliothek in Basel

entliehenen Bucher (1869-1879)," Nietzsche-Studien (1994) 23:388-442.

22 J.K.F. Zollner, Vber die Natur der Cometen. Beitrdge zu Geschichte und Theorie der

Erkenntniss, 2nd. ed. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1872.

23 Cf. KSA I, p. 795; 7, p. 451.
24 On the scandal Zollner's book caused not because of its epistemological ideas but by both

claiming that, due to the inferiority of the British to the German physicist, Germany was destined
to become the "showplace" of the new epoch of deductive reasoning in science, and at the same
time attacking Hermann von Helmholtz, the dominating figure in German science, cf. Robin
Small, "Nietzsche, Zollner, and the Fourth Dimension," Archiv fiir Geschichte der Philosophic
~1994) 76:278-301, esp. 279-282.
5 KSA 7, 635, my translation.
26 KSA 7, 450 my translation.
27 J.R. Mayer, Die Mechanik der Wiirme in gesammelten Schriften, Zweite umgearbeitete und

vermehrte Auf!., Stuttgart: Cotta, 1874.

28 KGB III/1, pp. 116-118, cf. Bauer, 198 , op. cit., p. 212. Cf. also H. Treiber, '"Das Ausland'

- die 'reichste und gediegenste Registratur' naturwissenschaftlich-philosophischer Titel in

Nietzsches 'idealer Bibliothek' ," Nietzsche-Studien 25 (1996): 394-412.
29 Cf. Bauer, op.cit., pp. 218 sq.
3° KSA 9, 523 (my translation).
31 Danto, 1980, op.cit., p. 205.
32 To me it is quite obvious that A.C. Danto doesn't see the counterfactual character of

Nietzsche's argument. He is assuming a realistic interpretation of Nietzsche's concept of the

infinite and accordingly of the eternal recurrence. This interpretation has become so commonplace
that it has even been named "the standard interpretation." For a discussion and criticism of this
standard interpretation cf. D.W. Conway, "Beyond Realism: Nietzsche's New Infinite,"
International Studies in Philosophy XXII/2 (1990): 93-109, esp. pp. 94 sqq.
: 3 Vogt, 1878, op.cit., p. 110; cf. Bauer, 1984, op.cit., p. 213.
-'4 For an analysis of the different arguments concerning eternal recurrence in the scientific and
philosophical publications between 1850 and 1880 cf. P. d' Iorio, "Cosmologie de I' eternel retour,"
Niet;:sche-Studien 24 (1995): 62-123.
35 Therefore we also do not need to suspect any "secret" scientific point of reference as e.g.

Riemann's geometry or any other theory of the fourth dimension; cf. the debate between Alistair
Moles and George J. Stack: A. Moles, "Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence as Riemannian Cosmol-
ogy," International Studies in Philosophy, 16 (1991): 21-35; G.J. Stack, "Riemann's Geometry
and Eternal Recurrence as Cosmological Hypothesis. A Reply," International Studies in
Philosophy 16 (1991):37-40; cf. again R. Small, 1994, op. cit., esp. pp. 290 sqq.: "Transcendental
physics and the fourth dimension."- And as this is a paper on Nietzsche's theory of truth in
relation to his criticism of science I will not even pretend to discuss the possible ethical
implications of the theorum of the eternal recurrence; cf. S. Marton, "L'eternel retour du meme:
these cosmologique ou imperatif ethique?," Nietzsche-Studien 25 (1996): 42-63.
36 This is obviously not seen by R.L. Anderson who- although in an intelligent way- constructs
a dilemma between perspectivism and the will to power doctrine as a "claim about the unique
underlying essence of the world." Anderson's attempt to "save" this doctrine by reading it "as an
interpretation of the unity of science, i.e. as a view about our way of knowing the world is, of
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE 277

course, no solution, because there is no such thind as a unity of science in Nietzsche's perspectival
thinking: R.L. Anderson, "Nietzsche's Will to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of Science,"
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2515 (1995): 729-750; cf. also - earlier and less
determined - D.A. Freeman, Nietzsche: Wi!I to Power as a Foundation of a Theory of Knowl-
edge," in: International Studies in Philosophy, 20 (1988):3-14.- Still another, although similar
dilemma between the will to power as a metaphysical and as an empirical theory has been posed
by M. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
p. 211 sq. In the words of S. Schwartz, 'The Status of Nietzsche's Theory of the Will to Power
in the Light of Contemporary Philosophy of Science," International Studies in Philosophy, XXV12
(1993): 86 sq.: "Either the will to power theory is metaphysical or it is empirical. If it is
metaphysical, Nietzsche could not have propounded it, since he eschews metaphysics, but if it is
empirical, it is so obviously false that no one would have held it." The "solutions" both of these
authors offer are, however, not very satisfying: Clark concludes that Nietzsche because of this
dilemma does not hold the will to power theory, whereas Schwartz tries to argue that he did hold
it and that it is an empirically falsifiable theory. Both these conclusions suffer from the same
weakness: For a very simple logical and epistemological reason there exists no dilemma: One of
the necessary conditions for a situation to be called "dilemmatic" is complete disjunction: there
have to be two and only two possibilities. The notions of "metaphysical theory" and "empirical
theory" do, however, not constitute a complete disjunction. As we know from recent developments
in the philosophy of science there is a lot more to find in the world of theories than just empirical
and metaphysical ones! Evolution theory e.g. is neither empirically falsifiable nor metaphysical
- and that is true for most fundamental scientific theories and, of course, for all epistemologies!
37 This universal function is what allows for both plurality of perspectives and non-relativistic

epistemology; cf. A. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1985), who even after more than a decade stands his ground against R.L.
Anderson, 1995, op. cit., pp. 730 sqq.
38 Cf. KSA 7, pp. 574 sqq., esp. p. 579.
39 In his later writings Nietzsche even compared the importance of Boscovich's ideas with the the

contribution of Copernicus to human knowledge: KGW V/2, p.541 and VII/2, p.264; cf. R. Small,
"Boscovich Contra Nietzsche," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research XL VI/3 ( 1986): p.
419.
40 G. Whitlock, "Roger Boscovich, Benedict de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche: The Untold

Story, Nietzsche-Studien, 25 (1996): 203.

41 Cf. Schlechta/Anders, 1962, op. cit., p. 128.
42 Roger Boscovich, Philosophia Naturalis Thea ria redacta ad unicam legem virium in natura

existentium, 1759; transl.by J.M. Child, (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1966); cf. G.J. Stack,
"Nietzsche and Boscovich's Natural Philosophy", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62 (1981 ): 69-
87; for differences between the two thinkers, especially with respect to the fact that Boscovich by
way of developing his theory of indivisible ''points of force" in actual fact brings forward quite
forceful arguments against the idea of eternal return, cf. R. Small, 1986, op.cit., esp. p. 420 ..
43 G.T. Fechner, Uber die physikalische und philosophische Atomenlehre, Leipzig: H. Mendels-

sohn, 1864).
44 Op.cit., 2nd ed. 1864, pp. 239-244.
45 Salaquarda, 1978, op.cit., pp.242 sq., 253; Stack, 1983, op.cit., pp. 316, 322 et passim.
46 Stack 1983, op. cit., pp. 37 sq.
47 W. Miiller-Lauter, "Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht," Nietzsche-Srudien, 3 (1974):1-

60; Abel, 1984, op .cit.

48 Cf. Stack, 1992, op. cit; Smith, 1987, op. cit..
49 Cf. Henke, 1984, op. cit., pp. 195 sq.
50 E.g., A.C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher. An Original Study, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia

UP, 1980); J. Krueger, "Nietzschean Recurrence as a Cosmological Hypothesis." Journal of the

History of Philosophy XVI/4 (1978): 435-444; B. Magnus, "Eternal Recurrence," Nietzsche-
Studien 8 (1979): 362-377; W. Mittelman, "The Relation between Nietzsche's Theory of the Will
to Power and his Earlier Conceptions of Power," Nietzsche-Studien 9 (1980): 122-141; R. Pfeffer,
"Eternal Recurrence in Nietzsche's Moral Philosophy," The Review of Metaphysics 19 (1965):
267-300; K. Schlechta/A. Anders, Friedrich Nietzsche. Fan den verborgenen Anfangen seines
Philosophierens, (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1962).
 ANDREA REHBERG

NIETZSCHE'S TRANSVALUATION OF CAUSALITY

This paper discusses Nietzsche's critique of causality, as one of the central

concepts of science, under the aspect of his physiological thinking. Causality is
not of course the only concept Nietzsche problematises as part of his compre-
hensive critique of scientific and metaphysical conceptuality - substance,
subject, telos and the concept of scientific law, for instance, could also be
mentioned. But Nietzsche's critique of causality occupies a central role in his
attempt to envisage an affirmative type of science, as opposed to the reductive,
nihilistic conceptuality which he saw to be dominating the science of his day
and which is still largely operative today. At certain points throughout the essay,
Kant's philosophical foundation of natural science in the Critique of Pure
Reason is taken as the paradigm of a philosophy imbued with unacknowledged
metaphysical values against which Nietzsche's type of critique is directed.
The basis on which Nietzsche is able to carry out this critique is that of life
conceived as will to power, and in particular the will to power as valuation, as
the production of values. For reasons to be elaborated below, the will to power
as valuation crucially has to be read as a physiological activity, operative on the
level of physiology and constitutive of (human) physiologies. By will to power
here is meant the economic differential play of forces in which a material
becoming articulates itself, and not a metaphysical, explanatory principle like
the forms, reason or Spirit. The will to power is formative and primary insofar
as, in a sense, nothing is given prior to it but it, on the contrary, describes the
formative differential play of forces that characterises becoming, a becoming
which is perpetual, essentially unconscious, pre- and trans-individual.
But although in this understanding of it, the will to power marks an originary
productivity formally akin to Kant's notion of the transcendental, it is, at the
same time, not in any way thought as divorced from the realm of the immanent,
as is the case in Kant's conception of transcendentality. As opposed to both
vulgar materialist and idealist impositions on the nature of materiality,
Nietzsche's physiological thinking is based on the presupposition that matter has
to be thought of as intrinsically self-excessive or self-transcending, and that a
thinking based on the will to power can conceive matter in this way.

279
B. Babich (ed.), Nietz,5che, Episterrwlogy, and Philosophy of Science: Nietz,5che and the Sciences II, 279-286.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
280 ANDREA REHBERG

As regards the concept of causality, the only question which Kant needs to
address is whether it is one of the a priori concepts according to which
experience is always necessarily structured, given the constitution of human
faculties? It is clear that Kant's theory of the production of knowledge for and
by the natural sciences, insofar as it claims that this knowledge is produced in
accordance with the concept of causality, is adequate. But the issue which
remains entirely unquestioned in this is what type of knowledge (Wissen) or
science (Wissenschaft) ensue when causality is accepted as the fundamental
organising principle. In short, according to Nietzsche, any discipline's adher-
ence to causality as the chief principle of production needs to be considered
from the point of view of value.
By taking the body as the point of departure for his transvaluative project,
Nietzsche instantly displaces one of the founding moves of all metaphysical
forms of thinking, namely the denial of the body, and he thereby puts the will
to power on a firmly materialist footing. But just as important as its materialist
nature is the fact that the will to power marks a radically anti-humanist stance.
To identify the will to power with any exclusively human perspective is too
reductive. The physiological perspective which is elaborated here should not be
taken as yet another reassuring confirmation of a philosophical anthropomor-
phism. On the contrary, in the displacement of all anti-materialist metaphysical
impulses, and their replacement by a physiological thought, the anthropomor-
phisation of nature is also overcome. In its place arises the conception of a self-
excessive materiality to which human life is only ever utterly incidental.

II

Perhaps the most radical transformation philosophy undergoes as a result of

Nietzsche's intervention is that in which valuation is conceived as the primary
process of life and values are thought as the parameters within which life is
articulated. Above all else, Nietzsche's thought of valuation dislodges the
traditional proprietary relation existing between values and human being. This
means that Nietzsche jettisons any intentionalist notions, according to which
values could be manipulated by a self-identical human subject. Instead, and in
keeping with the primacy of will to power as productive "principle," it is will
to power or, in short, life itself which produces values. So much so that it is
even entirely misleading- if inevitable, given the rules of a grammar structured
around subject-object relations- to distinguish between will to power and its
production of values, for it is this activity. Although this misapprehension has
of course been traditionally dominant, the fact that human being acts as the
channel through which values are articulated need not be misinterpreted in such
a way as to think of human being as ultimately originary of values. In order to
destabilise the dualist divisions imposed upon the flows of nature by anthropo-
centric interests, Nietzsche says that the will to power as production of values
("interpretation") is not confined to organic, or indeed any other kind of life:
"Life is only a special case of the will to power" (Will to Power 692). 3
 NIETZSCHE'S TRANSVALUATION OF CAUSALITY 281

Furthermore, the productions of the will to power are by no means confined to

the arena of human being but are also at work in all other kinds of organisms:

The will to power interprets: the formation of an organ is a question of interpretation; it delimits,
determines degrees, differentials of power ... interpretation is itself a means of becoming master
over something. (The organic process presupposes continual interpreting). (WP 643, translation
modified)

It is clear that "becoming master over something" mentioned in this note does
not refer to any human individual becoming master over something or someone.
It is, rather, human being, especially in its calculative-instrumental mode, its
mode of self-preservation, which is mastered by the interpretative excesses of
the will to power, by the will to power positing values, especially those of
enhancement.
Two types of values can therefore be distinguished: those which have an
originary status and which determine each particular physiology they shape and
inhabit in a very immediate sense and may therefore be called physiological
values; and those which pervade activities- for instance, philosophy, science,
politics etc. - in which human being traditionally believes itself to be the origin
of values and which may therefore be termed anthropocentric values. The
relation between the two kinds of values is discussed in the following passage:

When we speak of values we speak under the inspiration, from the perspective of life: life itself
forces us to posit values, life itself values through us when we posit values. (Twilight of the Idols,
4 p. 45, translation modified)

This is to say that physiological values are not produced by any form of
human activity but by life, the will to power itself. They can best be described
as, in a sense, transcendental. This means that they precede, and are themselves
constitutive of, human being and its anthropocentric values. It follows from this
that an examination of metaphysical structures of thought according to this
"theory" of values will have to retrace the conscious, manifest or anthropocen-
tric values inherent in them to the unconscious, latent or physiological values
of which they are an expression.
On the basis of this assumption, namely that of the primacy of physiological
values, it becomes necessary to re-examine phenomena under the aspect of these
types of values which have shaped and continue to shape them. The question in
each case is transformed from the previous "what is it?" (which enquires into,
and is ultimately predicated on the assumption of, the identity of that to which
it is addressed), to "which values are productive in this case?" and thereby turns
into a question concerning the processes constitutive of a physiology ("The
question of values is more fundamental than the question of certainty." WP
588). It is clear that the latter question belongs to a radically different philo-
sophical project than the former. Because truth is no longer the ultimate measure
but has instead become problematised for a physiologically oriented philosophy,
the hitherto central question of modem philosophy of the possibility of
knowledge and the concomitant theories of knowledge have lost their allure.
282 ANDREA REHBERG

Instead of concerning itself with questions ofknowability, thinking in the wake

of Nietzsche's physiological perspective continues to question the value of
knowledge. Nietzsche remarks: "It is improbable that our "knowing" should
extend further than is scarcely sufficient for the preservation of life." (WP 494,
translation modified).
What we call knowledge is precisely such an impoverished way of relating
to the world; it is merely interested in the preservation of life, it does not
promote excess and the dissemination of energy.
Nietzsche does not of course share this belief in preservation as the primary
value of a physiology:

Physiologists should think again about positing the drive for preservation as the cardinal drive of
an organic being. Above all else something that is alive [etwas Lebendigesj wants to expend its
force; "preservation" is only one of the consequences of this. (WP 650, translation modified)

Nietzschean diagnosis investigates whether a life form (an individual, a

group, a culture, etc.) is able to discharge its impulses and energies freely or
whether this capacity for expenditure is in any way inhibited. But it should also
be borne in mind that the two kinds of values are not mutually exclusive. Rather,
which one of them prevails is entirely a question of perspective, and hence a
question of the quality or nature of the life form aligned with one or the other
of the two kinds of value.
Thus far this most fundamental distinction of Nietzsche's physiological
thinking, namely that between preservation and expenditure, has only been
established in outline. But it is necessary to expand and complicate the account
of this Nietzschean economic thought of plenitude and preservation given so far.
First of all, they should not be thought of as standing in a merely oppositional
relation to each other. The "truth" of preservation is only relative to that
interpretation which traditional thinking would consider an "error," namely the
assumption of the more primary value of expenditure. To assume that all is in
flux, when knowledge as conceived by the metaphysical tradition can only arise
in approximation to a fixed and unchanging realm of truth, inevitably means that
such a metaphysically conceived truth is an error in a world thought as perpetual
becoming: "Truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of living
beings [lebendige Wesen] could not live." (WP 493, translation modified)
The error which is truth is indispensable for the preservation of a particular
life form, namely human being. Human being has a need for truth insofar as this
life form is oriented towards preservation. Insofar as truth can be seen to arise
out of need, the belief in the value of truth can be read as the symptom of a
fundamental impoverishment. But the truth of being and of preservation is an
error in a world of plenitudinous becoming; it is directed against what the
tradition thinks of as "this" world. But Nietzsche does not call it an error
because it arises out of a lack of knowledge or because it misses the truth, in
which case it would merely remain an error secondary and supplementary to this
metaphysical truth. The error which is truth still grows out of the inexhaustible
exuberance of life or will to power, it is only possible on the basis of the
originary extravagance in which life luxuriates. In other words, life (will to
 NIETZSCHE'S TRANSVALUATION OF CAUSALITY 283

power) expends itself in truth as an error to which it gives rise, even though, as
Nietzsche shows, this is a most perilous adventure which ultimately endangers
life itself. This is to say that preservation and expenditure are not simply
opposed to one another but that the economy in which they interact is itself only
possible because of life's insatiable desire for expenditure.
But there is a further twist to the transvaluation of this economy, for it must
be asked which is the site of the ruinous adventure of life in combat with itself.
Nietzsche names human physiology as the battleground on which life's active
forces of expenditure and its reactive forces of preservation are in combat with
each other. There it is being determined whether the affirmation of life in
dissemination or the negation of it in preservation is to become dominant. This
ongoing process may lead to the devastation of the human body, as has been the
case with the incorporation of the truths of the metaphysical tradition, as
Zarathustra deplores: " .. .1 tread amongst humans as amongst fragments and
limbs of humans .. .! [find] human being smashed and scattered as over a field of
battle and butchery." 5
Or else it may bring about the dissipation of the human body in a joyous
exchange with other flows of matter. Through these processes life is able, in the
latter case, to replenish its productive powers or, as in the former case, it can
become temporarily impaired in its disseminative capacities. Thus when, in the
following note, Nietzsche speaks of life-threatening physiological errors, the
threat which the error that is truth poses does not only concern life in its
physiological instantiation (for instance as human life, where the error is
sustained like a cancerous growth) but concerns even life "itself':

Error is the most costly luxury which human being can permit itself; and if the error is even a
physiological error it becomes life-threatening. For what has humanity consequently payed the
most, atoned the worst? For its "truths," for these were all errors in physiologicis ... (WP 454,
translation modified).

Because nothing is in principle exempt from the diagnostic procedure based

on the Nietzschean "theory" of values, no aspirations to a neutral, "factual"
sphere of objectivity can be sustained any longer. In fact the task of this
diagnostic is most urgent whenever any "eternal truths", ie anything purportedly
unproduced, is invoked. Thus especially anything which lays claim to the status
of scientificity, thereby seeking shelter in that supposed bastion of objectivity,
needs to be exposed to the anti-humanist perspective of the will to power:

Against positivism which halts at the phenomenon "there are only facts," I would say: no, there
are especially no facts, only interpretations. We can determine no fact "in itself," perhaps it is a
nonsense to want something like that. (WP 481, translation modified).

And so the question as to which values inform them must be addressed to the
sciences and to any kind of philosophy which acts as apologists of these ideals.
If these discourses display signs of an exhausted physiology, if they support
ideals of decadence, they will betray themselves by aspirations to an implicit
model of preservation- of themselves as of their respective objects. That is to
284 ANDREA REHBERG

say that their objects will be conceived or projected in terms of being (preserva-
tion), rather than becoming (expenditure). The question is, conversely, how
would a "science" of becoming, a non-representational "science" be organised,
to what extent could this differently conceived activity still be understood by
reference to the category of science and what would be the nature of its
conceptuality, i.e., what would supersede its traditional objectivity. Because it
is only by believing in a world of being that the formation of an object as such
can procede:

A world of becoming could not, in the strict sense, be "comprehended," be "known"; only insofar
as the "comprehending" and "knowing" intellect finds an already created crude world, constructed
from mere semblances, but become fixed, insofar as this kind of appearance has preserved life -
only insofar is there something like "knowledge" ... (WP 520, translation modified).

III

We are now in a position to examine the implications of any discipline's

investment in the notion of causality. For Kant it is the case that, unless the
"objective validity" of causality as a pure a priori concept of the understanding
is established, the project of knowledge condemns itself to a merely subjective
play of illusion6 . Nietzsche, on the other hand, thinking in a "suspicious" mode,
views such concepts as the supposed guarantors of knowledge with no more
than mildly mocking detachment:

The most believed in a priori "truths" are for me- assumptions until fUrther notice, for example
the law of causality, very well rehearsed habits of belief, so incorporated that not to believe in
them would ruin the race. But are they therefore truths? What a conclusion! As if truth were
proven by the fact that human being endures. (WP 497) 7

When Nietzsche speaks of "a priori truths," a priori being most immediately
associated with Kantian terminology, he clearly means "eternal" truths, the
"truths" of the metaphysical tradition from which Kant himself at other times
so eagerly wished to dissociate his own philosophy.
Nietzsche paints causality as one of the "eternal truths" behind which a
dogmatically inclined reason likes to hide from the perpetual onslaught of
nature, or simply matter, which, in its most primary modes, is profoundly
indifferent to the interests of self-preservation which occupy human being. What
is called "truth" by that tradition is in fact no more than one of the tenets by
means of which a particular life form tries to preserve itself. This "truth," the
law of causality, is thus the prime example of what was above described as an
anthropocentric value, a belief which helps to structure the world into a
regularity based on the primacy of being for the purposes of human being and
which reciprocally determines the human being which enters into commerce
with the world on the basis of'this concept. Thus it is possible to see how
Nietzsche's "theory" of values supersedes Kant's theory of knowledge.
We can now sum up why Nietzsche views causality as such a reductive
concept. He is concerned with rethinking change in non-representational ways,
 NIETZSCHE'S TRANSVALUATION OF CAUSALITY 285

that is to say, before the imposition of subject and object or, as he often puts it8 ,
doer and deed, upon a multifarious becoming. For him it is grammar, as a
function of self-preservation, rather than truth (which he, at any rate, greatly
problematises), which demands the separation of an occurrence into doer and
deed, the former of which is conceived in terms of being and substance, and as
causing the latter to take place as its effect:

The division of "doing" from the "doer," of the occurrence from a something that produces the
occurring, of the process from a something that is not process but rather endures, that is substance,
thing, body, soul etc., the attempt to comprehend an occurrence as a kind of shifting and change
of position of "beings" [Seiendes], of the permanent: this old mythology has fixated the belief in
"cause and effect" after it had found a fixed form in the linguistico-grammatical functions. (WP
631, translation modified)

Only through such an act of carving up the multiplicity of interacting forces

into two and assigning to one, as cause, the status of being, and to the other, as
effect, that of act and change, can an event in a way that would make sense to
traditional forms of science or philosophy be conceived. Nietzsche analyses this
in the following terms:

If I say "lightning flashes" I have posited the f1ashing once as activity and another time as subject;
so that in addition to an occurrence I have presupposed a being which is not at one with the
occurrence, which rather endures, is, and does not "become." (WP 531, translation modified)

Nietzsche sums up this entire act of simplification as: " ... we have posited the
effect [Wirkung] as something that effects [Wirkendes] and the something that
effects as being" (Ibid.). That is to say, a multiple becoming is first of all
reduced to a mere effect which is in tum posited as "something that effects." In
the next step the "something that effects" is then posited as being, as subject or
substance or any of the other metaphysical terms which have been construed as
exempt from becoming and its insatiable temporality.
Nietzsche here describes the processes of increasing hypostatisation and
ossification through which a traditional metaphysical conceptuality turns an
essentially irreducible becoming into a profoundly atemporal being (cf. for
example WP 631, quoted above). But Nietzsche's excavatory work is able to
restore the primordiality of a becoming which has been given a reactive
direction through the imposition of anthropocentric values. The advantage
which human being gains by imposing such a category of essentially temporal
identity (resulting in the effacement of a complex or recurring temporality) upon
fundamentally non-identical processes of becoming lies in the construal of fixed
points which seem to correspond to the supposed fixity from which the "I" is in
each case enunciated, thereby underwriting the comforting humanist idee fixe
that a self-identical subject and a self-identical object correspond to one another.
But, as Nietzsche consistently demonstrates, thinking, unlike traditional
metaphysics steeped in theological concerns, need not be comforting, need not
reassure anyone of their "security in certainty:" "We put a word where our
ignorance commences, where we cannot see any farther ... - those are perhaps
the horizons of our knowledge but no truths"' (WP 482, translation modified).
286 ANDREA REHBERG

Clearly, causality is just such a word which merely masks an excessive

multiplicity essentially irreducible to anthropocentric values and which marks
the boundary between the world as human beings construe it and the domain
beyond the horizon which remains obscure to any traditionally conceived form
of knowledge. This obscurity, to which the only appropriate response is the
affirmation of unknowing ( Unwissenheit), arises because of the necessarily
limited nature of reason and its categories as instruments of human knowledge.
The release from instrumental rationality's inflated aspirations can only come
about when the will to power is recognised as interpreting, creating and
organising, above and beyond the meagre calculations by means of which
humanity seeks to assure its continued existence.

Manchester Metropolitan University, England

NOTES

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1964 ). Hereafter CPR.
Cf. especially the "Second Analogy," CPR B 232-256.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random, 1968). Hereafter WP.
4 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 ). Hereafter TI.
5 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 160, translation
modified.
6 Cf., for instance, CPR A194 ff., B 239 ff. and A 201 ff., B 247.
7 Translation modified. Nietzsche's most famous critique of causality does of course occur in
"The Four Great Errors" in TI, pp. 58-65. In this paper I have mainly concentrated on sections
from WP precisely because they have received less attention to date.
8 For instance in On the Genealogy of Morals, (New York: Vintage, 1969), I, 13.
 PETER POELLNER

CAUSATION AND FORCE IN NIETZSCHE

Nietzsche's ideas on causality are at the very centre of his reflections on

epistemological and ontological problems in the final phase of his philosophical
activity. Remarks on this topic can be found both throughout his later published
writings and in the notebooks of the 1880' s. 1 In what follows I shall offer an
interpretation of the prominent "sceptical" line of thought expressed in these
remarks and of its relation to Nietzsche's sometimes perplexing criticisms of the
"so-called purely mechanical forces of attraction and repulsion" (WP 621)
introduced into modern physics by Newton and Boscovich. It would be
presumptuous to claim that the considerations I shall endeavour to isolate and
partly to re-construct represent all Nietzsche has to say on the subject of
causation - for one thing, his remarks concerning volitional causation will only
superficially be touched upon - but they do seem to me to contain some of his
most interesting insights into the nature and limitations of the modern scientific
enterprise, and they form the immediate background to his own prima facie
ontological ideas which figure so conspicuously in the notebooks ofthe 1880's.
What is commonly meant by the word "cause"? Partly we mean by it,
Nietzsche suggests, "that something can be constituted in such a way that when
it is assumed as given [gesetzt], thereby something else must also be necessarily
assumed as given" (KGW VII.3.34.70). A cause, according to this common use,
is an item the presence of which is a sufficient condition for "assuming as
given" another, separately identifiable item. But while this idea may indeed be
a component in our conception of a (complete) cause, it is clearly too general
- like Kant's unschematized category of causality - to distinguish properly
causal relations from other relations of dependence such as purely logical ones.
What needs to be added to yield the common understanding of what a cause is,
is the notion of a spatia-temporal particular, an "effective thing" (WP 552b)
whose "capacity to produce effects''' (WP 551) is released in certain kinds of
circumstances, thereby compelling or necessitating certain further changes -
"complexes of events" (WP 552d) - in other things or in the thing regarded as
cause itself to occur. Thus, according to Nietzsche, the ordinary pre-
philosophical conception of a cause involves the idea of a particular which, by
virtue of its efficacious nature, manifests in suitable conditions a force or
"compulsion" (WP 552) necessitating or "producing" (WP 552c) those events
we call its effects.
287
B. Babich (ed. ), Nietzsche, Episterrwlogy, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 287-297.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
288 PETER POELLNER

This account, which may be called the classical interpretation of causal

relations, famously came under attack in the writings of David Hume. For
Hume, the only relevant "impressions" (from which all "ideas," including all
general concepts, originate) that we actually receive in observing any particular
causal sequence are those of contiguity and of a certain temporal ordering in the
events we respectively designate as cause and effect. It is only once a sequence
of a given type has been observed frequently ("constant conjunction") that we
form the idea of the event we call the cause necessitating the "effect." No such
necessitation, compulsion, or "power" is perceived by the senses (i.e. by means
of an external impression) in any one observed sequence. Rather, the idea of it
is derived from an "internal impression," arising only after frequent exposure
to sequences of the same type. But "[t]here is no internal impression, which has
any relation to the present business, but that propensity, which custom produces,
to pass from an object to the idea of its usual attendant. This therefore is the
essence of necessity. Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the
mind, not in objects." 2 Our tendency to project the intra-mental impression of
necessity onto a supposed extra-mental reality is but an instance of the mind's
ever-present propensity to spread itself upon the objects.
Nietzsche's sceptical reflections on our putative knowledge of necessitating
powers operating among objects make explicit reference to Hume' s arguments,
while departing from them in significant ways:

We have no "sense for the causa efficiens": here Hume was right; habit (but not only that of the
individual') makes us expect that a certain often-observed occurrence will follow another [.... 1
That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the [... ]habit of seeing
one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events
caused by intentions. Is is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force- in will, in
intention- it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief
in the "subject." (WP 550)

According to this fragment, Hume was right in noting that we do not perceive
any "capacity to produce effects" (WP 551) in the objects - in this sense we
have indeed "absolutely no experience of a cause" (ibid.). But Nietzsche
disagrees with Hume on two important points. First, individual "custom" - i.e.
frequent past experience of specific conjunctions - cannot adequately explain
our strong propensity to expect the future to resemble the past. This seems
indeed correct. It is very implausible to hold that children only acquire a belief
in the "uniformity principle" with respect to sequences of specific event-types
once they have observed "constant conjunction" between events of the relevant
types in the past. With many of these types they seem to form the belief in
question without having had occasion to observe repeated conjunctions . While
it might be replied that they have nevertheless had overwhelming experience of
nature in general taking a uniform course, and no experience of it not doing so,
this also is by no means obvious. In fact, many "naively" observed event
sequences seem at first sight to disconfirm the expectation that nature takes a
uniform course (and thus that the future will resemble the past), because the
initial conditions are (unbeknownst to the non-scientific observer) different, and
 CAUSATION AND FORCE IN NIETZSCHE 289

the uniformity is only detected after the cause-effect system in question has
been examined more carefully, has been isolated from initially undetected
external interferences, and so forth? Moreover - and this is of course a general
problem of classical empiricism - Burne can give no plausible answer to the
question of what makes it possible for us to pick out the relevant similarities
which enable us to identify different tokens of causal sequences as being of the
same type. Any two sequences "resemble" one another in an indefinite number
of respects. Burne's genetic theory simply assumes that we have identified the
relevant similarities - for only in this way is the experience of causally
significant "constant conjunction" of properties possible - but he offers no
explanation of why we are so remarkably successful in doing this. 4 In contrast
to Burne, Nietzsche's parenthetical remark in the extract cited above hints at the
need for an evolutionary explanation both of our ability to focus on causally
relevant similarities and of our belief that the future will resemble the past.
A second important difference from Burne is this. While for Nietzsche, also,
there is a projection of something "inner" onto "external" objects, what is
projected is not an associative compulsion, the result of the frequent encounter-
ing of A's followed by B's, but rather the (possibly misleading) experience of
apparent volitional agency. Indeed, it is this projection of an efficacious power
seemingly accessible by acquaintance in intentional activity, which is responsi-
ble for the sense that we have causally "understood" or "comprehended" an
occurrence:

Causality is created by thinking compulsion into the process. A certain "comprehension" is the
consequence, i.e. we have made the process more human, "more familiar": the familiar is the
familiar habit of human compulsion associated with the feeling of force. (WP 664)

Our "understanding of an event" has consisted in our inventing a subject which was made
responsible for something that happens[ ... ]: causa efficiens and causafinalis are fundamentally
one. (WP 551)

It is clear from these as well as from many other passages5 that the concep-
tions of comprehension and of its correlative "explanation" which Nietzsche
adopts are rather stringent, if not entirely original: to explain an event is to
"reduce" [zuriickfiihren] it to something with which we are "acquainted" [ein
Bekanntes] or familiar [vertraut]. Now this requirement may prima facie be
interpreted in a variety of ways. For instance, on one reading, the covering law
explanations which came to furnish the model of explanation accepted by many
philosophers of science in the present century might well be thought to comply
with it. "Explaining" a phenomenon at the most basic level of explanation
means, according to this paradigm, identifying it as one of the terms of an
instantiation of some universal law-like correlation of the form "all A's are
(concomitant with) B 's." Thus, in order to explain some particular event x, on
this construal, we need to identify x as an instance of type A and to know the
relevant nomic universal "all A's are B's," which enables us to deduce the cause
of x from the conjunction of the proposition stating the occurrence of x and the
290 PETER POELLNER

proposition expressing the "law." Nietzsche explicitly rejects this kind of

account of causal explanation:

Cause and effect-- "Explanation" we call it: but it is description that distinguishes us from former
stages of knowledge and of science. We describe better - but we explain just as little as all
previous ones [.... ] The series of "causes"' stands in front of us much more completely in every
case, we reason: this and this has to precede if that is to follow- but thereby we have compre-
hended nothing. The quality, for instance, in any chemical process appears now as ever as a
"miracle," just as any locomotion does; no one has yet "explained" impact. (GS 112)

Evidently, when Nietzsche speaks of explanation consisting in the reduction

of a new or unfamiliar phenomenon to something that is familiar, he does not
mean the subsumption of the phenomenon under a known ("familiar") nomic
universal. The correlation of events of one type with events of another, however
quantitatively precise it may be, does not by itself lead to a "comprehension" of
the former -it merely "describes" its relations to other phenomena. The above
passage suggests that the Zuruckfiihrung required for causal explanation proper
has to do, not with formal relational properties stateable in functional equations,
but rather with the "qualities" involved in the causal process. It is tempting to
interpret this as gesturing towards the following two points. First, that the
common concept of causation involves the idea of a causal power which, as he
says elsewhere, "compels" the effect to happen (WP 552) and which has to be
thought of (at least when actualized) as a quality; and second, that only if we
were "familiar" with this quality would we be in a position to give a proper or
adequate causal explanation of whatever occurrence is being investigated. The
first of these interpretive claims gains its plausibility from its ability to link up
the passage under consideration (GS 112) with the notebook remarks referred
to earlier, the second is strongly suggested by some of Nietsche' s observations
on the Newtonian and Boscovichean concepts of force (see below) as well as by
his thoughts in volitional causality. While his formulations of the latter are in
some respects, which I shall point out presently, highly ambiguous, they are
quite univocal on the point at issue here. Thus he says in WP 689: "If we
translate the concept "cause" back to the only sphere known to us, from which
we have derived it, we cannot imagine any change that does not involve a will
to power[ ... ]" (cf. WP 621). The relative clause here indicates that the compo-
nent in the notion of causality Nietzsche is speaking of is the efficacious force
which he thinks we project onto objects from the alleged experience of it in
intentional action. Such an acquaintance with causal power, he says here, would
enable us to "imagine" it. Thus it appears that the kind of reduction to some-
thing familiar he has in mind in his remarks on explanation applies to the
"quality" of the power which we commonly believe to be essentially involved
in causal processes. We could only properly be said to have explained an event,
or to "comprehend" it, if this quality were familiar to us, that is, if we could
contentfully "imagine" it or were acquainted with it intuitively in a perceptual
or quasi-perceptual manner, or if it could plausibly be understood as materially
analogous 6 (similar) to some quality known in this way.
 CAUSATION AND FORCE IN NIETZSCHE 291

Like Hume, Nietzsche seems to say in a number of places that we cannot

explain causal relations in this sense: "There is no such thing as "cause"; some
cases in which it seemed to be given to us, and from which we have projected
it out of ourselves in order to understand an event, have been shown to be self-
deceptive" (WP 551). With regard to the supposed acquaintance with causal
power in volition, he sometimes maintains that here, too, "[w]e have no idea, no
experience, of such a process" (WP 664). Remarks such as these suggest that the
talk of natural necessity and efficacious force involves not so much an illegiti-
mate projection of "inner facts" onto external objects, but rather that it is strictly
meaningless - it expresses no "idea,'' no intelligible sense at all. However, such
radically sceptical statements on causal power are rare and are confined to the
notebooks which, one should always remember, record the tentative and
experimental development of Nietzsche's thought on this as on other matters.
There are many more passages which indicate a different view (or views).
Many, including some I have referred to already, surmise that we do possess an
idea of power and that this is indeed derived in some way from "the will" (e.g.
WP 490,619,685, 689; GS 127; KGW VIII.l.l.30; KGW VII.3.40.37). If we
follow the line of thought set out in these passages, Nietzsche's criticism is
directed not at the claim that we are acquainted with efficacy in volition, nor (a
fortiori) against the common belief that we have a genuine idea, a concept, of
causal power, but merely against false philosophical analyses or descriptions of
the former (see esp. GS 127, WP 689, BGE 19).7 In what is his most explicit and
sustained discussion of the issue in the published works (BGE 36) he is, despite
prevarications, prepared to venture a causal "hypothesis" based on the assump-
tion that there is indeed a contentful and intelligible idea of causal power. But
perhaps the strongest evidence that Nietzsche remains committed to causal
power (hence natural necessity) as an essential component in causal explanation
proper is that he tirelessly attacks various ostensibly explanatory theories for
failing to throw light upon it. Nowhere does he develop, or even advocate in a
programmatic form, a revised account of causality along the lines of the
"regularity" theory that many 20th century philosophers of science have taken
Hume to recommend.
Nietzsche's "scepticism" about causality thus does not seem to be a scepti-
cism about the concept of causal power: he does not (usually) deny its legiti-
macy or even its intelligibility. Rather, his sceptical claims appear to be twofold:
(l) the projection of a certain conception of causal power, derived from our
apparent acquaintance with efficacy in volition, is unjustified; (2) many familiar
and widely held theories which purport to give causal explanations of phenom-
ena in fact provide only "descriptions" because they fail to explain, in the sense
outlined earlier, the efficacious powers involved. As we have seen, Nietzsche
is sometimes ambivalent with respect to the precise sense in which (1) is to be
understood - as the claim that certain experiences which appear to acquaint us
with causal power in intentional agency do in fact nothing of the kind (while
others may do so); or as the proposition that while some "inner experiences" do
indeed afford a knowledge of causal power, the projection of this type of
efficacy onto physical objects is unjustified. I have argued above that a third,
292 PETER POELLNER

and more radical interpretation, suggested by a few notebook passages - that we

have no experience of causal power at all (which, given Nietzsche's meaning
empiricism, would entail that the expression is actually meaningless) - is
inconsistent with most of his statements and with his sceptical claims concern-
ing the lack of genuine explanations in modem, Newtonian and post-Newtonian
science.
Given the prominent role which "regularity" theories of causation have
played in twentieth century philosophy of science, the point of Nietzsche's
sceptical reflections might be thought to have been effectively disposed of. The
demand for an explanation (in Nietzsche's sense) of efficacy would be deemed
misguided by many proponents of such accounts, since according to them there
simply is no "quality" which "necessitates" an effect to occur- it is not merely
a case of our being ignorant of it. However, the difficulties attendant upon
regularity theories of causation are significant and should make us pause. A
brief review of some of these familiar problems may make one less dismissive
of Nietzsche's point. On the regularity view, a sequence of events is a cause-
effect sequence just in case (simplifying somewhat) it instantiates a nomic
universal representing a "law of nature." One of the questions arising here is
how a nomic (law-like) universal differs from accidentally true universal
propositions such as "all men in this building are under 46 years of age." A
standard reply has been that, in the case of accidentally true generalizations, the
objects referred to are typically contained within a limited spatio-temporal
region. Basic law-like universals are said not to be thus restricted; their objects
are not "required to be located in a fixed volume of space or a given interval of
time." 8 If this difference is taken as the criterion of demarcation between
accidentally true and nomic universals, it rules out any basic laws applying only
for a finite interval of time in a closed sub-region of space. Not only may this
disqualify some universals generally recognized as laws, 9 it also seems to
conflict with the common intuition that there could conceivably be basic laws
which hold only in a fixed subregion of space and during a restricted interval of
time.
According to a second suggested demarcating criterion, a genuine basic law
can be distinguished from accidentally true generalizations on account of the
fact that the evidence for it is not identical with its scope of prediction and that
the latter is open to further extension. 10 This implies that, by definition, there
cannot be basic causal laws applying only to a closed set of instances. In this
case also, it may be doubted whether a theory of causation forced to have
recourse to such definitional demarcations still captures enough of the ordinary
concept of causation to be considered as an analysis of this very concept, merely
purifying it of occult ingredients. For the thought that some things might
suddenly and without cause change their behaviour for a certain interval of time
such that their causal relations are altered for the duration of that interval seems
certainly intelligible - yet, according to the view presently being considered, it
should be necessarily false by virtue of the definition of causation. The point is
not whether such an occurrence is likely, nor whether there might not be
independent (e.g. Kantian) reasons against countenancing it as a real possiblity.
 CAUSATION AND FORCE IN NIETZSCHE 293

The point is rather this: people would not ordinarily be prepared to reject the
idea that there could be basic causal correlations obtaining in a closed set of
instances merely on definitional grounds, i.e. by virtue of the meaning of the
term "causation."
Aside from technical difficulties, the regularity theory (when combined with
the denial of natural necessity) faces of course powerful "intuitive" or common-
sense objections. Perhaps the most simple, but by no means least forceful, is that
it asks us to contemplate something really quite astonishing and, one may feel,
virtually incredible: the thought that uncountable events ("distinct existences,"
according to Hume) appear to have occurred since the beginning of the universe,
and continue to do so, in a regular, law-like manner, without there being any
reason for this. It asks us to accept this as a brute, contingent fact, in effect as
an extraordinary accumulation of accidents. 11 Could there be, one may be
inclined to ask, a theory more fanciful, more fantastic than this? My purpose in
making these remarks is obviously not to offer an exhaustive discussion of the
matter, but to indicate that the Nietzschean requirements concerning what causal
explanations should accomplish have not been clearly superseded by more
recent developments in the philosophy of science. On the contrary, there are
good reasons to believe that his statements capture what we standardly, pre-
philosophically, understand by (adequate) causal explanation and comprehen-
sion, and that theories which attempt to revise this "naive" understanding so as
to make Nietzsche's demands obsolete face formidable difficulties of their
own. 12
It is instructive to consider the particular application of Nietzsche's sceptical
strategy in his observations on the dynamist physics developed by Roger Joseph
Boscovich. He repeatedly refers to Boscovich's arguments against corpusculari-
anism in complete agreement so that it may indeed rightly be said that "Bo-
scovich had become a building block in Nietzsche's own philosophy." 13 In his
Theory of Natural Philosophy Boscovich argued that corpuscularianism -
according to which matter is composed of extended, absolutely rigid particles
moving in empty space and interacting by impact and pressure - is internally
inconsistent and should therefore be abandoned. Corpuscularianism implies that
the constituent particles become accelerated instantaneously and discontinu-
ously by finite, often quite large, increments upon impact. Such a discontinuous
change of velocity not only violates the law of continuity, a violation which
entails, according to Boscovich, that the system of interacting particles is in two
different states at the same instant; 14 it would also require, on the principles of
Newtonian physics, an infinite force. Boscovich concludes that change of
motion does not take place instantaneously and discontinuously upon contact
between moving particles, but rather continuously, on account of a repulsive
force acting at short distances between the elements of matter and increasing
asymptotically as the distance between them decreases. Since the magnitude of
this repulsive force approaches infinity with diminishing distance, it makes
direct contact between the elements impossible. Hence the ultimate constituents
of matter must be assumed to be perfectly simple and at some distance from
each other, for they must be indivisible in principle, that is, indivisible by any
294 PETER POELLNER

force, however large. This in tum implies (pace Locke) that the constituents of
matter cannot be extended, for "we see, in all those bodies that we can bring
under observation, that whatever occupies a distinct position is itself also a
distinct thing; so that those that occugy different parts of space can be separated
by using a sufficiently large force." 5 Boscovich's argument here is inductive,
rather than- like Leibniz's- conceptual. Leibniz asked, no less pertinently:
what could it mean to say that something is an actual, space-filling, extended
thing, and yet in principle indivisible? 16
For Boscovich, his arguments make it at least very likely that matter consists
of unextended physical points at some distance from each other, surrounded by
repulsive forces of the kind mentioned above, these turning into attractive forces
at a definite but as yet unknown distance from each point centre, so that for
larger distances Newton's gravitational laws continue to hold. Since Bo-
scovich's "points" have no volume, hence no mass in Newton's sense, his
"forces" also are defined differently from Newton's- they are in fact (when
actualized) accelerations, or otherwise propensities of acceleration. The upshot
of Boscovich's theory of matter is that matter consists of unextended point
centres surrounded by fields of "force." In Locke's language, matter does not
have the primary quality of solidity distinguishing it from empty space and
constituting the basis of its "powers" to make "a change in the bulk, figure,
texture and motion of another body." 17
Nietzsche takes Boscovich to have "refuted" mechanist atomism (BGE 12),
and he assimilates Boscovichean dynamism in various ways into his own
thought. It may be worth mentioning briefly in this context that it is partly
Boscovichean considerations which seem to motivate his denial of a substantial
"subject" as the basis or cause of the activities which appear to issue from it (see
esp. GM I: 13). Just as the material object, for Boscovich, consists of certain
"actions" and propensities, so the subject, for Nietzsche, consists of action-
events [Tun, Geschehen] and, possibly (although he is not explicit on this), of
dispositional propensities to act, which neither inhere in a Cartesian soul
substratum nor are dependent upon, or caused by, any actual and purely intrinsic
("primary") properties. This is what he means when he makes the often
misunderstood claim that the cause [das Wirkende] is not logically separable
from what it effects, or rather, from its "effecting" [das Wirken] (ibid.).
For Boscovich, the "forces" he postulates are both real 18 and ultimate, in the
sense of being irreducible to mechanical phenomena. Nietzsche, however,
follows Berkeley, Schopenhauer and Lange in denying any properly explanatory
value to both the Newtonian and the Boscovichean concepts of force: 19

One cannot "explain" pressure and impact themselves, one cannot get free of the actio in dis tans:
- one has lost the belief in being able to explain at all, and admits with a wry expression that
description and not explanation is all that is possible, that the dynamic interpretation of the world
with its denial of "empty space" and its little Jumps of atoms, will shortly come to dominate
physics[ ... ] (WP 618)

Nietzsche's point here is that terms like "force," "attraction" and "repulsion"
as used in physics may appear (especially to the non-scientific layperson) to
 CAUSATION AND FORCE IN NIETZSCHE 295

designate a known mode of operation at a distance, while in fact they refer

either merely to correlations of masses, distances and accelerations, or to some
unknown type of entity, whatever its real essence may be, which, if it were
known, would explain these correlations. And "knowledge" in this context
would require for him, as we saw earlier, an intuitive acquaintance with either
the efficacy itself or with an analogue to it, for "[a] force we cannot imagine is
an empty word" (WP 621). Quantitative laws of functional dependence,
expressed in mathematical formulae in which one variable is called "force" are
not genuinely explanatory:

The calculability of the world. the expressibility of all events in formulae - is this really
"comprehension''? (WP 624)

It is an illusion that something is known when we possess a mathematical formula for an event:
it is only designated, described; nothing more. (WP 628)

Does this mean that Nietzsche's interpretation of modern scientific theories

is "instrumentalist" or "positivist"? Not necessarily. It has been a standard
argument against positivist construals of putative theoretical entities that the
calculus of modern scientific theories often suggests that there are such entities
which, although originally unobserved (genes, atoms, etc.), can subsequently be
detected through conducting suitable experiments or developing more sophisti-
cated instruments of observation. On an instrumentalist interpretation of the
theories in question, such discoveries would have to be considered as "miracu-
lous" flukes, which they clearly are not. Nietzsche could concede this with
equanimity, for the point of his scepticism is different. The theoretical entities
which are eventually observed by suitable procedures are phenomena (spots on
a screen, tracks in a Wilson cloud chamber, etc.) whose intrinsic qualitative
nature remains unknown. Nothing of what Nietzsche says in this connection
requires him to deny that there may be real, perception-independent items of
some sort corresponding to variables in scientific equations which have as yet
not been correlated with observable phenomena, but which may in the future be
successfully correlated with observables. What he does deny is rather that such
newly discovered correspondences usually enlighten us about the qualitative
nature of these entities.
In the case of the fields of force to which Boscovichean physics effectively
reduces material objects, the problem might be put like this. The theory asks us
to conceive of objects not in terms of "primary" qualities with which we have,
according to Locke, sensory acquaintance, but rather in terms of (actualized or
dispositional) powers, which act "at a distance" in the pre-twentieth century
sense of this expression. But while (ignoring Hume's arguments for the
moment) it may be at least initially plausible to say that we are acquainted with
power in the phenomenon of solid, stuff-like objects impacting on one another,
it is even prima facie perplexing how we are to conceive, qualitatively, a power
or efficacy that is said to act at a distance, that is, via regions of space not
occupied by anything possessing in itself properties analogous to those we
ordinarily perceive in physical objects (like sensible hardness). If it is replied
296 PETER POELLNER

that force's are perfectly well observable, and that we may think of them (for
example) as the ob~ective correlates of certain sorts of experiences such as the
"feeling of strain,"-0 Nietzsche's rejoinder would presumably be this. We tend
to think that we can concretely, intuitively, conceive of (i.e. "imagine") the
objective correlate of feelings like the sensation of hardness as a quantity of
matter being intrinsically solid, voluminous, and of a certain shape (although
Nietzsche will eventually deny the coherence of this common sense belief, too),
but it seems simply bizzare to want to think of a presumed objective correlate
in inanimate nature of "feelings of strain" as in itself characterized by qualities
which could in any relevant way "resemble" the latter. Hence, while feelings of
strain may well serve as indications or signs of forces or powers, they do not
enlighten us about their "quality" - about what it is that makes them efficacious
- unless we are prepared to apply mentalistic predicates to them. And, as we
have seen, it is an understanding of qualities which "explanation" - or,
moderating Nietzsche's demand somewhat: adequate explanation- would have
to provide.
Modern physical science began with an attack on the "occult qualities" of
Aristotelianism, adopting as its battlecry the slogan that "to explicate a
phenomenon [isJ to deduce it from something else more known to us than the
thing to be explained by it." 21 But with the advent of Newtonian and, more
radically, Boscovichean forces, the wheel seems to have come full circle. The
apparently familiar is reduced to powers whose nature- their efficacy- is left
opaque. Hence Nietzsche's remark that "[t]he development of science resolves
the 'familiar' more and more into the unfamiliar: - it desires, however, the
reverse and proceeds from the impetus to trace the unfamiliar back to the
familiar" (WP 608). It is this exigency which gives rise to his own endeavour
- to which he devotes many pages in the later notebooks - to "supplement" the
"victorious concept 'force'" by an "inner will": 'There is nothing for it: one is
obliged to understand all motion, all 'appearances,' all 'laws,' only as symptoms
of an inner event and to employ man as an analogy to this end" (WP 619; cf.
WP 689; KGW VII.3.40.37)? 2

University of Warwick, England

NOTES
1 References are given in the text to Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, eds.
G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin, 1967-) KGW. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. W.
Kaufmann (New York, 1968). Trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale.
2 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford, 1975), 165.
: Cf. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York, 1950), 2 vo1s., vol. ii, 634f.
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1963), 46-8.
5 E.g. GS 355; KGW Ylll.l.5.10; KGW VII.3.34.246.
6 The contrast I have in mind here is with formal analogies, a distinction analysed in detail by
M. Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (Notre Dame, 1966 ), 60-70.
7 This interpretation of Nietzsche's criticism of theories of volitional causality is shared by A.
Mittasch in his classic commentary on Nietzsche's physics, Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphi-
losoph (Stuttgart, 1952), 227.
x Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (London, 1961 ), 59.
 CAUSATION AND FORCE IN NIETZSCHE 297

9 H.R. Harre and E.H. Madden, Causal Powers (Oxford, 1975), 30.
10 Nagel, The Structure of Science, 63.
11 Cf. Galen Strawson, The Secret Connexion (Oxford, 1989), 20-31.
12 A more radical rejection of the Nietzsche an conception of adequate explanation would be one

that denies that any qualities figure in "objective reality"- as opposed to "subjective" registerings
of it- at all. Nietzsche briskly dismisses a quasi-Pythagorean conception of objective reality in
exclusively formal or quantitative terms as unintelligible: "The reduction of all qualities to
~uantities is nonsense" (WP 564).
1 K. Schlechta and A. Anders, Friedrich Nietzsche - Von den verborgenen Anfiingen seines
Philosophierens, (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstadt, 1962), 136.
14 R. Boscovich, A Theory of Natural Philosophy (Chicago, 1922), 65.
15 Ibid., 85.
16 See e.g. G.W. Leibniz, "Primary Truths," in G. H. R. Parkinson (ed.), Philosophical Writings

~London, 1973), 91.

7 John Locke, Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in The Works of John

Locke, i (London, 1874), II.viii.23.

18 Boscovich, A Theory of Natural Philosophy, 113.
19 For the precedents mentioned here, see G. Berkeley, "Of Motion," in M.R. Ayers (ed.),

Philosophical Works (London, 1993), 255-276; A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Representation (New York, 1966), 2 vols., vol. i, 112-124; F.A. Lange,Geschichte des Materialis-
mus (Iserlohn, 1866), 360f. The latter two works are likely to have directly influenced Nietzsche's
thinking on the subject.
2 °
C.D. Broad, Scientific Thought (London. 1923), 162-3.
21 Robert Boyle, "The Origins of Forms and Qualities," in M.A. Stewart (ed.), Selected

Philosophical Papers (Manchester, 1979), 67.

22 I have offered a detailed interpretation of Nietzsche's development of this thought in my

Nietzsche and Metaphysics, (Oxford, 1995) . 267-288.

 SCOTT H. PODOLSKY AND ALFRED I. TAUBER

NIETZSCHE'S CONCEPTION OF HEALTH:

THE IDEALIZATION OF STRUGGLE

THE ETHOS OF BIOLOGICAL IDEALIZATION

With Darwin, a materialistic basis was established for explaining the emergence
and transformation of species, shaking to its very foundation the preceding
conception of natural order. By the end of the last century, it was generally
recognized that the crucial role played by Darwin was the introduction of
historical analysis to the center of biological thinking. Both the species and the
organism became less entities than processes, dynamically evolving and ever-
different. Being was fully realized as a Heraclitean flux, a becoming. This
metaphysical revolution of how we would henceforth regard time, the biological
world, and most fundamentally, ourselves, was the challenge to which Friedrich
Nietzsche responded; and in that response he challenged the pre-Darwinian
notions of health. Specifically, what Bernard had championed as the "normal,"
a stable interior milieu (or what Walter Cannon would later call "homeostasis"),
Nietzsche would endeavor to replace with inner turmoil as the essence of
biological function. While evolutionary biologists would refer to "fitness,"
Nietzsche would pervade his entire philosophy with the elusive maximal
adaptation of the striving organism. This struggle was directed towards some
unspecified and unknowable ideal, and Nietzsche invoked this struggle as the
essence of health.
Evolution offered Nietzsche an ethic in nature's seemingly ceaseless striving.
He found meaning not in something absolute and definitive, but in the Uber-
mensch (the Overman) as evolution embodied. What is potential and germinal
awakens to greater expansion and finer expression of its essence. With the
Overman, life becomes fuller and richer. "He is not a fixed goal which gives
meaning to evolution, but only expresses the fact that there is no need for such
a goal, that life in itself, in the process [of evolution] has its own value." 1 This
goaless evolution, where only potentialities are recognized, allows for evolution
to assume sui generis, a value in itself. Characteristic and central to this view
(echoed by others of the period, e.g. Henri Bergson) would be the reliance on
life to assume its own purposive character (through its evolutionary nature) and
the denial of the need for external forces or deities. When such a philosophy
would assume its expression in the self, jolting consequences would ensue.

299
B. Babich (ed. ), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 299-311.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
300 SCOTT H. PODOLSKY AND ALFRED I. TAUBER

Nietzsche ironically grasped eternity as the parameter of life, as evolution

continuing ad infinitum. In thus expanding the conception of life as radically
incorporating change in its death- renewal cycle, he pronounced the ideal of life.
No longer a "given," Man gropes toward the ideal; but this ideality is not a
definable goal. In this sense, the ideal represents, alone and unqualified,
evolutionary movement. Changes, adjustment, improvement are the responses
of life to its challenges, both external and from within. In the sequence of
evolutionary movement, every phenomenon is an irreplaceable and unrepeatable
step. Each increment is also unique and non-reiterable, both in time and in its
consequence. Such is freedom in Nietzsche's world, and this ethos would serve
as the foundation of his new morality.
But we need not be Nietzscheans to recognize how this philosophy would
articulate Man in the embrace of a post-Darwinian world. There is no stable
norm, no given, no static entity. The very character of evolution disallows
permanence in any sense, and in each instant, the organism must encounter its
environment and itself to evolve - that is, respond. Life is dialogical - an
ongoing and ceaseless dialogue between organism and its world. In a world of
flux, relativity, and indeterminism, evolution replaces rigid hierarchy and
ordered cosmic forces. But despite constant change, an entity has an identity.
How do we discern that character and what is it? It is in answering this question
that Nietzsche would develop his philosophy of the body and health. Just as the
body would be represented as a dynamic process evolving as the product of
internal and external struggle, so would health be represented as the very
quantification of that struggle.
Nietzsche's conception of the body has been discussed elsewhere;2 this essay
delineates Nietzsche's notion of health, a fundamental aspect of his general
philosophy. We are concerned with his opinions not so much to delve into the
particulars of his thinking, but to glean in his writings the origins of our
culture's own conceptions of health and illness. Those most personal manifesta-
tions of our very being are heavily endowed with the defining elements of
selfhood. This is a fundamental Nietzschean philosophical problem, and to the
extent that we recognize Nietzsche's importance as a seminal thinker, it
behooves us to explore his writings on these matters. One might dispel
Nietzsche's views of the body and health as "unscientific" and wildly meta-
phorical, but we believe he clearly articulated a Darwinian ethos that may well
be discerned in both theoretical biolog/ and more pervasively in common
views of disease. It is not rare to hear, "I have to build up my resistance" or "I
must will away this cold." These are mere echoes of a pervasive notion in our
culture that in some disguised and poorly articulated way, we are responsible
for our well-being as an important constituent of our very identity. The "norm"
for Nietzsche has been replaced by the "ideal," and this over-arching orientation
is expressed in his notions of health. Nietzsche's general formulation, so
relevant to a philosophy of medicine, is often ignored. Consider: "The idea that
a subject's health is identical with his ability to realize the goals set by himself
is a promising approach suggested recently, and independently by two analytic
philosophers, Caroline Whitbeck and Izymar Porn [!]" 4 Neither Brown, 5
 NIETZSCHE'S CONCEPTION OF HEALTH 301

Nordenfelt, 6 Pom, 7 nor Whitbeck8 recognize a debt to Nietzsche for first

articulating the underlying metaphysical argument for this position, and its
application for our notions of health. The approach towards defining health
taken by these authors is, in our opinion, an appropriate response to the
objective one adopted by Christopher Boorse, who argues that health is simply
the absence of illness. 9 But each fail to articulate the primary source for their
understanding of health in Nietzsche's writings, and thereby forfeit an important
consideration of its full philosophical implications. Whitbeck's concerns with
"ultimate goals" and Porn's explicit introduction of "ideality" clearly resonate
Nietzsche's own orientation, for these are prominent Nietzschean themes.
Nietzsche's ambition that the philosopher become "the physician of the soul"
was an application of his larger project concerning the Ubermensch. The
Nietzschean hero constantly strives to supercede himself, whether framed as an
ethical mandate, a characteristic of an anti-nihilistic social program, or in the
case examined here, as the problem posed by disease and addressed by
medicine. Nietzsche's basic proclamation, reiterated in various contexts, resides
in this belief concerning self-creation, self-overcoming, and self-responsibility.
The need to strive for an ever-elusive ideal health was the application of this
challenge to the realm of medicine.

NIETZSCHE'S CONCEPTION OF HEALTH

The general schema of Nietzsche's biology is based on his notebook entries

written in 1885-1886, between the writing of The Gay Science (1882) and On
the Genealogy of Morals (1887). This was a body-obsessed, health-centered
period for Nietzsche and reflects his psi;chological and physical anguish. Such
a process has been described elsewhere, 0 but it can be briefly summarized here.
As Moles has written, the body was viewed by Nietzsche as 1) complex, 2)
dynamic, 3) hierarchical (with struggles at lower levels resulting in novel,
emerging levels of activity), 4) based upon dominance/obedience relations
within this hierarchy, and 5) interconnected, with alliances and sympathies in
addition to struggles. 11 As Nietzsche wrote:

The individual itself as a struggle between parts (for food, space, etc.): its evolution tied to the
victory or predominance of individual parts, to an atrophy, a "becoming an organ" of other parts .
... The aristocracy in the body, the majority of the rulers (struggle between cells and tissues).
Slavery and division of labor: the higher type possible only through the subjugation of the lower,
so that it becomes a function. 12

Each drive is in a state of tension struggling with its neighbors in order to be

able to exert itself most strongly and fully. Thus, every body is a domain of
inner competition, in which each drive by nature attempts to be dominant and
to channel the power of the whole body into an expression of itself. 13 The sum
total of such struggle would be manifested as what eventually was termed the
"will to power." From this basic conception of the biological structure of our
organic being, Nietzsche constructed his view of health, a view which evolved
302 SCOTT H. PODOLSKY AND ALFRED I. TAUBER

eventually to dominate his worldview and ultimately serve as the basis of a new
morality.
Although his view of health changed, i.e., different elements were added and
elaborated over time, a consistent reading of "health" can be applied to
Nietzsche's use of the concept at all times, even if certain of its elements at any
given moment were more implicit than explicit. In general, the following six
components characterized the Nietzschean conception of health: I) Life is
characterized by disharmony and resultant struggle at all levels, with the ability
to harmonize and create order from chaos a measure of individual power. This
may represent Apollo taming Dionysus or the will to power, but the underlying
conception is the same. 2) In the absence of truth, God, and absolute good and
evil, one can only live well, looking for those values most useful to the good,
powerful, self-creative life. Such resultant activities may range from aesthetic
creation to warlike conquest in the name of such values. 3) Since self-creation
involves constant redefinition in a changing environment, one must continually
pose resistances to oneself and overcome them. The inability to even pose such
resistance represents sickliness. 14 The inability to overcome such resistance
reveals sickness. The abilities both to pose and overcome such resistance
represents health- perhaps even great health. 4) Since each individual is the
outcome of a unique, contingent history of struggle, and since greatness can be
accomplished in many ways, no two types of individual greatness need be equal.
Hence, there is no single static norm of health -the only constant of the many
expressions of health is the degree of power which individuals expend success-
fully. 5) Health of the body and health of the mind are not only physiologically
related, but operate according to parallel principles of resistance, struggle, and
creative overcoming. Therefore, the great thinker is healthy when he can
challenge his principles and incorporate anomalies into new and expanded
worldviews. 6) Hence, the philosopher as "physician of culture" and "physician
of the soul" - as Nietzsche was attempting to function - acts by challenging
prevailing principles and by forcing society and its individuals to acknowledge
and incorporate anomalies into their own worldviews. Note that while we have
attempted to depict Nietzsche's system as somewhat logically derived, it was
not constructed as such chronologically. However, the more fundamental
conceptions were always implicit, with his ideas only gradually exposed and
developed. Such a process should be kept in mind throughout the rest of this
section, where the development of Nietzsche's views of health will be presented
in three groupings.

1872-1873- EARLY MUSINGS ON THE GREEKS

Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1872) represented Nietzsche's

earliest introduction of the conception of health as the desire to seek out, and the
ability to overcome, resistance. In such early writing, to be read alongside The
Birth of Tragedy, health was primarily articulated at the psychological level
with the conceptions of Dionysus (as feverish, inherent disharmony) and Apollo
(as calm, willed order) in mind; the ordering of the psychological self from its
 NIETZSCHE'S CONCEPTION OF HEALTH 303

inherent disharmony would serve as the primordial healthy process. Central to

Nietzsche at this stage was the further claim that the healthy not only respond
to, but also seek out, challenges to their worldviews; suffering, for them, is the
midwife of creation, crushing those too passive to overcome its challenges while
elevating the strong to new levels. As Nietzsche wrote:

If philosophy ever manifested itself as helpful, redeeming, or prophylactic, it was in a healthy

culture. The sick, it made ever sicker .... Philosophy is dangerous wherever it does not exist in its
fullest right, and it is only the health of a culture - and not every culture at that- which accords
it such fullest right. 15

Philosophy becomes the epitome of challenge and resistance to one's way of

life, and Nietzsche thus implicitly grounded his conception of health in the
lifestyle of the healthy Greeks. Every healthy Greek, according to Nietzsche,
lived the life of the philosopher, addressing and overcoming self-generated
challenges. As he continued, "The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have
once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it." 16 Thus,
Nietzsche's conception of health was grounded in his conception of the
philosopher's self-presentation (and presentation to others) of new ways of life
as the stimulus to creative growth and self-maintenance.

The activity of the older philosophers ... tended toward the healing and the purification of the
whole. It is the mighty flow of Greek culture that shall not be impeded; the terrible dangers in its
path shall be cleared away: thus did the philosopher protect and defend his native land. 17

Moreover, just as the individual at the psychological level could absorb and
assimilate conflicting worldviews, so could the Greeks, who "invariably
absorbed other living cultures," 18 extend their domain at the cultural level. Thus,
without even mentioning the physiological organism, Nietzsche first created a
fledgling depiction of health in terms of the responses of the mind and the social
body to philosophical challenges.
In "The Philosopher as Cultural Physician," Nietzsche would repeat and
extend such views. He first reiterated the role of the philosopher as described
in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. 19 However, Nietzsche here made
the further, albeit brief and subtle, extension of such tension between dishar-
mony and harmony at the psychological and social levels - levels mediated by
philosophers - to the level of the biological organism itself. Life itself could be
seen as characterized by "the essential imperfection of things," 20 where
Dionysian chaos and struggle reside on the foundation of all things and where
Apollonian harmonizing is required to follow. Such an embryonic conception
was not fully fleshed out until The Will to Power, wherein all the different levels
- from the biological to the social - would be seen to have their own domains
of struggle, each affecting the levels above and below them. Nonetheless, while
Nietzsche allowed his conception of health to remain grounded primarily in
society at large at this time, he had begun to illustrate its ramifications at the
organismallevel.
304 SCOTT H. PODOLSKY AND ALFRED I. TAUBER

The end of this early stage was reached in section 52 of Daybreak (1881),
entitled "Where are the New Physicians of the Soul?" This would represent a
concise summary of his early call to philosophy to counter, not condone, the
type of comforting, life-negating philosophy stemming from Plato to Christian-
ity. Nietzsche proposed that the Greek model of the philosopher-as-resistor be
brought forward into the world which he had previously entitled "diseased." 21
His attempt to bring the Greek physician of cultural health - the philosopher-
into the modern age marked the end of his first stage.

THE GAY SCIENCE AND ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

The Gay Science and On the Genealogy of Morals serve as the central reposito-
ries of Nietzsche's mature concept of health; they can truly be said to be
dominated by such a concern. The former work is far less radical than the latter;
but more than any other text, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) moves the theme
of health to a central position in Nietzsche's thinking. There it develops all but
the first of the six postulates of Nietzsche's conception of health stated above,
and these may be presented in three groupings. First, Nietzsche chose this text
to elucidate the theme of health at the individual, rather than the societal, level.
The preface is filled with the concept of birth, of labor and creation produced
out of individual pain and struggle: "From such abysses, from such severe
sickness, ... one returns newborn, having shed one's skin." 22 In short, the
individual grows and become healthy by overcoming pain and engaging
struggle.
Second, alluding to the will to power without here labeling that conception,
Nietzsche next fully explicates the notion of health as arising from continuous
individual struggle and contradiction, from the posing and overcoming of
obstacles. In section 382, discussing "great health," Nietzsche most explicitly
relates such instructions:

Whoever wants to know from the adventures of his own most authentic experience how a
discoverer and conqueror of the ideal feels ... -needs one thing above everything else: the great
health -that one does not merely have but also acquires continually, and must acquire because one
gives up again and again, and must give it up. 23

Great health therefore results in the individual so powerful that he can not only
withstand, but even look forward to, defeats from which he can recover and
grow (GS 163). However, at the same time, health has become the elusive ideal:
"And now, after we have long been on our way in this manner, we argonauts of
the ideal, with more daring perhaps than is prudent, and have suffered shipwreck
and damage often enough, but are, to repeat it, healthier than one likes to permit
us, dangerously healthy, ever again healthy" (GS 382).
This is the essence behind his famous dictum in section 283 to "live danger-
ously," and it reveals Nietzsche's emphasis upon those who continually
contradict and redefine themselves and others. In fact, not only is great health
an elusive ideal, but it is not even a single definable ultimate state. In the critical
section 120, Nietzsche maintains that there is no normal health - and this
 NIETZSCHE'S CONCEPTION OF HEALTH 305

applies to both the health of the soul and the health of the body upon which it
is based (note Nietzsche's encroaching physiologism here):

Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your
energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus
there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable
to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the "equality of men," the more must
the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be
abandoned by medical men. Only then would the time have come to reflect on the health and
illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul. (GS 120)

The importance of this passage cannot be overemphasized - it is the fulcrum

by which we argue the Nietzschean biological concept concerning the unique,
individually contingent histories of physiological and psychological selves. It
also represents the only time Nietzsche explicitly abjures the concept of normal
health (although it remains implicit in all his writings).
Finally, it is in The Gay Science where health becomes a central evaluative
concept, as Nietzsche removed truth from the realm of reality and replaced the
search for truth with the naturalistic search for health. "Good" and "evil" are
implicitly replaced by "healthy" and "sick," as Nietzsche wrote:

I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of that word- one who
has to pursue the problem of the total health of a people, time, race, or of humanity- to muster the
courage to push my suspicion to its limits and to risk the proposition: what was at stake in all
philosophizing hitherto was not at all "truth" but something else - let us say, health, future,
growth, power, life. (GS, Preface 2)

This idea, still embryonic here, would serve as the foundation of On the
Genealogy o.f Morals. In fact, the many conceptions of health introduced in The
Gay Science may be said to represent the foundation upon which Morals would
build to logical completion.
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) may be said to represent the Nietzschean
account of health, and more broadly, health is the key to reading all three of its
essays. Therein, Nietzsche fully fleshed out his replacement of truth with health.
As several critics have noted, the first essay, with its juxtaposition of the
good/evil and good/bad dichotomies, may just as well have juxtaposed good/evil
with healthy/sick. Nietzsche repeatedly contrasted in this first essay the healthy,
active noble lifestyle with the sickly, reactive slave lifestyle. Note, moreover,
in this context, the striking prelude to the eventual identification of health with
the will to power:

To demand of such strength that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a
desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to
demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength. 24

Health was being reduced to the expression of the will to power itself seeking
out and overcoming resistances. This final aspect of health was at last coming
into place.
306 SCOTT H. PODOLSKY AND ALFRED I. TAUBER

The second essay, historically delineating the emergence of the bad con-
science, extends the concept of health to yet another level of organization: not
that of a single community or individual, but that of all humanity since the
painful inception of civilization. This essay serves as a lucid illustration of how
mankind's endemic sickness, the painful historical onset of the bad conscience,
could itself be incorporated by the strong and transformed into such traits
necessary for future, great health as personal discipline and endurance. The bad
conscience was a "serious illness," but it was "an illness as pregnancy is an
illness," 25 and this theme would dominate the second essay. The very onset of
the sickness of the bad conscious stimulates the strong to overcome future
sickness and attain still greater health. Finally, the third essay, derived from the
first, attempted yet another device to demonstrate Nietzsche's conception of
health. Almost rhetorically, he exposed its antithesis, asceticism, as the
medicine of nihilism - as a quack remedy for mankind, hoping for his readers
to derive their own therapeutic conceptions therefrom. As he wrote:

It would be pointless to indulge in criticism of this kind of priestly medication, the "guilty" kind.
Who would want to maintain that such orgies of feeling as the ascetic priest prescribed to his sick
people ... ever benefitted them? ... The ascetic priest has ruined physical health wherever he has
come to power 26

Both his own remedy and his diametrical opposition's had been presented; it
was for his readers to choose their cure.
Thus, On the Genealogy of Morals served as a bridge between the pre-axial
and post-axial conceptions of health. In it, we see still more clearly an underly-
ing use of the will to power and the Overman (see, for instance, GM II: 10)
which was a decidedly post-Zarathustra modification. These conceptions had
been implicit before this period, but only at this time could they be said to fully
shape Nietzsche's presentation of health. The healthy man was becoming the
Ubermensch, and the striving for health was becoming the will to power, as
Nietzsche reduced his system to several crucial foundation-points. This process
would achieve its fullest clarification in The Will to Power, written at the same
time as On the Genealogy of Morals.

THE WILL TO POWER AND TO PHILOSOPHIZE

The Will to Power at last offered the full identification of life's ceaseless
struggle, the first component in the "logical" construction of Nietzschean health.
This component had been implicit all along, but now life itself was to be
explicitly viewed as the result of internal strife and overcoming. "Health" could
now be regarded as representing the identical essence of competition, whether
viewed at the more complex societal and organismic levels or extrapolated to
the simplest protozoa or individual cells. Health, in sum, was proclaimed as just
one aspect of the will to power. The philosopher as cultural physician, or
physician of the soul, was merely a favorable resistance for such a will. The
forming, shaping, healthy individual was now no "healthier" than amoebae
themselves, extending their pseudopods, overwhelming and incorporating their
 NIETZSCHE'S CONCEPTION OF HEALTH 307

environment. 27 Thus, Nietzsche had firmly placed humanity within its naturalis-
tic, physiological context; all the aesthetics and philosophisizing of the Greeks
were at last to be seen as no more than the stretching of mental pseudopods.
Health, and humanity, had been fully naturalized, and Nietzsche's system of
health had been completed in terms of a sweeping biological synthesis.
Nietzsche espoused such views of health as finally developed in the axial
period until the very end of his writing. In Ecce Homo ("Why I Am So Wise,"
section 2), Nietzsche presented the same theory of the healthy Overman that he
had been espousing for nearly two decades. Having fully confessed his own
decadence in section 1, Nietzsche devoted section 2 to his own overcoming of
nihilism. He had become, of course, his own model for the healthy Overman,
and he declared his philosophy to represent his own autobiography. Many critics
have shown how Nietzsche's theory of health derived from his own manifold
health concems?8 A single quote will summarize Nietzsche's own circumspect
view quite well:

I took myself in hand. I made myself healthy again: the condition for this - every physiologist
would admit that - is that one be healthy at bottom. A typically morbid being cannot become
healthy, much less make itself healthy. For a typically healthy person, conversely, being sick can
even become an energetic stimulus for life, for living more. This, in fact, is how that long period
of sickness appears to me now: as it were, I discovered life anew, including myself; I tasted all
good and even little things, as others cannot easily taste them- I turned my will to health, to life,
into a philosophy. 29

Thus, the will to health finally equalled not only the will to power, but
Nietzsche's will to life and to philosophize. It is from this point that we might
discern our own indebtedness as these themes have filtered into our medical
culture at large, a topic which will be discussed below.

NIETZSCHE ON HEALTH IN ITS PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT

More might have been written concerning Nietzsche's views on health. 3 Certain °
writers, in a manner similar to ours, do discuss Nietzsche's health as the
antithesis of the avoidance of health? 1 A few summary remarks will therefore
be made before presenting our own argument. Fundamentally, though, our
interpretation hinges upon the assumption that Nietzsche applied the same
Darwinian orientation he espoused in his view of the body to his understanding
of health: struggle, competition, and overcoming. As a caveat, it is important to
note that no one attributes to Nietzsche the type of Bemardian conception of
health-as-passive-normalcy.
However, contrary to our view, several critics do interpret Nietzsche as
envisioning sickness as extrinsic to the body, as something to be overcome by
a fundamentally normalized organism which will then rise to a higher level of
normalcy. In their analyses, health= self= normal, sickness= other= harmful,
and the harm must be overcome. 32 This may lead to a dynamic, progressive,
ascending spiral of health, but it is not a conception of health as the
non-progressive, elusive ideal. With Pasley our disagreement lies in the will to
308 SCOTT H. PODOLSKY AND ALFRED I. TAUBER

power. He places no emphasis upon the internal struggle for health epitomized
by and generalized as the will to power. The subject is, for him, still a unity,
countering a specific other. This lack of a conception of multitude, a subject
unified by the will to power seeking an ideal of health, distinguishes this
"non-Darwinian" reading. Health occurs when sickness happens to be over-
come; it is not a fundamental process of striving for resistance. It is still
mediated by a "reactive," rather than an "active," organism. Kaufmann shares
Pasley's opinion, but based on a different interpretation of the eternal recurrence
from our own, 33 and it is here that the full implications of Nietzschean health
can be understood.
Nietzsche's philosophy assumes its most profound biological orientation in
the eternal recurrence, which is fundamentally organic in its implicit connota-
tions of renewal, regeneration, and return. There are those who understand
eternal recurrence as a cosmological princM;le; the reasons for rejecting this
interpretation are amply argued elsewhere. 4 Philosophically, Nietzsche uses
eternal recurrence as a theory not of the world, but of the self. The interpretation
of the eternal recurrence must reside in a consistent reading of Nietzsche's
concepts of the will to power and its corollary, becoming as true being. In a
profound sense, Nietzsche envisioned that the eternal recurrence is the fulfill-
ment of living each moment, each act, each choice without the demurrals of past
remorse or future judgement. We are enjoined to live as if each moment is to be
relived, unchanged, into eternity. The eternal recurrence is the final destination
of a deeply rooted evolutionary process, a calling which should become an ethic
of our biological being, independent of any transcendent principle. With that
perspective, each moment is not only immutable, but precious, and forever
accountable to ourselves. Nietzsche's recurrence does not refer "to a life
precisely like this one, but to this very life." 35 In Nietzsche's words:

I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent- not to a new life
or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same, selfsame life ... to each again the
eternal recurrence of all things ... to proclaim the overman again to men. 16

Nietzsche thus would imbue the quality of eternity into every moment, and
he would lead us to a supreme self-awareness of the ultimate and inescapable
responsibility for our acts. The last element of the ethic then is to accept the
irrevocability of every choice allowing us to assume the mandate of responsibil-
ity for our life, a life to be lived again and again, eternally. If God is dead, then
our morality must be based on our self-willed sovereignty. Responsibility then
resides solely in the self, whose identity is based on fully acknowledging the
primacy of the will to power and living its mandate freed of false and encum-
bering moral restrictions. This is a commitment only the strong can assume, for
the sick sigh, "If only I were some else." (GM III: 14) If life is to be eternally
recurrent, then we must accept living in the present in its full and self-sufficient
complement. Time is framed not in the past or future, but accompanies us,
moving steadily forward in the present. In this sense, Nietzsche accepts
"becoming"; but he does so with the particular proviso of apprehending the
 NIETZSCHE'S CONCEPTION OF HEALTH 309

omnipotent present as full being, which in turn entails the rejection of becoming
as an end or goal. (WP 53)
Thus, by removing extraneous moral context, life is lived as full and
unencumbered will. The will, alone on its own axis, unselfconsciously knows
no past or future. The eternal recurrence, as an ethical mandate, becomes the
ultimate assertion of that will. It is precisely the raising of man, the animal, from
the one-dimensional will to a second ethical dimension that allows a moral
exercise of will to alter the self and thereby become freed and healed. Here then
is an expansive ethic, in which a fully creative will is celebrated, and redemp-
tion may be thus attained. And further, if the eternal recurrence is regarded as
the essence of "becoming" with no end point, then health - as the appropriate
expression of that activity- is never achieved but remains an elusive ideal. To
be sick is not to strive; health is the expression of the will's ceaseless struggle
- never fulfilled, but always becoming.

CONCLUSION

Aside from the interest Nietzsche generates in his own right, what lessons might
we learn from his philosophy of health? If we refer to the opening passages of
this essay, we posited that Nietzsche offers us a window, as it were, into the
metaphysical foundations of how we might view ourselves as healers or
patients. This is not to say that we need adopt his proposal of the body as a
crucible for Darwinian struggle of competing drives, but rather to contemplate
the general sense of responsibility for one's health. He argued we are funda-
mentally our bodies, demanded that rather than being subject to divine fate, we
assume to the extent our self-will permits, our own life course. This is a heroic
Romantic anthem to be sure, and it was enunciated in different guises by others.
But Nietzsche most clearly articulated the very modern notion that we must
rediscover ourselves in, or better, as our bodies. It is a theme picked up by later
phenomenologists, e.g., Merleau-Ponty, and has drifted into our common culture
in myriad ways. But these are not our direct concern.
Most fundamentally, we are struck with the general ethos in medicine that
there is a close correlation between life-style and health. Ethos perhaps is a
strange way of posing this current truism given the epidemiological information
to support this medical "fact," but there is a strong ethical correspondence
between the interpretation of such medical data. Our culture no longer accepts
normalcy; we aspire to an idealized health, from our premature infants to our
growing number of octogenarians and beyond. Our medical expectations are
driven not by population norms but by the ideals (ala Galton). 37 We should
recall that the Nietzschean notion of health was a radical rejoinder to the
pre-Darwinian concept of balance and normalcy. The norm was a discovery of
Bernard's generation; 38 the ideal of Nietzsche was to eclipse it. The "norm"
today is to be ill; we complain of ailments more than twice as frequently as fifty
years ago. 39 An idealized ideal of health has in fact become a national mandate
as we hear public health officialdom proclaim the benefits of recommended diet
and exercise.
310 SCOTT H. PODOLSKY AND ALFRED I. TAUBER

This is not the place to critique our modem health aspirations, but it is of
interest to probe one seminal philosophical source for their origin. Nietzsche
thus focuses our interest, for we have grasped a cardinal axiom of Nietzschean
insight- we may aspire to an idealized state of health from multiple points of
origin. We do so both because of our biological character that he defined as the
will to power, but also applied as an ethical mandate in the eternal recurrence.
The problematic nature of Nietzsche's morality remains undiscussed here, and
we would not be construed as endorsing his position. The issue explicated here
is more modest, namely on what basis did Nietzsche propose health as both a
medical (qua biological) and ethical concern?
We perceive a deep resonance in our culture's current concerns with
Nietzsche's notions that we strive for health on the basis that evolution demands
the organism struggle for its existence and pursue self-aggrandizement
(Darwin), as well as fulfill its ethical mandate (Nietzsche). Thus following
Darwin, the organism is no longer given, static and defined, but must be
regarded as dynamic and ever-changing. Within a Darwinian construct,
Nietzsche bequeathed an ethos of how this fundamental character of our
biological nature would be transformed into a new morality, one in which
human beings, as both a society and as individuals, are ultimately responsible
for, and to, ourselves. It is a pervasive ethic, whose full influence in medicine
we suspect remains to be fully expressed.

Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University

NOTES
1 G. Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche [1907] (Loiskandl H, Weinstein D, Weinstein M.,
trans.] (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 7.
2 A. 1. Tauber, "A Typology of Nietzsche's Biology," Biology and Philosophy 9 (1994): 25-45.
3 L. Buss, The Evolution of Individuality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
4 L. Nordenfelt, On the Nature of Health: An Action-Theoretic Approach (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1987), p. 65.
5 W.M. Brown, "On Defining 'Disease'," Journal of Medical Philosophv 10 (1985): 311-328.
6 -
Nordenfelt, On the Nature of Health.
7 I. Porn, "An Equilibrium Model of Health," in: L. Nordenfelt, B.I.B. Lindahl, eds., Health,
Disease, and Causal Explanation in Medicine (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984),
fP· 3-9.
C. Whitbeck, "Four Basic Concepts of Medical Science" PSA l (1978) 210-222; C. Whitbeck,
"A Theory of Health" in A. L. Caplan, H. T. Engelhardt, Jr, J.J. McCartney, eds., Interdisciplinary
Perspectives (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publications, 1981) pp. 611-626.
9 C. Boorse, "Health as a Theoretical Concept," Philosophy of Science 44 (1977) 542-573.
10 Tauber, "A Typology of Nietzsche's Biology"; A. Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and

Cosmology (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1990); E. Blonde!, Nietzsche: The Bodv and
Culture, trans. S. Hand (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991), T. Long, "Nietzsche's
Philosophy of Medicine," Nietzsche-Studien 19 (1990): 112-128.
11 Moles, op. cit.
12 F. Nietzsche, The Will To Power [1904] trans. W. Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale (New York:

Vintage Books, 1967), 344, 348-349.

13 Tauber, "A Typology of Nietzsche's Biology"; Moles, p. 102.
14 M. Letteri, "The Theme of Health in Nietzsche's Thought," Man and World 23 ( 1990): 411:

WP47.
15 Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks [1872], trans. M. Cowan (Washington,

D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1962), pp. 27-28.

 NIETZSCHE'S CONCEPTION OF HEALTH 311

16 Ibid., p. 28.
17 Ibid., p. 35.
18 Ibid., p. 30.
19 Nietzsche, "The Philosopher as Cultural Physician," in D. Breazeale, ed. and trans., Philosophy

and Truth, Selections from Nietzsche's Notebook of the Early 1870s (Atlantic Highlands:
Humanities Press, International, 1990), pp. 71-73.
20 Ibid., p. 69.
21 Nietzsche, Daybreak [1881], trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1982), pp. 52-53.

22 Nietzsche, The Gay Science [1882; 343-347 in 1887], trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage

Books, 1974), p. 37.

23 Ibid., p. 346.
24 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals [ 1887], trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale

~New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 45.

5 Ibid., p. 84, 88.
26 Ibid., p. 142, 143.
27 WP 654.
28 M. Pasley, "Nietzsche's Use of Medical Terms," in Pasley, ed., Nietzsche: Imagery and

Thought- A Collection of Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 123-158.
29 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo [1888], trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 4
30 [See however the comprehensive contribution to this theme by the German philosopher and

physician, Pia Daniela Volz, Nietzsche im Labyrinth seiner Krankheit. Eine medizinisch-
biographische Untersuchung (Wiirzburg: Kbnigshausen & Neuman, 1990) as well as, in part,
Sarah Kofman's massive two volume study, Explosions. Del' "Ecce Homo" de Nietzsche (Paris:
Galilee, 1992); English translation by Duncan Large forthcoming.- Ed.)
31 See Long, "Nietzsche's Philosophy of Medicine." Long points to Karl Jaspers' influence in this

understanding of Nietzschean health. See Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Understanding of His Philosophi-

cal Activity, trans. C. Walraff and F.J. Schmitz (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1965),
p, 114-115.
- Pasley, pp. 149-153.
33 W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1974), pp. 316-333.

34 See A. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

1985) . pp. 142-146.

35 W. D. Williams, Nietzsche and the French (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), p. 100.
36 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1885], trans. W. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche (New

York: Penguin Books, 1959), p. 333.

37 A.Tauber, "Darwinian Aftershocks: Repercussions in Late Twentieth Century Medicine,"

Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 87 (1994): 27-31.

38 G. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological [1966], trans. C. R. Fawcett in collaboration

with R. S. Cohen (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

39 E. Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era

(New York: The Free Press, 1992).

 ERIC STEINHART

THE WILL TO POWER

AND PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING

INTRODUCTION

The world, according to Nietzsche, is will to power, and nothing besides (WP
1067; BGE 36). 1 But the world as will to power remains enigmatic, despite
Nietzsche's many efforts to explicate its operation in physics, chemistry,
biology, psychology, and politics. 2
In what follows I am to clarify the will to power by interpreting its activity
as that of a parallel distributed processing (henceforth abbreviated as PDP)
system. PDP systems are populations of dynamical units whose independent but
synchronized operations make a whole whose behavior is typically more than
the sum of the behaviors of its parts. PDP systems form the basis for work in
chaos, fractals, cellular automata, non-linear dynamical systems, self-organizing
systems, and neural nets.

WORLD AS WILL TO POWER:

THE WAVE MECHANICS OF THE WILL TO POWER

In accordance with Nietzsche's anti-metaphysical attitude (TI 6), we treat the

will to power as a physical hypothesis (BGE 22, 36)? The will to power is a
continuous chaotic flux having no logical order in itself (GS 109, 111; WP 520,
711 ). We introduce logical order into this chaotic continuum by partitioning it
into spatio-temporal pieces (GS 112). So divided, the will to power is a totality
of identical cases (WP 512, 521, 532, 544, 551, 552, 568, 569). Each identical
case is a center afforce (WP 634, 715) with some degree of power (WP 635). 4
While these centers of force are atoms in a relative sense (WP 715), we
cannot conceive of their interactions in terms of Newtonian particle-mechanics
(GS 373; BGE 12; WP 624, 636). So we think of their interactions in wave-
mechanical terms (WP 1067; GS 310). All centers of force radiate shockwaves
corresponding to the intensity of their degrees of power (WP 634); these
traverse the entirety of space (WP 638). 5 The reverberations of these waves
(WP 636) place each center of force into relations of tension (WP 635) with all
other centers (WP 567, 634, 635, 638).

313
B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Episterrwlogy, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 313-322.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
314 ERIC STEINHART

The world as will to power is a finite, conserved quantity of force (Z III: 10/1;
WP 595, 1062, 1066, 1067). It is discrete insofar as the number of configura-
tions of forces in it is calculable and definite (WP 1066). The will to power is
bounded (WP 1067). It is, consequently, a self-contained granular medium
shaken by internal detonations (i.e. percussive power-discharges). In such a
medium, patterns like Chladni's "sound-figures" appear (PT, p. 24; cf. p. 82);
these patterns are the invariants of interacting waves. They are treaty-drafts of
will (WP 715), power-constellations. Strikingly, experiments with vibrated
granular media have demonstrated the emergence of patterns ("oscillons")
acting like charged particles. 6 These oscillons combine to form atomic and
molecular structures: vibrated discrete media support non-trivial physics.
Our model of the will to power as a self-enclosed granular medium shaken
by internal detonations is a PDP model. Several further features of PDP systems
motivate their use as models for the will to power: (1) PDP systems are
inherently relational, directly modeling the perspectival nature of the will to
power; (2) processing in PDP systems is holistic, and so is activity in the will
to power;7 (3) PDP theorists have put forth thennodynamic theories of computa-
tion, and Nietzsche describes the will to power in thermodynamic and philologi-
cal (informational) terms; (4) certain PDP systems are self-organizing dynami-
cal systems, and Nietzsche describes the will to power as just such a system; 8
(5) PDP accounts of recursive auto-associative memories square well with
Nietzsche's view of memory as active; (6) PDP theorists have opposed their
distributed models of cognition to centralized models, and Nietzsche makes the
same opposition; (7) PDP accounts of how cooperative strategies (e.g. conven-
tions) emerge within collectives of agents accord well with Nietzsche's accounts
of how language & knowledge emerge in the herd. We use these parallels to
make sense of the will to power in contemporary scientific terms.

FROM THERMODYNAMICS TO PHILOLOGY:

THE THERMODYNAMIC CONCEPTION OF THE WILL TO POWER

Nietzsche describes the will to power in thermodynamic terms (WP 1067). 9 The
will to power cycles between a hot high point and a cold low point (GS 277; WP
639, 712, 1067). This thermal cycle is both global (WP 1067) and local (WP
567, 636). 10 The global cycle is the eternal return (GS 109, 341; WP 1000-
1067).11 The local cycle is superimposed on the global cycle, much as the
diurnal cycle of daily heating and nocturnal cooling is superimposed on the
yearly cycle of summer heating and winter cooling.
These thermal cycles constitute the inner will (WP 619) that distinguishes the
will to power from merely mechanical force. Both the local and global cycles
are best modeled physically as waves (GS 310), 12 that is, as sinusoidal functions
of time. 13 The incongruence of the will to power with itself (WP 568) prevents
these cycles from being damped out, thereby rendering entropy cyclical (WP
639, 1063, 1064, 1066) rather than always increasing. The will to power is a
discrete dynamical system oscillating through evolutionary self-organization
and devolutionary self-disorganization (WP 712, 796).
 THE WILL TO POWER AND PDP SYSTEMS 315

What distinguishes the will to power from mechanistic systems (GS 373; WP
618-639) is that its entropy is cyclical: time's arrow reverses direction at both
low and high points (WP 712). From high to low, entropy goes up; from low to
high, it goes down. As entropy increases, the world as a whole becomes more
homogeneous: thermal contrasts decrease, energy disperses itself, hotspots
disappear; as entropy decreases, the world becomes more heterogeneous:
thermal contrasts increase, energy concentrates itself, hotspots appear.
The entropy of the world as will to power is naturally factored into two
opposed but directly proportional (i.e. agonistic) qualities: turbulence and
agility. These are (roughly) the Dionysian and Apollinian aspects of the will to
power. 14 At the high point, both are maximal; at the low point, both are minimal.
Exemplars of maximal agility in maximal turbulence include dancing near the
abyss (GS 347), the tree that raises its branches into the lightning (GS 19, 371),
and the ship in the storm. (GS 318, 382) The more agile Stoic lives best in more
turbulent times; the less agile Epicurean lives best in less turbulent times (GS
154, 306, 375).
Turbulence and agility determine the temperature of the will to power both
locally and globally in space and time. As the will to power heats up from low
(coldest) to high (hottest), both agility and turbulence intensify. Increasing
heterogeneity yields hot action: the most skillful mastery of the greatest chaos
by the greatest artistry (i.e. ordering power). 15 A master of musical improvisa-
tion is hot insofar as he or she plays skillfully with chance as a partner (GS 303),
and at the high points in life we are all such masters (GS 277). As the will to
power cools down from high to low, both agility and turbulence slacken.
Increasing homogeneity yields cool action. The hot insights and actions of the
individual freeze into the linguistic and moral conventions of the herd.
Physics today recognizes a deep analogy between entropy and information-
processing.16 This analogy binds thermodynamics and philology: the will to
power as a self-interpreting text (GS 374; WP 481, 556, 643; BGE 14, 22) is a
t herma1 m .
. f ormatiOn-processor. 17

The thermal cycle of the will to power from low point to high point and back
down precisely parallels the thermal cycle of PDP information-processing
systems l 1.ke B o 1tzmann mac h.mes, 18 ..h armony mac h"mes, 19 spm-g
. 1asses, 20 an d
Ising systems. 21 Thermodynamics and interpretation focus our model of the will
to power as a PDP system: power-constellations in the will to power are
information-bearing patterns transformed by recurrent cycles of melting and
freezing. Insofar as the will to power is a PDP system transforming information-
bearing patterns, its interpretation is computation.
Our view that the will to power computes like a Boltzmann or harmony
machine is reinforced by Nietzsche's conception of an extremely simple kind
of cognition. Since all of existence is engaged in interpretation, that is, in
computation, even crystals compute. Indeed, such computation is a primitive
form of cognition that proceeds by annealing (WP 499). 22 Such primitive
thinking remains operative even in humans (GS 54).
316 ERIC STEINHART

PERCEPTION AND APPEARANCE:

THE WORLD-PROCESS AS PERCUSSION AND REPERCUSSION

Our wave-mechanical conception of the will to power helps to clarify its action
as percussion and repercussion (WP 567, 636). At each moment, driven by the
inner will (the internal oscillation of the will to power) each center of force
detonates, radiating a shockwave into the whole of the will to power (WP 636).
Other centers of force (organized into power-constellations) resist (WP 568) by
reflecting and modulating the shockwaves they receive as they transmit their
own. The reverberations of these shockwaves (WP 633) ground the musicality
of the will to power, so that rhythm, tempo, melody, and harmony become
legitimate cosmological categories. (Cf. GS 84, 109, 373; WP 552) Waves
mirror waves, hence new unities (WP 552, 561) and patterns of functional
organization form in the will to power (WP 636). The cycle of percussion and
repercussion is a thermodynamic one on which informational (auto-philological)
processes supervene.
Percussion and repercussion explain how each power-structure adopts a
perspective to all others (WP 567, 636) via perception and appearance.
Perception is not limited to sentient animals (BGE 36): every power-
constellation perceives (PT, 96). Inorganic compounds, simple organisms,
plants, animals, and human beings all perceive. The regularity of interactions
among inorganic power-structures presupposes perception (PT, 92-1 02). The
capacity of protoplasm to assimilate and integrate other power-constellations is
a primitive kind of perception. (WP 500, 510) Plants also perceive the world
(PT, I 0 I, 102). The whole genealogical series of cognitive mechanisms operates
in animal and human perception (GS 54).
Perception and appearance supervene on the percussive and repercussive
cycle. The percussive radiation of the shockwave from each power-constellation
begins the act of perception. Insofar as it begins with the transmission of a
wave-front, perception is thus like sonar or radar. Perception is not passive
reception of sense data but rather the emission of a signal and consequent
interpretation of its reverberations. As they transmit their own shockwaves
proportional to their strength, other power-constellations act as mirrors
reflecting perspectivally modulated signals back to their origins.
Waves mirror waves, so that all things receive echoes of their original
transmissions. The strength of these echoes is proportional to the distance (GS
162; WP 637) so that spatial locality emerges in the holistic interplay of
wavefronts. Originally transmitted signals are modulated as they are ret1ected
by other power-constellations, and these modulations carry information. The
totality of reflected and modulated wavefronts is the appearance of the rest of
the world to each power-constellation (WP 567-569). Appearance is dynamic
(GS 54): it distributes information throughout the world.
The world as the reflections of all wave-fronts is the will prior to any
interpretation; it is "the formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations"
(WP 569). Sensations are stimuli: sources of force differentials that need to be
integrated or assimilated (WP 499, 500, 510, 511, 521, 532; BGE 230) into
existing power-constellations. Perception ends with the assimilation of reflected
 THE WILL TO POWER AND PDP SYSTEMS 317

wave-forms; it is a cooling down from the high point (hottest; the point at which
all transmitted wave-fronts bounce back) to the low point (coldest; all wave-
fronts assimilated). All power-constellations are defined by their exchanges of
appearances with one another and are thus not things-in-themselves but
perspectival effects on one another (WP 553-569). Here the informational
mechanics of the will to power are exactly analogous to those of Boltzmann or
harmony machines.

EVOLUTION: THE SELF-ORGANIZATION OF THE CHAOS OF FORCES

The will to power is a self-organizing chaos. 23 It is "a work of art that gives
birth to itself' (WP 796). Order (functional complexity as measured by
algorithmic compressibility or logical depth) 24 is not imposed from above or
outside in accordance with an eternal plan. 25 The world as will to power is a
work of art without an artist (WP 796), no Platonic Demiurge or Christian God
needed. Order emerges spontaneously in the will to power through the wave-
mechanical (percussive and repercussive) interactions of its centers of force.
The thermal information-processin~ activity of the will to power (its self-
interpretation) is self-organization?
Self-organization does not mean that chaos decreases as order increases; it
means that ever greater agility artistically orders ever greater turbulence
wherever the will to power is far from thermal equilibrium in its entropic cycle.
Self-organization as will to power produces forms (arrangements) of increasing
functional complexity. The notion of self-organization is a central PDP
concept. 27
The will to power organizes itself into a perspectival system of self-
reproducing power-constellations. Such patterns are pre-forms of life (BGE 36)
able to reconstitute their structures (but never their identities) over time. 28 All
enduring things, from quarks to quasars, are self-reproducing patterns. Accord-
ing to the eternal return (GS 109, 341; WP 1053-67), the whole universe is a
self-reproducing power-constellation. Organisms are the paradigms of such self-
reproducing power-constellations. (See WP 640-658.)
Self-reproducing patterns presuppose massively parallel media able to
support structures of high and increasing complexity. Self-reproducing patterns
have long been studied by PDP theorists? 9 The massively parallel computational
media used in the field of synthetic biology (artificial life) permit research into
many different models of biological and ecological processes. 30 Such PDP
systems are the laboratories in which to study Nietzsche's theories of life as will
to power (GS 349; BGE 13; WP 681, 691, 702, 704), in particular his theories
of organism-environment interaction (WP 499, 500, 510, 511, 521, 532, 655-
658), his theories of interactions in the organism (WP 660), and his anti-
Darwinian approaches to ecology and evolution (GS 349; TI IX:14; WP 647,
679-685).
Self-reproducing power-constellations do not just reproduce themselves; they
also evolve. But evolution requires continuity, and consequently requires the
repetition of a primitive past in a more sophisticated present. The past is
318 ERIC STEINHART

repeated in the present only insofar as the present preserves the past. Evolution
thus requires memory. (WP 646) Memory, like sensation, is active everywhere
in the series of types: memory operates in the inorganic (PT, 92-102); plants
have memory (PT, 97); animals and humans have memory as well. For
Nietzsche, memory is active. (See GS 54)
Memory is the power of the past to project an image of itself into the present
via the recognition of what it has in common with the present. (Cf. WP 499,
521; GS 114; BGE 230) The past assimilates the present to itself by reproducing
itself in the present, that is, by encoding itself within the present. 31 Each self-
reproducing pattern in the will to power contains a compressed description of
its history or genealogy (WP 682), as every living organism (a self-reproducing
pattern) contains a self-description in its DNA (its genotype). 32
At each moment, fading patterns in the will to power encode compressed
descriptions of themselves within emerging patterns. Such compressed
descriptions are memories, and the encoding of them and their relations with the
present is learning. In a PDP system, learning occurs through a change in
connection weights. Connectionists have constructed mnemonic networks in
which compressed descriptions are nested in other descriptions; such nets are
called recursive auto-associative memories. 33 Nietzschean memory acts in a
similar fashion.

MINDS AS WILL TO POWER:

MINDS AND BODIES AS WAVE-FORMS IN THE WILL TO POWER

Nietzsche uses Chladni's sound-figures to characterize mind-body interaction.

Chladni's sound-figures are patterns that emerge on a flat, resonant, sand-
covered surface when a vibrating string is held underneath. These patterns
correspond to the invariants in the acoustical waves that induce vibrations in the
flat surface. Nietzsche says: "images are related to the underlying nervous
activity which agitates them in the same way that Chladni's acoustical figures
are to the sound itself' (PT, 24; cf. 82). Nietzsche thus identifies the physical
brain-processes with a wave-form and the psychical, mental entity with the
invariant structure thereof. He conceives of mind and body as interacting,
interpenetrating, superimposed wave-forms in the will to power. Transvaluating
the Cartesian opposition of res cogitans and res extensa entirely, Nietzsche says
"our body is but a social structure composed of many souls" (BGE 19).
Nietzsche rejects centralized models of mind. He denies that there is an "I"
or ego behind the "I think" (BGE 17). No homunculus, executive agent, or
central processing unit in the mind manipulates passive ideas or directs psychic
processes. Nietzsche thus embraces a distributed model of the mind. (See BGE
12; WP 481-492) The mind is not a single substance, of which ideas are modes.
Rather, it is an relationally unified ecosystem of ideas. (WP 508, 561) Ideas are
active: each has a life of its own and comes when it will. (BGE 17) The mind
is an affiliation of symbiotic cognitive structures - a living network of self-
reproducing computational or interpretive patterns. (WP 490, 492) Nietzsche
anticipates PDP approaches to mind like connectionism. 34 Control in
 THE WILL TO POWER AND PDP SYSTEMS 319

connectionist systems is not centralized: the homunculus or executive ego is

rejected in favor of cooperative and competitive interactions of many independ-
ent agents.
Like many connectionist models, Nietzsche's model of mind is social and
hierarchical. The mind is a hierarchical structure in which some self-
reproducing patterns rule and others are ruled; the social structure of such a
mind contains ruling souls and ''useful 'under-wills' or 'under-souls"' (BGE
19). A soul is not an atomic unity, but rather a multiplicity. A soul may be
conceived of as "a social structure of the drives and affects" (BGE 12). Thinking
is a result of this social organization of instinctual drives, for it is "merely a
relation of these drives to each other" (BGE 36). Thinking simply is the
competitive and cooperative interactions of the drives, and conscious thinking
"is actually nothing but a certain behavior of the instincts toward one another"
(GS 333). Nietzsche is anticipating Minsky's "society of mind" model by over
"15
100 years.·

CONSCIOUSNESS, LANGUAGE, CONCEPTS

We have considered how Nietzsche's theory of cognition within the individual

human being accords with PDP accounts; but cognition is also distributed over
many individuals: the herd also functions as a PDP system. The single human
organism participates in herd cognition via consciousness (GS 333, 354; WP
524-529).
Conscious thought (herd thought in the individual) manifests itself in words,
which are signs for communication. (GS 354; cf. WP 524) Herd cognition
emerges along with language. Due to the need to cooperate in unequal but
similar circumstances with many others who are unequal but similar instances
of the human species (GS 111, 117), every word becomes a concept. (PT, 83,
89) The genealogy of conceptual thought is thus: images, words, concepts. (WP
506)
As the final products of the genealogy of cognitive structures, concepts have
the slowest tempo and coldest temperature. (PT, 84-85) The emergence of a
concept is like that of a crystal in a molten fluid. (PT, 86) Networks of concepts
are like "spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong
enough not to be blown apart by every wind" (PT, 85). Reproducing itself
within different sensory images, the concept is a constant figure over a changing
ground. It has a slower tempo and colder temperature.
Concepts are thus those self-reproducing patterns in which the greatest agility
masters the greatest turbulence: the conceptual system is an order that masters
all the chaos of sensations. Indeed, it is an order with its own chaos. The
conceptual system is a "chaos of ideas" in which "[t]he ideas that were
consistent with one another remained, the greater number perished" (WP 508).
For Nietzsche, language is a convention. According to Lewis, a convention
is a solution to a coordination problem? 6 Language is the totality of surviving
solutions to problems requiring the coordination of many individuals within the
herd. The emergence of cooperative strategies for interaction has been studied
320 ERIC STEINHART

in PDP systems such as the prisoner's dilemma? 7 PDP models of language

emergence verify its emergence as a form of social cooperation. 38 PDP accounts
of the emergence of socially secured scientific knowledge have also been
provided, 39 thus bringing our scientific conception of the will to power full
circle to a conception of science as will to power.

CONCLUSION

The will to power is not a metaphysical mythology; it is a novel approach to

existence with a class of non-trivial physical models (at least the class of
discrete finitary dynamical systems with cyclical or invariant entropy).
Contemporary PDP models of natural phenomena from elementary physics
through chemistry, biology, and psychology all share important features with
Nietzsche's will to power accounts. The explanatory coherence of the hypothe-
sis of the world as will to power is not insignificant; further exploration of the
class of physical models of the will to power may indeed reveal that our world
is will to power, and nothing besides.

William Paterson University, New Jersey

NOTES

Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Nietzsche's works are by text and section number.
The texts arc Beyond Good and Evil (BGE), trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House,
1966); The Gay Science (GS), trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974); The Will
to Power (WP). trans. W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdalc (New York: Random House, 1968);
Twilight of the Idols (TI), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1984); Philosophy
and Truth (PT), trans. D. Breazeale (London: Humanities Press, 1979).
2 Many writings on the will to power are from the Nachlass. Scholars such as Kaufmann and
Magnus wish to devalue or discredit these notebooks; others, such as Danto and Moles. value them
as highly as the published writings. We side with Danto and Moles, for precisely the reasons
offered by Moles. See A. Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology, (New York:
Peter Lang, 1990), Introduction, section II.
3 In doing this we need to be sensitive to Nietzsche's own philosophy of science. To this end we
are guided by B. Babich's Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994).
4 Here Nietzsche is inspired by R. J. Boscovich's A Theory of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1967/1763). See also G. Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovich's Natural Philosophy,"
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62, 198 I, pp. 69-87; G. Whitlock, "Roger Boscovitch, Benedict
de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche: The Untold Story," Nietzsche-Studien 25, 1996, pp. 200-220.
5 Such a statement is striking to ears acquainted with quantum physics. See Alistair Moles,
Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology, p. xii. In it we find (however darkly guessed),
something very much like Bohm's notion of a particle and its pilot-wave. Nietzsche's entirely
holistic treatment of the will to power cannot but reinforce the relation to Bohm. See D. Bohm,
Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1980).
6 P. Umbanhowar, F. Melo, & H. Swinney, "Localized Excitations in a Vertically Vibrated
Granular Layer," Nature. Vol. 382 (29 August 1996), pp. 793-6.
7 PDP systems manifest deep holism, such as rearranging the parts in a whole without
decomposing the whole into its parts (i.e. rearranging the parts without manipulating the parts
themselves, but just the whole). See D. Blank, L. Meeden, and J. Marshal, "Exploring the
Symbolic/Subsymbolic Continuum: A Case study of RAAM," in J. Dinsmore (Ed.). The Symbolic
and Connectionist Paradigms: Closing the Gap (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992), pp. 113-
148. See especially sec. 6. and 6.2 for holistic transformations.
8 T. Horgan & J. Tienson, "Cognitive Systems as Dynamical Systems," Topoi 11(1), pp. 27-43.
 THE WILL TO POWER AND PDP SYSTEMS 321

In thermodynamics, energy, entropy, and temperature are all carefully distinguished. For a very
readable and highly engaging introduction to thermodynamics, particularly the second law, see R.
Penrose, The Emporer's New Mind (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), ch. 7.
10 Nietzsche is explicit about the global thermal cycle in WTP 1067, describing the will to power

as alternating between hottest forms and coldest forms. The local cycle is not explicitly discussed,
but the cycle described in WTP 636 exactly parallels the global cycle described in WTP 1067.
11 For the relation of the eternal return to thermodynamics, see Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of

Nature and Cosmology, Postscript.

12 Nietzsche draws a parallel between the ocean (which is disturbed both by local crests and

troughs and by global tidal flows and ebbs) in GS 310, whose title is "Will and Wave."
13 Supposing the Great Year of Zarathustra (Z III:l3/2) to have duration G, the global cycle is

sin(t/G) and the local cycle is sin(t) where tis (discrete) time.
14 W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,

1974), p. 235.
15 In a tennis match, for instance, the play becomes hotter as the motion of the ball becomes more
chaotic and the players exercise more and more ordering power (i.e. skill) to keep the ball in play.
16 See W. H. Zurek (ed.) Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information. Santa Fe Institute

Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Vol. VIII. (Redwood, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1990).
17 We emphatically do not want to understand the interpretive activity of the will to power in

terms of von Neumann-style computation. F. Evans presents a powerful Nietzschean critique of

VonNeuman-style approaches to computation and cognition in Psychology & Nihilism: A
Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992).
18 G. E. Hinton & T. J. Sejnowski, "Learning and Relearning in Boltzmann Machines," in D. E.

Rumelhart & J. L. McClelland (eds.), Parallel Distributed Processing (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1986), Vol. I, ch. 7.
19 P. Smolensky, "Information Processing in Dynamical Systems: Foundations of Harmony

Theory," in D. E. Rumelhart & J. L. McClelland (eds.), Parallel Distributed Processing

(Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 1986), Vol. 1, ch. 6. A good account of computation as path-
following in an energetic or entropic state-space can be found in D. W. Tank & J. J. Hopfield,
"Collective Computation in Neuronlike Circuits," Scientific American 257(6), 1985, pp. 104-114.
20 D. L. Stein, "Spin Glasses," Scientific American 261 (I), 1989, pp. 52-61.
21 T. Toffoli & N. Margolus's Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling

~Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), ch. 17.

2 During computation in a PDP system "parts of the network gradually assume values that

become stable; the system commits itself to decisions as it cools; it passes from fluid behavior to
the rigid adoption of an answer. The decision-making process resembles the crystallization of a
liquid into a solid" (Smolensky, ibid., vol. 1, ch. 6, p. 233).
23 In this respect Nietzsche's views anticipate the theories of I. Prigogine, winner of a Nobel Prize

in 1977 for his work on self-organizing systems. Prigogine contends that order emerges
spontaneously in systems far from thermal equilibrium. See I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, Order
out o.f Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984). Note the reference
to Nietzsche on p. 136. See also J. Lothar, "Nietzsche: Dekonstruktionist oder Konstruktivist?,"
Nietzsche-Studien 23, 1994, pp. 226-240.
24 For algorithmic compressibility, see G. Chaitin, "Randomness and mathematical proof,"

Scientific American 232 (5), 1975, pp. 47-52. For logical depth and other definitions of
complexity, see C. H. Bennett, "How to define complexity in physics, and why," in W. H. Zurek
~ed.) Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, pp. 137-148.
5 This is perhaps the most important feature of Nietzshe's entire philosophy, yet commentators
still get it wrong. Consider R. H. Grimm, who says that form "is something imposed upon the
chaos of power-quanta ... ( ... analogous ... to the process whereby a potter may impose any form
he chooses on a formless lump of clay)" R. H. Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1977). Grimm's account is precisely what does not happen.
26 Jean Granier, "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos," in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison

~Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

" 7 Teuvo Kohonen, Self-Organization and Associative Memory (New York: Springer-Verlag,
1984).
28 Self-reproducing power-constellations are not substances. From moment to moment, the

elements (centers of force) in self-reproducing power-structure change, but perspectival relations

among those elements remain the same (the content has changed, but the form is the same). It is
through recurrence of structure that things wstain themselves in the flux of the will to power.
322 ERIC STEINHART

29 For self-reproducing patterns in PDP systems known as cellular automata, see: J. von
Neumann,Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1966);
E. Codd,Cellular Automata (New York: Academic Press, 1968); C. Langton, "Self-reproduction
in cellular automata" Physica D 10, 1984, pp. 135-144; E. Berlekamp, J. Conway, & R.
Guy, Winning Ways (New York: Academic Press, 1982), vol. 2, ch. 25.
°
3 C. G. Langton (ed.) Artificial Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
31 A pattern C(t) encodes itself within C(t+1), but then (C(t) encoded within C(t+1)) encodes itself

within C(t+2), and ((C(t) encoded within C(t+1)) encoded within C(t+2)) encodes itself within
C(t+3). Earlier organizations recursively nest themselves within later organizations. This nesting
structure is the genealogical structure of memory; it is the basis for the temporal order.
32 The point fits with Nietzsche's Lamarckian understanding of evolution.
33 J. Pollack, "Recursive distributed representations," Artificial Intelligence 46, 1994, pp. 77-105.
34 D. E. Rumelhart & J. L. McClelland, Parallel Distributed Processing (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1986), Vol. I, pp. 134-5.

35 M. Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).
36 D. K. Lewis, Convention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). Nietzsche might

endorse a Gricean account of meaning.

37 R. Axelrod, "Effective choice in the Prisoner's Dilemma," Journal of Conflict Resolution 24

~P· 198o, pp. 3 -25. . . . ,

· B. MacLennan, "Synthetic Ethology: An Approach to the Study of Commumcatlon, pp. 631-
658; G. M. Werner & M. G. Dyer, "Evolution of Communication in Artificial Organisms," pp.
659-688. Both in C. G. Langton, C. Taylor, J. D. Farmer, & S. Rasmussen (eds.), Artificial Life
II. SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Vol. X. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991).
39 P. Thagard, "Societies of minds: Science as distributed computing," Studies in History and

Philosophy of Science 24, 1993, pp. 49-67

 PETER DOUGLAS

THE FRACTAL DYNAMICS OF A NIETZSCHEAN WORLD

This essay proceeds from the premise that mathematical concepts and relations
can be appropriated for the purpose of creating new modes of interpretation of
existing texts and phenomena. 1 More specifically, it brings together certain
aspects of fractal geometry and chaos theory to provide an interpretive frame for
the philosophical work of Friedrich Nietzsche. What follows from this concate-
nation is purely speculative, neither mathematical in its form and intent nor
exegetical in its reading of Nietzsche. There is no concerted attempt made here
to justify this method of interpretation in the context of Nietzsche's own
epistemological speculations. In fact such a task might well be quite difficult
given his criticisms of the mathematical project - its efforts to equalize and
make the same, its simplification of the tremendous complexity of the world,
and its democratic design to preserve life for its average and reactive aspects.
Rather if any justification is sought at all, it is from the results of this interpreta-
tion and whether or not it carries with it the spirit of Nietzsche's thought. What
follows then is the explication of a method of interpretation, and this is offered
under the auspices of Nietzsche's argument that if knowledge is always a means
to something, a means to the creation of certain effects, then "the most valuable
insights are methods."2

CHAOTIC DYNAMICS

In reading aspects of Nietzsche's work within a frame provided by fractal

geometry and chaos theory, this interpretive process characterizes the world as
a complex nonlinear dynamical system. Such systems are conventionally
described in terms of a state space and its dynamic, and here state space is
specifically defined as the potential field to which the system is bound, while
its dynamic is taken as the iterative function which drives the system's non-
teleological evolution. Dynamical systems are typically represented by an
equation of the form: x(n+ 1) = F(x(n)) - where each successive state of the
system (x(n+ 1)) is determined by the previous state x(n) and its subsequent
behaviour under the operation of the function F. Linear systems of this type are
strictly deterministic and have closed form solutions which enable them to be
solved via analytic methods which circumvent the need to directly compute the
system's evolution. The stability of systems which lend themselves to such
323
B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 323-330.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
324 PETER DOUGLAS

treatment is such that any unaccounted for effects are kept within predictable
bounds, leaving the integrity of the analysis intact. However the inherent
instability of some nonlinear deterministic systems gives rise to unpredictable
behavior which cannot be neatly described by analytic approaches. While the
evolution of such "chaotic" systems is predictable in the sense of being confined
to a subset of state space called the "attractor," its position at any specific
moment can only be fathomed by allowing the system unfold numerically. The
instability of chaotic systems derives from the nonlinear interactions of their
components which amplify even slight perturbations into effects which
influence their macroscopic behavior. Given that the phenomena which chaotic
systems seek to model exist within an extended network of similar systems
which continually swap energy with their surroundings, there is a continual
source of effective randomness and innovation as adjacent systems feed into one
another to produce "self-organising" patterns of dynamic stability.
Despite the differences between chaotic and more stable systems, chaos
theory still retains the possibility that simple deterministic laws with probabilis-
tic outcomes may underlie complex phenomena that resist attempts to describe
them analytically. Nietzsche was critical of epistemological approaches of this
kind, arguing that they represent attempts by "man" to "find formulas so as to
simplify the tremendous quantity of his experiences" (WP 640). 3 However chaos
theory also posits the possibility that the world might be thought of as an
extended network of "individual" chaotic systems, each following their own
behavioural imperatives while interacting with one another in complex and
unpredictable ways. In acknowledging the relational character of phenomena
in this manner, chaos theory can be interpreted as providing an argument
against the search for immutable and universally applicable laws, with any
"law-like" behaviour operating within "individual" systems whose interactions
with one another would produce unpredictable effects incapable of analytic
treatment. In an analogous way, Nietzsche posits the existence of what he refers
to variously as "quanta," "quanta of force," "quanta of power," "quanta of will
to power" and "dynamic quanta," which do not follow laws but rather the
dictates of the "will to power" which operates through them. "If something
happens thus and thus and not otherwise, that does not imply a 'principle,'
'law,' 'order,' [but the operation of] quanta of force the essence of which
consists of exercising power against other quanta of force"(WP 689).
Nietzsche ascribed great significance to the will to power, describing it as
"the essence of life," 4 "the ultimate ground and character of all change" (WP
685), and even arguing that "[t]he world seen from within, the world described
and defined according to its 'intelligible character' -it would be 'will to power'
and nothing else." 5 Each quanta is therefore a particular expression of the will
to power, the phenomenal outgrowth of its drive to express its superfluity- not
as a law, but as a necessity, as "that which must overcome itself again and
again" 6 in its role as the iterative imperative or dynamic of quanta here
characterized as chaotic systems. Given that the will to power "can manifest
itself only against resistances" (WP 656), quanta necessarily exist "in a relation
of tension to all other dynamic quanta" (WP 635), forming a complex relational
 THE FRACTAL DYNAMICS OF A NIETZSCHEAN WORLD 325

network in the same manner as extended chaotic systems. The iteration of the
will to power therefore takes place in as many sites as there are quanta,
operating not as a universal law but as an imperative which drives the dynamical
evolution of quanta in their multifarious manifestations.
Quanta exist by virtue of the effects they produce and that which they resist,
and so each quanta is a unique perspective towards the world by virtue of this
necessity to differentiate. Their essence therefore lies in their relations with all
other quanta, in the way they effect and are affected by all other expressions of
the will to power. Hence the world is no more and no less than a collective of
perspectives, wherein each "construes all the rest of the world from its own
viewpoint, i.e., measures, feels, forms, according to its own force" (WP 636).
However to describe a perspective or quanta as unique, as having its "own
viewpoint ... its own force" is to posit the existence of some sort of structure or
identity which both arises through the iteration of the will to power and enables
its expression. Nietzsche further desc1ibes the will to power as "not a being, not
a becoming, but a pathos - the most elemental fact from which a becoming and
effecting first emerge" (WP 635), and in this context we can interpret the
iteration of the will to power as an occasion or opportunity for the dynamism of
becoming and the structure of being to be expressed- not as mutually exclusive
but mutually dependent, each being the necessary condition for the other's
presence. An iteration of the will to power therefore presents for the world an
opening, and it is within this opening that perspectives or quanta arise, persist,
decay and perish.
The structure or identity of a perspective is the manifestation of its effort to
"impose upon becoming the character of being" what Nietzsche refers to as "the
supreme will to power" (WP 617). Perspectives therefore reproduce themselves
through a process which seeks to create a continuity of becoming from the
discontinuity of the will to power's iteration, while also using the "mask" of
being to cover the underlying multiplicity they have influence over. Becoming
might therefore be said to provide a sense of temporal continuity, while being
enforces a sense of spatial identity. 7 1be underlying multiplicity, both temporal
and spatial, is structured in a fractal manner, revealing a complex of perspec-
tives within perspectives. 8 Fractals are the result of an iterative dynamic
operating at an increasing number of scales to produce self-similar complex
structures with no inherent scale and infinite detail. In much the same manner,
the opportunities or openings that each iteration of the will to power presents for
the world arise within all perspectives, and so must be incorporated into their
structure if they are to retain their identity. The apparent unity of a perspective
is therefore a "unity only as organisation and co-operation ... as a pattern of
domination that signifies a unity but is not a unity" (WP 561). The "pattern of
domination" that characterizes a perspective extends as far as spheres of
influence of adjacent perspectives on the same fractal scale of organization,
while also extending within to structure its constituent perspectives. These in
turn cooperate to varying degrees in the formation of the organizational unity
of the "higher order" perspective, while simultaneously seeking to maintain and
further their own influence. The sphere of influence of a perspective therefore
326 PETER DOUGLAS

extends as far as the imposition of its structure, and this is achieved through the
"appropriation and assimilation" of other perspectives which become its
constituents. Nietzsche explains this process as "above all a desire to over-
whelm, a forming, shaping and reshaping, until at length that which has been
overwhelmed has entirely gone over into the power domain of the aggressor and
has increased the same" (WP 656). The structure of a perspective is never
completely stable then, as it is "continually growing or periodically increasing
and decreasing according to the favourability or unfavourability of circum-
stances" (WP 715) as it strives to maintain and extend its sphere of influence.
All change must therefore be understood "as the encroachment of one power
upon another power" (WP 689) as perpsectives are strengthened, modified or
overwhelmed in the incessant interactions that take place between perspectives
under the iterative imperative of the will to power.
As well as the fractal complexity of the inner structure of perspectives, the
surfaces or boundaries between perspectives are also fractal, purveying an
intricate and dynamic complexity across all scales of interaction. 9 These fractal
surfaces are formed by the incessant struggle for influence and dominion
between perspectives that is the process of interpretation; for as Nietzsche
argues, "interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something" and
it is the will to power that interprets: that is, "it defines limits, determines
degrees, variations of power" (WP 643) as manifest in the structure of perspec-
tives. Interpretation is therefore the process that the will to power initiates
through its iteration, being and becoming are the dual aspects of its operation
as we understand it, and perspectives are the structural manifestation of its
activity. The characteristic structure of a perspective therefore represents a
particular interpretation, and the characteristics manifested are derived in
relation to adjacent perspectives and the necessity to differentiate to exist.
The process of interpretation involves either the assimilation or appropriation
of one perspective by another through the reinterpretation of a previous
structure, or the incorporation into an existing perspective of a fresh opening
onto the world as brought about by the most recent iteration of the will to
power. While the latter always entails the imposition of structure by a higher
order perspective on its constituents, the former may occur either across the
same fractal scale as the overpowering of a contemporary, or as a "revolution
from within" between different levels of organization as a constituent perspec-
tive expands its own sphere of influence "upwards" to overpower a higher order
structure and either diminish or completely dispel its dominion. The structural
transformations caused by reinterpretions may be sudden: immediately
obscuring the structures of the previous interpretation; or more gradual:
beginning with a change in "meaning" which, if imposed unchallenged for long
enough, eventually becomes part of the core structure of a perspective such that
it is considered to be part of its "nature" - what seems unchangeable and
enduring.
The incessant interpretive struggles that form the fractal surfaces between
perspectives provides what might be referred to as the sensory data that a
perspective organizes according to its characteristic structure. Given the
 THE FRACTAL DYNAMICS OF A NIETZSCHEAN WORLD 327

multidimensional character of state space, these fractal surfaces serve as the

mutual boundaries of any number of adjacent perspectives, and so the stimuli
will be interpreted in as many ways as there are adjoining perspectives. The
particular interpretation imposed will depend on the characteristics of a
perspective as well as its orientation to its surroundings. Each perspective
therefore attempts to "fix" its own interpretation of its fractal surfaces in order
to stabilize its structure and preserve its sphere of influence. Nietzsche refers to
this drive to stabilize and preserve as the "will to truth":

Will to truth is a making firm, a making true and durable, an abolition of the false character of
things, a reinterpretation of it into beings. "Truth" is therefore not something there, that might be
found or discovered- but something that must be created and that gives a name to a process, or
rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end - introducing truth, as a processus in
infinitum, an active determining- not a becoming-conscious of something that is itself firm and
determined. It is a word for the "will to power." (WP 552)

The more powerful a perspective's will to truth, the greater its capacity to
impose being upon becoming and so the more stable its structure. However the
stability imposed by the will to truth inhibits the dynamism of becoming, and
this is essential for a perspective's struggle to expand its sphere of influence.
There is always a tension, therefore, between stability and dynamism- between
the imposition of being which strives to preserve, and the dynamism of
becoming which seeks expansion and growth.

FRACTAL BODIES AND KNOWLEDGE

The characteristics of a perspective as a chaotic system define the state space it

is a subset of, and these characteristics can be associated with what Nietzsche
refers to as "drives": "every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its
perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm"
(WP 481); "drives either oppose or subject each other" (WP 677). That these
descriptions of drives apply just as well to perspectives is to be attributed to
their fractal structure, with the distinction between them being merely hierarchi-
cal. So while we can say that a perspective is composed of a multiplicity of
drives, each of these drives is in turn a perspective composed of a multiplicity
of drives and so on. The number of drives constituting the structural unity of a
perspective represents the number of degrees of freedom of its state space, and
the specific characteristics of each of these drives determine its coordinates. As
the potential field of a perspective then, state space is the sum of all the possible
states a perspective can adopt as determined by the states of its constituent
drives at some point in its evolution. However as mentioned above, the actual
evolution of a chaotic dynamical system is confined to a subset of its state space
known as its "attractor"- here termed a perspective.
While the number of dimensions of a perspective and its state space are
determined by the number of constituent drives, the phenomenal manifestations
of a perspectives take place in three-dimensional physical space. This situation
is analogous to the depiction of fractal attractors of more than three dimensions
328 PETER DOUGLAS

on two-dimensional surfaces such as a page or a computer screen. In both cases

the full complexity of the entire structure remains unknown due to the limita-
tions imposed by a lower dimensional representation. However just as Nietzsche
argued for an understanding of "art as the will to overcome becoming, as
'eternalisation' but shortsighted, depending on the perspective: repeating in
miniature, as it were, the tendency of the whole" (WP 617), so the phenomenal
manifestations of a perspective are its attempt to express "the tendency of the
whole" at its fractal surfaces in order to stabilize its structure. This process is
similar to the "reconstruction" of the attractor of a dynamical system from
limited data. 10 By taking a single component of a dynamical system and treating
its behavior at fixed time delays (say at one, two, and three seconds ago) as if
they were the degrees of freedom of its state space, an attractor may be
constructed which preserves many of the important properties of the original.
This technique assumes that the behaviour of a single component of a dynamical
system will be influenced by its interactions with other components such that it
would contain implicit information about the system as a whole. Nietzsche
makes a similar point in arguing that "every displacement of power at any point
would affect the whole system" (WP 638), and so here we assume that the will
to truth as a perspective's drive to impose being upon becoming would also
contain implicit information about the perspective as a whole. By taking this
information from the iterative states of a perspective designated past, present
and future, a composite structure is created whose behavior or form is the
intersection of successive states of becoming. The phenomenal manifestation of
a perspective is therefore a self-referential horizon which continually refers back
to itself as it evolves, thereby creating the illusion of the regularly recurring and
enduring themes upon which the mask of being depends. A perspective seeks
to install as many phenomenal manifestations of itself at its fractal surfaces as
possible in order to "fix" its structure or being. However even though they are
intended to mime the structure of the perspective they derive from, phenomenal
manifestations also contribute to that structure, and so will alter it to an extent
determined by the strength of the phenomenal manifestation's own expression
of the will to power as it seeks its own growth. The world in which the
phenomenal manifestations of perspectives exist and interact is therefore an
expression of the perspective which they derive from and contribute to- it is the
sensible world they recognize as their "reality." The more the phenomenal
manifestations of a perspective are influenced by the overarching structure they
partly constitute, and the more they are in agreement with one another, then the
more stable the "reality" they exist within and contribute to.
As phenomenal manifestations of perspectives ourselves, we are not
autonomous, intentional "entities" but the epi-phenomena of interpretive
processes. The parameters within which we have knowledge of ourselves and
the world are therefore set by the structure of the perspective we are elements
of. We cannot overcome these restrictions unless we overcome the influence of
our overarching perspective, and this would in itself alter the world we seek to
know. Knowledge is therefore a dynamic process which is part of the structure
that the will to truth creates in order to stabilize the perspective it works
 THE FRACTAL DYNAMICS OF A NIETZSCHEAN WORLD 329

through, and so is part of the same process and serves the same purpose as the
phenomenal manifestations of a perspective. Just as phenomenal manifestations
have been described as a self-referential horizon then, knowledge is as
Nietzsche suggested "a referring back: in its essence a regressus in infinitum"
(WP 575) which deals only with things of its own making. "We operate only
with things that do not exists: lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans,
divisible space. How should explanations be at all possible when we first turn
everything into an image, our image:!" (GS 112). 11
However within the frame provided by this interpretation of Nietzsche's
work, even the understanding of our own "image" gives us some understanding
of the processes we are and the encompassing perspective we partly constitute.
So a system of knowledge such as mathematics which this interpretation takes
as its starting point enables us "to determine our human relations to things" and
is for Nietzsche a "means for general and ultimate knowledge of man" (GS
246). This knowledge is part of the structure of what we are as the epi-
phenomena of interpretive processes beyond our phenomenal experiences, and
so mathematics might be said to provide some insight into these structures.
However as a particularly systematic and rigorous form of knowledge, it can
also be argued that mathematics is a strategy which aims to "fix" the world into
a more coherent and orderly structure, and that the more we use mathematics in
order to "know" the world, the more stable and mathematical the world we seek
to know becomes. In other words mathematics in part constitutes the orderly
world it seeks to understand.
While it has been argued so far that knowledge is an attempt to stabilize the
structure of a perspective under the impetus of the will to truth's drive to impose
being upon becoming, it must also remembered that the fundamental imperative
of the will to power is not self-preservation but self-overcoming. This aspect is
embodied in the notion of becoming which strives for fluidity and dynamism
rather than the stability of being. So while this tension between being and
becoming - stability and dynamism-- set the necessity conditions of the will to
power's manifestations, it is also the guarantee of their eventual demise as the
drive for self-overcoming leads inevitably towards the nihilistic self-destruction
of all perspectives. Nietzsche strove to come to terms with this tension in his
philosophy, endeavouring to reveal a world of becoming while acknowledging
that "knowledge is possible only on the basis of belief in being" (WP 518). The
compromise is always between a stability within which coherent and universal
claims to knowledge are validated, and a fluidity which denies such foundations
by acknowledging the shifting process of becoming which being masks.
However given the prevailing tendency towards stability, Nietzsche took it upon
himself to emphasize the possibilities of fluidity, openness and new possibilities
for knowledge: "There are many souls one will never uncover, unless one
invents them first." 12 His fundamental notion of the will to power does not
legislate form and meaning then, but attempts to break open the horizon created
by knowledge into a proliferation of chance relationships which have a different
appearance from every perspective.
330 PETER DOUGLAS

Bringing Nietzsche's work together with fractal geometry and chaos theory
seeks to provide a structural basis for his thought without foreclosing on the
dynamism required for the creation of new possibilities from existing condi-
tions. The emphasis from chaos theory has provided the possibility of unpredict-
able and novel conditions arising from the interaction of dynamic systems
driven by localized functions, while the emphasis from fractal geometry has
stressed the rich and intricate possibilities of structures which offer an inex-
haustible font of detail. The aim is to explore the possibilities of forms of
knowledge which expand the world rather than foreclosing on its possibilities
in the vein of Nietzsche's own project: "But one thing is certain: you will never
travel around the world (which you yourself are!) but will remain an impenetra-
ble enigma to yourselves!" 13 as knowledge in part creates the world we seek to
know, and so new knowledge allows us to create new worlds.

Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

NOTES
1 This essay is an abbreviated and revised version of my "Nietzschean Geometry," SubStance
81 (1996) 132-152.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books,
1990), p. 135.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale (New
York: Vintage Books, 1968). Subsequent citations are listed in the text followed by section
numbers. For a concordance to the German critical editions, see S. Simmons, "Concordance
Indexing The Will to Power with the Notebooks and the Critical German Editions," New Nietzsche
Studies, I (1996) 1/2:126-153.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage
Books, 1969), p. 79.
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books,
1990), p. 67.
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books,
1969), p. 138.
7 This process does not so much take place in space and time as it is constitutive of space and
time in a manner similar to that developed in the philosophical work of Alfred North Whitehead.
8 The fractal structure of perspectives might be likened to the Cantor set, a self-identicallinear
fractal constructed by removing the middle third of a solid line in an infinite series of iterations.
The internal structure of any line segment is revealed upon closer inspection (or magnification)
to be identical to that of the collection of line segments it is associated with. No matter the scale
of inspection then, the identical structure is revealed.
9 What is envisaged here is somewhat similar to the Koch curve. If we take a line segment and
raise an equilateral triangle over its middle third and then repeat this process on each subsequent
line segment ad infinitum, the result is a curve of infinite detail and length. As with the Cantor set,
closer inspection on any scale reveals the identical structure as the original, and so any measure
of its length is dependent upon an arbitaray choice as to the scale of inquiry.
10 See Crutchfield, J. P., Farmer, J. D., Packard, H., & Shaw, R. S. "Chaos," Scientific American,

255 (1986), pp. 46-48 for a discussion of this technique.

11 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974).
12 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 69.
13 Nietzsche, Daybreak. Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 164.

 ULLRICH MICHAEL HAASE

NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGY: A DEFENCE OF

PHENOMENOLOGY AGAINST MODERN MACHINERY

Si les animaux n' etaient que des pures machines, ce ne serait

qu'une raison de plus pour ceux qui pensent que l'homme n'est
qu'une machine aussi; mais il n'y a plus personne aujourd'hui
qui n'avoue que les animaux ont des idees, de Ia memoire, une
mesure d' intelligence.
-Voltaire

The modern philosophers, "are these still human beings, one then
asks oneself, or only machines that think, write and talk"?
- Friedrich Nietzsche

In the second untimely meditation, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of

History for Life, written during the last months of the year 1873, Nietzsche sets
forth the imperative for the spirit of a "new age":

the origin of historical education [Bildung] ... must itself in turn be historically understood, history
must itself dissolve the problem of history, knowledge must tum its sting against itself- this
threefold must is the imperative of the spirit of the "new age", if it really does contain something
new, mighty, original and a promise of life.'

From the perspective opened up by this quotation, it is possible to locate the

three "positivistic" texts -Human, All too Human, Dawn, and The Gay Science
- within a wider project, which returns, at the end of the original edition of The
Gay Science, to that theme which has already haunted the second untimely
meditation, namely the thought of the Eternal Return of the Same. The project
followed in these texts, then, is to bring knowledge to the point where it turns
its sting against itself; to fathom out the necessity following the paradox
exposed in modem history, namely that life- and, this is to say, life as such, not
only in its human form - lives on and dies through knowledge: fiat veritas,
pereat vita. 2 The question "how much truth can be incorporated?", while
pushing the question for the essence of truth, at the same time reaffirms that the
human being cannot exist without it, and hence continually has to ask for the
Being of the logic of identity. The question of truth and its incorporation is here

331
B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Episterrwlogy, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 331-339.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
332 ULLRICH MICHAEL HAASE

taken in its ambiguity, between that which is traditionally called the truth of
being, that is, the identification of truth with being -a conception that cannot
simply be changed nominally- and that which now appears as the truth, namely
that there is no truth; in other words, that being, that which alone can be true, is
only an illusion. And yet, this truth cannot even be said, or rather, its being said
should change the whole framework of thinking, so that it can approach the
knowledge that there is only becoming. The first understanding of truth has,
since Plato, been determined through the notion of death, and hence resists
incorporation, while the second cannot even be incorporated as a truth, since it
signifies the dispersal of existence.
What are we to do with this impossible necessity of truth? While Nietzsche's
point does not necessarily imply that we are confined to Kant's "Island of
Reason," it does mean that we have to take the question of the essence of know-
ledge more seriously than before, where "serious" implies that the question of
knowledge can no longer be restricted to a position of conscious standpoints,
nor appear to consciousness in the form of a systematic propositional structure.
Instead of simply ignoring the question of the identity necessary for any under-
standing - by claiming, for example, that all interpretations are valid, while
some are better than others - it shall be "our serious striving to understand
everything as becoming, to deny our being as individuals, possibly to look into
the world with many eyes, to live in drives and our daily occupations, in order
to make oneself some eyes from it, to give oneself temporarily over to life, in
order then to rest temporarily with the eye above life."
From here my claim should become clearer, in that it is the three writings
here in question, which offer themselves to be counted for the first of these
periods, while in the Zarathustra an essential attempt is made to rest with the eye
above life. What does not change in the move of these different stances of the
philosopher, is the attempt to make an experiment with truth - and hence an
attempt at a critique of truth in the sense of bringing it to appearance in its own
crisis -while in each case the question remains, what kind of experiment applies
to which understanding of truth: the question being whether the experimental
character of Nietzsche's thinking, a thinking whose sense for truth restricts itself
"temporarily" to experiment, 4 gives way to an apology of the unrestricted reign
of the techno-sciences, as the twentieth century has experienced it, or if the aim
of Nietzsche's affirmations consists in instituting work-shops for the struggle
against our present age. 5 At least it should be clear that, in order eventually to
leave nihilism behind, in order to find one's way back to something, 6 it will be
necessary to surmount the state of "mere" experimentation.
If the task of philosophy can be described as pushing its time to the point of
crisis, then this crisis- from the early 1880's up to the end of the twentieth
century and beyond- will turn around the question of technology, as it is here
that the central philosophical question of the unity of necessity and freedom
finds itself so clearly set apart and counterpoised, that what are differentials can
appear as opponents, taking as their battle field the essence of the human being.
In other words, the age of technology brings into the open the crux of modernity
in its separation between inside and outside, this non-culture and non-science,
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGY 333

as Nietzsche names it in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for

Life, and as Merleau-Ponty redresses it in The Visible and the Invisible. The
question of an epistemological transcendence, in its modern formulation,
therefore has to become meaningless, if phenomenology is to achieve anything.
The claim of our new philosophers, namely that we have to think the wholly
impersonal in the form of the inhuman, hence embodies the collective weaknes-
ses of modernity, insofar as it does not leave the Christian conception of truth
behind, but rather perverts and perennializes it. It preserves an implicit claim to
objectivity without considering its ground and it keeps the forced character of
modernity, which, by suppressing this ground, has come to see its most
important enemy in psychologism. For these reasons an extra- and supra-
personal experience must be taken for one of the most singular exceptions in the
world, 7 while nowadays, in a world that reformulates any possible value as a
right, everybody reserves at least the right to un-personal experiences. It is on
these grounds that phenomenology is directed "against" technology, notwith-
standing the fact that it cannot afford the nai"vete to oppose technology on moral
grounds.
It is clear why Nietzsche himself could not and would not revert to unifying
this broken unity of subject and object, and hence of man and world, systemati-
cally. But having played it apart in all the early works, the thought of the
Eternal Return of the Same has precisely this function: to fuse these opposites
into the frightful abyss of truth and art- so that the conception of a new, not
metaphysical, eternity 8 might appear as answer to the question: "when may we
begin to naturalise us humans in terms of the pure, newly discovered, newly
redeemed nature ?"9
That the human being could at all attribute the notion of free will to itself
depends on its claim that what is given to it through the fact of knowledge, is
nothing else than an access to a transcendent and true world. In other words, the
questions of epistemology do not merely concern our understanding of the
world, but our very essence as temporal, and hence transcendent beings. It does
not make any difference, whether the human being is understood as s0ov
JtOALTLKOV, as syov .A6yov FXOV, as animal rationale, as res cogitans, as ens
moralis or animal mortalis, or as embodying the negative power of time; in each
case these determinations are dependent on its access to the principle of identity,
that is to say, on the principle of epistemology, establishing the primacy of
Being as true Being, i.e. as Being-Known.
Yet, since Nietzsche we accept - in too superficial a way, often reminiscent
of the scene described in The Madman 10 - that this primacy of Being as Being-
Known has ended: "the Truth cannot be known. All that can be known is
semblance." 11 But how shall the existence of human being remain possible? "So
that there could arise any degree of consciousness in the world, there had first
of all to arise an unreal world of error,'' 12 namely a world of being. The age of
technology itself is precisely this moment of the realisation of idealism through
its own abolition, insofar as its motivation and its values are derived from
idealism, while its "ideology" is anti-idealistic in intent. The age of technology
334 ULLRICH MICHAEL HAASE

hence places the very possibility of the existence of consciousness in the world
under scrutiny.
The paradox of conscious existence consists in the fact that consciousness can
only reassure itself through its very acts, while the existing act does not point
back at consciousness as its cause. While the Christian world has always
promised its intelligibility by way of the creation of a God who, in its turn,
creates in the same way as we produce, so that we could understand the world
by analogy with our actions, it is precisely insofar as we act, that we cannot
understand ourselves. In the creative act mankind transcends itself, in that the
human being becomes natura naturans, 13 nature itself, insofar as she is active.
Consequently, the human being cannot contain its being by means of a
subjection to the divine.
And yet, insofar as freedom can only be determined in relation to knowledge,
a freedom that cannot be known is no freedom at all. Or, insofar as the under-
standing, by its very nature, tends towards the ideal of mechanism, the only way
that it can take hold of freedom is by reconciling it with necessity. The first step
of this reconciliation then consists of its negation: "everything here is necessary,
every motion mathematically calculable .... The actor's deception regarding
himself, the assumption of free-will, is itself part of this calculable mecha-
nism."14 While giving itself over to life, the actor shall give up the illusion of
freedom precisely to become a free spirit, that is, freed through the teaching of
absolute irresponsibility. 15
But through the very assumption of a universal mechanism, following from
an observation of life, mechanism itself has been proven wrong, as Nietzsche
argues, 16 once the moment has been reached at which it is necessary to rest with
the eye above life. While this moment presents itself, in abstraction, as a move
transcending life, and hence as a move towards idealism - it does so only if
posited as a theoretical standpoint. What remains is the insight into the impos-
sibility to explain human action through conscious deliberation, that is, through
a falsified will. That technology cannot be countered consciously - not even
through a dream of the automatic unconscious -, this would be the significance
of our experiment with truth: namely, following Heidegger's words, to realise
that the universality of technology, as the reduction of truth to the unconcealed-
ness of that which has been "stocked up" [ Unverborgenheit des Bestandes], 17
has to be willed, so that the will itself runs out of steam. This turning of the will
against itself, this esoteric insight, that "there is no such thing as a will," 18 which
could transcend life and hence determine itself, according to Descartes, as
divine, is the second step towards the liberation of freedom from the will.
It is hence not very difficult to jump from that premise towards the idea of
technology as that which finally frees the human being from itself, by freeing
it from the illusion of its free will. And yet, according to Nietzsche one can
already see that the way this is done, namely through the explicit denial of free
will, falls short of fulfilling the task as radical as necessary, namely by laying
the ideal calmly on ice. 19 If it was the case that the fundamental character of the
world were, in all eternity, mechanism, then one should easily be able to
understand why "it is not that the machine will replace the human being: it is the
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGY 335

human being that has supplemented, up to the industrial revolution, the absence
of machines." 20 In a way it is quite uncanny how the will to truth, reaching the
point where it can no longer be incorporated by the human stomach, abolishes
the latter, accompanied by the cheery affirmation of the stomach's bearer. The
human being has suffered enough, and, as it suffers from indigestion, it turns
with ressentiment against its very stomach, affirming with all glory that the need
for nourishment has been overcome, that nature has finally played her part -
attempting, as a true follower of the Nietzschean spirit, to help the weak and ill-
.
constitute d to pens
. h .21
And yet, having established that it is an illness of the stomach that has been
diagnosed, one could as well have accepted the warning that all this reasoning
might constitute a huge misunderstanding. The first misunderstanding concerns
the right with which this "materialism" does claim Nietzsche as its predecessor;
the second, and more serious, concerns a misunderstanding as well about
Nietzsche's exposition of affirmation as an antidote to the idealised concept of
negation, as of the essence of the age of technology. And it does not help in this
respect, if one tries to cover over this misunderstanding by the explicit interdic-
tion of any critical distancing from the development of technology, as expressed
by Bernard Stiegler in the following way: "the reactions provoked by the
techno-scientific revolutions, might they be immediate, or mediate and
mediated, 'epidermal' or calculated, are the real danger and have to be over-
.
come 1mperat1 .ve1y. ,22
The philosophical climate is already heated up: every questioning attitude
towards technology is understood as romantic and dangerous. Every critique of
our age, which does not affirm its height, as it goes pregnant with colourful
possibilities of an inhuman future, will be happily and laughingly denounced as
melancholy, and hence as an illness. As Freud has complained about the lie with
which children are educated - that is, not being made aware of the brutal nature
of reality - here the attitude of encouragement to understand the facts of life,
which demand that one adapt oneself or that one perish, presupposes that one
has already understood, or, rather, is designed so as to avoid the question for the
nature of the age of technology. One is asked to make one's choice while the
cards are already dealt. What is interesting regarding this forced affirmation of
technology, this mistaken identification of affirmation with acquiescence -
ending in a perverted Hegelianism, in so far as it affirms its self-effacement in
the face of the real - is its motivation. This motivation is, as I have claimed
above, idealistic in essence. The age of technology, as the unconditional reign
of cybernetics, is the realisation of idealism especially in its Christian mission
against nature and history.
Even if the attempt is made to escape this mission through the detennination
of technical organisation as neither mechanic nor organic, what remains is
precisely this hidden objectivity, that takes the world as a whole as its object,
representing it independently from the human being and independently from its
time. It is such a view which first of all makes it possible to characterise the age
of the human as supplementing the absence of machines.
336 ULLRICH MICHAEL HAASE

And yet, does not this idea of a neither mechanic nor organic organisation
derive from Nietzsche, who argues in section 109 of the Gay Science that one
shall not call the universe an organism- since an organism is dependent on that
on which it feeds - while the idea of a universal mechanism is equally de-
throned? However, to make such an insight into a positive and affirmative
theory presupposes in its turn an eternalised and thus Christian idea of truth. As
such it misses the centre of philosophy, in that it only knows either necessity or
freedom. Furthermore, this idea derives itself from the existence of organisms
and their fallacies, insofar as "it is from the period of the lower organisms that
man has inherited the belief that there are identical things.'m
This misunderstanding as to the historial nature of the real - and conse-
quently as well the failure to grasp the utmost importance of all our knowledge
for the future - engenders itself through the repetition of just this trait of
philosophy, that it thinks that thinking itself has to have a disregard of history,
especially insofar as history seems to place too much emphasis on the ailings of
a human being, overestimating the importance of its existence. The hypothe-
sized universality of technology and the "machinic," their absolute rights against
a human being which has to be humanistic in order to will its survival, reduces
history to the poetical chemistry of mechanic couplings, which is supposed to
account for the passing of centuries. As if we had only to remove the riddle of
the human being from history in order to acquire an objective stance deprived
of its reason.Z4 This objectivity then asks, if from a different perspective, the
central question of idealism: "what remains of the world, after one has cut one's
head off?" 25 Here one strives from a blindness to being into the direction of a
blindness towards history- in Nietzsche's words: a blindness towards the whole
of reality. In this installation of technology, furthered and demanded by those
acolytes of its prolific qualities, the discourse on technology acquires its
tautological grounding. In the same way as the modern natural sciences had
attempted to turn their practise of truth into the presupposition of all knowledge
generally, so as to make a historical discourse on science meaningless, the
discourse on technology attempts to make an argument out of its success. It is
in this discourse that we can find a symptom of the phenomenon of technology,
which, as the will to will, is itself the tendency towards the un-historical.
Consequently it remains possible to think technology as fulfilled metaphysics?6
If the conjunction of science and technology is understood as the foundational
character of modernity, then it does not only become obvious that in fact the
conception of ;;e xvrt is a necessary condition of the ascent of metaphysics, but
furthermore, that the whole discourse of the human being, which temporarily
supplements for the absence of machines, goes back to Descartes. The materia-
lism that ensues from the Cartesian position is hence the consequence of the
belief that one can leave the dualism behind, by making a decision for one of the
two sides. And, as one would rather become a machine than having one's head
cut off, the decision appears not to be that difficult.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty has already warned us of the logic that employs itself
in this dialectic of objectivity leading from the natural sciences to the "ma-
chinic" sciences:
 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGY 337

Thus science began by excluding all the predicates that come to the things from our encounter with
them. The exclusion is however only provisional: when it will have learned to invest it, science
will little by little reintroduce what it first put aside as subjective; .... Then the world will close in
over itself, and, except for what within us thinks and builds science, ... , we will have become parts
or moments of the Great Object. 27

In order to be able to understand the logic that moves us from the natural
sciences to the machine-sciences and from the humanities to journalism, as
Heidegger puts it, 28 it is helpful to note that Leibniz has supplied a decisive
stepping stone for this development of scientific thought, precisely in his
argument against those philosophers, who are too materialistic. That the logical
foundation of the freedom of the soul in its self-determination gives rise to the
infinitely machinistic character of the world, grounds - once stripped of the
teleological character of Leibniz' philosophy- the development, at the end of
which the voluntarism of modern philosophy will have been transformed into
the will to power as technology. 29
On the one hand, there is no sense in denying this development, all that I am
concerned with here, is Nietzsche's attempt to think the necessity of the techno-
logisation of modern culture, and the need to persist throughout this fate by
means of an experiment that will eventually exhaust its historial power and lead
back to "some-thing." It is in this respect, that Nietzsche's words of experi-
mentation and function can be understood as a prolegomena to the concept of
technology. In the happiness and the forced nature of the analyses of technology
that demand our approval, on the other hand, one can discern, not only the spell
cast by the natural sciences, which have been taken in by the concept of pure
apperception, 30 and which reach this purity precisely through conjuring up the
dissolution of the human being in a technologically understood reality, but also
Heidegger' s analysis of the forgetfulness of being:

:n:otY)OL£- 'te)CVY). Where do machinations (die Machenschaft) lead us? To experience. How does
this happen? (Ens creatum- modern nature and history- technology) through the profanation
[Entzauberung] of that which is, a profanation which hands power over to a cast spelled by itself.
Bewitchment and experience.
The perennial reinforcement of the desolation of Being in the forgetfulness of Being. 31

***
One of the first points of reservation against a reading of Nietzsche as given
above, will be that it attempts to unify his thought. If he intended it to be unified
in such a way, then he would easily have been able to say that which we make
him say. And yet, on the level of our interpretation, while we might say less
than that what Nietzsche had to say, we still say more than that what we would
have been able to say, if we had suspended all difficulties by simply claiming
that Nietzsche's truth is multiple. Taken from this stance, the placid affirmers
of Nietzsche's multiplicities proliferate bad philology and a nihilism, which is
riddled by such fear of a misunderstood truth, that it hardly dares to open its
mouth. Whoever is of the opinion that it would be enough simply to deny the
conception of identity, has not yet understood much about the necessities of
thinking, and will consequently always be too occupied with the word "being"
338 ULLRICH MICHAEL HAASE

than having any other choice left but to deny the phenomenon. Whoever tries
to give up on retracing the movement of Nietzsche's thought in its coherency,
will always remain lost in a muddle, which will once affirm that the will can
only be found in intelligent creatures, 32 who will then say that there is no will
at all, and finally come to the conclusion that all is will against will.
The claim ensuing from the threefold "must," in the course of which the
thought of the Eternal Return of the Same will have accomplished the move-
ment of knowledge turning its sting against itself, hence aims at an actualisation
of the difference between freedom and necessity, in a way which for some might
sound more humanistic than open to the boundless challenge of Cybernetics.
While the thought of the Eternal Return of the Same has to remain small and
powerless for millennia, finally it will lead to the realization of the "infinite
importance of our knowledge, our errors, our habits, and our ways of life for all
that is to come." 33 The promise given by this age of thought, named as there-
naturalisation of the human being, will hence lead us away from any idealism
of number, away from a mathematically determined space, in which reality does
not even appear as a problem34 - which was, after all, precisely its promise -
towards a new and old reality:

What we have won back for ourselves today with an unspeakable amount of self-constraint- the
free view of reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the whole
integrity of knowledge- was already there! Already more than two millennia ago! And good and
delicate taste and tact! ... as body, as gesture, as instinct- in a word, as reality ... 35

Manchester Metropolitan University, England

NOTES
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, "Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie fiir das Leben," Kritische
Studienausgabe, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967-77 and 1988), 1, 306; English translation by
Peter Preuss: On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1980), p. 45.
2 Ibid., KSA 1, 272; English translation: p. 23.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, NachlajJ, V 11 [141], KSA 9, 494 ff.
4 Cf., Nietzsche, Die frohliche Wissenschaft, § 51, KSA 3, 416, trans. W. Kaufman, The Gay
Science, (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 115.
5 Nietzsche, NachlajJ, III 8 [104], KSA 7, 262, "Werkstatten des Kampfes gegen die Gegenwart."
6 Cf., Nietzsche, Siimtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975-1984),
~uoted as KSB, followed by volume/page numbers, KSB 8/81.
Cf., Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, I§ 157, KSA 2, 148; trans. R. J. Hollingdale,
Human, All Too Human, (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press,
1986), p. 84.
8 Compare the Rundgesang- in its varying names -at the end of the last but one section of Also
Sprach Zarathustra, KSA 4, 404; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollindale, (London:
Penguin, 1969), p. 333.
9 Diefrohliche Wissenschaft, § 109, KSA 3, 469, The Gay Science, p. 169; translation modified.
10 Ibid., § 125, "Der Tolle Mensch"; Nietzsche here conjures up the image of contemporary
culture, where everybody always already knows everything, without having understood much.
11 NachlajJ, III 29 [20], KSA 7, 633
12 Nach/ajJ, V 11 [162], KSA 9, 503.
13 Cf.: Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil ... , § 8, KSA 1, 310; On the Advantage ... , p. 48.
14 Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, I§ 106, KSA 2, 103; Human, All Too Human, p. 57,

translation slightly modified.

 NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGY 339

15 Cf., Ibid., § 133, KSA 2, 128.

16 Cf.. NachlajJ, VIII 14 [188], KSA 13/375.
17 Cf.: Martin Heidegger, "Die Frage nach der Technik," in: Die Technik und die Kehre,

(Pfullingen: Neske, 1962, 1988), p. 34.

18 Nietzsche, NachlajJ, VIII 5 [9], KSA 12, 187; "Es giebt gar keinen Willen." The important

point about this statement is, that it appears as point 2, following on "1. - everything is will against
will": the whole note bears the title: "Exoteric- esoteric."
19 Cf.: Ecce Homo, KSA 6, 321 ff.
20 Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, vol. 1, (Paris: Galilee, 1994), p. 82.
21 Cf., Nietzsche, Der Antichrist, § 2, KSA 6, 170.
22 Quotation taken from the back-cover of Stiegler, La technique et le temps.
23 Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, I§ 18; Human, All To Human, p. 21.
24 And yet, the reason of objectivity, namely the promise of communication, does still support the
dream of technology and its metaphorics of free flows.
25 Cf.. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, I§ 9, KSA 2, 29.
26 Cf., Heidegger, "i.iberwindung der Metaphysik," in: Vortriige und Aufsiitze, (Pfullingen: Neske,

1954, 1990, § X, p. 76.

27 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et /'invisible, (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 31; The Visible

and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 15.
28 Cf., Heidegger, Beitriige zur Philosophie, (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989), p. 158.
29 While reminding us of the etymology of the word "machine," which derives from machina,

1-llJXIiVl], ~-tT\XO£, which in tum goes back to the sanscrit mah, to prepare, to grow, magham,
rcower, and to the Gothic mag, "I can," and mahts, power.
0 Nietzsche, NachlajJ, VII 26 [413], KSA 11, 262.
31 Heidegger, Beitriige ... , §50, p. 107; ":rtotl]OL£ --cexvlJ. Wohin fiihrt die Machenschaft? Zum

Erlebnis. Wie geschieht das? (Ens creatum- die neuzeitliche Natur und Geschichte- die Technik)
Durch die Entzauberung des Seienden, die einer durch sie selbst vollzogenen Verzauberung die
Macht einriiumt. Verzauberung und Erlebnis. Die endgiiltige Verfestigung der Seinsverlassenbeit
in der Seinsvergessenheit."
32 Cf.: Nietzsche, Diefrohliche Wissenschaft, § 127, KSA 3, 483.
33 NachlajJ, V 11 [141], KSA 9, 494ff: "Das neue Schwergewicht: die ewige Wiederkunft des

Gleichen. Unendliche Wichtigkeit unseres Wissen's, lrrens, unserer Gewohnbeiten, Lebensweisen

fiir alles Kommende."
34 Cf.: Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1968), "Reason in

Philosophy," § 3, p. 46.
35 Nietzsche, Der Antichrist, § 59, KSA 6/248
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 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Barry Allen teaches philosophy at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He

is the author of Truth in Philosophy (1993) among many other essays. His
contribution to the present collection is part of a work in progress, entitled
Knowledge and Civilization.

David B. Allison is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New

York at Stony Brook. Editor of the internationally influential collection, The
New Nietzsche, as well as collections on de Sade, Schreber, and others. Allison
is editor, with Babette Babich, of the journal, New Nietzsche Studies, and author
of many essays on Baudrillard, Derrida, Heidegger, Husserl, Nietzsche, etc. He
is currently completing a new book on Nietzsche.

R. Lanier Anderson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Stanford Univer-

sity. His articles about Nietzsche appear in journals such as Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science, Synthese, and Nietzsche-Studien.

Babette E. Babich is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University in New

York City and Adjunct Research Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown
University. She is author of Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting
Science on the Ground of Art and Life (1994 ), and editor of From Phenomenol-
ogy to Thought, Errancy, and Desire (1996), and co-editor of Continental and
Postmodem Currents in the Philosophy of Science (1995). She is Executive
Secretary of the Nietzsche Society and founded the journal, New Nietzsche
Studies, which she edits with David B. Allison. She is currently working on a
study of Heidegger' s critique of technology and the culture of modern science
as well as a book collection on Nietzsche and Music.

Bela Bacs6 is Professor and chair of Aesthetics at Eotvos Lonmd University in

Budapest, Hungary. He has translated Heidegger, Gadamer, etc., into Hungar-
ian. His Hungarian language publications include The Art of Understanding and
Understanding Art; Borderlines: Hermeneutical Essays; The Shadow of the
Word: Understanding Paul Celan 's Poetry, as well as a collection of essays in
German, Die Unvermeidbarkeit des lrrtums. Essays zur Hermeneutik (1996).

359
B. Babich (ed. ), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 359-363.
360 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Justin Barton is writing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Deleuze/

Guattari, the industrial revolution and the strategy of diagraming at the
University of Warwick, England.

Heidi Byrnes is Professor of German/Linguistics at Georgetown University.

Her research focus is the advanced instructed learner of German, particularly the
learner's acquisition of academic literacy in a second language, discourse
analysis and crosscultural discourse. Her most recent publication is the edited
volume, Learning Second and Foreign Languages, published by the Modem
Language Association (1998).

Jonathan Cohen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of

Maine at Farmington. He is working on a book-length study of Nietzsche's
Human, All Too Human.

Daniel W. Conway is Professor of Philosophy at The Pennsylvania State

University. He is the author of numerous essays on topics in nineteenth century
philosophy, continental philosophy, and political theory, along with two recent
books, Nietzsche and the Political (1997) and Nietzsche's Dangerous Game:
Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols ( 1997).

Peter Douglas is a Ph.D. student in the School of Humanities at Griffith

University, Brisbane, Australia and is currently exploring the implications of
replacing relations which structure Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and
Whitehead's Process and Reality with those from fractal geometry and chaos
theory.

Lysane Fauvel is a French-German scholar studying philosophy at the State

University of New York at Stony Brook.

Ullrich Michael Haase is Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan

University in England. He has published mainly on questions of hermeneutics
and phenomenology, especially the work of Nietzsche, Gadamer, and Deleuze.

Patrick A. Heelan is the William A. Gaston Professor of Philosophy at

Georgetown University. He was formerly a research physicist in high energy
physics and seismology. He has published Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity
(1964) and Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (1983) as well as
numerous essays in the philosophy of science based on the works of Husserl and
Heidegger.

Duncan Large is Lecturer in German at the University of Wales, Swansea, and

Chairman of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society. He has translated works by Sarah
Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor (1993) and Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
( 1998), and published articles on Kofman, Nietzsche, Proust, and Robert Musil.
He is currently editing a volume of essays on Nietzsche for Macmillan and
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 361

completing a comparative study of Nietzsche and Proust for Oxford University

Press.

Alasdair Macintyre is Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. His books

include: A short History of Ethics, After Virtue. Whose Justice? Which Ration-
ality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.

Robert Nola is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Auckland,

New Zealand. He has published papers in the areas of philosophy of science,
science education, and on writers such as Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault. He is
editor of Relativism and Realism in Science. His most recent book is a collection
of essays entitled Foucault.

David Owen is lecturer in political philosophy and assistant director of the

Centre for Post-Analytic Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He is
author of Maturity and Modernity (1994) and Nietzsche, Politics, and Modernity
(1995) and editor of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies. He is currently co-editing
a collection on Foucault and Habermas and writing a book on tragedy.

Scott Podolsky has written on the role of virus research in the origin of life-
theories, the development of post-World War II immunology, and late nine-
teenth century theories of nutrition. He is co-author with Alred I. Tauber of
Generation of Diversity (1997), a history of how molecular biology was
introduced into immunology. He is currently a medical resident at Boston's
Brigham and Women's hospital.

Peter Poellner is a lecturer in Philosophy, University of Warwick, in the United

Kingdom. He is the author of Nietzsche and Metaphysics (1995).

Andrea Rehberg is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Post-Kantian Critical

Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her researches are in the
area of European Philsosophy and she has written on Kant, Nietzsche, Heideg-
ger and Irigaray.

Richard Schacht is Professor of Philosophy and Jubilee Professor of Liberal

Arts and Sciences at the University of lllinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he is
the Executive Director of the North American Nietzsche Society. He is the
author of Nietzsche (1983), The Future of Alienation (1994), and Making Sense
of Nietzsche (1995). He is the editor of Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays
on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1994) and general editor of the
Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy (forthcoming).

Robin Small is senior lecturer in philosophy of education at Monash University,

Melbourne. His research has been largely in the philosophy of education and the
history of ideas, including articles on Hegel, Marx, Husserl and Kafka; he is
currently working on a study of Nietzsche's thought.
362 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Eric Steinhart is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at William Paterson

University of New Jersey. He has done corporate computer research. He has
written on analogy, metaphor, and metaphysics and is interested in the use of the
computer in philosphy.

Alfred I. Tauber is Director of the Boston University Center for Philosophy

and History of Science. He is author of The Immune Self, Theory or Metaphor?
(1994) and co-author with Leon Chernyak of Metchnikoff and the Origins of
Immunology (1991) and with Scott Podolsky, The Generation of Diversity
(1997).

Paul J. M. van Tongeren is Professor of Philosophical Ethics at Nijmegen

University. He is the author of Die Moral von Nietzsches Moralkritik ( 1989) and
one of the co-editors of Eros and Eris (1992). His book, Reinterpreting Modern
Culture: A Introduction to Fr. Nietzsche's Philosophy is forthcoming.

Paul Valadier is Professor of Moral Philosophy and Politics at the Jesuit

Faculty of Philosophy in Paris, and at the Catholic University of Lyon, France.
He is the author of Nietzsche et le christianisme (1974), Nietzsche l'athee de
rigueur (1989), Eloge de la conscience (1994), and L'anarchie des valeurs. Le
relativisme est-il fatal? (1997).

Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsacker is Director, emeritus, of the Max-

Planck-Gesellschaft in Munich. He has taught physics and philosophy at the
universities of Berlin, Strasbourg, Gottingen, Hamburg, and Munich and is the
author of numerous books, including Die Atomkerne ( 1937), Zum Weltbild der
Physik (1943), Bedingung des Freidens (1963); Die Tragweite der Wissenschaft
(1964); Die Einheit der Natur (1971), translated as The Unity ofNature; Wege
in der Gefahr (1977), translated as The Politics of Peril ; Der Garten des
Menschlichen (1978); Wahrnehmung der Physik (1983); Zeit und Wissen
(1992); Der bedrohte Friede- heute.

Talia Welsch is completing her doctorate in Philosophy at the State University

of New York at Stony Brook.

Rex Welshon is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of

Colorado. He is the author, with Steven Hales, of Nietzsche's Perspectivism,
forthcoming.

Greg Whitlock has taught philosophy at Austin Community College. He is the

author of Returning to Sits-Maria: A Commentary to Nietzsche's 'Also sprach
Zarathustra' (1990) and scholarly essays in philosophical journals as well as in
astronomical/cosmological magazines and journals.

Walther Ch. Zimmerli is Professor of Philosophy at Philipps University in

Marburg and Permanent Senate Visiting Professor at Stellenbosch University,
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 363

South Africa, among other visiting appointments in Austria, Australia, Hungary,

Japan, South Africa, and the US. He is the author, co-author, or editor of 23
books, including Die Frage nach der Philosophie (2nd edn., 1984), ed.,
Technologisches Zeitalter oder Postmoderne? (2nd edn., 1991), Geist und Natur
(1991 ), Technologie als 'Kultur' (1997) and of more than 300 articles in
journals and collections.
 NIETZSCHE, THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, AND CRITICAL THEORY
NIETZSCHE AND THE SCIENCES VOL. I
Edited by
BABETTE E. BABICH
in cooperation with
ROBERTS. COHEN
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
DORDRECHT I BOSTON I LONDON
1999

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements IX
List of Abbreviations Used xi

ROBERTS. COHEN I Preface XV

INTRODUCTION

BABETTE E. BABICH I Nietzsche's Critical Theory:

The Culture of Science as Art 1
Resume and Section Summaries 14

NIETZSCHE AND THE TRADITION

HOWARD CA YGILL I Nietzsche and Atomism 27

STEPHEN GAUKROGER I Beyond Reality: Nietzsche's Science of
Appearances 37
TILMAN BORSCHE I The Epistemological Shift from Descartes to
Nietzsche: Intuition and Imagination 51
E. E. SLEINIS I Between Nietzsche and Leibniz: Perspectivism and
Irrationalism 67
STEVEN CROWELL I Nietzsche Among the Neo-Kantians;
Or, the Relation Between Science and Philosophy 77
ANGELE KREMER-MARIETTI I Nietzsche's Critique of Modern
Reason 87
CHARLES BAMBACH I The Politics of Knowledge: Nietzsche Within
Heidegger' s History of Truth 103
KURT RUDOLF FISCHER I Nietzsche and the Vienna Circle 119

365
366 TABLE OF CONTENTS- VOLUME l

NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF GRAMMAR, CULTURE, AND

INTERPRETATION

JOSEF SIMON I Grammar and Truth: On Nietzsche's Relationship

to the Speculative Sentential Grammar of the Metaphysical Tradition 129
HOLGER SCHMID I The Nietzschean Meta-Critique of Knowledge 153
WOLFGANG MULLER-LAUTER I On Judging in a World of
Becoming: A Reflection on the 'Great Change' in Nietzsche's
Philosophy 165
MANFRED RIEDEL I Scientific Theory or Practical Doctrine? 187
JOSEF KOPPERSCHMIDT I Nietzsche's Rhetorical Philosophy
as Critique of Impure Reason 199

NIETZSCHE, HABERMAS, AND CRITICAL THEORY

JURGEN HABERMAS I On Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge:

A Postscript from 1968 209
KLAUS SPIEKERMANN I Nietzsche and Critical Theory 225
BRIAN O'CONNOR I Nietzsche and Enlightenment Science:
A Dialectical Reading 243
JAMES SWINDAL I Nietzsche, Critical Theory, and a Theory of
Knowledge 253
MAX PENSKY I Truth and Interest: On Habermas's Postscript to
Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge 265
JOANNA HODGE I Habermasian Passion and the Nietzschean
Contagion 273
TOM ROCKMORE I Habermas, Nietzsche, and Cognitive Perspective 281
BERNHARD B. F. TAURECK I Habermas's Critique of Nietzsche's
Critique of Reason 289
NICHOLAS DAVEY I Nietzsche, Habermas, and the Question of
Objectivity 295
TRACY B. STRONG I A Postscript on Habermas, Nietzsche,
and Politics 307

Selected Research Bibliography 315

Notes on Contributors 327

Table of Contents of Volume Two: Nietzsche, Epistemology,

and the Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II 333

Index 335
 INDEX

Abel, G., 188, 200n, 273n, 275n Berlecamp, E. [& J. Conway & R. Guy],
Achilles, 126 322n
Agrippa, H.C., 125, 140n Bernard, C., 299, 307, 309
Alcibiades, 183 Bernasconi, R., 22n
Allen, B., 3, 16, 18, 20n, 23n, 24n, 140n Biagioli, M., 132, 140n, 219n
Allison, D.B., 17, 24n, 175n, 216n Bittner, R., 71n
Anaxagoras, 75-76 Blank, D, [& L. Meeden & J. Marshal],
Anax:imander, 24n 320n
Anders, A. [with Schlechta], 22n-23n, 157n, Blonde!, E., 23n, 139n, 319n
187,200n,297n Bloor, D., xv
Anderson, R.L., 3, 15, 21n, 57n-59n, 273n, Blumenberg, H., 130, 139n
276n,277n Bly, R., 215, 219n
Ansell-Pearson, K., 158n Bohm, D., 320n
Apollo, 203-204,216, 216n, 302-303,315 Bohr, N., 227
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 5, 214, 260 Boltzmann, L., 315, 321n
Arbib, M. [with Hesse], 219n Bongie, C., 158n
Aristarchus, 97n Bonhoeffer, D., 231
Aristotle, 5. 7, 10, 94, 124, 131,207,214, Boorse, C., 301
230,232,296 Borsche, T., 21n, 24n
Ashmole, E., 140n Boscovich, R.J., xv, 17, 19, 75, 99n, 187-
Augustus, 221 199, 199n-201n, 227, 270,273n, 277n,
Austin, J., 229 291,294,297n,320n
Axelrod, 322n Bourget, P., 155
Ayer, A.J., 123, 138n Boyle, R., 10, 16, 75, 125, 134, 297n
Breazeale, D., 22n, 23n, 107n, 273n
Babich, B.E., xvii, 20n-23n, 57 a, 122n, Briggs, J.C., 140n
139n, 157n, 167n, 188,200n,203,205, Broad, C.D., 297n
216n, 217n, 219n, 273n, 275a, 275n, Bromwich, D., 215
320n Brown, W.M., 301, 310n
Bachelard, G., 216n Bruno, G., 125
Bacon, F., 10, 16, 125, 131, 133-134, 136, Buchdahl, G., 21n
139n, 140n, 214 Buckley, M.J., 140n
Bacs6, B., 21n Buechner, A., 88n
Barton, J., 16 Burckhardt, J., 187
Baudrillard, J., 17, 179-184, 185n Buss, L., 310n
Bauer, M., 258, 273n, 275n, 276n
Bell [with Harari], 157n Caesar, 79, 221
Beller, M., 219 Canguilhem, G., 311 n
Bennett, C. H., 321n Cannon, W., 299
Bergson, H., 299 Cardan, J., 86
Berkeley, G., 93, 94, 294, 297n Carnot, L., 158n

367

B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II, 367-371
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
368 INDEX

Carnot, S., 152-153, 156, 158n, 268 Douglas, P., 20, 330n
Caspari, 0., 265 Dretske, F., 57n
Cavell, S., 22n Drews, A., 273n, 275n
Caygill, H., 24n, 177n Dtihring, E., 189, 268
Chaitin, G., 321 n Duhem, P., 216n, 218n
Char, R., 161, 162 Dumont, L., 83-86, 88n, 89n
Chisholm, R., 46n
Clark, M., I, 14, 20n, 21n, 22n, 48, 57n, Eamon, W., 139n
58n,59n, 122n, 174,273n,276n,277n Elijah, 231
Clausius, 152-153, 268 Emerson, R. W., 228
Clement XIV, 199 Empedocles, 75-76
Cohen, J., 16. 107n Engels, F., 152, 154
Cohen, R.S., 24n, 275a Epicurus, 86, 315
Colli, G. [with Montinari], 253, 255 Erasmus, 242
Columbus, C., 79, 158n Evans, F., 321n
Comte, A .. 152
Codd, E., 322n Faraone, C.A. [with Obbink], 139n
Conway, D., 16, 273n, 276n Faust, Faustus, 16, 124-125, 135, 138n,
Condillac, E.B. de, 73 209n
Copernicus, N., 75, 87n, 132-133, 158n, Faraday, M., 75
!71, 189, 192, 200n, 211,249 Fechner, G.T., 88n, 197, 270, 273n
Couliano, I., 138n Feher, M., 219n
Crescenzi, C., 273n, 276n Fere, c., 155
Crombie, A., 219 Feuerbach, L., 112, 136
Crutchfield, J.P. [&J.D. Farmer, H. Pack- Ficino, M., 140n
ard, R.S. Shaw], 330n Feigenbaum, 143
Fischer, K.R., 21n
Dalai Lama, 41 Fish, S., xv
Dante, 221 Fiumara, G.C., 219n
Danto, A., 2, 14. 21n, 253,267, 273n, 275n, Fjelland, R., 218n
276n,277n,320n Flint, V., 139n
Darwin, C., xv, 19-20, 83, 85, 96-97, lOOn, Foucault, M., 4, 99, 131, 139n, 141, 149n
107n,223-225,253, 258,272,299,307, Franklin, B., 125, 200n
309, 310 Freeman, D.A., 20n, 273n, 276n
Davies, P., 157n, 217n Frege, G., 6
Dawkins, R., 96, 217n Freud, S., 17, 335
Dear, P., 24n Friedman, M., 21n
Dee, J., 125
Delacroix, E., 12 Gadamer, H.-G., 162, 165, 166n, 167n
Deleuze, G., 141, 144, 149n, 153, 157n Galileo, G., 87n, 125, 132-133, 140n, 171,
de Man, P., 57n 199,205,208,211, 219n
Democritus, 75-77,80, 197,237 Galton, F., 309
Dennett, D., I OOn Gasche, R., 164, 167n
Derrida, J., 4, 57n, 153, 157n, 165, 167n Cast, Peter [Koselitz, H.] 188
Descartes, R., 10, 63, 67, 136, 185n, 214, Gaukroger, S., 24n
217n.228,232,294, 334,336 Geertz, C., 216, 217n, 218n
Descombes, V., 156n Gemes, K., 20n, 57n
Destutt de Tracy, A.L.C., 73 Gerber[Sh'iteJabiribnHayyan], 131, 139n
Dewey, J., 129, 139n, 206 Georg, S., 221
Diderot, D., 136 Giere, R., lOOn
Diogenes Laertius, 75 Gleick. J., 149n
Dionysus, 18, 114, 147, 151, 155, 156,203, Goethe, J.,W., 18, 87, 114, 141, 143, 209n
215,216, 219n, 236-237,302-303,315 Granet, M., 229
d'Iorio, P., 273n, 276n Granier, 1., 46n, 321n
Djuric. M. [with Simon], 273n Greisch, J., 23n
 INDEX 369

Grimm, R.H., 321n Keefer, M., 138n

GrtinbJmm, A., 275a Kelvin, 188. See W. Thomson
Guattari, F. [with Deleuze], 149n Kepler, J., 171
Kerszberg, P., 21n, 22n
Haase, U., 20, 24n Koselitz, H. [Peter Gast], 188
Habermas, J., I, 21n Kofman, S., 46n, 57n, 311 n
Hales, S. [with Welshon], 21n, 46n Kohonen, T., 321n
Ham, 124, 134, 139n Kopperschmidt, J., 2ln
Hanson, N.R., 218n Krell, D.F., 4, 159n
Harari [with Bell], 157n Kremer-Marietti, A., 21n, 24n
Harre, R. [with Madden], 296n Krueger, J., 273n, 277n
Hartmann, E. von, 86 Kuhn, T., 208
Hatfield, G., 57a, 58n
Havas, R., 57n Lachterman, D., 24n
Hawking, S., 158, 217n Lakatos, 1., 96
Heelan, P., 18, 216a, 216n-219n Lakoff, G. [and M. Johnson], 219n
Heidegger, M., I, 4, 5, 20, 22n 79, 12ln, Lamarck, 18, 96, 223, 224-226, 322n
161-165, 166n, 187n, 188,204-206,209- .Landkammer, J., 275a
210,213-215, 216n, 217n,218n, 219n, Lange,F.A.,61,63, 76, 79, 87n, 268,270,
334-335, 337, 339n 273n,275n,294,297n
Heisenberg, W., 219n, 227 Langton, C., 322n
Hegel, G.W.F., 56, 135 Laplace, J., 152, 156
Helmholtz, H. von, 77, 152, 264, 268, 273n Large, D., 17, 24n, 156a, 158n
Henke, D., 23n, 273n, 277n Lasswitz, K., 268
Heraclitus, 7, 78, 85, 155, 179, 180, 258, Latour, B., 157n, 219n
299 LeBon, G., 152
Herbert, A.P., 89n Leibniz, G.W., 48n, 232, 263, 272, 294,
Hermes, 151, 156 297n, 337
Hesse, M., 296n; [with Arbib], 219n Leiter, B., 22n, 23n
Hinton, G.E. [& T.J. Sejnowski], 321n Letteri, M., 3l0n
Hippocrates, 75 Levinas, E., 23n
Hitchcock, E.A., 139n Lewis, C.S., 88n
Holbach, P.T. de, 136 Lewis, D.K., 319, 322n
Hollingdale, R.J., 24n, 201n Lewontin, R.C., 24n
Holmyard, E.J., 139n Liebmann, 0., 71n, 197, 268
Horgan, T. [& J. Tienson], 320n Locke.J.,63, 73,78,94,294-295, 297n
Hossenfelder, M., 71n Long, T., 310n
Hume, D., 6, 9, 21n, 91, 93, 94-95, 98, 288- Lorenz, K., 271
289,291,295,296n Lothar, J., 321n
Husser!, E., 4, 204-206, 209, 213-214, 217n Love, F., 189, 200n
Lowith, K., 171, 177n
James, W., 129, 139n, 296n Lucretius, 158n
Jaspers, K., 311n Luther, M., 231
Jenner, E., 155
Jones, R.F., 140n Mach, E., 8, 19, 216n,227, 264,273n
Juranville, A., 157n Machiavelli, N., 19, 114,269
MacLennan, B., 322n
Kant, 1., I, 5-6, 15, 21n, 49-156, 158n, 159n, Madden, E.H. [with Harre], 296n
61, 64,67, 70,76-77,81, 86,91, 94,105, Magus, S., 124, 134, 139n
109-110, 125, 152, 171, 182,227,232, Magnus,B.,57n, 157n,273n,277n, 320n
239,249,258,260,261, 267,276n, 279- Makreel, R., 275a
280,284,287,292,332 Marion, J.-L., 23n
Kaufmann, W., 24n, 87n, 157n, 201n, 273n, Markovic, Z., 198, 201n
308,311n,320n,321n Marton, S., 273n, 276n
Kau1bach, F., 58n.l Marx, K., 136
370 INDEX

Mayer, J.R., 8, 19, 152-153, 157n, 188, 189, Plato, 5, 7-9,11, 24n, 21,61-63,73-74,91,
190. 197, 258, 264-265, 266, 273n, 276n 110-111, 129, 137, 139n, 164, 182-183,
Maxwell, J.C., xv 185n,207,214, 224,227-228,230,232-
McDowell, J., 126, 139n 234,239,247,260,317
Mead, G., 129 Podolsky, S. [with Tauber], 19-20, 24n
M.erleau-Ponty, M., 309, 333. 336, 339n Poellner, P., 19, 24n, 7ln, 99n, 297n
Michele!, J., 152, 155 Poincare, H., 153, 156
Minsky, M., 319, 322n Poinsot, J. [John of St. Thomas], 151, !56
Mittasch, A., 296n Polanyi, M., 219n
Mittelmann, W., 273n Pollack, J., 322n
Moles, A., 273n, 276n, 301, 310n, 320n, Pontius Pilate, 154
321n Popper, K., 271, 296n
Montaigne, M., 187 Porn, I., 300-301, 310n
Montinari, M. [with Colli], 253, 255 Porta, D., 125, 140n
Morowitz, H.J .. 158n Poundstone, W., 158n
Moses, 231 Prigogine, I., 321n; [with Stengers], 157n,
Miiller-Lauter, W., 21n, 23n, 121n, 274n, 32ln
277n Proctor, 157n
Protagoras, 183
Nageli, C. von, 268 Psellus, M., !40n
Nagel, T., 296n Putnam, H., 129
Napoleon, I 14 Pythagoras, 8, 24n, 79, 224, 297n
Needham, P., 218n
Nehamas. A., 42, 46n, 57 a, 57n, 122n, 274n, Quine, W.v.O., 129
275a, 277n, 311n
Neumann, J. von, 322n Ranke, L., 114
Newton, I., 10, 18, 19, 171, 197,208, 219n, Raphael, 12
291,294 Ravetz, J., 140n
Neurath, 0., 13 Reason, J ., 139n
Nickles, T., 217n Ree P., 83, 88n, 187
Nola. R., 15 Reginster, B., 57a, 59n
Nordenfelt, L., 301, 310n Rehberg, A., 19, 24n
Remak, H., 275a
Obbink, D. [with Faraone] 139n Rembrandt, 12
Oehler, M., 274n Rey, A., 152
Okrent, M., 218n Ridley, A .. 177n
Oresme, N .. 79 Riedel, M., 2ln, 23n, 24n
Overbeck, F., 265 Rimbaud, A., 12
Owen, D., 17, 177n Rorty, R., 126, 129-130, 139n
Rossie, P ., 139n
Pan, 236 Rouse, J., 213, 218n
Parmenides, 7, 124, 179, 234,236,258 Rousseau, J.-J., 187
Pascal. B., 187, 199 Ruby, lOOn
Pasley, M., 311 n, Rudolph, E., 239
Pasteur. L.. 17, 154-156 Rumelhart, D.E., [& J.L. McClelland], 322n
Patterson, 1.. 275a Russell, B., !38n, 237, 263
Pautrat. B., 157n
Peirce, C. S., 129 Sacks, M., 22n
Penrose, R., 321 n Salaquarda, J., 270, 274n, 275n, 277n
Pericles, 7 5 Sartre, J.-P., 23n
Petrarch. 242 Schacht, R., 14, 22n, 24n, 37n, 48-49, 58n,
Petronievic, B., 199n 59n
Pfeffer, R., 274n, 277n Schelling, F.W.J., 63
Picht, G., 223, 229, 236, 239 Schlechta, K., 260, 274n; [with Anders],
Pico della. M .. 140n 22n-23n, 157n, 187, 200n,274n,277n
 INDEX 371

Schleiermacher, F., 161 Thucydides, 75, 114

Schmid, H., 2ln, 23n, 24n, 166, 167n Toffoli, T. [& N. Margolus], 32ln
Schmitz-Dumont, 197 Tongeren, P. van, 15, 7ln
Schopenhauer, A., 19, 59n, 61-62, 64, 67, Treiber, H., 274n, 276n
7ln, 105-106, 141, 156, 187, 199, 224, Trilling, L., 254
242,260,269,294,297n
Schrift, A., 46n, 57n, 274n, 275n Umbanhowar, P. [&F. Melo & H. Swin-
Schott, G., 140n ney], 320n
Schutte, 0., 46n
Schwartz, S., 21, 274n, 277n Vaihinger, H., I
Scott, C., 4 Vaughn, T., 132, 139n
Searle, J., 229 Valadier, P., 18, 2ln, 23n
Seigfried, H., 274n, 275n Van Gogh, V., 12
Sellars, W., 213 Vattimo, G., 215, 219n
Serres, M., 17, 24n, 151-156, 156n-159n Vermeer, J., 12
Seurat, G., 12 Verne, J., 152, 158n
Shapin, S., 139n Vogt, J.G., 19, 192, 196, 197,264-265,268,
Shapiro, G., 157n 273n, 274n, 275n
Shorter, E., 31ln Voltaire, F.M.A. de, 136, 140n, 242, 331
Simmel, G., 79, 139n, 310n Volz, P.D., 3lln
Simmons, S., 330n
Simon, J., 2ln, 24n; [with Djuric], 273n Wagner, R., 104, 156, 187, 198, 222
Simons, P., lOOn Ward, S., 140n
Sleinis, E.E., 2ln Weber, E.H., 88n
Small, R., 15, 24n, 274n, 276n, 277n Weber, M., 177n
Smith, C., 274n, 276n Webster, C., 139n
Smolensky, P., 32ln Weinberg, S., xv, 217n
Socrates, 11, 88n, 135, 214, 234, 244-245, Weinert, F., lOOn
250 Weinstein, M.A., 139n
Sokal, A., 22n Weizslicker, C.F. von, 18, 2ln, 23n, 240n
[King] Solomon, 10 Weizslicker, V. von, 229
Sophocles, 75 Welshon, R., 14, 2ln
Spencer, H., 154 Werner, G.M. [&M.G. Dyer], 322n
Spiekermann, K., 2ln, 274n, 275n West, D., 2ln
Spinoza, B., 18, 141, 187-195, 197,248 Williams, B., 177n
Spir, A., 7ln, 192, 196 Williams, W.D., 3lln
Stack, G., 87, 188, 200n, 270, 274n, 275n, Whitbeck, C., 300-301, 310n
276n,27n, 320n Whitehead, A.N., 7, 330n
Steinhart, E., 20 Whitlock, G., 17, 24n, 270, 274n, 277n.
Steinle, lOOn 320n
Stendahl, 73 Wiggins, D., lOOn
Stengers, I. [with Progogine], 157n, 321n Wittgenstein, L., 6, 11, 22n, 130, 139n, 261
Stewart, B., 188 Whyte, L.L., 189, 199n, 200n
Stiegler, B., 335, 339n Wright, C., 139
Strauss, D.F., 88n, 187, 198-199
Strawson, G., 297n Xanthippe, 88n
Swammerdamm, 171
Zermelo, E., 226
Tarski, A., 6, 124, 219n, 263 Zeus, 92
Tank, D.W. [& J.J. Hopfield], 32ln Zimmerli, W.Ch., 19, 2ln, 24n, 274n
Tauber, A., 19-20, 310n, 3lln Zollner, J.G.F., 188, 264, 274n, 276n
Taureck, B.H.F., 2ln, 24n Zo1a, E., !52, 154
Thagard, P., 322n Zurek, W.H., 32ln
Thomson, W., 153, !57n
 Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
Editor: RobertS. Cohen, Boston University

1. M.W. Wartofsky (ed.): Proceedings ofthe Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science,
196111962. [Synthese Library 6] 1963 ISBN 90-277-0021-4
2. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philo-
sophy of Science, 196211964. In Honor of P. Frank. [Synthese Library 10] 1965
ISBN 90-277-9004-0
3. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philo-
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1967 ISBN 90-277-0013-3
4. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Proceedings ofthe Boston Colloquium for the Philo-
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5. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Proceedings ofthe Boston Colloquium for the Philo-
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6. R.S. Cohen and R.J. Seeger (eds.): Ernst Mach, Physicist and Philosopher. [Synthese Library
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7. M. Capek: Bergson and Modern Physics. A Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation. [Synthese
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8. R.C. Buck and R.S. Cohen (eds.): PSA 1970. Proceedings of the 2nd Biennial Meeting of
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[Synthese Library 39] 1971 ISBN 90-277-0187-3; Pb 90-277-0309-4
9. A.A. Zinov'ev: Foundations of the Logical Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Complex Logic).
Translated from Russian. Revised and enlarged English Edition, with an Appendix by G.A.
Smimov, E.A. Sidorenko, A.M. Fedina and L.A. Bobrova. [Synthese Library 46] 1973
ISBN 90-277-0193-8; Pb 90-277-0324-8
10. L. Tondl: Scientific Procedures. A Contribution Concerning the Methodological Problems of
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1973 ISBN 90-277-0147-4; Pb 90-277-0323-X
11. R.J. Seeger and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Philosophical Foundations of Science. Proceedings of
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58] 1974 ISBN 90-277-0390-6; Pb 90-277-0376-0
12. A. Gr-nbaum: Philosophical Problems of Space and Times. 2nd enlarged ed. [Synthese Library
55] 1973 ISBN 90-277-0357-4; Pb 90-277-0358-2
13. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Logical and Epistemological Studies in Contemporary
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17. B.G. Kuznetsov: Reason and Being. Translated from Russian. Edited by C.R. Fawcett and R.S.
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 Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
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ISBN 90-277-0953-X; Pb 90-277-0954-8
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27. M. Grene and E. Mendelsohn (eds.): Topics in the Philosophy of Biology. [Synthese Library
84] 1976 ISBN 90-277-0595-X; Pb 90-277-0596-8
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ISBN 90-277-0584-4; Pb 90-277-0612-3
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131] 1979 ISBN 90-277-0723-5; Pb 90-277-0956-4
30. P. Janich: Protophysics of Time. Constructive Foundation and History of Time Measurement.
Translated from German. 1985 ISBN 90-277-0724-3
31. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Language, Logic, and Method. 1983
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32. R.S. Cohen, C.A. Hooker, A.C. Michalos and J.W. van Evra (eds.): PSA 1974. Proceedings
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1976 ISBN 90-277-0647-6; Pb 90-277-0648-4
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[Synthese Library 96] 1976 ISBN 90-277-0657-3; Pb 90-277-0658-1
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ology of the Social Sciences. [S ynthese Library 134] 1979
ISBN 90-277-0727-8; Pb 90-277-0968-8
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37. H. von Helmholtz: Epistemological Writings. The Paul Hertz I Moritz Schlick Centenary
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Bibliography by R.S. Cohen andY. Elkana. [Synthese Library 79] 1977
ISBN 90-277-0290-X; Pb 90-277-0582-8
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40. Not published.
41. Not published.
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ISBN 90-277-0827-4
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1980 ISBN 90-277-1061-9; Pb 90-277-1062-7
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48. M.W. Wartofsky: Models. Representation and the Scientific Understanding. [Synthese Library
129] 1979 ISBN 90-277-0736-7; Pb 90-277-0947-5
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ISBN 90-277-0737-5
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ISBN 90-277-0761-8; Pb 90-277-0764-2
53. N. Goodman: The Structure ofAppearance. [Synthese Library 107] 1977
ISBN 90-277-0773-1; Pb 90-277-0774-X
54. H.A. Simon: Models of Discovery and Other Topics in the Methods of Science. [Synthese
Library 114] 1977 ISBN 90-277-0812-6; Pb 90-277-0858-4
55. M. Lazerowitz: The Language of Philosophy. Freud and Wittgenstein. [Synthese Library 117]
1977 ISBN 90-277-0826-6; Pb 90-277-0862-2
56. T. Nickles (ed.): Scientific Discovery, Logic, and Rationality. 1980
ISBN 90-277-1069-4; Pb 90-277-1070-8
57. J. Margolis: Persons and Mind. The Prospects ofNonreductive Materialism. [Synthese Library
121] 1978 ISBN 90-277-0854-1; Pb 90-277-0863-0
58. G. Radnitzky and G. Andersson (eds.): Progress and Rationality in Science. [Synthese Library
125] 1978 ISBN 90-277-0921-1; Pb 90-277-0922-X
59. G. Radnitzky and G. Andersson (eds.): The Structure and Development of Science. [Synthese
Library 136] 1979 ISBN 90-277-0994-7; Pb 90-277-0995-5
 Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
60. T. Nickles (ed.): Scientific Discovery. Case Studies. 1980
ISBN 90-277-1092-9; Pb 90-277-1093-7
61. M.A. Finocchiaro: Galileo and the Art of Reasoning. Rhetorical Foundation of Logic and
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62. W.A. Wallace: Prelude to Galileo. Essays on Medieval and 16th-Century Sources of Galilee's
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63. F. Rapp: Analytical Philosophy of Technology. Translated from German. 1981
ISBN 90-277-1221-2; Pb 90-277-1222-0
64. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Hegel and the Sciences. 1984 ISBN 90-277-0726-X
65. J. Agassi: Science and Society. Studies in the Sociology of Science. 1981
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66. L. Tondl: Problems of Semantics. A Contribution to the Analysis of the Language of Science.
Translated from Czech. 1981 ISBN 90-277-0148-2; Pb 90-277-0316-7
67. J. Agassi and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Scientific Philosophy Today. Essays in Honor of Mario Bunge.
1982 ISBN 90-277-1262-X; Pb 90-277-1263-8
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69. J.H. Fetzer: Scientific Knowledge. Causation, Explanation and Corroboration. 1981
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70. S. Grossberg: Studies ofMind and Brain. Neural Principles of Learning, Perception, Develop-
ment, Cognition, and Motor Control. 1982 ISBN 90-277-1359-6; Pb 90-277-1360-X
71. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Epistemology, Methodology, and the Social Sciences.
1983. ISBN 90-277-1454-1
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ofEpistemic Appraisal. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1434-7
74. A.A. Zinov'ev: Logical Physics. Translated from Russian. Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1983
[see also Volume 9) ISBN 90-277-0734-0
75. G-G. Granger: Formal Thought and the Sciences of Man. Translated from French. With and
Introduction by A. Rosenberg. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1524-6
76. R.S. Cohen and L. Laudan (eds.): Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Ess<iys in Honor
of Adolf Gr-nbaum. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1533-5
77. G. Bhme, W. van den Daele, R. Hohlfeld, W. Krohn and W. Schlfer: Finalization in Science.
The Social Orientation of Scientific Progress. Translated from German. Edited by W. Schlfer.
1983 ISBN 90-277-1549-1
78. D. Shapere: Reason and the Search for Knowledge. Investigations in the Philosophy of Science.
1984 ISBN 90-277-1551-3; Pb 90-277-1641-2
79. G. Andersson (ed.): Rationality in Science and Politics. Translated from German. 1984
ISBN 90-277-1575-0; Pb 90-277-1953-5
80. P.T. Durbin and F. Rapp (eds.): Philosophy and Technology. [Also Philosophy and Technology
Series, Vol. 1)1983 ISBN 90-277-1576-9
81. M. Markovic: Dialectical Theory of Meaning. Translated from Serbo-Croat. 1984
ISBN 90-277-1596-3
82. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Physical Sciences and History of Physics. 1984.
ISBN 90-277-1615-3
 Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
83. E. Meyerson: The Relativistic Deduction. Epistemological Implications of the Theory of
Relativity. Translated from French. With a Review by Albert Einstein and an Introduction
by Milic Capek. 1985 ISBN 90-277-1699-4
84. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Methodology, Metaphysics and the History of Science.
In Memory of Benjamin Nelson. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1711-7
85. G. Tams: The Logic of Categories. Translated from Hungarian. Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1986
ISBN 90-277-1742-7
86. S.L. de C. Fernandes: Foundations of Objective Knowledge. The Relations of Popper's Theory
of Knowledge to That of Kant. 1985 ISBN 90-277-1809-1
87. R.S. Cohen and T. Schnelle (eds.): Cognition and Fact. Materials on Ludwik Fleck. 1986
ISBN 90-277-1902-0
88. G. Freudenthal: Atom and Individual in the Age of Newton. On the Genesis of the Mechanistic
World View. Translated from German. 1986 ISBN 90-277-1905-5
89. A. Donagan, A.N. Perovich Jr and M.V. Wedin (eds.): Human Nature and Natural Knowledge.
Essays presented to Marjorie Grene on the Occasion of Her 75th Birthday. 1986
ISBN 90-277-1974-8
90. C. Mitcham and A. Running (eds.): Philosophy and Technology//. Information Technology
and Computers in Theory and Practice. [Also Philosophy and Technology Series, Vol. 2] 1986
ISBN 90-277-1975-6
91. M. Grene and D. Nails (eds.): Spinoza and the Sciences. 1986 ISBN 90-277-1976-4
92. S.P. Turner: The Search for a Methodology of Social Science. Durkheim, Weber, and the
19th-Century Problem of Cause, Probability, and Action. 1986. ISBN 90-277-2067-3
93. I.C. Jarvie: Thinking about Society. Theory and Practice. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2068-1
94. E. Ullmann-Margalit (ed.): The Kaleidoscope of Science. The Israel Colloquium: Studies in
History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Vol. 1. 1986
ISBN 90-277-2158-0; Pb 90-277-2159-9
95. E. Ullmann-Margalit (ed.): The Prism of Science. The Israel Colloquium: Studies in History,
Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Vol. 2. 1986
ISBN 90-277-2160-2; Pb 90-277-2161-0
96. G. Mrkus: Language and Production. A Critique of the Paradigms. Translated from French.
1986 ISBN 90-277-2169-6
97. F. Amrine, F.J. Zucker and H. Wheeler (eds.): Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal. 1987
ISBN 90-277-2265-X; Pb 90-277-2400-8
98. J.C. Pitt and M. Pera (eds.): Rational Changes in Science. Essays on Scientific Reasoning.
Translated from Italian. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2417-2
99. 0. Costa de Beauregard: Time, the Physical Magnitude. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2444-X
100. A. Shimony and D. Nails (eds.): Naturalistic Epistemology. A Symposium of 1\vo Decades.
1987 ISBN 90-277-2337-0
101. N. Rotenstreich: Time and Meaning in History. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2467-9
102. D.B. Zilberman: The Birth of Meaning in Hindu Thought. Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1988
ISBN 90-277-2497-0
103. T.F. Glick (ed.): The Comparative Reception of Relativity. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2498-9
104. Z. Harris, M. Gottfried, T. Ryckman, P. Mattick Jr, A. Daladier, T.N. Harris and S. Harris: The
Form of Information in Science. Analysis of an Immunology Sublanguage. With a Preface by
Hilary Putnam. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2516-0
105. F. Burwick (ed.): Approaches to Organic Form. Permutations in Science and Culture. 1987
ISBN 90-277-2541-1
 Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
I06. M. Almsi: The Philosophy ofAppearances. Translated from Hungarian. 1989
ISBN 90-277-2150-5
107. S. Hook, W.L. O'Neill and R. O'Toole (eds.): Philosophy, History and Social Action. Essays
in Honor of Lewis Feuer. With an Autobiographical Essay by L. Feuer. 1988
ISBN 90-277-2644-2
108. I. Hronszky, M. Feh<;r and B. Dajka: Scientific Knowledge Socialized. Selected Proceedings
of the 5th Joint International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science organized
by the IUHPS (Veszpr<;m, Hungary, 1984). 1988 ISBN 90-277-2284-6
109. P. Tillers and E.D. Green (eds.): Probability and Inference in the Law of Evidence. The Uses
and Limits of Bayesianism. 1988 ISBN 90-277-2689-2
110. E. Ullmann-Margalit (ed.): Science in Reflection. The Israel Colloquium: Studies in History,
Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Vol. 3. 1988
ISBN 90-277-2712-0; Pb 90-277-2713-9
Ill. K. Gavroglu, Y. Goudaroulis and P. Nicolacopoulos (eds.): lmre Lakatos and Theories of
Scientific Change. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2766-X
112. B. Glassner and J.D. Moreno (eds.): The Qualitative-Quantitative Distinction in the Social
Sciences. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2829-1
113. K. Arens: Structures of Knowing. Psychologies of the 19th Century. 1989
ISBN 0-7923-0009-2
114. A. Janik: Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0056-4
115. F. Amrine (ed.): Literature and Science as Modes of Expression. With an Introduction by S.
Weininger. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0133-1
116. J.R. Brown and J. Mittelstrass (eds.): An Intimate Relation. Studies in the History and Philo-
sophy of Science. Presented to Robert E. Butts on His 60th Birthday. 1989
ISBN 0-7923-0169-2
117. F. D'Agostino and I.C. Jarvie (eds.): Freedom and Rationality. Essays in Honor of John
Watkins. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0264-8
118. D. Zolo: Reflexive Epistemology. The Philosophical Legacy of Otto Neurath. 1989
ISBN 0-7923-0320-2
119. M. Kearn, B.S. Philips and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology.
1989 ISBN 0-7923-0407-1
120. T.H. Levere and W.R. Shea (eds.): Nature, Experiment and the Science. Essays on Galileo and
the Nature of Science. In Honour of Stillman Drake. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0420-9
121. P. Nicolacopoulos (ed.): Greek Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science. 1990
ISBN 0-7923-0717-8
122. R. Cooke and D. Costantini (eds.): Statistics in Science. The Foundations of Statistical Methods
in Biology, Physics and Economics. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0797-6
123. P. Duhem: The Origins of Statics. Translated from French by G.F. Leneaux, V.N. Vagliente
and G.H. Wagner. With an Introduction by S.L. Jaki. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0898-0
124. H. Kamerlingh Onnes: Through Measurement to Knowledge. The Selected Papers, 1853-1926.
Edited and with an Introduction by K. Gavroglu andY. Goudaroulis. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-0825-5
125. M. Capek: The New Aspects of Time: Its Continuity and Novelties. Selected Papers in the
Philosophy of Science. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0911-1
126. S. Unguru (ed.): Physics, Cosmology and Astronomy, 1300-1700. Tension and Accommoda-
tion. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1022-5
 Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
127. Z. Bechler: Newton's Physics on the Conceptual Structure of the Scientific Revolution. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-1054-3
128. E. Meyerson: Explanation in the Sciences. Translated from French by M-A. Siple and D.A.
Siple. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1129-9
129. A.I. Tauber (ed.): Organism and the Origins of Self. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1185-X
130. F.J. Varela and J-P. Dupuy (eds.): Understanding Origins. Contemporary Views on the Origin
of Life, Mind and Society. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1251-1
131. G.L. Pandit: Methodological Variance. Essays in Epistemological Ontology and the Method-
ology of Science. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1263-5
132. G. Mun<;var (ed.): Beyond Reason. Essays on the Philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-1272-4
133. T.E. Uebel (ed.): Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle. Austrian Studies on Otto Neurath
and the Vienna Circle. Partly translated from German. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1276-7
134. W.R. Woodward and R.S. Cohen (eds.): World Views and Scientific Discipline Formation.
Science Studies in the [former] German Democratic Republic. Partly translated from German
by W.R. Woodward. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1286-4
135. P. Zambelli: The Speculum Astronomiae and Its Enigma. Astrology, Theology and Science in
Albertus Magnus and His Contemporaries. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1380-1
136. P. Petitjean, C. Jami and A.M. Moulin (eds.): Science and Empires. Historical Studies about
Scientific Development and European Expansion. ISBN 0-7923-1518-9
137. W.A. Wallace: Galileo's Logic ofDiscovery and Proof. The Background, Content, and Use of
His Appropriated Treatises on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1577-4
138. W.A. Wallace: Galileo' s Logical Treatises. A Translation, with Notes and Commentary, of His
Appropriated Latin Questions on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1578-2
Set (137 + 138) ISBN 0-7923-1579-0
139. M.J. Nye, J.L. Richards and R.H. Sn1ewer (eds.): The Invention of Physical Science. Intersec-
tions of Mathematics, Theology and Natural Philosophy since the Seventeenth Century. Essays
in Honor of Erwin N. Hiebert. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1753-X
140. G. Corsi, M.L. dalla Chiara and G.C. Ghirardi (eds.): Bridging the Gap: Philosophy, Mathem-
atics and Physics. Lectures on the Foundations of Science. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1761-0
141. C.-H. Lin and D. Fu (eds.): Philosophy and Conceptual History of Science in Taiwan. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-1766-1
142. S. Sarkar (ed.): The Founders of Evolutionary Genetics. A Centenary Reappraisal. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-1777-7
143. J. Blackmore (ed.): Ernst Mach -A Deeper Look. Documents and New Perspectives. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-1853-6
144. P. Kroes and M. Bakker (eds.): Technological Development and Science in the Industrial Age.
New Perspectives on the Science-Technology Relationship. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1898-6
145. S. Amsterdamski: Between History and Method. Disputes about the Rationality of Science.
1992 ISBN 0-7923-1941-9
146. E. Ullmann-Margalit (ed.): The Scientific Enterprise. The Bar-Hillel Colloquium: Studies in
History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Volume 4. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1992-3
147. L. Embree (ed.): Metaarchaeology. Reflections by Archaeologists and Philosophers. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-2023-9
148. S. French and H. Kamminga (eds.): Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics. Essays in
Honour of Heinz Post. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2085-9
149. M. Bunzl: The Context of Explanation. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2153-7
 Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
150. I.B. Cohen (ed.): The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences. Some Critical and Historical
Perspectives. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2223-1
151. K. Gavroglu, Y. Christianidis and E. Nicolaidis (eds.): Trends in the Historiography of Science.
1994 ISBN 0-7923-2255-X
152. S. Poggi and M. Bossi (eds.): Romanticism in Science. Science in Europe, 1790-1840. 1994
ISBN 0-7923-2336-X
153. J. Faye and H.J. Folse (eds.): Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy. 1994
ISBN 0-7923-2378-5
154. C.C. Gould and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Artifacts, Representations, and Social Practice. Essays for
Marx W. Wartofsky. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2481-1
155. R.E. Butts: Historical Pragmatics. Philosophical Essays. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2498-6
156. R. Rashed: The Development ofArabic Mathematics: Between Arithmetic and Algebra. Trans-
lated from French by A.F.W. Armstrong. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2565-6
157. I. Szumilewicz-Lachman (ed.): Zygmunt Zawirski: His Life and Work. With Selected Writings
on Time, Logic and the Methodology of Science. Translations by Feliks Lachman. Ed. by R.S.
Cohen, with the assistance of B. Bergo. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2566-4
158. S.N. Hag: Names, Natures and Things. The AlchemistJabir ibn Hayyan and His Kitiib al-Ahjiir
(BookofStones).l994 ISBN0-7923-2587-7
159. P. Plaass: Kant's Theory ofNatural Science. Translation, Analytic Introduction and Comment-
ary by Alfred E. and Maria G. Miller. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2750-0
160. J. Misiek (ed·.): The Problem of Rationality in Science and its Philosophy. On Popper vs.
Polanyi. The Polish Conferences 1988-89. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2925-2
161. I.C. Jarvie and N. Laor (eds.): Critical Rationalism. Metaphysics and Science. Essays for
Joseph Agassi, Volume I. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2960-0
162. I.C. Jarvie and N. Laor (eds.): Critical Rationalism, the Social Sciences and the Humanities.
Essays for Joseph Agassi, Volume II. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2961-9
Set (161-162) ISBN 0-7923-2962-7
163. K. Gavroglu, J. Stachel and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Physics, Philosophy, and the Scientific
Community. Essays in the Philosophy and History of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics.
In Honor of Robert S. Cohen. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2988-0
164. K. Gavroglu, J. Stachel and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Science, Politics and Social Practice.
Essays on Marxism and Science, Philosophy of Culture and the Social Sciences. In Honor of
RobertS. Cohen. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2989-9
165. K. Gavroglu, J. Stachel and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Science, Mind and Art. Essays on Science
and the Humanistic Understanding in Art, Epistemology, Religion and Ethics. Essays in Honor
of Robert S. Cohen. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2990-2
Set (163-165) ISBN 0-7923-2991-0
166. K.H. Wolff: Transformation in the Writing. A Case of Surrender~and-Catch. 1995
ISBN 0-7923-3178-8
167. A.J. Kox and D.M. Siegel (eds.): No Truth Except in the Details. Essays in Honor of Martin J.
Klein. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3195-8
168. J. Blackmore: Ludwig Boltzmann, His Later Life and Philosophy, 1900-1906. Book One: A
Documentary History. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3231-8
169. R.S. Cohen, R. Hilpinen and R. Qiu (eds.): Realism and Anti-Realism in the Philosophy of
Science. Beijing International Conference, 1992. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3233-4
170. I. Ku9uradi and R.S. Cohen (eds.): The Concept of Knowledge. The Ankara Seminar. 1995
ISBN 0-7923-3241-5
 Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
171. M.A. Grodin (ed.): Meta Medical Ethics: The Philosophical Foundations of Bioethics. 1995
ISBN 0-7923-3344-6
172. S. Ramirez and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Mexican Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science.
1995 ISBN 0-7923-3462-0
173. C. Dilworth: The Metaphysics of Science. An Account of Modem Science in Terms of Prin-
ciples, Laws and Theories. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3693-3
174. J. Blackmore: Ludwig Boltzmann, His Later Life and Philosophy, 1900-1906 Book Two: The
Philosopher. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3464-7
175. P. Damerow: Abstraction and Representation. Essays on the Cultural Evolution of Thinking.
1996 ISBN 0-7923-3816-2
176. M.S. Macrakis: Scarcity's Ways: The Origins ofCapital. A Critical Essay on Thermodynamics,
Statistical Mechanics and Economics. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4760-9
177. M. Marion and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Qu(:bec Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Part I: Logic,
Mathematics, Physics and History of Science. Essays in Honor of Hugues Leblanc. 1995
ISBN 0-7923-3559-7
178. M. Marion and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Qu(:bec Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Part II:
Biology, Psychology, Cognitive Science and Economics. Essays in Honor of Hugues Leblanc.
1996
ISBN 0-7923-3560-0
Set ( 177-178) ISBN 0-7923-3561-9
179. Fan Dainian and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Chinese Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science
and Technology. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3463-9
180. P. Forman and J.M. Snchez-Ron (eds.): National Military Establishments and the Advancement
of Science and Technology. Studies in 20th Century History. 1996
ISBN 0-7923-3541-4
181. E.J. Post: Quantum Reprogramming. Ensembles and Single Systems: A 1\vo-Tier Approach
to Quantum Mechanics. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3565-1
182. A.I. Tauber (ed.): The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3904-5
183. S. Sarkar (ed.): The Philosophy and History of Molecular Biology: New Perspectives. 1996
ISBN 0-7923-3947-9
184. J.T. Cushing, A. Fine and S. Goldstein (eds.): Bohmian Mechanics and Quantum Theory: An
Appraisal. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4028-0
185. K. Michalski: Logic and Time. An Essay on Husserl's Theory of Meaning. 1996
ISBN 0-7923-4082-5
186. G. Mun<;:var (ed.): Spanish Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4147-3
187. G. Schubring (ed.): Hermann G-nther GrajJmann (1809-1877): Visionary Mathematician,
Scientist and Neohumanist Scholar. Papers from a Sesquicentennial Conference. 1996
ISBN 0-7923-4261-5
188. M. Bitbol: Schrdinger's Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-42fi6-6
189. J. Faye, U. Scheffler and M. Urchs (eds.): Perspectives on Time. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4330-1
190. K. Lehrer and J.C. Marek (eds.): Austrian Philosophy Past and Present. Essays in Honor of
Rudolf Haller. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4347-6
191. J.L. Lagrange: Analytical Mechanics. Translated and edited by Auguste Boissonade and Victor
N. Vagliente. Translated from the M(:canique Analytique, novelle (:dition of 1811. 1997
ISBN 0-7923-4349-2
192. D. Ginev and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Issues and Images in the Philosophy of Science. Scientific
and Philosophical Essays in Honour of Azarya Polikarov. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4444-8
 Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
193. R.S. Cohen, M. Home and J. Stachel (eds.): Experimental Metaphysics. Quantum Mechanical
Studies for Abner Shimony, Volume One. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4452-9
194. R.S. Cohen, M. Home and J. Stachel (eds.): Potentiality. Entanglement and Passion-at-a-
Distance. Quantum Mechanical Studies for Abner Shimony, Volume Two. 1997
ISBN 0-7923-4453-7; Set 0-7923-4454-5
195. R.S. Cohen and A.l. Tauber (eds.): Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension. 1998
ISBN 0-7923-4579-7
196. M. Otte and M. Panza (eds.): Analysis and Synthesis in Mathematics. History and Philosophy.
1997 ISBN 0-7923-4570-3
197. A. Denkel: The Natural Background of Meaning. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5331-5
198. D. Baird, R.I.G. Hughes and A. Nordmann (eds.): Heinrich Hertz: Classical Physicist, Modern
Philosopher. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-4653-X
199. A. Franklin: Can That be Right? Essays on Experiment, Evidence, and Science. 1999
ISBN 0-7923-5464-8
200. Reserved
20 I. Reserved
202. Reserved
203. B. Babich and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory.
Nietzsche and the Sciences I. 1999
ISBN 0-7923-57 42-6
204. B. Babich and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science. Nietz-
sche and the Sciences II. 1999
ISBN 0-7923-5743-4; Set 0-7923-5778-7

Also of interest:
R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): A Portrait of Twenty-Five Years Boston Colloquia for the
Philosophy of Science, 1960-1985. 1985 ISBN Pb 90-277-1971-3
Previous volumes are still available.

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