NIETZSCHE, THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, AND CRITICAL THEORY

BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Editors

JURGEN RENN. Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science and KOSTAS GAVROGLU. University of Athens ROBERT S. 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)

VOLUME 203

NIETZSCHE, THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE,

AND CRITICAL THEORY

NIETZSCHE AND THE SCIENCES I

Edited by

BABETTE E. BABICH

Fordham University

in cooperation with

ROBERTS. 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 978-90-481-5233-9 ISBN 978-94-017-2430-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-2430-2

Printed an acid-free paper

All 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, inc1uding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and

retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

IN MEMORIAM

Walter Schmid 1910-1997

PRO OPERE GRATIAE

T ABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Used

ROBERT S. COHEN / Preface

INTRODUCTION

BABETTE E. BABICH / Nietzsche's Critical Theory: The Culture of Science as Art Resume and Section Summaries

NIETZSCHE AND THE TRADITION

ix xi

xv

1 14

HOWARD CA YGILL / Nietzsche and Atomism 27 STEPHEN GAUKROGER / Beyond Reality: Nietzsche's Science of Appearances 37 TILMAN BORSCHE / The Epistemological Shift from Descartes to Nietzsche: Intuition and Imagination 51 E. E. SLEINIS / Between Nietzsche and Leibniz: Perspectivism and Irrationalism 67 STEVEN CROWELL / Nietzsche Among the Neo-Kantians; Or, the Relation Between Science and Philosophy 77 ANGELE KREMER-MARlETTI / Nietzsche's Critique of Modem Reason 87 CHARLES BAMBACH / The Politics of Knowledge: Nietzsche Within Heidegger's History of Truth 103 KURT RUDOLF FISCHER / Nietzsche and the Vienna Circle 119

NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF GRAMMAR, CULTURE, AND

INTERPRETATION

JOSEF SIMON / Grammar and Truth: On Nietzsche's Relationship to the Speculative Sentential Grammar of the Metaphysical Tradition 129 HOLGER SCHMID / The Nietzschean Meta-Critique of Knowledge 153

vii

viii T ABLE OF CONTENTS

WOLFGANG MULLER-LAUTER / On Judging in a World of Becoming: A Reflection on the 'Great Change' in Nietzsche's Philosophy 165 MANFRED RIEDEL / Scientific Theory or Practical Doctrine? 187 JOSEF KOPPERSCHMIDT / Nietzsche's Rhetorical Philosophy as Critique of Impure Reason 199

NIETZSCHE, HABERMAS, AND CRITICAL THEORY

JURGEN HABERMAS / On Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge: A Postscript from 1968 209 KLAUS SPIEKERMANN / Nietzsche and Critical Theory 225 BRIAN O'CONNOR / Nietzsche and Enlightenment Science: A Dialectical Reading 243 JAMES SWINDAL / Nietzsche, Critical Theory, and a Theory of Knowledge 253 MAX PENSKY / Truth and Interest: On Habermas's Postscript to Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge 265 JOANNA HODGE / Habermasian Passion and the Nietzschean Contagion 273 TOM ROCKMORE / Habermas, Nietzsche, and Cognitive Perspective 281 BERNHARD B. F. TAURECK / Habermas' s Critique of Nietzsche's Critique of Reason 289 NICHOLAS DA VEY / Nietzsche, Habermas, and the Question of Objectivity 295 TRACY B. STRONG / 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

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The publisher's permission to translate Tilman Borsche's essay "Intuition und Imagination" in Mihailo Djuric and Josef Simon, eds., Kunst und Wissenschaft bei Nietzsche (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1986) is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also expressed here for the publisher's permission to translate Jtirgen Habermas's "Nachwort" to his collection, Friedrich Nietzsche, Erkenntnistheoretische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968).

I take the happy opportunity herewith to affirm my respect and admiration for Robert S. Cohen and I thank him for suggesting and for 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 enthusiasm for philosophy and the breadth of his ongoing research interests in both philosophy and science. The institutional support provided by the Graduate School of Georgetown University is also gratefully and acknowledged because the practical labor on this collection was in considerable part supported by the research project, Hermeneutic and Phenomenological Approaches to the Philosophy of Science, directed by Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., William A. Gaston Professor of Philosophy.

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 ruc 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 (n, Wolfgang Muller-Lauter, Birgitte Scheer, and Josef Simon. Beyond my own effort to engage 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 in this tradition, as 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 communica-

ix

x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

tion that remains still to be broadened between different language traditions and different scholarly formations.

Beyond the direct personal trajectory of this collection, the tradition of reading "Nietzsche and the Sciences" dates from Nietzsche's earliest interpret­ers. 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 Jahnig'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 my deep personal thanks to David B. Allison, Richard Cobb­Stevens, Theodore Kisiel, Alexander Nehamas, Tracy B. Strong, and Marx Wartofsky (t). I also thank Alasdair MacIntyre for his kind encouragement as well as for the balanced example of his thoughtful Preface to Volume Two. And, I thank Holger Schmid not only for his assistance with both collections, working with me to correct literally everyone of the translations from the German, but also for philosophic conversation in Nietzsche's own spirit on the esoteric kernel of antiquity, language, poetry, and music.

LIST OF ABBREVIA nONS 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. GrofJoktav-Ausgabe, 2nd. ed., (Leipzig: Kroner, 1901-1913).

KGB Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by. G. Colli and M. Montinari, (BerlinfNew York: Walter de Gruyter, 1975 sqq.).

KSA Siimtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe (MlincheniBerlin, 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 Horneffer, (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 1. 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 1, 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. Rl. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Cited by page number.

HH Human, All Too Human, (1878-80), trans. Rl. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Cited in some essays by volume, part, and section number.

D Daybreak, (1881), trans. Rl. 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.l. Hollingdale, (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1961). Certain essays also include section headings.

BGE Beyond Good and Evil, (1886), trans. R. 1. Hollingdale (Harmond­sworth: 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. Rl. Hollingdale (New York: Viking Penguin, 1968); see also Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche. Cited by page number.

TI The Twilight of the Idols, (1889), trans. Rl. 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 xiii

referencing other translations or the original text, the section titles cor­responding to cited page ranges are: "Forewonf': 21-22; "Maxims and Arrows": 23-27; "The Problem of Socrates": 29-34; "'Reason" in Phi­losophy": 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 1 Owe to the An­cients": 105-111.

EH Ecce Homo, ([1888] 1908), trans. R. J.Hollingdale (Harmond­sworthlLondon: Penguin, 1979, 1992). Cited by page number; certain essays list essay headings and section numbers. For convenience in ref­erencing other translations or the original text, the section titles corre­sponding to cited page ranges are: "Foreword"; 33-36; "Epigraph": 37; "Why 1 Am So Wise": 38-50; "Why I Am So Clever": 51-68; "Why 1 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 Mor­als": 114-115; "Twilight of the Idols": 116-118; "The Wagner Case": 119-125; "Why 1 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 corre­sponding NachlafJ references please see the recent double concordance to the KSA and KGW editions by Scott Simmons in New Nietzsche Studies 1:112 (1996): 126-153. See also Marie-Luise Haase and Jorg Salaquarda, "Konkordanz. Der Wille zur Macht: Nachlass in chronolo­gischer 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. Kemp­Smith (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).

PREFACE

To each reader of Nietzsche's works, the reading has been a confrontation, personal, even private, prejudiced by previous hearsay or distortion, prepared by philosophical commitment or by political passion. I think it likely that each of us follows a personal pathway to Nietzsche, but I resist the thought that we each must have our own private Nietzsche. Interpreting, arguing, mutually criticizing, even disputing ad hominem and by scandal, understanding Nietzsche has from the beginning, more than a century ago, been a public cultural concern. And yet, each personal pathway to Nietzsche may reveal one's own appreciation of his astonishing and prophetic insights. For me, he was on the far horizon of philosophy of science.

*** I was an American physicist with philosophical curiosity, studying and working during the last half of the 20th century. My dominant themes were pro and con Kantian, along with Russell, soon joined by Mach, the Vienna Circle empiri­cists, and later the linguistic and historical turns in the philosophy of science, all especially attending to the nature of scientific explanation in its puzzling varieties. These empiricisms quarreled with the evident metaphysical presuppo­sitions of the great scientists, of Newton and Galileo and Leibniz and apparently all the others too. For so many scientists, Ernst Mach in his time and mine clarified and distinguished what is empirical and what is conventional within scientific descriptions, what is conceptually helpful but only auxiliary, what is hypothetical but without referential requirement. Thus Emile Meyerson wrote of the scientist's demand for identity persistent through temporal change (in his Identity and Reality); he claimed that ever present identity and other non­demonstrable explanatory components of scientific theories are 'plausible,' and not in fact a priori knowledge but plausible fictions. But also, well before Meyerson, with Mach's rational reconstructions of the conceptual histories of mechanics and other branches of natural science, there appeared such plausible fictions: but these fictions of science, usable within limits of scale or otherwise bounded domains, must not be mis-used or taken to be absolute.

If the 'plausible' was intrinsic to scientific thought, in whatever forms fit the science of a time, then we seem to have had, in historical stages, models and pictures of our world which contain 'mere' appearances: metaphors, intellectual

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B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory: Nietzsche and the Sciences I, xv-xx. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

xvi PREFACE

myths, regulative fictions, artificial simplifications, an intellectual scaffolding. Early on (perhaps 1946), I was surprised by Hans Vaihinger's powerful epistemological realism in his treatise on The Philosophy of 'As If' (begun in 1877, published in German 1911, English 1935 and, for me, the British wartime edition of 1944). He saw fictions throughout the sciences, which were both convenient and necessary, both heuristic and regulative. My surprise was greatest reading Vaihinger's final chapter, 'Nietzsche and his Doctrine of Conscious Illusion.' So many excerpts from Nietzsche remain with me from Vaihinger's grab-bag, saturated with Nietzschean stimuli; among them:

We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by assuming bodies, lines, surface, causes and effects, motion and rest, shape and content; without these articles of faith nobody would now be able to endure life! But that does not mean that anything has yet been proven. Life is no argument; for error might be one of the conditions of life.

and

Parmenides said: 'We cannot think that which is not' - but we at the other extreme say 'What can be thought must certainly be a fiction.'

This went beyond positivism; and so did my logical empiricist heroes as well. Philipp Frank, in his article on 'The Importance of Ernst Mach's Philosophy of Science for Our Times' (1917; English translation 1941, 1949) first anticipated his admiration for Nietzsche with a passage from Goethe (from Maxims and Reflections ):

Hypotheses are the scaffolds which are erected in front of a building and removed when the building is completed They are indispensible to the worker; but he must not mistake the scaffolding for the building.

Then Frank appreciates Nietzsche's sociological understanding of traditional philosophy long before Karl Mannheim, recognizing the recurrent opposition to science of those Frank testily called 'school philosophers.' This was Nietzsche's 'psychology of metaphysics' - or the demand for a 'true,' absolute, objective world,

This world is apparent; consequently there is a true world; - this world is conditioned; conse­quently there is an unconditioned world ... (and later) A true world - of whatever kind, certainly we have no organ of perception for it.

Was I hearing the young Frank, and Neurath and Carnap through Nietzsche's words? Again:

It is of cardinal importance to do away with the true (metaphysical) world. It is the great devaluation of the world that is us: it has so far been our most dangerous attack on life.

How the traditional metaphysical views of the philosophers which joined reason with mystical foundations, had developed from primitive conceptions,

PREFACE xvii

was central to the young 'positivist' Nietzsche. To Frank and his intellectual collaborator, the mathematician Richard von Mises, Nietzsche's epigram here had critical insight: 'The mystical explanations are considered to be deep; but they are not even superficial.'

And in a passage in his Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding (1939/1951) on the relation ofthe roots of poetry, the origin of feelings, in their relation to reason and science, Mises cites Nietzsche:

Feelings are nothing ultimate and original; behind the feelings there stand judgments and evaluations ... The inspiration that is based upon a feeling is the grandchild of a judgment - and also of a false one! - and in any case not of your own! To trust one's feelings - that means to trust one's grandfather and grandmother and their grandparents more than the gods which are with us: our reason and our experience.

[Kurt Fischer explores Nietzsche's reception by the Vienna Circle, in our volumes, and Elisabeth Nemeth cogently examined 'Nietzsche, Neurath and the Reflexivitat der Moderne' in a recent Festschrift for Fischer (Philosophie, Psychoanalyse, Emigration, Vienna 1992).]

* * *

Far from my logical empiricists, my attention to Nietzsche was caught 30 years ago by two opposed works: Walter Kaufmann's fascinating treatise Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950 and the 4th edition 1974), and Arthur Danto's Nietzsche as Philosopher (1965 and 1980).

I had met Kaufmann by chance, in Warsaw in the early 1960's, a time of cold war heating dangerously. We argued politics and metaphysics and ideologies, through Marxist and Nietzschean lenses; and then I found his Nietzsche, in the stunning book itself ... the concerns Kaufmann showed overwhelmed and nearly persuaded me. Coming after the appreciations by Philipp Frank and von Mises, I was provoked to look further by the epigraph chosen by Kaufmann from Gottfried Benn, writing in 1950:

Virtually everything my generation discussed, tried to think through - one might say, suffered; one might also say, spun out - had long been expressed and exhausted by Nietzsche, who had found definitive formulations; the rest was exegesis.

Could this be so? Turning to Danto's book was a cool and exciting bath, rather as I recall my first time reading Russell. So enormously documented with Nietzsche's very words, so utterly reasonable, so much a model of my own outlook from Carnap and Reichenbach), looking for rational reconstruction of valuable unclear texts. But certainly Danto was convincing in saying with Nietzsche that 'language describes - insofar as we may think of language as descriptive at all - the illusions we take for reality.' This was followed by the resonating phrase:

Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

xviii PREFACE

Danto took Nietzsche's dialectic to heart for me, including Nietzsche's tender hope for science, which needs 'debate and distrust as its closest companions.' This was Nietzsche with Hume, and again with Mach, speaking of the 'severity of science .... in this clear, strict element (man) has his power whole; here he can fly!'

Yes, with the hypothetical fictions of science we may live, we may even fly, with our fictional scientific atoms, and causes and effects; but be careful ... again we must say with Nietzsche, against pragmatic truth, 'Life is no argu­ment..among the conditions of life, error might be one.' So Danto sweeps into the nihilistic net of Nietzsche's instrumentalist perspectivism, with dead-on energy beyond the clear lesson of impersonal, objective science: for Nietzsche

ALL science. natural as well as unnatural ... , is today concerned to talk man out of his self-respect.

Then I could see Nietzsche going beyond, trapped within the free perspectives of the human-social situation succinctly characterized by Otto Neurath's boat (in his tale of 1932):

We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry­dock 00.

And Neurath, a bit later (1944),

A new ship grows out of the old one, step by step - and while they are still building, the sailors may already be thinking of a new structure, and they will not always agree with one another. The whole business will go on in a way we cannot even anticipate today.

* * * Danto points to a cheerful Nietzsche, glowing with liberation from any religious or other metaphysical absolute:

00. a new dawn with the news that God is dead. Our heart flows over with thankfulness, amaze­ment, presentiment, expectation. Finally! Our ships can embark again, and go forth to every danger. Every hazard is again permitted the enquirer. Perhaps there never was so open a sea. (1878)

I wondered: how cheerful, how glowing? Richard Schacht in his Making Sense of Nietzsche offers a sober reminder from Nietzsche:

00' little ship, look out! (The ocean is infinite) and nothing more awesome than infinity 00. oh woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom - there is no longer any 'land' (Gay Science 124)

" Yet Nietzsche, who was courageous, seems cheerful. Norman O. Brown (in his Life Against Death, 1959) cites Nietzsche's optimistic realism at the climax of the Genealogy of Morals:

Too long has the world been a madhouse 00.

PREFACE xix

But Brown quickly follows with a reply, the bitter message of Freud in Civization and its Discontents, that the madhouse will not end.

***

To me there seemed no doubt that philosophy of language and philosophy of the sciences would be illuminated by Nietzsche's writings, however exaggerated may be his perspectivist pragmatic account of human thought, however corrosive would be a literal understanding of his mythic interpretations of science in theory and practice. Did Nietzsche's philosophical analysis collapse in his posthumous notebooks, among his tantalizing metaphors of alchemy, art, and play, of the alchemist, the artist, the child playing? Thus he wrote:

The alchemist is the only true benefactor of mankind

and in an earlier letter to Georg Brandes

... the alchemist is the worthiest kind of person that exists: I mean him who out of what is trifling, even despicable, creates something valuable, like gold. He alone enriches, the others only exchange. (1888)

So, with Nietzsche, perhaps the creative scientist as artist? And art, so often an instrument for power, nevertheless, for Nietzsche

has the essential characteristic in its perfecting of existence, its production of perfection and fullness; essentially art is affirmation, blessing, and deification of existence (Will to Power 821)

Finally, the creative anti-metaphysics of undetermined spontaneity is always, for Nietzsche, a child's playfulness,

... a new beginning, a game,a wheel that rolls out of itself, a first excitation, a holy yea-saying. (Zarathustra 31, cited by Stanley Rosen in The Mask of Enlightenment, p. 83)

So the child, (still a metaphor?) is a 'sacred yes' to all existence, or so it might seem. And the rolling wheel of the childish game, anticipating recurring cycles, even eternally rolling, eternally returning.

[I recall my colleague Milic Capek very early (1962) brought me to Nietzsche another way, to Nietzsche's combination of eloquence with careful scientific argument for his myth of eternal return, the repeatedness within combinatorial chance. For Capek (in his Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics, 1961), these passages, based on Nietzsche's own genuine mathematical analysis, anticipated the radical idea of eternal recurrences in the ideal physical statistics of 'thinkers who certainly cannot be suspected of having an excess of poetic imagination': Poincare (1906), Zermelo (1896), Abel Rey (1927). Friedrich Engels, also anticipating, followed a line of analysis similar to that of Nietzsche, at the same period, in his 'Notes on Dialectics of Nature' of 1873-83 (published, 1920's).]

xx PREFACE

A final source of Nietzsche for me was Habermas's reflections in his work on knowledge and human interests, and especially his critical essay in his edition of Nietzsche's epistemological writings. This essay led me to think of 'Nietzsche and the sciences' for the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, but to be sure, a critical critique, with many other perspectives. The relevance of Nietzsche to the philosophy and history, even the political economy, of science was plain, now at the end of our 20th century madhouse, more than a century after his life work.

* * * Two concluding aphorisms (cited by Okochi Ryogi in his insightful essay

'Nietzsche's Conception of Nature from an East-Asian Point of View'):

My task: The dehumanization of Nature, and then the naturalization of humanity; after it has attained the pure concept of 'Nature' . Human beings and philosophers have in the past projected the human into nature - let us dehumanize nature.

Lastly,

It is not a matter of getting rid of science but rather of mastering it. For science is in all its aims and methods utterly dependent on philosophical ideas, though it easily forgets this.

* * * Professor Babette Babich created these volumes, never losing her tolerant spirit nor her own philosophical strength. I thank her and admire her.

ROBERT S. COHEN Boston University July 1998