Angèle Kremer Marietti
Nietzsche and the Ontogeny of
Truth
(Revisited paper published in Nietzsche, Theories
of Knowledge, and Critical Theory, Nietzsche and the sciences I, Edited by
Babette Babich and Robert S. Cohen, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999,
pp.87-102 under the title of “Nietzsche’s Critique of Modern
Reason”.)
Abstract
The problem of genealogy did not begin with On the Genealogy of
Morals. Nietzsche joined together in one unit an epistemology of reason and
an epistemology of morals. Privileged moments in the current of nietzschean
thought raise major philosophical questions: alternating the first
epistemological criterion of “the ground of art” with a second
epistemological criterion, referring to the state of contemporary history and
natural sciences. Rather than a theory of knowledge or a critique of pure
reason, we find a theory of modern reason : a critique of a historical
phenomenon. With his interest in symbolic processes, evident in The Birth of
Tragedy and The Philosopher's Book as in Human All Too
Human, it is possible to place Nietzsche in the context of our contemporary
research in the field of the “philosophy and science of mind”.
By taking science as a creation and as an interpretation, Nietzsche was
led to explain and understand reason on the basis of art. For Nietzsche,
history and the natural sciences, the products of modern reason, work as a tool
against the ways of reason itself, either in metaphysics or indirectly in
science, as the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals demonstrates
the origin of science in metaphysics. Through an original but concealed
cognitive paradigm and through a deconstructive series of untimely observations,
Nietzsche attained something like a knowledge regarding knowledge by tracing the
process of symbolization processes in order to discover the formation of
concepts and the representation of
events.
Nietzsche’s investigations into the
problem of the birth or origin of concepts – the problem of genealogy
– , did not begin with On the Genealogy of Morals (1887).
Nietzsche had always sought to understand the genesis of cultural facts. Thus,
The Birth of Tragedy (1872) is a history of consciousness, a kind
of conversion rite designed to illuminate and reawaken the deep origin of
Western civilization. Additional evidence for Nietzsche’s enduring concern
appears in Human, All Too Human (1878-1880), or Daybreak
(1882) and other writings, published or
unpublished.
Most centrally, he faced the
origin and genealogy of science as a «new problem». This was
“the problem of science itself - science seen for the first time as
problematic and questionable” [1]. From this new epistemological
viewpoint, Nietzsche sought to express “the ontogeny of thought”
[2] as well the ontogeny of action and all human events. Such a
genealogical search is in itself a critique of modern reason. But Nietzsche's
purpose exceeds critique, because critique promises him the means to attain a
“knowledge of the conditions of culture, a knowledge surpassing all
previous knowledge, as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals” (HH 1,
25). Utopia perhaps?
In the same spirit as
my earlier essay on this theme, "The Ground of Art : a Key for Reading the
Nietzschean Text" [3], I shall here examine the criteria Nietzsche used to
interpret the hidden forces of modern reason.
I. Out of suspicion
If we could
construct a knowledge “surpassing all previous knowledge”, it would
proceed from a genealogical disciplin that Nietzsche wanted to be
“active” - that is, not “reactive”, and recognizing how
Nietzsche opposed everything to this last word signified [4] - and, if not
totally independent, at least conscious of the imperatives determining these
processes.
Thus Nietzsche’s works grow
out of suspicion. Interpreted positively, they might profitably be applied to
all future human speculations and actions..Negatively applied, they could end in
the blind alley of nihilism as a psychological state, for neither the concept of
“finality”, nor “unity”, nor “truth” (nor,
consequentfly, as Nietzsche adds, the concept of “being”) may any
longer be used to interprete world and existence [5].
However, if the three categories above are
no longer sufficient to interprete the world, this does not mean that the world
itself lacks value, as a vulgar nihilist might believe. Psychological nihilism
is a vulgar reaction to the difficulty of knowing the world, but it is also a
manner of reacting in front of the fear of nihilism. What is more, the vulgar
threat of nihilism is overcome by Nietzsche’s authentic
antinihilism[6]. And yet false categories of reason induce psychological
nihilism, since we only value, as Nietzsche argues, a fictitious world
[7].
The
essential Nietzschean question in concentrated in these inquiries and their
results which are not properly nihilistic but historical in the genealogical
sense. Nietzsche's interest in history does not escape life but, on the
contrary, must serve it (“Only so far as history serves life will
we serve it”) [8]. Nietzsche studies modern reason as an historical
event : his critique includes believing in history, neither in historicism nor
in a factual kind of history, which he calls “the historical
sickness”. Everything human depends on history, more precisely : on
process. Nietzsche's critical examination ends by suspending all interpretative
categories. The deceptions brought about by these categories had led us to
devaluethe world. Categories like reason are historical.
It can be noted that in addition to an
epistemology of reason concerning traditional categories of thought,
Nietzsche infers a consequent epistemology of morals. Our
suppposed knowledge based on our way of representing the world influences our
moral judgment of world and existence, and consequently our way of being human.
Indeed, Nietzsche’s criticism proceeds more from an existential
determination than a purely intellectual decision. But the epistemological
standing of both attitudes is oriented to the critique of our modern (not
ancient, not medieval) reason.
Opposed to
the fictitious world we have constructed, therefore, we do not know the
real world, because it is not available to us via what we know through
rational categories. And this real world might conserve all its value in
itself.
Nietzsche’s philosophical
interrogation thus remains open to the value of world and existence.
Notwithstanding his objections to Kant's Critiques, Nietzsche proposed, like
Kant, to reveal a world known in virtue of our faculties, but unknown in itself
(an sich). Nietzsche’s fundamental difference from Kant is his
suspicion of our intellectual faculties. For him, they are not “pure
principles of understanding” but merely means, something by way of which
we have sought to represent and know the world in order to live securely in it.
Lacking such purity, we are desperate :
When
the blight that lies dormant in the womb of theorical culture is gradually
beginning to frighten modern man, and he casts uneasily around in the stores of
his experience for remedies to ward off the danger without quite believing in
their efficacity [...]. (BT 18)
The philosopher of desperate
knowledge will be absorbed in blind science : knowledge at any price.
[9]
II.
Privileged moments
We shall now consider some
privileged moments in the current of Nietzschean thought, particularly where he
looks back at his earlier work. These occasions in 1886 and 1888 are instructive
with regard to the significance Nietzsche gave to his philosophical search. In
1888 Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo, a last survey on his works and life. In
1886, he published several Prefaces for the edition of his Complete Works and
gave the first recapitulation of his Complete Works and gave the first
recapitulation of the overall meaning he found in
them.
The 1886 Prefaces focus his outlook
from the period of The Birth of Tragedy to that of Beyond Good and
Evil in one time and place. Nietzsche recognizes himself in the attitude
that his critics ascribed to him :
My
writings have been called a School for Suspicion, even more for Contempt,
fortunately also for Courage and, in fact, for Daring. Truly, I myself do not
believe that anyone has ever looked into the world with such deep
suspicion, and not only as an occasional devil's advocate,but every bit as
much,to speak theologically, as an enemy and challenger of God. (HH 1,
Preface 1)
And Ecce Homo, the
1888 autobiography, articulated prior to his final collapse, explains “how
one becomes what one is”. Here we are explicitly taught a new word for
“ideals”, - “idols”. The foreword to that work offers a
conclusion for the philosopher's whole life and thought : “Reality has
been deprived of its value, its meaning, its veracity, to the same degree as an
ideal world has been fabricated... The ‘real world’
and the ‘apparent world’ - in plain terms : the fabricated
world and reality”[10].
In order to approximate the inner logic of
his thematic order to its own epistemological criteria, we can provisionally
abandon the dates of Nietzsche's first publications to consider their real
elaboration. Indeed, if we follow carefully what Nietzsche writes in the two
1886 Prefaces destined to the whole of Human, All Too Human, especially
the second, we learn that the three first Untimely Meditations
(1873-1874) are to be understood not as continuous with the chronology of their
publications but, with reference to the gestation and the general movement of
Nietzsche's thought, as ch aracterizing his thought prior to The Birth of
Tragedy (1872) [11].
Thus we must
consider the time when Nietzsche prepared the material for the three first
Untimely Meditations. Nietzsche wrote the texts which composed The
Birth of Tragedy : they were written between winter 1869 and winter 1871
[12]. In particular, the text "On Truth and Lies in A Nonmoral Sense"
(unpublished by Nietzsche and dated 1873) belongs to the conceptual period
priori to the elaboration of The Birth of Tragedy, the same time as
the elaboration of the third Untimely Meditation, on "Schopenhauer as Educator",
published in 1874, when Nietzsche was no longer Schopenhauer’s defender.
And assuming the truth of Nietzsche's revelations in the 1886 Preface that he
prepared the third Untimely Meditation, as well as the first and the second ones
for the two books of Human, All Too Human, these may have taken place
between 1865 (when he read Schopenhauer) and 1869. Hence, the Untimely
Meditations do not offer the initial and then permanent Nietzschean move to
decipher the cryptic, artistic ploys of modern reason.
Such a cl assification has a defining effect
on our understanding of the continuity of Nietzsche’s work, and on the
criteria of his thought. It inverts the phenomenology of the existential
succession of his themes and sharpens the importance of Nietzsche's meditation
on Greek art and on art in general. Consequently, we can affirm that the
reference to art plays the part of an epistemological criterion in the critique
of modern reason. This critique could yeld knowledge of or about knowledge, the
precondition needed to keep humankind from self-destruction and which for
Nietzsche would also be “the enormous task of the great minds of the next
century”[13]. We have the first epistemological criterion of
Nietzsche's critique of modern reason “on the ground of art” (auf
den Boden der Kunst) (BT, Preface 2).
III.
Major philosophical questions
The Birth of
Tragedy addressed three major philosophical questions, which Nietzsche
affixed to a double problematic of science and the consequent valuation of world
and existence. These questions are : 1. The problem of science as heir of to
socratic thought, complicated by the rigorous path taken by science with respect
to the destiny of modernity; 2. the problem of today’s modern tragedy
that no longer assumes the synthesis of Apollinian and Dionysian energies which
was the art of Greek tragedy ; 3. the fundamental problem of the
“metaphysical” meaning common to myth and music. These problems are
part of the interrogations situated within the circle of Nietzschean knowledge
about knowledge both achieved and desired.
The result is that the philosopher of desesperate knowledge must become the
philosopher of tragic knowledge, who “masters the uncontrolled knowledge
drive, though not by means of metaphysics” (PT 11) - taking metaphysics in
the traditional sense. In the same current of ideas, the unpublished theoretical
fragments of the Philosopher's book [14] show the conflict
between art and knowledge [15]. There the basic idea is that the
philosopher has to play a therapeutic part in the culture [16]; the
philosopher must penetrate the arcana of language and science from the point of
view of the relation truth/untruth, understood in a nonmoral sense [17],
in order finally to ask the philosophic question of the cultural opposition of
science and wisdom [18].
In the very
middle of an original pragmatic strategy inspired by his remarkable Greek
culture, Nietzsche thought that art, exactly as medieval nominalism had opposed
history and the natural sciences to faith, would henceforth be opposed to
knowledge. To outline this longed for inverse cultural movement, Nietzsche
explains : “History and the natural sciences were necessary to combat the
middle ages : knowledge versus faith. We now opposite knowledge with art :
return to life ! Mastery of the knowledge drive ! Strengthening of the moral and
aesthetic instincts ! (PT 64)
History (or
more exactly das Historische) and the natural sciences are by
Nietzsche in 1872-1875 imagined in cultural opposition to “enormous
artistic powers” (PT 8). However, natural history had imprinted him
with the naturalistic idea that “advanced physiology will declare that the
artistic begins with the organic” (PT 18). This position,
which Nietzsche had already developed in The Birth of Tragedy, concerns
the relation of art and nature : the artist creates thanks to natural forces in
him [19], because there are “artistic powers which spring from
nature itself, without the mediation of the human artist” (BT 2). These
artistic energies are the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Art and nature are not
dialectically opposed by Nietzsche, as they were in the Greek classical
tradition, because Nietzsche makes the natural existence of art an axiom.
[20]. However art does not belong to nature, but only to humanity
[21].
Following Nietzsche's judgments
on Greek art and philosophy, philosophy and science are so related, even now in
modernity, that philosophy has effective mastery over science, since science
depends on philosophy as much in its purposes as in its methods. There is no
distinct philosophy separated from science : “there they think in the same
manner that we do here” (PT 23). The ground of artistic genesis, which is
advantageous to philosophy, also favours the scientific approach, according to
Nietzsche. From a similar perspective, Karl Popper presented myths, fables,
hypotheses and theories as founded on the same continuum. Popper refers
to the theory of the Presocratic Anaximander, who envisaged the earth as
“freely poised in midspaces” and claimed that it remained
“motionless because of its equidistance or equilibrium”[22].
For Nietzsche this common origin of philosophy and science was the reason why he
then maintained that philosophy should control science in its development :
“But that philosophy which gains control also has to consider the problem
of the level to which science should be permitted to develop : it has to
determine value [23].
Indeed, from a
philosophical point of view, we could still agree with Nietzsche's judgment that
every scientific thought implies a philosophic thought (PT 22). Today the
question is raised once again from a scientific point of view, with Gerald
Holton's question : “Do scientists need a philosophy ?” [24]
We are not to identify the “rational scientist” with a
philosophically sophisticated scientist : philosophy is not simply rational - as
Nietzsche's philosophy proves – nor is science. For scientists,
philosophizing may remain implicit, but evident in their thematic
[25] choices : “It will suffice here to mention only what
may be the most ancient and persisting of these thematic conceptions, acting as
a motivating and organizing presupposition to this day” [26].
Holton's conclusion however is that scientists should openly return to ethical
inquiries and discussions, “to the concerns of Socrates and to the idea,
in the seventeeth century discussions, of the parallelism of scientific and
spiritual progress” [27]. Thus we find that today professional
societies of scientists attempt to engage questions of ethics and human
values. Science and philosophy are united in the "The Philosopher" who
outlines an ontogeny of the world, conceived from an artistic point of
view uniting science and philosophy on the same “ground of art”.
Thus Nietzsche suggests the artistic roots of modern reason. Reason, art and
nature are not separated, and “the natural process is carried on by
science” (PT 38). We are jointly and severally liable to the universe
before knowing it. In the beginning, when reason began to be active in the human
mind, “artistic powers” would have been producing images and
selecting among them (PT 24).This archeological process continues today
:
Conscious thinking is nothing but a
process of selecting representations. It is a long way from this to
abstraction.
(1) the power which produces the
profusion of images ; (2) the power which selects and emphasizes what is
similar. (ibid.)
Thereafter all
this activity would have developed according to the rhetorical laws of metaphor
(and metonymy and synecdoche), always at work in human language. In his course
on Rhetoric (not 1874, but 1872-1873), Nietzsche avocated the
“power to discover and to make operative that which works and impresses,
with respect to each thing, a power which Aristotle calls rhetoric, [and which]
is, at the same time, the essence of language ; the latter is based just as
l
little as rhetoric is upon that
which is true, upon the essence of things. Language does not desire to instruct,
but to convey to others a subjective impulse and its
acceptance”[28].Conceptual abstraction is a product of metaphorical
processes, and “a most important product. It is an enduring impression
which is retained and solidified in the memory” (PT 49). If conception is
produced by metaphoric process [29], then science itself has its own
indirect debt to rhetoric:
We have seen
how it is originally language which works on the construction 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 [...]. (PT/TL 88)
The drive toward the formation of
metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant
dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This
drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular
and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral
products, the concepts. (PT/TL 88-89)
Here Nietzsche displays a remarkable
intuition of the intellectual mechanisms of language and science. Contemporary
studies show how metaphor can be used as a better model for structuring
knowledge than that of first-order logic : metaphor gives a knowledge
representation in artificial intelligence and is one of the basic cognitive
mechanisms implicated in restructuring a knowledge base [30].
In addition, we can count many languages in
the same discipline coming from a variety of constructed theories : all these
languages have their own history. And, regarding daily life, each one of us,
with Bas van Frassen could say : "I am immersed in a language which is
thoroughly theory-infected, living in a world my ancestors of two centuries ago
could not enter" [31].
Even nowadays,
the activity of rational understanding or the "knowledge drive" (PT 23) is
“mastered by the imagination” (ibid.), which presents us with
what we seek in order to think (PT 24). If we can say that the transcendental
imagination was the most original of Kant's findings in the Critique of Pure
reason, from a certain pioint of view, it is henceforth Nietzsche's idea as
well, mixed now with his original intuition about unconscious processes
:
There are many more sets of images in the
brain than are consumed in thinking ; The intellect rapidly selects similar
images ; the image chosen give rise, in turn, to a profusion of images ; but
again, the intellect quickly selects one
among them, etc. [32]
Hence, our understanding, our
categorizing and naming, is in essence a “surface power” (PT 19,
cf. 18). With our understanding, only through quantities we can reach “the
ultimate boundaries of what is knowable”(ibid).Then, “absolute
knowledge” comes to it via calculating and only with regard to spatial
forms (ibid.). But the “inclination for truth” (44), the
“knowledge drive” (23) or the “intellectual drive”
(44), as we are wont to call it, is first produced as a moral phenomenon -
“Man demands truth and fulfills this demand in moral intercourse with
other men” (27) - which is veracity, born in society, and
“esthetically generalized” by metaphor (44). Yet, “mankind
acquires the aspiration for truth with infinite slowness (28).
Observing how “like recalls
like” (44) by following the natural laws of memory and imitation,
Nietzsche displays a refined analysis of the sensible mechanisms or modulations
(he observes how the mimosa is gifted in memory without conscience, and then
without images), installed at the foundations of the conscious and intellectual
assimilation of the world into knowledge. Therefore knowledge will also be "the
metamorphosis of the world into men" (52). In its beginnings, reason makes
“logically invalid inferences” (48) through the use of rhetorical
figures, which Nietzsche sees as “the essence of language”
(ibid.). Genealogically, reason, which began only with art, thereafter
became a combination of morality and art.
IV.
Two criterions
In Human, All Too Human,
we can trace an overthrow of perspective by another epistemological criterion.
We add that the former criterion is neither refuted nor invalidated. But now
joined to the first epistemological criterion of “the ground of art”
is a second epistemological criterion, referring to the state of contemporary
history and natural sciences. This new criterion is destined to examine modern
thought with special attention to the ontogeny of the modern way of thinking as
deeply extended through history and the natural sciences. Nietzsche now wishes
to apply the scientific methods as a critical tool for examining the traditional
ways of philosophizing. Therefore, reason is to be be seen under the light of
natural history. This yields a new means to criticize reason without suppressing
its primary artistic (and organic) nature.
Nietzsche clearly distinguishes his own new
intellectual constitution and state of mind relative to his previous one.
Indeed, he is himself conscious of the distance there is between his first
constitution of mind and the new, when, in Spring 1877, he affirms that his
previous works were like pictures from which he used to take colors from the
subjects represented, like an artist [33]. Effectively, The
Birth of Tragedy began to put the problem of science in the manner of the
artists, since the book is full of images of the Greek art and myth.
Nevertheless, in 1886 he depicts his work with severely : “images frenzied
and confused, sentimental, in some places saccharine-sweet to the point of
effeminacy” [34].
In 1872,
Nietzsche championed Schopenhauer's motto : “art as the properly
metaphysical activity of man” [35]. It is true that
art changes the feelings of the subject about his individuality and his
situation within space and time, to which importance he becomes undifferent. But
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche did not give the same meaning to the term
“metaphysics”. The reason is their interpretation of
“will”. Georg Simmel clarifies : "According to Nietzsche we will
because we live, whereas for Schopenhauer we live because we will" [36].
Therefore, it must be emphasized that Niezsche did not intend the
“metaphysical” to refer traditional metaphysics, but rather to the
notion of the “unconscious” (probably inspired by Kant and by
Schopenhauer together), found in The Birth of tragedy. Jung correctly
notes that “metaphysical” here means “unconscious” in
The Birth of Tragedy [37].
Including its two companion volumes, Human, All Too Human is
deliberately poised against philosophy understood as “metaphysical”
in the traditional sense : Nietzsche proclaimed himself both against
metaphysics and against his own romantic (Wagnerian and Schopenhauerian)
sickness which he thought he had abandoned. Heidegger thus inaccurately
assimilates Nietzsche's philosophy to traditional metaphysics [38]. In
fact, Nietzsche, far exceeds Schopenhauer while retaining that part of knowledge
he gained from him : the consideration of the primacy of art and the evidence of
pathos acting within human beings or concerning all human things. The first
Section sets the tune by bringing together art and metaphysics [39],
announcing that philosophy, “like art, wishes to render the greatest
possible depth and meaning to life and activity” (HH I, 1:6). However,
Nietzsche demands that we mistrust this “depth”, when it deviates
from truth :
If one substracts the added
elements of thought from the deep feeling, what remains is intense feeling,
which guarantees nothing at all about knowledge except itself, just as strong
belief proves only its own strength, not the truth of what is believed. (HH
I, 1: 15)
But art is still necessary ; it is
now the necessary transition between a metaphysical philosophy and a
philosophical science : “Beginning with art, one can more easily move on
to a truly liberating philosophical science” (HH I, 1:27). The new
sciences are positive : they do not separate historical and natural philosophy,
because historical philosophy “can no longer be even conceived of as
separate from the natural sciences” (HH I,
1:13).
Nietzsche then appreciates now
explicitly the historical sense which "is the congenital defect of all
philosophers" (HH I, 1:2). In the 1886 Preface (HH I), he proclaims that
“it is the future which gives the rule to our past”[40].
Nietzsche is referring to our personal history, bringing to light, contrary to
the supposed linearity of time, a prospective conception of history, according
to which historical time must be thought not going forward, from the past to the
future, but backwards, from our representation of the future to the present
time in which we live ; and, from that point of view, we can also interpret
also our past. Auguste Comte articulated this prospecting conception of history
in his pamphlet Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour
réorganiser la société [41].
Historical philosophizing cannot be
practised without the virtue of modesty, as it is necessary in the search of
truth. Nietzsche proposed a “chemistry of concepts and feelings” (HH
I, 1:1) which would show that oppositions between concepts are metaphysical
exaggerations pushed to raise such a question : “how can something arise
from its opposite - for example, reason from unreason, sensation from the
lifeless, logic from the illogical, [...] truth from error ?”[42].
Henceforth Nietzsche calls attention to the false conclusions of false
assertions and on logical errors or paralogisms : “a thing exists,
therefore it is legitimate. Here one is deducing fonctionality from viability,
and legitimacy from functionality” (HH I, 1:30). These errors are
frequent in metaphysics. However, in the one hand, Nietzsche denounces our
“habits in making conclusions” (ibid.), but, on the other, he
imposes the idea of "illogical necessity" (31) because it is a further error to
believe “that the nature of man can be transformed into a purely logical
one” (ibid.). On one hand, against metaphysics, Nietzsche affirms
that “all judgments about the value of life have developed illogically and
therefore unfairly” (32). On the other he asserts that “error about
life is necessary for life” (33) and that “all human life is sunk
deep in untruth” (34).
Metaphysical
explanations used the concepts of “finality”, “unity”,
“truth” and “being” - none of which may any longer be
used to interpret both world and existence [43]. Besides, in "The
Philosopher”, Nietzsche had seen that “time, space, and causality
are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to
ourselves” (PT 47). And Nietzsche recognizes causality “as neither
actual, nor yet natural, but as a fiction and a historical one”
[44]. Like the Positivists, Nietzsche rejected metaphysics, which tended
to give to the world a logical unity. Now, while it is evident that metaphysical
explanations are convenient for a young person, later “he understands
that physical and historical explanations bring about at least as much that
feeling of irresponsibility, and that his interest in life and its problems is
kindled perharps even more thereby” (HH I, 1: 23).
All scientists regularly employ comparisons
in their work. Nietzsche remarks that the age of comparisons has arrived,
because much more knowledge makes more comparisons possible. Exactly the same
remark holds for the real composition of cosmopolitan classes of Europe :
“Such an age gets its meaning because in it the various world views,
customs, cultures are compared and experienced next to one another, which was
not possible earlier, when there was always a localized rule for each culture,
just as all artistic styles were found to place and time" (HH I, 1:23).
There is nothing that would preclude the
existence of a metaphysical world. Yet for a scientific era, the determination
of such a reality cannot count as an important item of knowledge : “No
matter how well proven the existence of such a world might be, it would still
hold true that the knowledge of it would be more inconsequential than the
knowledge of the chemical analysis of water must be to the boatman facing a
storm” (HH I, 1:9). It is essential to note that scientific positivism is
the referent for Nietzsche's new observations. The three texts, now grouped
under the title of Human, All Too Human, are formed by this
philosophical attitude in all topics : scientific questions as well as moral,
religious, psychological, political, social, historical ones. Nietzsche calls
together all the great Europeans, dating from Homer and so on. He does not
forget the philosophers, the scientists, the writers, the poets, the painters,
and the musicians. This precious notation is tied to a philosophic strategy :
Nietzsche here means to assimilate the whole of positivism yet without
relegating it "to idealism" [45].
In all matters, in Human All Too Human, Nietzsche adopts the new
scientific approach of the century and in the search for and articulation of
truth recommends prudence and modesty as well. However, the originality of this
positivist interest allows Nietzsche to continue his study of dreams. While in
The Birth of Tragedy, Apollo was the master of the dream (and
Dionysius the master of intoxication), with Human, All Too Human,
Nietzsche moves deeper into the analysis and interpretation of dreams; we
are far beyond the Apollonian dream. Natural history inspires Nietzsche in his
present method. We first discover in the dream a realm:
which primitive humanity believed to be "a second real
world" (HH I, 1:5). And for Nietzsche : “this is the origin of all
metaphysics” (ibid.).
Secondly,
he observes that memory is disturbed by sleep and that in the primeval era,
memory likewise disturbed the waking state. Similarities then conveyed the
arbitrariness and the confusion "with which the tribes composed their
mythologies" (HH I, 1:12). Freud confirmed “Nietzsche's concept of the
dream as a means to knowledge of man's archaic heritage” [46].
Before Freud, Nietzsche tried to articulate “the logic of dreams”
(13). He used his representation of dream to interpret our thought processes
with the elements of dream-thought : “Here, then, the imagination keeps
pushing images upon the mind, using in their production the visual impressions
of the day - and this is precisely what dream imagination does"(ibid.).
Nietzsche's explanation shares two precise points with Freud' s interpretation :
first, the reference to the past, albeit to the past of humanity than that of
the individual, and, secondly, the judicious observation of the specific way
we reason in dreams, something Nietzsche thinks that a primeval habit retained
by modern reason :
I think that man still
draws conclusions in his dreams as mankind once did in a waking state, through
many thousands of years : the first causa which occurred to the mind to
explain something that needed explaining sufficed and was taken for truth.
(According to the tales of travelers, savages proceed this way even today). The
old aspect of humanity lives on in us in our dreams, for it is the basis upon
which higher reason developed, and is still developing, in everyman : the dream
restores up to distant states of human culture and gives us a means by
which to understand them better. (Ibid.)
Through these original and positive
analyses, Nietzsche acknowledges the origin of metaphysics, a product of reason,
and reason itself, in dream thought. He compares the last to the thought of
exotic peoples : here is the origin of human reasoning. In all fields, Nietzsche
underlines the imperativ necessity of establishing and using scientific methods,
the most decisive cultural part of all the scientific progress :
And in fact, the fervor about having the
truth counts very little today in relation to that other fervor, more gentle and
silent, to be sure, for seeking the truth, a search that does not tire of
learning afresh and testing anew. (HHI,
1:9)
All in all, scientific methods are at least
as important as any other result of inquiry ; for the scientific spirit is based
on the insight into methods, and were those methods to be lost, all the results
of science could not prevent a renewed triumph of superstition and nonsense.
(ibid.)
Nietzsche
shows again, in Daybreak, his interest in the search of “the exact
history of a birth”[47]. Voices opposed to philosophy claim the
return to science, to nature, to the natural part of science (D 427). Part of
the aphorism 132 is devoted to the French founder of positivism, Auguste Comte,
as is all of aphorism 542 : “The philosopher and the old age”.
Nietzsche comes back to the question about scientific methods : seeming to
answer Comte who preconised "the" positive method and eemphasized, in the
Course of Positive Philosophy, that the diverse abstract sciences of his
classification practised numerous specifically adapted scientific methods.
Nietzsche presents himself as being willing either to tear away the secrets from
the things, or, on the contrary, to respect and interpret their mysteries (D
432).
Nietzsche dedicated Daybreak to
the moral prejudices, recognized in observations which are really influenced by
the scientific way of thinking. He relates morality and causality through the
notion of an inverse proportion between the sense of morality and the sense of
causality : the sense of morality going backwards together with the going
forward of the sense of causality (D 10). That is to say, the progression of
history and the sciences of nature results in a regression of morality. And that
is so, because there is no moral principle in the physical phenomena. In spite
of these constatations, Nietzsche meant to apply the notion of causality to the
field of morality.The result is the defect of responsibility. And so it happens
that Nietzsche treats facts in the same way as Herbert Spencer, who coined the
notion of “integrative change” (D 26) in the statement of his law
of evolution[48]. It is why, the sense of truth, for Nietzsche, is only
a sense of security for humans as well as animals.
V. Rather art
and method than truth
We could follow many more
exemples of the movements ot the two important Nietzsche's epistemological
attitudes. Nietzsche oscillated from the criterion of art to that of history and
the natural sciences, in order to come back to the first criterion in Thus
spoke Zarathoustra and On the Genealogy of Morals. Indeed, we see
clearly his return to myth, after Daybreak and The Gay Science,
especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, while the first Section of
Beyond Good and Evil once again returns to the same epistemological
preoccupations as the first Section of Human, All Too Human [49].
The viewpoint of art and the point of view
of history and the sciences of nature are united in the oscillating dynamic of
Nietzsche's inquiry : returning now to art, now to history and the natural
sciences, and now again to art, and so on. One might ask about Nietzsche's kind
of philosophy. We have elsewhere qualified this manner of thinking as
labyrinthic.
But Nietzsche himself ? What
kind of philosopher was he ? Is Nietzsche merely a popular philosopher, like
Ludwig Büchner whose famous but mediocre book, Force and Matter, he
read ? [50] Nietzsche however had read fast almost all scientific
important scientific publications of his time [51]. Or is Nietzsche, who
certainly read the the jurist and anthropologist Hermann Post [52],
founder of the disciplin of juridical ethnology, a philosopher of the new human
sciences ? Or, like Kierhegaard, and under the mastery of Schopenhauer, is
Nietzsche a philosopher of existence, asking about the inner conditions which
are now possible in modernity ? [53]
Rather than a theory of knowledge or a critique of pure reason, we find a theory
of modern reason, that is to say, a critique of an historical phenomenon. Modern
reason is a cultural event which has appeared and can accordingly either
disappear or else evolve. Nietzsche's critique of modern reason is therefore a
genealogy of our Western reason which gave us science. Life requires illusions
and belief in truth, but “the truth and the effective are taken to be
identical, here too one submits to force” (PT 17). As the Will to Power is
not yet enunciated, his idea is that unconscious forces are acting in the core
of our rationality and the knowledge which it gave us. By contrast, art has
truthfulness with it : “it alone is now honest” (PT 29). In
conclusion, rather art and method than truth
:
What then is truth ? A movable host of
metaphors, metonymies, an 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).
With his interest in symbolic processes, evident in The Birth of Tragedy
and the Philosopher's Book as in Human All Too Human, it is
possible to place Nietzsche in the context of our contemporary research in the
field of the “philosophy and science of mind”. Nietzsche
interprets these symbolic processes as belonging to “fiction”
(Erdichtung), that is, as artistic creations, but also as natural (and
social) products. Similarly, today, Colin Murray Turbayne explains that now in
the philosophy of mind the problem is “of bringing to the surface these
extended metaphors submerged or partially submerged in the accounts of the
influential metaphysians of the past” [54].
By taking science as a creation [55]
and as an interpretation [56], Nietzsche was led to explain and understand
reason on the basis of art. For Nietzsche, history and the natural sciences, the
products of modern reason, work as a tool against the ways of reason itself,
either in metaphysics or indirectly in science, as the third ess ay of On the
Genealogy of Morals demonstrates the origin of science in metaphysics.
There, Nietzsche treats the difficult problem of metalanguages, according to
which we are f aced with the necessity to use a metalanguage to study a specific
object. Under pain of nullity of a research, we must examine the object to be
known in another perspective than its own.
Nietzsche's philosophic vocation may be qualified as a radicalism, with its
implication of an immoderate aspiration to truth and fairness. He obeys this
aspiration unconditionally [57]. Through his genealogical analyses,
Nietzsche assimilates belief and unbelief in a kind of “eidetic
reduction”, as our highest speculations always work to reduce either to
the idea which we believe or to one we do not want to believe.
When Rudolf Carnap criticizes metaphysics
and metaphysicians, he assumes that Nietzsche had done the same [58].
Thus Carnap’s Überwindung der Metaphysik (1931) may be
compared with Nietzsche's criticism of metaphysics in Human, All Too Human.
Curiously, Carnap regards Nietzsche as a “metaphysian” who had
the good sense to avoid the error for which he reproaches other metaphysians.
Carnap is right to underline the “empirical content” of Nietzsche's
work, its “historical analyses of specific artistic phenomena, or a
historical-psychological analysis of morals”[59]. He praises
Nietzsche for having not chosen in Thus Spoke Zarathustra “the
misleading theoretical form, but openly the form of art, of poetry”
[60]. However, Nietzsche is not at all content to simply express his
feelings about life. Nietzsche discovers the way to criticize metaphysics via
its faulty conclusions, but he also discovers, with his idea of “the
illogical necessary” (HH I,1:31), how to criticize a stricly logical point
of view like Carnap's.
Through an original but
concealed cognitive paradigm and through a deconstructive series of untimely
observations, Nietzsche attained something like a knowledge regarding knowledge
by tracing the process of symbolization processes in order to discover the
formation of concepts and the representation of events. Yet surely this is not
the same “attempt to gain knowledge about knowledge” which he
regards as Kant's task in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft" [61].
(Thanks to
Tracy Strong and to Ignace Haaz for assistance with this essay. )
Notes
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out the Spirit of
Music, trans. S. Whiteside, ed. M. Tanner (London: Penguin, 1993) :
“Attempt as a Self-Criticism” (1886), p.4.
2. Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human, I., §. 18, trans. M. Faber and S. Lehmann
(London: Penguin, 1994), p. 25. Hereafter cited as HH.
3. Cf.
Angèle Kremer-Marietti, "Le «terrain de l'art», une clé
de lecture du texte nietzschéen", in D. Janicaud, ed., Nouvelles
lectures de Nietzsche (Lausanne : L'Age d'Homme, N°1, 1985).
4. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Nietsche et la philosophie (Paris, P.U.F.,
1962) ; see Chapter 2 : « Actif et réactif ».
5.
Nachlass November 1887-März 1888, 11 (99), KGW, VIII, 2, p.
287-288. See also Le Nihilisme européen, Traduction et notes par
Angèle Kremer-Marietti, précédé de "Que signifie le
nihilisme?" par Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Paris Union
Générale d'Editions, coll. 10/18, 3è trimestre 1976, p.178.
New traduction and introduction: Paris, Kimé, 1997.
6. See
Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science. Reflecting Science on
the Ground of Art and Life (New York : State University of New York Press,
1994), p. 244 : “In fact, the vulgar threat of nihilism is furthest from
Nietzsche' s concern”.
7. Nachlass November 1887-März
1888, 11 (99), KGW, VIII, 2, p. 288.
8. On the Advantage and
Disadvantage of History for Life, trans., with an Introduction by P. Preuss
(Indianapolis: Hackett, Inc., 1980) ; Preface, p. 7. German title of the
Meditation : Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben
(1874), which is Part 2 of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations
(Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen).
9. Cf.
Das Philosophenbuch. Theoretische Studien (1872-1875), Nietzsches
Werke, GOA, Kröner, X ; see the different texts without this title in
Nachlass, KGW III, 4, 2, 1. The French translation, Le Livre du
philosophe, was first published with an Introduction and Notes by
Angèle Kremer-Marietti (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1969), corrected and
reprinted 1978 ; now reprinted in GF Collection (Paris, Flammarion , 1991).
Cf. the English translation : Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth. Selections
from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. D. Breazeale
(New Jersey: Humanities, 1979) ; see “The Philosopher”, § 37
: Philosophy and Truth (1991), p. 12 ; Le Livre du philosophe
(1991), p. 48. Cited as PT followed by the page number.
10. Ecce
Homo. How one becomes what one is, trans. with Notes by R. J. Hollingdale,
(London: Penguin, 1991), p. 4.
11. HH, I, 1, 25, p.31.
12.
See my Introduction "La Naissance de la tragédie trace la
voie de la vérité radicale", in : Nietzsche, La Naissance de la
tragédie, Traduction de Jean Marnold et Jacques Morland revue par
Angèle Kremer-Marietti (Paris : Librairie Générale
Française, 1994), pp. 5-31.
13. HH, I, 1, 25, p. 31.
14.
Rather Philosopher's Book than Philosophers' Book.
15. See
"The Philosopher : Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge" (1872)
; Philosophy and Truth, pp. 1-58 ; Le Livre du philosophe, pp.
37-103.
16. See "The Philosopher as Cultural Physician" (1873) ; PT, 67-76
.
17. See "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (1873) ; PT,
77-97 ; cited from this translation TL followed by the page number.
18. See
"The Struggle Between Science and Wisdom" (1875) PT, 125-146.
19. See Sarah
Kofman, Nietzsche et la métaphore, Paris, Payot, 1972, p. 47:
« L'art prolonge le travail de la force artistique
inconsciente ».
20. Cf. David Lenson, The Birth of Tragedy. A
Commentary (Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1987, p. 39.
21. Cf. Human,
All Too Human, Nachlass (1876-1878), 23 (150), KGW, IV, 2.
22. Cf.
Karl R. Popper, "Back to the Presocratics" (1958), Sections II-IX, in
Conjectures and Refutations (New York, Harper and Row, 1968), Chapter 5.
23. PT, 8, see also pp. 22,23.
24. Gerald Holton, The Advancement
of Science, and its Burdens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
see pp.163-178.
25. Cf. Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought.
Kepler to Einstein. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
26.
Holton, The Advancement of Science and its Burdens, p. 175.
27.
Holton, loc.cit., p. 178.
28. Cf. Philologica, Zweiter Band,
Nietzsches Werke, Band XVIII (Leipzig, Kröner, 1912), p. 249. See
Sander L.Gilman., Carole Blair, David Parent, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric
and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 20.
29. See
Sarah Kofman, loc.cit., p. 5: "grâce au concept, l'homme range
l'univers entier dans des rubriques logiques bien ordonnées, sans savoir
qu'il continue alors l'activité métaphorique la plus
archaïque".
30. Cf. Earl R. Mac Cormac, A Cognitive Theory of
Metaphor (Cambridge: Massachusetts, 1985) ; Eileen Cornell Way,
Knowledge representation and Metaphor (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Puiblisher, 1991). Cf. also Vincent de Coorebyter, ed, Rhétoriques de
la science (Paris, P.U.F., Collection L'Interrogation Philosophique, 1994) ;
see my essay, pp. 133-148 : "Le figuré et le littéral dans le
langage scientifique".
31. Cf. Bas C. van Frassen, The Scientific
Image (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p.81.
32. Ibid.
33.
KGW, IV, 2, 22 (64).
34. See "Attempt at a Self-criticism", in The
Birth of Tragedy, p. 5.
35. See Ibid., p. 7.
36. Cf.
Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (1907), Translated by Helmut
Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein (University of Massachusetts
Press, 1986; International Nietzsche Studies, Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1991) ; see p. 76.
37. Cf. Carl Gustav Jung, Psychological Types
(1920), Chapter III : Apollinian and Dionysian. Nietzsche :"The Birth of
Tragedy", in Collected Works, London, 1953-1971. See "La Naissance de la
tragédie trace la voie de la vérité radicale",
loc.cit., p. 16-17: "Comme Nietzsche l'a affirmé, c'est une
«métaphysique» de l'artiste, mais si nous suivons Jung, par qui
une modification s'impose, nous devons un moment remplacer le terme de
'métaphysique' par celui d' «inconscient», pour obtenir cette
affirmation que La Naissance de la tragédie est l'inconscient de
l'artiste" .
38. Cf. Michel Haar, "La Physiologie de l'Art :
Nietzsche revu par Heidegger", in Nouvelles Lectures de Nietzsche,
pp.70-80 ; see p.70: "Cette lecture présente Nietzsche, on le sait,
principalement (et massivement) comme l'«achèvement de la
métaphysique», résumant et clôturant les grandes
époques de son histoire". See also Angèle Kremer-Marietti, "Le
Nietzsche de Heidegger. Sur la volonté de puissance", Revue
Internationale de Philosophie, 1/1989, n°168.
39.Title of Section
One : “Of First and Last Things”.
40. HH I, Preface,
§. 7, p. 10.
41. Cf. Auguste Comte, Plan des travaux
scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la
société (1822), Paris, Aubier, 1970 ; see p. 122-123 :
"L'ordre chronologique des époques n'est point l'ordre philosophique. Au
lieu de dire : le passé, le présent et l'avenir, il faut dire : le
passé, l'avenir et le présent. Ce n'est, en effet, que lorsque,
par le passé, on a conçu l'avenir, qu'on peut revenir utilement
sur le présent, qui n'est qu'un point, de façon à saisir
son véritable caractère".
42. HH I, 1:1. The same
observation occurs in Beyond Good and Evil, I “On the
Prejudices of Philosophers.”
43. Nachlass November 1887-März
1888, 11 (99), KGW, VIII, 2, p. 287-288.
44. See Tracy B. Strong,
Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (1975).
Expanded Edition, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press,
1988, p. 69.
45. Cf. Human, All Too Human, Nachlass
(1876-1878), 22 (37), Spring and Summer 1877, KGW, IV,
2.
46. See note 11 of the American translaters, PT 19. Cf. Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams. In an addendum to the fifth edition of this
work (1919), Freud refers to Nietzsche's concept of the dream as a means to
knowledge of man's archaic heritage, «of what is psychically innate in
him» (Standard Edition, V, p. 549)".
47. Nietzsche, Daybreak,
trans R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, Aphorism
I. Hereafter cited as D followed by the aphorism number.
48. Cf. Herbert
Spencer, First Principles (1862, 1867, 1875, 1888).
49. Cf. “Was geschah mir : Horch ! Flog die Zeit wohl davon ? Falle
ich nicht ? Fiel ich nicht - horch ! in den Brunnen der Ewigkleit ?“
Also sprach Zarathustra, IV, Mittags, KGW, VI, 1, p.340. And „Wir
suchen Verschiednes auch hier oben, ihr und ich. Ich nämlich
suche mehr Sicherheit, deshalb kam ich zu Zarathustra. Der nämlich
ist noch der festeste Thurm und Wille, Also sprach
Zarathustra, IV, „Von der Wissenschaft“, KGW, VI, 1,
p.372.
50. Ludwig Büchner, Kraft und Stoff. Empirisch-philosophische
Studien.In allgemein-verständlicher Darstellung, Frankfurt am Main,
Meidinger, 1855. The materialist philosopher Friedrich Karl Christian Ludwig
Büchner (1824-1899) was the brother of the writer Georg Büchner
(1813-1837). Ludwig Büchner has published his work in 19 editions, from
1855 to 1898. Nietzsche held the 15th edition, dated 1883 ; but he could have
earlier read the book as well. Constantly revisited, Büchner's book,
Force and Matter, is based upon the new scientific results of the time
from the works of the physicist Sir William Robert Grove (1811-1896), the
physiologist Jakob Moleschott (1822-1893), the pathologist Rudolf Virchow
(1821-1902), the mathématician and physicist Sir William Thomson, first
Baron Kelvin (1824-1907), the biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), and so on.,
all well known by Nietzsche. Büchner asserted that infinite matter
transformes incessantly, while force circulates without end. Hence, for
Nietszche, the possibility of proving scientifically what will be the idea of
Eternel Return of the Same and justifying the theory of the Will to Power.
51. Nietzsche's readings in the matter of physical and natural sciences
are very important. See Alwin Mittasch, Friedrich Nietzsche als
Naturphilosoph, Stuttgart, Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1952.
52. Albert
Hermann Post (1839-1895) is considered the founder of comparative law ; he is
the author of : Einleitung in eine Naturwissenschaft des Rechts,
Oldenburg, 1872 and Der Ursprung des Rechts. Prolegomena zu einer allgemeinen
vergleichenden Rechtswissenschaft, Oldenburg, 1876. He published his works
between 1861 and 1895, and brought the idea of "ethnological
jurisprudence".
53. Simmel, loc.cit., see p. 5 : “[The
desire for an absolute goal] is the heritage of Christianity. It has left a
need for a definitivum of live's movement, which has continued as an empty urge
for a goal which has become inaccessible. Schopenhauer's philosophy is the
absolute philosophical expression for this inner condition of modern man. The
center of his doctrine is that the essential metaphysical essence of the world
and of ourselves has its total and only decisive expression in our
will”.
54. See Colin Murray "Metaphors for the Mind", in Logic
and Art. Essays in honour of Nelson Goodman, Indianapolis and New York, The
Bobbs Merrill Comp. Inc., 1972, p.61. Cf. Colin Murray Turbayne, The Myth of
Metaphor, New Haven : Yale, University Press, 1962.
55. Cf. Ruediger
H. Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge ‘Berlin, Walter de
Gruyter, 1977) ; see p. 137 : "What we claim to know about the world or
concerning objects is properly a creation of our own, projected
‘outward’ and not gleaned from a careful examniation of
‘things’".
56. Cf. Babette E. Babich, loc.cit, p. 228 :
"The perspectivalist context of interpretation defined by a world of chaotic
and necessary Will to Power reveals the creative interactional character of
cultural and so scientific truths".
57. See the word
Rücksichtslosigkeit (meaning the entity 'restrictionless'),
Daybreak, 512 .
58. Cf. Rudolf Carnap, English
translation in A. J. Ayer, Logical Positivism (New York, The Free Press,
A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1959), pp. 60-81 : "The
Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language".
59. Cf.
A. J. Ayer ed., p. 80.
60. Ibid.
61. Cf. Grimm, loc.
cit., p. 55 : "Nietzsche is obviously suspicious of the attempt to gain
knowledge about knowledge,which he sees as Kant's task in the Kritik der
reinen Vernunft. Briefly, Nietzsche views this attempt as embodying the
same inconsistency which we have already pointed out as inherent to the
correspondence theory".