Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie: Hintergründe, Wirkungen und Aktualität ed. by Helmut Heit (review)

Few will dispute that the sciences were of special importance to Nietzsche. The natural and human sciences had a significant influence on his thought from the very beginning, and his writings probe and engage with them, exploring their interrelations as well as their place in an adequate broader view of our existence. By contrast, it is less clear whether Nietzsche had, or thought that we could have, something that amounts to a philosophy of science. To the extent that he did, we must ask what its content and value may be. This involves asking whether his thought can help to explain what natural science is, what it can and cannot do, and how it relates to other areas of enquiry. Similarly, we must ask how it can help us to further not only the concerns of humanistic understanding but also our understanding of these concerns themselves.

The editors of Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie: Hintergründe, Wirkungen und Aktualität present a collection of essays that promise to cast new light on these questions. All of the contributions are original and were first presented at a conference titled “Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie” at the Technische Universität Berlin in July 2010. Some thirty papers were selected and revised for the volume, of which roughly a third are in English, the others being in German. One drawback of the volume is its price, especially given the minimal effort at editing and correcting mistakes that has been made. This is fairly typical of German academic publications, but it means that the fate of the book is the library. There is no substantial introduction, and the contributions vary significantly in style and quality: the level of scholarship and presentation is generally high, but many papers are encumbered with too much paraphrase and repetition, too much broad unwarranted assertion, and correspondingly too little patience for argument and for critical and original engagement with Nietzsche or rival interpretations of him. To some extent, however, these deficiencies are outweighed by the wealth of ideas and perspectives that are presented. The book also benefits from the expertise of the contributors, many of whom are recognized, and even outstanding, scholars from around the world. (Indeed, a note on the contributors would have been helpful, especially given that they come from different countries and backgrounds.) In this review, I focus on the papers from which I learned most and which I found to be written in a clear and accessible style.

Thomas Brobjer examines Nietzsche’s view of science in Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo and the notes from the Nachlass of 1888. He suggests that in those writings, a conception of a new, revalued science emerges. Admittedly, this conception is less visible in the books than in the notes of the Nachlass, but Brobjer thinks it unlikely that the latter represent rejected ideas (40). While the published works put a strong emphasis on the importance of accepting and knowing “reality” and praise the virtues of courage and intellectual honesty that are required to accept it, the notes from early 1888 add further dimensions. In them, Nietzsche explores what science might be once it completely rejects the dichotomy between a “true” and an “apparent” world, discards its moral and religious heritage, and gains a better understanding of itself and its relations to philosophy. Here, more textual evidence would have been welcome, but the paper gives a useful overview of Nietzsche’s attitude to science in the last year of his active life.

In an elegantly written contribution, Lanier Anderson revisits his earlier interpretation of will to power. On this interpretation, will to power is not a grand metaphysical theory in the German tradition but rather “an account of the unity of the sciences, which aims to establish connections across various different domains of empirical knowledge by identifying a central conceptual structure” (56). Still insisting on this interpretation, Anderson considers...