Nietzsche and Science (review)

This book is a collection of essays from the 2001 Friedrich Nietzsche Society annual conference. As Gregory Moore’s informative introduction suggests, the essays are not concerned with any direct involvement with science, or Nietzsche’s critique of epistemology, but with his relationship to individual sciences, the effect of these on his work, and his relation to the emergence of the scientific worldview. Most generally, this relationship is manifest in the value Nietzsche placed on the physical standpoint basic to science and the humility of the scientific method, as opposed to more speculative models for thinking.

The first half of this book is chiefly concerned with Nietzsche’s relation to actual scientific texts, to the history of science, and to the uses made of his research in this area, while the second half deals mainly with the relationship between philosophy and a broad-based science as a basis for Nietzsche’s notion of a gaya scienza. The first essay by Thomas Brobjer provides a detailed exploration of Nietzsche’s readings of scientific texts. These are shown to be fairly extensive, though not detailed or concerted. Nietzsche had periods of intense reading associated with the development, for example, of a certain speculative point of view on physical and cosmological theories, expressly to support the theories of will to power and eternal recurrence. The better-known works Nietzsche consulted, such as Lange’s popular History of Materialism , are balanced by more detailed works, but his research could not be described as more than an active interest. Nietzsche read works on such topics as Darwinian theory and physiology as well. Again, these are associated with the development of certain ideas: with a rejection of Christian and Hegelian notions of development and teleology, respectively, and with Nietzsche’s obsession with his own health. It is clear that Nietzsche was not engaged in a disinterested study but was looking for evidence to back up his point of view on a number of scientific issues.

Following Brobjer’s extensive list, Richard Brown takes as his point of departure Nietzsche’s remark concerning the Buddha as physiologist. The basic issue addressed is the influence of the body on thinking. Brown traces an influence to Feuerbach, who suggested the necessary effectiveness of such a relation. Brown addresses the views of a number of commentators, building up his argument for the importance of physiology in providing an alternative to religious bases for value judgments. This is no doubt the case for Nietzsche, who considered that the thought of God, or being, involves the attribution of a culturally valued concept to a feeling or pathos, in a metonymical inversion of cause and effect. A physiological analysis of will to power touches on the question of which is primary, will to power or the resistance it seems to require to become manifest, to develop, and to become spiritualized. Brown makes the interesting claim that, for Nietzsche, the notion of cause and effect originated in physiological precedents (66). This does not rid us of the problem of priority, though it does seem to point in the direction of a notion of thinking as responsive rather than autonomously willful. Nietzsche suggests that feelings come first, as responses to life, and are already value laden at this level, making physiology a study of the body as a “great reason.”

Gregory Moore brings Nietzsche’s health issues into the perspective of a sick Europe, full of spas with gaunt figures staggering to their doors. Decayed and degenerate, the body is supported by health books and quackish treatments. As well as these, Nietzsche’s belief in the benefits of clear skies and sunshine goes some way to explain his cyclic travels each year, though the suggestion that spring fever was the basis of la gaya scienza is perhaps a reference to Dionysianism and Parnassus—or opium. Perhaps the latter was causing Nietzsche’s stomach cramps and constipation, hardly a model for a Dionysian, as Moore remarks (though apparently, Nietzsche attempted...