(Myth #1 is here.)
Myth: Nietzsche was anti-science, a Rortyesque debunker of the epistemic pretensions of science for the 19th-century.
Reality: In the mid-1870s, Nietzsche went through a phase of unabashed "science worship," viewing natural science as the paradigm of all genuine knowledge; the culmination of this period came with Human, All-too-Human. This gave way, however, in the early 1880s to a NeoKantian skepticism (inspired by Schopenhauer and Friedrich Lange) about whether science could plumb the depths of reality, of the world-as-it-is-in-itself. Once Nietzsche repudiated, however, the metaphysical distinction between a noumenal and phenomenal world on which this skepticism rests, the skepticism about science vanishes and in his later works he repeatedly endorses a scientific perspective as the correct or true one (in contrast to, e.g., religious and moral interpretations of phenomena).
Even in the often misunderstood Third Essay of the Genealogy--in which Nietzsche attacks only the value of truth, not its objectivity or our ability to know it--Nietzsche refers to "there being so much useful work to be done" in science and adds, regarding the "honest workers" in science, that, "I delight in their work" (GM III:23). In works from earlier in the 1880s, he still lauds science for "the severity of its service, its inexorabililty in small as in great matters...the most difficult is demanded and the best is done without praise and decorations" (GS 293) and says that "the ideal scholar in whom the scientific instinct, after thousands of total semi-failures, for once blossoms and blooms to the end, is certainly one of the most precious instruments there are" (BGE 207). His complaint about science here, and elsewhere, isn't that it fails to provide objective knowledge of the truth, but rather that it can not entirely preempt "philosophy," in Nietzsche's special sense of that term, since "genuine" philosophy is concerned with the creation of values. In short, contrary to the Rortyean image, all of Nietzsche's final, major works--the Genealogy, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo--"exhibit a uniform and unambiguous respect for facts, the senses, and science" (as Maudemarie Clark puts it in Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, p. 105).
The intellectual context in which Nietzsche was writing should hardly make his real attitude towards science surprising. Hegelian Idealism was a dead issue by the time Nietzsche was being educated, replaced by versions of NeoKantianism and the movement that became known as “German Materialism,” which embodied a naturalistic world-view, well-captured by one of its leading proponents, the medical doctor Ludwig Büchner (older brother of the proto-existentialist playwright Georg), in his 1855 best-seller Force and Matter: "the researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings." "Man is a product of nature," declared Büchner, "in body and mind. Hence not merely what he is, but also what he does, wills, feels, and thinks, depends upon the same natural necessity as the whole structure of the world" (p. 239). So spoke the "German Materialists" of the 1850s and after.
German Materialism really exploded onto the cultural scene in the 1850s, under the impetus of the startling new discoveries about human beings made by the burgeoning science of physiology. After 1830 in Germany, "Physiology...became the basis for modern scientific medicine, and this confirmed the tendency, identifiable throughout the whole of the nineteenth century, towards integration of human and natural sciences" (Schnädelbach 1983, p. 76). A slew of Materialist books appeared throughout the 1850s.
Given their tremendous impact, it would have been impossible for the young Nietzsche to have been unfamiliar with the Materialists. A critic of materialism writing in 1856 complained that, "A new world view is settling into the minds of men. It goes about like a virus. Every young mind of the generation now living is affected by it" (quoted in Gregory, p. 10). Yet the crucial event for Nietzsche was his discovery in 1866 of Friedrich Lange’s recently published History of Materialism, a book which opened up for him the whole history of philosophical materialism up to and including German Materialism, as well as introducing him to the profound developments in modern natural science, especially chemistry and physiology. As with Schopenhauer, the impact on the young Nietzsche was dramatic. “Kant, Schopenhauer, this book by Lange--I don’t need anything else,” he wrote in 1866 (quoted in Janz 1978 I, p. 198). He viewed the work as “undoubtedly the most significant philosophical work to have appeared in recent decades” (ibid.), and called it in a letter of 1868 “a real treasure-house,” mentioning, among other things, Lange’s discussion of the “materialist movement of our times” (quoted in Stack 1983, p. 13).
From Lange, Nietzsche would have acquired a clear picture of contemporary German Materialism, of its “mechanical understanding of man as a mere natural creature” (Lange 1865, p. 213), of its view that, “The nature of man is...only a special case of universal physiology, as thought is only a special case in the chain of physical processes of life” (Lange 1865, p. 248).
(Lange, as noted, was one of a number of "neo-Kantian" critics of Materialism who held, first, that modern physiology vindicated Kantianism by demonstrating the dependence of knowledge on the peculiarly human sensory apparatus, and, second, that the Materialists were naive in believing science gives us knowledge of the thing-in-itself rather than the merely phenomenal world. At the same time, Lange's general intellectual sympathies were clearly with the Materialists as against the idealists, theologians, and others who resisted the blossoming scientific picture of the world and of human beings. Thus, for example, he remarks: "if Materialism can be set aside only by criticism based upon the [Kantian] theory of knowledge...in the sphere of positive questions it is everywhere in the right..." (1865, p. 332).)
While a reaction to German Materialism did set in by the 1870s and 1880s, Nietzsche's youthful engagement with the Materialists made a profound and lasting impression on him. In early 1868, he briefly contemplated switching from the study of philology to chemistry, and starting in the late 1860s, he began an intensive reading of books on natural science, readings which continued into the 1880s (Janz 1978 II, pp. 73-74; Hayman 1980, p. 234). He admits that in the late 1870s, "A truly burning thirst took hold of me: henceforth I really pursued nothing more than physiology, medicine and natural sciences" (EH III:HAH-3). This impression is evident even in his mature work of the 1880s. In Ecce Homo, he complains of the "blunder" that he "became a philologist--why not at least a physician or something else that opens one's eyes?" (EH, II, 2). The same year, he comments (in a passage evocative of La Mettrie’s 1748 Man a Machine) that, “Descartes was the first to have dared, with admirable boldness, to understand the animal as machina: the whole of our physiology endeavors to prove this claim. And we are consistent enough not to except man, as Descartes still did...” (A 14).
(For more discussion, and full citations, see Chapters 1 and 2 of my Nietzsche on Morality [London: Routledge, 2002].
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