Nietzsche and Science

Thomas H. Brobjer, Gregory Moore, Gregory Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351914628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Nietzsche and Science explores the German philosopher's response to the extraordinary cultural impact of the natural sciences in the late nineteenth century. It argues that the science of his day exerted a powerful influence on his thought and provided an important framework within which he articulated his ideas. The first part of the book investigates Nietzsche's knowledge and understanding of specific disciplines and the influence of particular scientists on Nietzsche's thought. The second part examines how Nietzsche actually incorporated various scientific ideas, concepts and theories into his philosophy, the ways in which he exploited his reading to frame his writings, and the relationship between his understanding of science and other key themes of his thought, such as art, rhetoric and the nature of philosophy itself.

PART I
NIETZSCHE’S KNOWLEDGE OF SCIENCE

Chapter 1
Nietzsche’s Reading and Knowledge of Natural Science: An Overview¹

Thomas H. Brobjer

If we are properly to appreciate Nietzsche’s views on science, we must take into account not only his explicit statements on the subject, whether drawn from his published writings or his notebooks, but also the relevant books he read before formulating his position. For a man occasionally dismissive of the virtues of reading (as opposed to original, independent thinking) and notoriously shy about acknowledging his intellectual debts (apart from a select band of forerunners such as the ancients and Goethe), Nietzsche was a voracious reader and his philosophy was profoundly coloured by the works he perused. As I have argued elsewhere,² two important tasks face Nietzsche scholarship today: first, to determine what Nietzsche read and when; second, to examine how he responded to his reading and how this influenced the contents of his published works. Only by uncovering Nietzsche’s stimuli and sources will we come to understand fully the themes and questions to which his writings are a response. This chapter will focus on the first of these tasks: I shall discuss Nietzsche’s intellectual development in terms of his reading of books relating to natural science.

Nietzsche’s interest in natural science was limited and came to him relatively late in life. Nevertheless, an examination of his reading suggests that he was better informed and more engaged in questions relating to natural science than has generally been assumed. About one-tenth of the books in his private library (that is, about 100 titles) can be classified as belonging to the field of natural science, though he also read a large number of relevant books no longer extant in his private library. Most of these he bought in 1875 or later. The three disciplines in which he demonstrated the most interest were physics, physiology and Darwinism. By and large, though, his knowledge of physics was sketchy (and his understanding of mathematics was rudimentary). He was altogether better informed – that is to say, he read more – about physiology and about issues relating to Darwinism. As I will show in more detail below, in 1868 Nietzsche planned a programme of study of natural science, but did not carry it out. His first real encounter with natural science was in 1873 when he read several scientific texts in an attempt to understand pre-Socratic thinking; his second was in 1875–76, when he bought and read numerous scientific books in order to compensate for his lack of education in this area. He was interested in natural science primarily during the so-called ‘middle period’ of his career (1875–82), though his interest in physiology began in 1880–81 and intensified until his mental collapse. His acquisition and reading of scientific books reached a peak during 1875–81. After 1883 Nietzsche continued to read about physiology, but his reading was not concentrated in any particular year. His interest in natural science corresponds neatly with the common division of his intellectual development into three phases, and a causal connection between them does indeed exist – that is, his view of science and truth is closely related to the shifts in his thinking.

It is not my intention here to discuss in detail the influence which individual works or authors exerted on Nietzsche, or to identify the many excerpts and borrowings that can be traced in his notebooks. That would be impossible in the limited space available to me here. Instead, I aim to provide a chronological survey of Nietzsche’s reading of natural science throughout his life, based on a close examination of his published writings, letters and notebooks, as well as on the unpublished papers and contents of his extant library in Weimar. That does not mean that I shall be concentrating solely on works by experimental scientists such as Robert Mayer, Wilhelm Roux and Carl von Nägeli. In fact, Nietzsche’s views on, and knowledge of, natural science were probably influenced more by philosophers and thinkers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, F.A. Lange and Otto Liebmann than by purely scientific books, and for this reason they will figure prominently in the discussion below. His tastes were eclectic, ranging from eminent Victorians such as Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer to often quite obscure figures like William Rolph and Afrikan Spir, who even in the nineteenth century were largely unknown. This, then, is what makes a study of Nietzsche’s reading so important: through it we are able to reconstruct the idiosyncrasies of Nietzsche’s understanding of science.

Nietzsche and Darwinism

Nietzsche’s relation to Darwinism is an important and complex issue, and has, over the years, attracted a great deal of attention. For this reason, I shall deal with it only briefly here and in the greater part of this chapter concentrate on the other branches of the natural sciences relevant to Nietzsche’s reading and thinking.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection had an incalculable influence on the scientific, intellectual and cultural climate of the second half of the nineteenth century, including the fields of philosophy and literature – those fields in which, broadly speaking, Nietzsche himself worked. As such, Darwinism – or more precisely, evolutionism – represents an important general background for Nietzsche’s thought. Some aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy – such as his view of development, progress and history, as well as his concepts of the will to power and the Übermensch – cannot be fully understood without taking into account his attitude towards Darwinism. Yet Darwinism was not just a backdrop to Nietzsche’s thinking, it also constituted a theory and a world-view which Nietzsche directly discussed and criticized. But for all the discussion there has been of Nietzsche and Darwinism, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that Darwinism never seems to have fully engaged Nietzsche’s interest and that he always remained a somewhat superficial and amateur commentator. This was despite the fact that he read a large number of books on the subject, including specialist biological treatises as well as works of popular science (many of these will be mentioned in due course), and the fact that his best friend during his ‘middle period’, Paul Rée, was a firm supporter of Darwinism. Furthermore, unlike Rée, Nietzsche seems not to have read anything by Darwin himself (nor by major advocates of Darwin such as T.H. Huxley or Ernst Haeckel), with the one possible exception of Darwin’s ‘Biographical Sketch of an Infant’, an article published in Mind in 1877 on the development of infants (but of little or no relevance to Darwinism). Furthermore, Nietzsche’s interest in Darwinism, such as it was, was almost exclusively restricted to its significance for human affairs and culture; like most non-specialist writers of the time, he was never particularly concerned with it as a narrowly biological theory that sought to explain the origins and diversity of life (although he read several detailed studies dealing with it in this manner). It is hardly surprising, then, that Nietzsche’s evolutionism has a greater affinity with Lamarckism (which allows for cultural and intellectual inheritance) than with Darwinism as such.

There are, broadly speaking, two schools of thought on the subject of Nietzsche and Darwinism. On the one hand, Nietzsche has been frequently regarded as a Darwinist and his writings interpreted in this light.³ There are apparently good reasons for doing so. He introduces his concept of the Übermensch with the words: ‘You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes …. Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman’ (Z ‘Prologue’ 3–4). Later he will say: ‘Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species’ (Z i ‘Bestowing Virtue’). He often speaks of the crucial importance of physiology and breeding (Züchtung); he affirms naturalism and becoming (Werden); his well-known emphasis on struggle and competition has, at first glance, much in common with the Darwinian concept of struggle for existence; and he rejects the idea that nature is teleological, that life develops according to some inherent goal or purpose.

However, Nietzsche has been just as often regarded as an anti-Darwinist, and this view also has strong arguments in its favour. His express criticisms of both Darwin the man and Darwinism the theory are many and harsh. He disputes the claim that the main motor of organic change is the instinct for self-preservation (whether formulated as Schopenhauer’s ‘will to life’ or Darwin’s ‘struggle for existence’) and the passive adaptation of an organism to its external environment; instead, he prefers to stress an internal creative force – what he calls the ‘will to power’. Furthermore, he rejects the idea of progress implicit in Darwin’s theory – that life is advancing to ever greater degrees of perfection – and complains in Ecce Homo that his concept of the Übermensch has caused ‘learned cattle’ to suspect him of Darwinism (EH ‘Books’ 1). And despite his use of the term ‘super-species’ in Zarathustra, he claims in The Antichrist that he is not interested in creating some possible higher species beyond humanity but in producing more noble forms of humanity: ‘The problem I raise is not what ought to succeed mankind in the sequence of species ( – the human being is an end – ): but what type of human being one ought to breed, ought to will, as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future’ (A 3).

So which of these interpretations is correct? In a way, both are. In the most general sense in which Darwinism is (and was) understood – that is, as a byword for evolutionism in general – there can be no doubt that Nietzsche accepted it. He seems never to have wavered in his rejection of teleology or to have doubted the basic proposition that human beings evolved from animals. In a well-known note from the year 1872–73 he wrote, for example, of the ‘awful consequence of Darwinism, a theory which, by the way, I hold to be true’ (KSA 7, 19[132]). Not long afterwards, Nietzsche echoes this sentiment in On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, where he considers ‘true but deadly’ the ‘doctrines of sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts, types and species, of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal’, and argues that, should these ideas be more widely disseminated, the fabric of society will disintegrate as moral and legal codes lose their binding force (HL 9).

Furthermore, Nietzsche’s antagonism towards Darwinism proper – that is, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection – is perfectly compatible with a commitment to evolutionism in general. In fact, many nineteenth-century biologists celebrated Darwin’s achievement of putting evolutionism on a scientific basis whilst also rejecting outright, or at least downplaying, the role of natural selection (the absence of a genetic model of heredity undermined its explanatory power). Adaptation and the selective pressure of the struggle for existence – which Nietzsche himself saw as an essentially second-order phenomenon – were viewed by many of the writers in his library as subordinate to other evolutionary mechanisms: a law of development (Bildungsgesetz) (F.A. Lange in his Geschichte des Materialismus); an internal struggle for existence among the constituent parts of an organism (Wilhelm Roux in Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus); life’s insatiable tendency to expand itself (W.H. Rolph’s Biologische Probleme); and an endogenous ‘perfection principle’ impelling life to ever more complex structures (Carl von Nägeli’s Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre ).⁴

Nietzsche’s reading of a number of books about different aspects of Darwinism, many of them critical, is certainly one of the reasons why he takes a more hostile view of Darwin as he moves into the last phase of his thought around 1883. From this point onwards there are indeed a number of notes with titles such as ‘Against Darwinism’ and ‘Anti-Darwin’ (see, for example, KSA 12, 7[25]; KSA 13, 14[123], [133], [137]; also TI ‘Expeditions’ 14). But this opposition to Darwinism is rooted not only in the biological arguments he appropriated from Roux and Nägeli, for example. Internal changes in Nietzsche’s thinking, related to his move away from ‘positivism’ (involving, among other ...