Abstract
Are we obliged to see science in terms of uncovering the reality under the appearances? Nietzsche’s criticisms of science are distinctive in that, unlike some of his contemporaries and predecessors, who were content to lament the ascendancy of science over theology or literature, his attack is effectively one on a scientific rationality that takes its starting-point and rationale from early Greek metaphysics. This metaphysics is one in which the central question is that of distinguishing appearance and reality, science simply being that most recent form of enquiry that has laid claim to a monopoly to the successful realisation of this metaphysics. But although he does sometimes seem to question the monopoly of science in this respect, the main thrust of Nietzsche’s argument is against a much deeper target, the metaphysics of “reality” and “truth” underlying scientific rationality.
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Notes
Whether he is right to do so, and how much the transition to a “scientific rationality” is tempered by later developments — the Christianization of Greek metaphysics in the Patristic era, the transition from metaphysics as theology to metaphysics as a science of being in the Scholastic era, the Enlightenment construal of science as something in competition with theology, etc. — is a question I shall leave to one side here, although ultimately I believe that this is where many key issues lie.
Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufman ( Random House: New York, 1968 ), 18.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 19.
Die Geburt der Tragödie (GT) §15; translation taken from Basic Writings, 95–6.
BT 12, p. 83.
BT 12, p. 83–4.
BT 12, p. 85. The quote is not a literal one, but is almost certainly from a passage in Simplicius, given as fragment 503 in G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers ( Cambridge: Cambridge, 1963 ), 372–3.
BT 13, p. 86.
BT 14, p. 90–1.
The Genealogy of Morals, 10; ibid, p. 551.
Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vemant, Les ruses d’intelligence: la metis des grecs (Paris, 1974), translated into English as Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Sussex, 1978 ).
See Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration (London, 1969).
Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 1993 ), p. 238.
See Nathan Sivin, “Why the Scientific Revolution Did Not take Place in China — Or Didn’t It?” in E. Mendelsohn (ed.), Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences (Cambridge, 1984 ), 531–54.
Science“ as something exclusively concerned with investigation of the natural world was a project that did not begin to be pursued until the second half of the eighteenth century at the earliest. Indeed the term ”science“ does not seem to have been used in this new way until the beginning of the nineteenth century. See Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, ”De-centring the “big picture”: The Origins of Modern Scienceand the modern origins of science,“ British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 26 (1993), 407–32. Nevertheless, the situation is quite different from that described by Sivin.
See the discussion in Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration (London, 1969), chs. 7 and 8. Taoist conceptions of nature are more “active” than Confucian and so-called “neo-Confucian” ones, but Taoists regarded nature as being ultimately inscrutable.
Ibid., p. 328.
Such as in observational astronomy, where great precision was combined with a complete ignorance of the fact that one had to alter one’s calculations depending on the location of the place where the observation was made. The case is cited in Huff, op. cit., p. 240.
Alexandre Koyré, Etudes d’histoire de la pensée scientifique (Paris, 1973), p. 86.
Alexander Koyré, Newtonian Studies (London, 1965 ), 24–5. The same kind of concern is expressed in more detail in E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern ScienceVLondon, 1924 ).
In some respects, it is indeed difficult to separate them. This is the case, for example, with the thesis of Carolyn Merchant, in The Death of Nature (San Francisco, 1980), that there is a shift in a conception of nature as a nuturing mother to an image of nature as a passive woman. Here there seems to be reciprocal interaction between the development of science and the culture it develops in: although, of course, to be able to say this in the first place we need to have made the requisite distinction.
See my “Justification, Truth, and the Development of Science,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 29 (1998), 97–112.
I say “seems” because I don’t want to rule out the possibility, which I take seriously, that the claim may have started life in the seventeenth century as part of the elaboration and defense of natural theology in terms of natural philosophy, a defense that changed character as natural theology came into conflict with revealed religion in the work of deist writers at the end of the seventeenth century, and which, once separated from revealed religion, took on a life of its own and became an anti-religious tool in the hands of French Enlightenment thinkers.
See Galileo, Two New Sciences, trans. Stillman Drake ( Madison, Wisconsin, 1974 ), 65–108
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Gaukroger, S. (1999). Beyond Reality: Nietzsche’ S Science of Appearances. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 203. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2430-2_3
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