On First Principles: Rhetoric, Induction, Concern

In this essay I hope to vindicate Hume’s claim from the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that neither experience nor reason can support the principle of induction. In so doing I suggest we take a close look at how experience is constituted, following Karl Popper in arguing for a reversal in the relations Hume supposes between observation and hypotheses. The result of this will point the way to criteria which removes the requirement of rational or empirical justification for first principles on condition that they are empirically falsifiable.

I

First Principles: Induction

Hume sees our human understanding as wrought in two: (1) relations of ideas and (2) matters of fact. Relations of ideas are a priori truths, e.g. that three plus five makes eight, which we can know without having to look at how things are in the world. Matters of fact, contrarily, are known a posteriori which means that we have to look at how the world is in order to come to have such knowledge, e.g. that motion from one billiard ball communicates motion to another. In section IV of the Enquiry, Hume is keen to investigate the nature of our evidence of matters of fact “beyond the present testimony of our senses, or the records of our memory”.[1]

To begin he supposes that our knowledge of matters of fact is founded on knowledge of cause and effect, citing the example of finding a watch on a barren desert island. Finding this watch would lead one to conclude that there had once been people there through simple inference from the effect (watch) to the cause (people).[2] As we know watches exclusively as an effect of human activity we come to associate the phenomena and so are able to infer, upon finding the one, the former presence of the other. So now the problem becomes one of discovering how we arrive at knowledge of cause and effect.[3]

Hume argues that we can’t manage this a priori because we cannot infer the causal powers of anything from sensible qualities alone and so we must become empirically acquainted with causes and effects in order to make such an inference. One could not, for instance, deduce upon first seeing two pieces of smooth marble that they would become extremely difficult to separate except by lateral pressure[4] - only by having first experienced such a phenomenon could we come to expect it when next presented with two pieces of marble. If a priori reasoning cannot ground our knowledge of cause and effect that leaves us with one remaining candidate: experience. Following on from this in Part II of section IV Hume endeavours to find out what the foundation of our conclusions from experience is.

Remarkably, Hume claims that such conclusions are “not founded on reasoning, or any process of the understanding”.[5] He establishes this by considering two propositions of the sort we find in all reasoning concerning matters of fact:

(1) "I have found that such an object is always attended by such an effect".

(2) "I foresee, that other objects, which are, in appearance, similar, will be attended with similar effects".[6]

This second statement is known as the principle of uniformity. In Humean terms, it is the notion that the hidden causal powers governing the behaviour of the natural world are uniform across time. But the question is: how do we infer (2) from (1)? We begin with such experience as we have in witnessing the constant conjunction of two events, one billiard ball communicating motion to another. We might witness this simple phenomenon hundreds, maybe thousands of times – but how could we possibly derive (2) from such temporally limited cases?

Hume admits that he cannot discover the device which leads us from the one to the other, but is not willing to say that as he cannot presently think of the solution to our conundrum that no such solution is therefore possible.[7] However, in order to bolster his negative conclusion he will take apart the two forms of human understanding and try to show why we can’t in principle discover the reason for our inference from (1) to (2) in either of them. We’ve seen why we cannot make this inference a priori given that we can certainly conceive of the causal laws governing the universe changing in the future. We must therefore focus instead on probabilistic reasoning regarding matters of fact. Recall Hume’s argument up to now:

i. Our reasoning concerning matters of fact is based on cause and effect (p. 26)

ii. All reasonings and conclusions based on cause and effect are derived from experience (p. 29)

iii. All our experiential conclusions derive from the supposition that the past will resemble the future (principle of uniformity).

We see that the foundation of our conclusions based on experience is the principle of uniformity and so we cannot then secure this principle on experience without falling into circularity! We find ourselves with a problem: all of our empirical knowledge happens to be based on causal inference and yet when we look for the ground upon which this knowledge rests we cannot find it in the understanding at all. No a priori reasoning and certainly no amount of experience can justify our supposition of uniformity, for Hume.

How then are we led to anticipate future events based on our finite past experience? Hume proposes that it is habit or custom which leads us to this expectation.[8] He defines habit/custom as the propensity of a repeated operation or act to cause the reproduction of the very same operation or act, reiterating that no process of the understanding is factored in.[9] But, significantly, as this kind of faculty is not cognitive/propositional in nature (owing to its not being an operation of what Hume calls the understanding) it means that the principle of induction is not a principle at all but rather a mode of behaviour. What we must now consider is the possibility that behaviour can function as a mode of the understanding.

II

Knowing-How & Rhetoric

Italian rhetorician Ernesto Grassi sees the problem of first principles as arising from a failure to appreciate the metaphysical relation between two types of discourse: the rhetorical and the rational.[10] Rational discourse consists in proving things, and to be proven means to be demonstrated on the basis of something.[11] In order to prove the notion that a moving billiard ball will communicate motion to a stationary one, for instance, we point to our past experiences of such phenomena on the basis of the principle of induction. Raw experience alone only gets us as far as constantly conjoined perceptions - we must make an inference based on the principle of induction in order to arrive at the general claim adverted to.

But rational principles cannot themselves be demonstrated by rational means, as to be proven demands the supposition of just such first principles. This is another way of expressing Hume’s problem above, that induction cannot ground induction without presupposing itself and thereby running into circularity. So when we posit these first principles, Grassi asks, what is the form of discourse through which we do it, if not rationality? As Hume has eliminated the possibility of experience filling this role, perhaps we ought to consider Grassi’s claim that it is from out of rhetorical, creative discourse that these suppositions come into being.[12] Grassi understands rhetoric metaphysically as the origin of rational discourse and not, as is typically understood, a set of clever argumentative tricks.[13] Rhetoric is understood as emerging from praxis, the day-to-day concerns of human existence, which are historically contingent.[14]

As we’ve seen, Hume concludes that neither demonstrative nor probabilistic reasoning can ground the principle upon which induction rests – it is only habit which leads us to suppose this. But what if the phenomenon proposed here as “habit” was in fact a form of the understanding? Certain philosophers in fact do see this non-propositional habitual comportment as a form of the understanding, one upon which propositional knowledge rests. Gilbert Ryle was one such philosopher:

“…both philosophers and laymen tend to treat intellectual operations as the core of mental conduct […] they tend to define all mental-conduct concepts in terms of cognition. They suppose that the primary exercise of minds consists in finding the answers to questions and that their other occupations are merely applications of considered truths…”[15]

While this might not be totally true of Hume (see footnote 12), nevertheless he is partly implicated for imagining that the understanding performs only cognitive operations, either through a priori deduction in formal systems or a posteriori inference based on past experience. But our readiness to deal with situations in our daily lives exhibits understanding too, for instance we know-how to use all sorts of things without needing to make explicit inductive or deductive inferences based on considered truths. Ryle saw the application and consideration of discovered truths as an operation of intelligence, and not vice-versa. Praxis, then, is perhaps a form of the understanding too.

With respect to this the first thing which strikes us about Hume’s account is his restriction of the understanding to propositional forms, both demonstrative and probabilistic. While his insistence that sceptical abstract reasoning will never affect the day to day comportment of human life[16] is very astute, nevertheless I feel his cognitive-propositional picture of the understanding prevents him from fully grasping any possible non-propositional origins of logical principles - leaving them shrouded in mystery. In the next section we will consider more evidence regarding the notion of practical concern and the role in plays in human understanding.

III

The Necessity of Perspective

What Hume says about the specific nature of experience aside from its relation to ideas is scant, suggesting he thinks the concept is unproblematic and in need of no elucidation. However, if we take a closer look at how experience is resolved to us we might gain significant insight into Hume’s problem. Karl Popper helpfully deflates the myth of directly intelligible experience, insisting first that experience is experience-for something and that as such any perceived repetitions are repetitions-for-something.[17] The perspective[18] of the subject is paramount as any perceived repetitions have to be interpreted as repetitions from within a perspective. This is as against the “naïve view” that events are similar and their being recognised as such is down to our unmediated perception of that fact.[19]

In order to make this clear consider two separate cases involving one person passing an item to another person. Both instances are formally identical with respect to experienced sense-data (which is to say in both instances we witness one person passing an item to another). Now suppose that these instances have different meanings - in one a gift is being given and in another a debt is being repaid. Sense-data alone cannot convey these different meanings as the sense impressions themselves are identical and therefore contain no indication of how to discriminate the different meanings. The meanings of the two instances are found in the purposive activities involved. In the gift-giving example, for instance, let’s say it’s your birthday and so when the gift is presented to you, you can interpret the item as a gift according to your expectations of the situation. Contrast this with the debt repayment instance – one is not expecting a gift, but they are expecting repayment from their friend and so they interpret the item as repayment, not as a gift.

Popper furthers this challenge, inviting us to appreciate the absurdity of the instruction: “take a pencil and paper; carefully observe, and write down what you have observed!”[20] This instruction immediately solicits the question “observe what?” – alluding to the requirement of a purposeful direction to guide any observation:

“Observation is always selective. It needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a problem. And its description presupposes a descriptive language, with property words; it presupposes similarity and classification, which in its turn presupposes interests, points of view, and problems.”[21]

It’s helpful to think of this in terms of a library. If it was disorganised it would be very difficult to find any book we were after, so we organise it as best fits its particular purpose. In a university library, for instance, the books are typically divided along disciplinary lines; Philosophy, German, Psychology, etc. Popper’s point is that we perform a similar feat in our experience, interpreting/organising it according to how what we’re perceiving matters to us, relative to our interests, points of view, and problems.

The import of this result is two-fold. The first outcome is that Hume is right that experience alone cannot support the principle of induction (as we have discovered the necessity of a perspective from which to interpret experience). The second outcome is that Hume’s psychological solution runs into the exact same difficulties as we found when trying to explain the supposition of the principle of induction from experience. This is owing to the fact that repetitions need to be interpreted as repetitions from within a perspective so that even habit presupposes experience within an organising perspective.[22] Two avenues within the problem now point us to the perspectival character of experience.

If the first outcome stands we see that the proper starting points for securing knowledge are problems emerging from our particular interests/concerns – not raw perception itself.[23] We have seen how we cannot subtract our active sensitivity to the meaning of a situation and try to rebuild it from the sensory remainder as one needs their concernful perspective to interpret sensory experience. An experiment involving young dogs which Popper mentions offers a great example of this. After being exposed to a lit cigarette for the first time the dogs turn and move away from it, unable to be coaxed into returning. Days later they were shown the cigarette again and responded in like manner, even turning away from a rolled up piece of white paper, interpreting it as similar in kind to the cigarette which had previously disturbed them.[24]

The dogs’ past experience informs their current perspective and enables them to anticipate discomfort when presented with another object which looks like the offending cigarette. But if (1) a perspective allows our experience to be intelligible while, (2) experience simultaneously informs and shapes that very perspective - are we not again stuck at circular reasoning? Not this time, as our expanded notion of experience shows us that the dog’s initial apprehension of the cigarette as unpleasant was not a passive/direct experience but a concernful experience mediated by the dogs’ simple aversion to unpleasant smells. The experiment shows that no foregoing experience is required for an object to be initially interpreted as something.

IV

Conclusion

Now, as we’ve seen that knowledge does not proceed from unmediated experience but from experience within an organising perspective, we may suppose that the origin of the principle of uniformity is found in those very activities in which the anticipation of regularity is discovered. What Hume called habit is not any passive reception of repetitive impressions, in fact we’ve seen that it need not even be repetitive but can be formed after one instance. Habit, rather, is the active appropriation of things relevant to our interests. This leaves us with the possibility that no justification is required for our expectation of regularity save its genesis in dealing with things in a world organised by our interests.

But Popper’s solution does not cast our principle of uniformity to the hounds of irrationality. While it may originate in the behavioural anticipation of uniformity this does not mean that it isn’t subject to another empirical process: falsification. If no amount of verifying experience can justify the leap from constantly conjoined perceptions of a certain kind to a universal rule governing all possible perceptions of that kind, induction is troubled from the ground up. However, a falsified theory is falsified deductively – meaning that you can logically demonstrate that something isn’t the case[25] rather than inferring that it probably is. Finding a black swan, for example, renders it deductively certain that the hypothesis “all swans are white” is false. The aim therefore is not to verify the principle of uniformity by experience but to ensure that it is able to be falsified by experience. The condition is that falsification takes place within a perspective wherein a falsifying observation is interpreted as a falsifying observation.

Bibliography

Hume, D. (1909). Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Clarendon Press.

Popper, K. (1972). Conjectures and Refutations. Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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[1] (Hume, 1909), p. 26

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid. p. 27

[4] Ibid. p. 28

[5] Ibid. p. 32

[6] Ibid. p. 34

[7] Ibid. pp. 34-35

[8] Ibid. p. 43

[9] Ibid. p. 43

[10] (Grassi, 2001), pp. 18-24 (note:)

[11] Ibid. p. 19

[12] Ibid. p. 19

[13] Ibid. pp. 18-19

[14] Ibid. pp. 6-7 (if we were not concernful beings for whom the natural world has meaning with respect to those concerns, nothing like induction would be necessary as we would have no need to make any inductions).

[15] (Ryle, 2000), p. 27 (my italics)

[16] (Hume, 1909), p. 41

[17] (Popper, 1972), p. 44

[18] Popper doesn’t explicitly use the word ‘perspective’ however I feel it is a convenient catch-all expression for the various phenomena he lists as helping organise and make sense of experience (see footnote 15).

[19] Ibid. p. 45

[20] Ibid. p. 46

[21] Ibid. pp. 46-47

[22] Ibid. p. 45

[23] Ibid. p. 155

[24] Ibid. p. 44

[25] Providing all background assumptions stand, etc.

Fragments of Zarathustra: The North Wind

Dipping back into Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra after a three-year hiatus and am amazed at how dense and rich it is when you concentrate and spend time immersed in single passages (though of course with Nietzsche's work especially, no single part can be wholly grasped without reference to the broader panorama of his whole thought). I'm considering going over the text again and sharing my interpretations of a few selected passages for future posts, the first of which we'll look at now:

The figs are falling from the trees, they are fine and sweet: and as they fall their red skins split. I am a north wind to ripe figs. Thus, like figs, do these teachings fall to you, my friends: now drink their juice and eat their sweet flesh! It is autumn all around and clear sky and afternoon - Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, "On the Blissful Islands"

The figs, as Nietzsche makes clear, are the teachings of Zarathustra (and therefore of Nietzsche himself). A prevalent theme in the Zarathustra, and in much of Nietzsche's work, is that of nihilism, a problem which finally led him to propose a "revaluation of all values". The destruction of values, principles, ways of living, and so on was felt by Nietzsche to result from the prevailing values' own will-to-truth. The values destroy themselves when they turn backwards and discover falsehoods where truth was supposed to dwell.

As the "north wind" Nietzsche presents himself literally as a force of nature, an icey Hyperborean force descending from Northern Europe to cast the ripened figs to the Earth. The image of a fig is also deeply significant. Note how the figs are already ripe, all Nietzsche can do is take them down off the branches. He cannot create them ex nihilo - they are received, inherited from the past (recall Nietzsche's love of necessity, life overcoming itself, amor fati...) In a passage from Ecce Homo, Nietzsche shares his thoughts about creativity with respect to his experience writing the Zarathustra: "Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages called inspiration? [...] One is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. [...] One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed - I have never had any choice".

In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche denounces the notion of free will (and therefore also of blame) as contrary to necessity, sourcing them in the desire to punish those who do you wrong. If there is no free will, the idea goes, those who do us harm cannot be held responsible (and therefore cannot be punished). Elsewhere he speaks of the notion of free will being founded in the idea that we are in essence some sort of separate ego-substrate, a transcendental eye which sees absolutely, and which is not bound by the necessity through which the phenomenal world declares itself. The notion of returning to Earthly values, and of affirming the phenomenal world as the only demonstrable world, is a theme permeating Nietzsche's mature work, and in fact one of the primary themes in the Zarathustra. The old values to be replaced are, after all, those transcendentalising doctrines which interpret life as worthless and which posit other more 'meaningful' worlds, either theistic or metaphysical.

In any case, the metaphor here is poignant - the teachings are just "one necessity more", hanging from the branch, necessitated by the tree, necessitated by the Earth... Necessity itself is not overthrown along with the old values but is in the process of overcoming only affirmed again. And with the wax and wane of the seasons the figs ripen and become ready for harvest. The seasons themselves are a classic example of necessity as life overcoming itself, and as Nietzsche has presented his thought in a clear autumn afternoon, the north wind metaphor is particularly remarkable. His attention to sensations and feelings along with his aversion to merely intellectual argument wholly justifies itself in this vivid display. Autumn signals its fate: the coming of winter - the north wind is a grim reminder of what is to come. But what is so powerful is that Nietzsche saw himself as telling us the history of the next 200 years... a cold and discomforting reminder of the future indeed. He hailed the coming of the new values and therefore also the destruction of the old, a moment of such significance that Nietzsche presents it as nothing less than the murder of God - an act which would plunge Europe into the cold and dark winter of nihilism.

After Zarathustra's disciples take the teachings and begin the creation of new values, nihilism overcomes itself and we emerge refreshed in the Spring and the Summer whence the new values reign, and on again into autumn and to eternal recurrence...

On Perspectivism, Science, and the Affects in Nietzsche

In this essay I am going to critically discuss Nietzsche’s account of perspectivism, defending Brian Leiter’s rejection of what has come to be known as the received view. With his interpretation in view I aim to unearth an example of perspectival interpretation embedded in the last part of the Genealogy of Morals (henceforth ‘GM’). To this end I hope to go some way towards answering the question of what Nietzsche means when he speaks of perspectives and consequently how he understands interpretation.

The place which we find Nietzsche’s most explicit account of perspectivism is found in the GM section 12. In it he denounces the idea of a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless, knowing subject” insisting that it is in fact unintelligible to imagine a knowing being having a nature of that kind. For Nietzsche, the separation of the will and the intellect amounts to the latter’s castration. At the section’s close he asserts the priority of knowing grounded in an active interpretive engagement with the world organised from within a perspective and insists that such perspectival knowing is the only kind of knowing.

Nietzsche’s comments are, unfortunately, very brief and so a plentiful horizon of interpretive possibilities has been opened up trying to get clear on what Nietzsche means when he talks of perspectives and interpretation. The “received view” has it that perspectivism amounts to the following claims: the world has no determinate nature, our models of the world are necessarily in error (no interpretation has a definite state of affairs to correspond to), and as a result no ‘mere’ interpretation is any better than another.[1] The evidence for this interpretation is found throughout Nietzsche’s work, in his denial of an absolutely knowable reality,[2] his challenging of the value of truth,[3] and his insistence that all understanding is interpretation.[4]

Treating all of these issues would take us beyond the remit of the current paper, however presenting some interpretive evidence against the received view (henceforth ‘RV’) will be necessary in support of the present claim. The aspect of Leiter’s interpretation which is significant in the context of the present essay is his emphasis on passages where Nietzsche can be seen speaking of a certain privileged mode of access to reality. The idea is that if Nietzsche’s mature philosophy does contain a notion of epistemic privilege then the RV (which asserts priority over no view) will simply be at odds with Nietzsche’s other mature views, rendering the interpretation inconsistent.[5]

Throughout his later work we often see Nietzsche rejecting ‘spiritual’ or metaphysical interpretations of matters in favour of naturalistic or physiological accounts. At the end of GM I he in fact offers a sort of challenge to academia, to involve physiologists and physicians in developing the history of moral concepts. He writes that “all ‘Thou shalts’ […] require physiological investigation and interpretation prior to psychological examination".[6] Elsewhere, Nietzsche describes the possible physiological grounds of ressentiment as “excessive secretion from the gall-bladder”, “deficiency of sulphuric or phosphoric potash in the blood”, and “poor circulation in the lower body”, among others.[7] Yet more revealingly he even says that “if one cannot deal with ‘spiritual suffering’ […] this is not the fault of his ‘spirit’; but more probably that of his stomach” and “if he cannot ‘deal’ with an experience, then this kind of indigestion is as much a matter of physiology as the other kind".[8]

Similarly, in Twilight of the Idols (henceforth ‘TI’) Nietzsche describes a fundamental error of morality and religion in their conflation of cause and effect.[9] Morality and religion err by prescribing a way to live and insisting that following it will grant happiness. Nietzsche instead holds that “one can experience hope because the physiological basic feeling is once more strong and ample".[10] This reversal means that the state of the body provides the condition of possibility for feeling ill or well, but Nietzsche’s whole claim is even stronger than this. He seems to want to tell us that a good constitution necessarily causes someone to perform certain acts (they must, he writes) and refrain from others, contra the religious/moral view that happiness actually results from such acts of faith, charity, and hope themselves.[11] Nietzsche here explicitly denounces moral and religious interpretations as translation into a "false dialect".[12]

The difficulty the RV faces is translating Nietzsche’s talk of falsehoods, errors, and the priority of physiological interpretation into the sorts of radically sceptical terms it must couch him in. If one interpretation cannot be better than another, why does Nietzsche quite obviously prefer to emphasise physiological phenomena in his discussions of morality? Leiter offers two ways a proponent of the RV might respond to this challenge, the most promising of which is denying that Nietzsche grants epistemic privilege to naturalistic and physiological interpretations. On this view Nietzsche favours an interpretation on the basis of its pragmatic value where endorsement emerges not of a relationship to truth but out of its contribution to living well. Certainly in his notebooks he describes every interpretation as “a symptom of growth or decline"[13] which would seem to suggest a mode of evaluation apart from epistemic concerns.

The problem is that if the world has no determinate structure then how could it be that moral and religious interpretations translate somatic phenomena into a false dialect? In order for something to be falsified there must be a discrepancy between the way in which it is and the way in which it has been presented. This simply doesn’t make any sense under the RV which has it that, owing to its lack of a determinate structure, any interpretation of the world is as good as another. Further supporting passages are provided by Leiter, indicating where Nietzsche denounces morality and religion for their lack of contact with reality[14] and where he stresses that the phenomenal world is the only demonstrable world.[15][16] The consequence of this view is that it devalues transcendental interpretations such as religion, morality, and metaphysics. Furthermore, as Nietzsche is here explicitly praising a mode of access to reality it seems the most obvious way of understanding his rejection is epistemic and not pragmatic.

Leiter makes use of the following analogy provided by Frithjof Bergmann to make this interpretation of Nietzsche clear.[17] On any given map there is represented a series of data representing a landscape of some sort. Depending on the concernful perspective which gives the map its meaning (is it for navigation? for finding treasure? is it a map of geological phenomena?) certain elements of the world become salient and are represented on the map. If you want to get from Leeds to London the same map a geologist might use to predict the whereabouts of a given mineral won’t be of use. You need a map with roads on it, not geological formations. The roads and geological formations are both there in the world, though not always represented on the same map, maps being as they are informed by a set of active concerns (what the map is for).

So it is with interpretation, certain aspects of the world become salient relative to one’s concernful perspective. There are infinitely various elements we can include on a map, though only a few of those are relevant to our concerns. The possibility remains that some maps are false in that they do not describe the landscape at all. Critically, as Christopher Janaway points out, the idea of an “absolute” map which excluded nothing is absurd, yet, contra the RV, it doesn’t follow that the maps we do have don’t describe the world in any way.[18]

Now, it would be hasty to call this matter settled though we have at least now provided sufficient textual evidence to demonstrate the plausibility of Leiter’s claim against the RV. It seems like Nietzsche does value certain interpretations over others, and that he does so on epistemic grounds. But in order to get clearer on what Nietzsche actually means by “interpretation” and how he imagines a perspective we will look at the example of science to which he devotes a considerable amount of time to in the GM. We’ll see what he has to say about the perspective from which science emerges and then trace the type of interpretation such a perspective gives rise to.

Nietzsche claims that there is no such thing as a science without presuppositions[19] and controversially accuses science of being supported by a mode of the ascetic denial of sensuality.[20] He holds that scientists are moved by a will to conceal their suffering which emerges “from a lack of any great love”. He describes them as “insensate men who fear one thing only: being brought to consciousnes..."[21] This ascetic basis results in the scientific emphasis on disinterested contemplation, something which Nietzsche himself rejects.[22] There are obvious affinities here between the suffering of the scientist from a lack of ideals and the suffering of the poorly-constituted, treated in GM II, both of whom, for Nietzsche, seek refuge in the denial of sensuality[23] and the denial of their perspectival characters.[24]

Now, Leiter quotes Nietzsche as saying that the physicist’s interpretation of the world is a “perversion of meaning” and a “bad mode of interpretation".[25] In GM I Nietzsche presents his initial comments on the character of the scientist. The “English Psychologists” mentioned here seek the driving force of human life “in the very place the intellectual pride of man would least wish to find it” – in a “blind arbitrariness of a mechanistic chain of ideas” or “in something purely passive, automatic, reflex-like, molecular, and fundamentally stupid".[26] In a late notebook entry Nietzsche openly challenges the mechanistic notion that calculability grants comprehension, and taking the example of a piece of music he asks how much has been understood when its calculable aspects are translated into the formalism of mathematics.[27]

Nietzsche’s dim view of scientific reductionism is obvious, but crucially (and in line with Leiter’s interpretation) he does not insist that the interpretation offered by scientists is untrue. In fact, Nietzsche asserts that there remain a lot of useful things for science to pursue, and even remarks that the work of scientists brings him pleasure.[28] His repeated emphasis on physiology too reveals his support of science, however ambivalent that support may be - so why it that the physicist’s mechanistic view is a bad mode of interpretation?

Nietzsche’s selection of a piece of music to demonstrate the wrongs of reductionism is incredibly astute. Quite clearly, when one reduces a piece of music down to its calculable formal aspects much of the piece is stripped away. Merely considering a list of calculable facts is an entirely different manner of approach to listening to the music and being moved by it. What is reduced in a mechanistic interpretation is the character of a thing as it is when it’s experienced. What makes his example so clever is that music has an essentially affective import so that science’s “cooling of the feelings"[29] is made particularly obvious when given in contrast to it.

It might be true that a piece of music has this or that calculable structure[30] but it is simply erroneous to imagine this disinterested perspective as the only or most fundamental way of understanding the music. One way of discovering things about the piece is to listen to it and be involved with it first-hand, it is quite another to reduce it to its formal calculable elements for the sake of study. We’re already familiar with Nietzsche’s strong emphasis on first-hand phenomenal experience. However, what might seem a strange is that he seems to be referring to something other than science when he gives deference to phenomenal experience. In fact he even goes so far as to say that science concerns itself with a world other than the phenomenal world.[31] Indeed the object of physics is no longer even the object of experience considered in its primary qualities but the ideal formalism of mathematics.[32]

What the foregoing demonstrates is how a perspective, a will, effects an interpretation of the world. If Nietzsche’s analysis of the character of the scientist is correct, science’s inclination towards discovering facts of a certain formal, ideal character by means of disinterested contemplation emerges from a denial of sensuality. What thus becomes salient in this interpretation of the world are precisely those sorts of facts, and affectivity, sensuality, and so on are demoted to a lower rank ontologically.

- Jordan Adshead (February 2012)

Bibliography

Heidegger, M. (2009). The Question Concerning Technology. In M. Heidegger, Basic Writings (pp. 307-343). Routledge.

Janaway, C. (2007). Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy. Oxford University Press.

Leiter, B. (1994). Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. In R. Schacht, Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (pp. 334-357). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1968). The Will To Power. Vintage Books.

Nietzsche, F. (2003). Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Penguin Books.

Nietzsche, F. (2008). On The Genealogy of Morals. Oxford University Press.

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[1] Leiter (1994), p. 334

[2] GM III, 12

[3] GM III, 24

[4] WP 481

[5] Leiter (1994), pp. 336-338

[6] GM I, 17

[7] GM III, 15

[8] GM III, 16

[9] TI VI, 1

[10] TI VI, 6 (emphasis added)

[11] TI VI, 2

[12] TI VI, 6

[13] WP 600

[14] The Anti-Christ (‘A’), 15

[15] TI III, 6

[16] TI IV

[17] Leiter (1994), p. 356

[18] Janaway (2007), p. 204

[19] GM III, 24

[20] Ibid.

[21] GM III, 23

[22] GM III, 12

[23] GM III, 25

[24] GM III, 24

[25] Beyond Good and Evil (‘BGE’), 22

[26] GM I, 1

[27] WP 624

[28] GM III, 23

[29] GM III, 25

[30] In Bergmann’s terms, it is an aspect owning the possibility of being represented on a ‘map’, but it is not an absolutely complete map in itself.

[31] GM III, 24

[32] Heidegger (2009), pp. 326-328