NIETZSCHES CRITICAL THEORY OF SCIENCE AS ART

NIETZSCHES CRITICAL THEORY OF SCIENCE AS ARTBabette E. Babich

Department of Philosophy: Fordham University113 West 60th Street: New York, NY 10023In his post- (if not neo-)Kantian and informatively pre-Heideggerian reflection on the very possibility of knowledge and truth, Nietzsche's critique of truth articulates the "tragic" limit of critique as such. At this tragic limit, Nietzsche's radicalization of Kant's critical project inverts or opposes traditional readings of Kant's critical program. Nietzsche aligns both Kant and Schopenhauer with what he named the effectively, efficiently pathological optimism of the rationalist drive to knowledge, patterned on the Cyclopean eye of Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy.(1) For the rest of Nietzsche's writerly life, the name of Socrates would serve both as a signifier for the historical personage marking the end of the "tragic age" of the Greeks as well as a signifier for the philosophical tradition of the idealization of reason, knowledge, and truth: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer.The path of science, for Kant, especially regarded as the developmental course of natural science, or more accurately: mathematical physics, represented the paradigmatic progress ideal or evolution of a positive increase in knowledge beyond what was known by (or given in experience). On this schematic outline, the scientific knowledge of (say) Newtonian physics progresses to an underlying truth beyond appearamce. All knowledge, Kant wrote, begins with experience but the mystery of truth entails that all knowledge does not stop there, which further entails that what can be known is not limited to experience. One can pronounce the mathematical and physical truth of what is beyond any possible experience; more typically and more mundanely, the achievement of theoretically informed, empirically or practically verified science means that in spite of the logical force of David Hume's critique, one can predict what will be; one can know the future on the basis of past resemblances. Kant's critical reflection began by noting that whatever is must also be possible, the question is how? What metaphysics had heretofore ambitioned without success, to Kant's mind, mathematics and physics seemed patently to have attained. The Euclidean shape of space, the successive arrow of time, these conditions were the necessary, eternal prerequisites for or conditions of the possibility of experience in space and in time. The claims that every event must have a cause or that two things cannot, in the same way, and at the same time, occupy the same space were therefore preconditions for the possibility of scientific knowledge just because science was built upon such axioms: scientific knowledge was as manifest in the axioms of physcial space and time as in the axioms of mathematical speculation.So far was Nietzsche from standing in Kantian humility and awe before the starry sky above, much less the moral law within, that Nietzsche would have been one of the few men in his century or any other to challenge the apotheosisation of Newton or else, for more evolutionary tastes, Darwin. Kant's error lay in "solving" the "problem of science," invoking it as a touchstone for philosophy rather than raising "the problem of science itself ... as a problem, as questionable" (BT, Attempt at a Self-Criticism 2) as Nietzsche would claim that he alone was the first to do. As inherently uncritical, the enterprise of science was even more subject to the same intrinsic limitations as philosophy: "it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests" (GS 344). Metaphysics was possible as a science neither in mathematics nor natural science nor indeed theo-ontology (or cosmology).(2) Although Nietzsche liked to claim that he aspired to a more radical doubt than Descartes and although he was surely more critical than Kant in calling for the key reflex of the critical project to be turned against itself, Nietzsche nonetheless differs from the enlightenment project of philosophical modernity in general, i.e., from Kant if not Descartes, for he does not exclude his own provocative solution from the very pernicious problem of the limit of critical reflection. Rather than a revolutionary call for still another effort, as it may be heard from authors as dissimilar as the Marquis de Sade and Jrgen Habermas, that is: from the height of the enlightenment to our own post-enlightenment times, Nietzsche recognizes the tragic limit of critique as such. Any critical project is irrecusably subject to distortion precisely because an organon, even a reflective organon, simply cannot be used on itself. Thus the reflexive limit of the critical project entailed that what Nietzsche was to name "the problem of science" (BT, Self-Criticism 2) could not be recognized on the ground of science.(3)Regarded as a radically critical, which is also to say: quintessentially philosophic approach to the question of science, Nietzsche's grounding question of theoretical or scientific knowledge quickly takes the philosophic reader to the depths of critical reflection. Not even the original author of the critical philosophy, puts science so manifestly in question (though to be sure Kant does show the extent to which science itself is constrained by the preconditions of the understanding as such). And if Kant is scrupulously uncritical in this regard, we are still more restrained as a culture today. It is anti-modern, anti-science, and indeed: irrational to challenge the hegemony of science, scientia, episteme. Thus, we tend not to challenge the epistemic value of natural or physical science. This reticence extends from real, i.e., ordinary, non-philosophical life to embrace not only physics and genetic engineering but the newly chic technoculture of information technology and cognitive science as knowledge. When a physicist speaks (whether in the tones of geekish jocularlity as in the case of the late "Mr." Richard Feynman or with the savage gravity of Stephen Weinberger) we swallow what is said without a word, if only in the fear (now more than justified post the "science wars" or "clash of the wimps vs. the nerds") that any question or reservation be interpretable as a sign of our own anxiously culpable scientific incompetence or audacity.(4) Such a seemingly uncritical adulation of science (as the impressive and imperial achievements of techno-scientific engineering in the form of roads/aqueducts, bridges or in the inventions, steam- and oil-driven, of the machine age, or more recently, the age of computer images and instant media communications such as television, telephones, cellular phones, the internet, and so on) has characterised intellectual culture since the days not only of Newton but of Lucretious and and there are those who will argue, with Nietzsche at the forefront, that this is the true legacy of Plato's academy and his pre-Cartesian idealisation of geometry as the sine qua non for wisdom itself.(5)In the contextual (conceptual) and diffuse complex of Nietzsche's early (and later) reflections on the relation between truth and lie, science comes to be "seen for the first time as a problem."(6) Because the problem of science cannot be seen on the ground of science (this is the simple dyad of truth and lie in a truth table/truth value sense), Nietzsche appropriated the perspectival reflex he calls the prism, lens, or reflective "optic" of art and life. But Nietzsche's critical project itself is far from transparent, which may be why the majority of specialist scholars appear to have overleapt the convolutions of Nietzsche's same critical epistemic concerns.From the start, Nietzsche argues, the whole of philosophy (like language itself) followed an illogical course. It is only as philosophy develops that "it takes on the pathos of truth and truthfulness. Initially, this has nothing to do with matters of logic. Instead it indicates merely that no conscious deception is propagated" (KSA 7, 486). Thus Nietzsche offers a contrast between earlier culture (including philosophic culture and he uses similar language in a discussion of the philosophic virtue of Thales first articulation of the ubiquity of liquidity [cf. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks 3, and KSA 7, 431]) with our own current outlook vis--vis truth and lie, appearance and reality: "A man who does not believe in nature's truthfulness but perceives instead metaphorphoses, diguises, masquerades everywhere --seeing divinities in bulls, the wisdom-plentiful author of nature in stallions, nymphs in trees: when such a man now institutes truthfulness as his own law, he comes as well to believe in the truthfulness of nature toward him" (KSA 7, 482). Thus Nietzsche always foregrounds willed illusion as the ultimate test of the highest art of tragic redemption: "one must," he says, "will illusion." The later Nietzsche repeats this earlier reflection by reminding us that in contradistinction to the origins of mythic culture, and what remains the case in our dreams, rather than a play of appearances, revealing the artistry behind the world, rather than a festival play, or a game, we transform deception into a moral (not merely an epistemic) issue. In this framework, in an early Nachla entry entitled "On the lie" Nietzsche expresses the notion of "truth and lie" beyond good and evil in a precisely "extramoral sense" articulating the contrast between art and knowledge and between ancient, tragic wisdom and modern nihilism: "The assertion of knowledge has a moral source" (KSA 7, 473).To understand the philosophic importance of Nietzsche's critique of science as such (i.e., not only natural science but also theology, history, philology, and even philosophy, etc.), we recall that Nietzsche will later echo his earlier reflections on the value of truth with reference to deception by reminding us not of the possibility of lying or of the illusion of play-acting, dressing up (as the actors in the comic play Shakespeare named after a dream dress up as Oberon or Titania, or even Bottom, but rather of being duped. One refuses the idea that one should be lied to. But "it is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance" (BGE 34). For Nietzsche, regarding the "blind rage with which philosophers resist being deceived," it is imperative to pose the deflationary question "Why not?" (ibid.). The rage to avoid deception (cf. Nietzsche's Hobbesian cum Piercian convention of a Friedensschluss coined to avoid "the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain [i.e., harmful] kinds of deception" [KSA 1, 877-878]), to abolish suffering, the drive to be sure that everything, including "God and nature" be found subject to the very same laws (Kant) are all for Nietzsche symptomatic not of the logical substratum of the world in truth but the same "moral prejudice." And as we strive to avoid being hoodwinked, to eliminate error and lie, our valuation of the pure, monological, and singular truth threatens a blind eye to the world we can countenance and thereby the world of possible experience and understanding in a schematism reducing the range of polyvalent perspectives to no more than a logically univocal "false" alternative.The critical question Nietzsche raises against science is not what we today would call a critisism or critique of science. Nietzsche is not concerned with the products (value) of science per se (whether religion or morality, history or thermodynamics) and thus he can and does praise science (in its integrity) again and again. Instead, Nietzsche's critical undertaking challenges the possibility of any knowledge of the philophical foundations of science (as art) in the light what he speaks of as life. As an art or techne/technique, science is a means for winning the truth. Thus Nietzsche famously (and iconoclastically) argues for a parallel between the ascetic practices of and ideals of both religious and scientific projects in the third section (and not only there) of On the Genealogy of Morals. The ascetic striving for truth Nietzsche describes as alienating and alien to us "Man does not exist by nature in order to know. Two faculties required for different purposes truthfulness (and metaphor) have engendered the inclination to truth" (KSA 6, 474; cf. 475). For Nietzsche, rather than an ordinary perceptual correspondence, the idealist fantasy of seeing and saying the truth, the drive to know depends upon the humanizing (anthropomorphic) inclination or direction of egologocentric engagement with the world: "Ultimately, every law of nature is a sum of anthropomorphic relations" and Nietzsche adds an addendum contra the modern scientific ideal of quantificational objectivty: "especially number ..." (KSA 4, 494). This we may regard as Nietzsche's Protagorean qua Procrustean Delphic principle: "the basic thought of science is that man is the measure of all things." (494; cf. 449;BGE 3). Otherwise said: "All natural science is nothing but an attempt to understand man and what is anthropological; more correctly, it is an attempt to return continuously to man via the longest and most roundabout ways" (KSA 7, 449).Nietzsche's reflections on truth and lie return again and again to the problem of logic, in the wake of Socrates' transformation of the philosophic enterprise because with Socrates "truthfulness gains possession of logic" (487). By the time we get to Aristotle, the challenge of "the infinite difficulty of classification" (ibid.) finds its determinative resolution in the principle of non-contradiction, as Aristotle underscores this first principle as an axiomatic assumption apart from any necessity for (or indeed: any possibility of) demonstration (Meta. 1005b 15-25). This same principle sets the terms for what Nietzsche calls the conflict between art and knowledge.(7)The outcome of this conflict is decided at the outset.(8) There is (can be) no articulable or logical basis for conflict between the irrational and the rational on logical (or else: rational) grounds. By the same token, there is no contest (no ratio; no analogy or comparison) between art (qua irrational) and knowledge (or science). Thus while Nietzsche claims that both art and science trade in illusions, traditional philosophers of science together with the vast majority of scholars in other disciplines, but above all, the scientists themselves hear in Nietzsche's assertions (when they advert to them at all) only the chaotic impressions of what they sometimes bemusedly think to recognize (inaccurately enough) as the "Dionysian" (i.e., per definitionem, perforce, irrational) because and just because such scientists, for their part, happen to know that the object of science is the pure and simple truth.(9) The recent science/culture skirmish(10) is thus both a contemporary result of this insularity and a testament to the ongoing hegemony of science.The unimpeachably mainstream view in the philosophy of science and among real-life scientists themselves contends (this is a minimum) that if scientific knowledge is to be counted as known as such, that is, as true, it must certainly or very probably not be false. The great appeal of Popper's falsificationist ideology (particularly but not only) for nave philosophers of science, and the theoretical core of the mainstream criticisms raised against astrology (mostly by intellectually aggrieved scientists) and Freudian psychoanlysis (mostly by Adolf Grnbaum) is its aura of modern free thinking and logical enlightenment. But molecular biology or (as the example of Pons-Fleischmann illustrates) low-temperature fusion physics are disciplines not falsifiable in peer-review practice (experimental design and critique). The received or normal account of science has to be argued at all costs. The possibility of conceptual, theoretical and experimental change remains as difficult to advance, to test, to defend (i.e., paradigm transitions remain as problematic and "revolutionary" (and that means as subversive)] as they have been throughout science's history.In the philosophy of science, truth and lie are epistemologically authorized (not just moral) opposites. And, again, defining art qua art as beyond the constraints or limitations of truth, means that art -- including the poetic expression of the "truth of art" -- is beyond any opposition to lie. We have, according to one convention, two categories, or, for another enduring coinage: two cultures. It is of capital importance to note that such a distance or disparity hardly means that art and truth/knowledge are not comparable. Rather are art and truth/science always and only unilaterally compared in coordinate or binary terms as "two cultures." Artists speak of science (Leonardo, Cezanne, van Gogh, Klee, Valry) invoking the language of science and scientists speak of art (and beauty) in science's terms.(11) It is thus evident in C.P. Snow's influential lecture of the same name, that art and knowledge (or science) are to be judged or arraigned on the terms of the sciences and not the other way around -- which other way is also not accidentally Nietzsche's way.(12)For Nietzsche, considering, on the one hand, "the value of knowledge, and, on the other hand, a beautiful illusion which has exactly the same value as an item of knowledge -- provided only that it is an illusion in which one believes --, one realizes that life requires illusions, i.e., untruths which are taken to be truths" (KSA 7, 433). Nietzsche's critique of knowledge as art, the illusion of truth as illusion qua willed illusion, refuses the idealising terms of the opposition between knowledge and art and thus highlights the "nihilistic" consequences implicit in the uncritical ranking of knowledge above art.(13)For Nietzsche, "truth," precisely in and according to its ideal Platonic definition, "cannot be recognized." With this critical explication, Nietzsche means no challenge to the Platonic ideal but only argues that qua empirical "truth" (i.e., what today is called scientific or even factual truth): there is no truth. "Truth is unknowable; Everything knowable illusion" (KSA 7, 633). Again, "Knowing the truth is impossible" (519) or in the more famous expression of this in "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," "Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions" (KSA 1, 880-881). If we dare (and this at our own hermeneutic peril) to overlook or if (let's be phenomenological about it and say:) if we "bracket" Nietzsche's epistemologically bold style, it is manifest that he does no more than affirm the exactly critical perspective for beings such as ourselves who know and can know only via appearances. "Without metaphor there is no authentic knowing. Knowing is only an operation using the most arbitrary metaphors." Thus for Nietzsche, "Strictly regarded, knowing takes only the form of tautology and is empty" (KSA 7, 493). Ergo knowledge is "nothing more than an imitation of a perceived imitation. Naturally, as a result, it is unable to penetrate the domain of truth" (KSA 7, 491).Nietzsche's critical claim that "there is no truth" thus targets the connection between the unchanging ideal of logical certainty (absolute knowledge) and the mutability of real or natural objects or "things." Observing that "Pure logic is the impossibility which supports science" (KSA 7, 479), Nietzsche highlights the impropriety (or coordinate incoherence) of logic as the theoretical support of empirical science. (Note that this does not -- and could never be though to -- undermine the pure coherence of logical abstraction as such.) Declaiming "the pathos of truth in a world of lies," Nietzsche recollects the conflict of ideal truth with the changing reality of the real world, precisely as an opposition fixed as an incontrovertible obstacle to knowledge or science in philosophy ever since the Eleatic dedication of faith in the world of unchanging being.Nietzsche's point is not the point of convergence or agreement with formal or informal logical calculi but rather the nuanced observation that although "rhetorical figures" (which he parenthetically identifies as "the essence of language," so that we do not overlook the dynamic scheme of his argument) "are logically invalid inferences," what is then consequently said to be true is generated by contrast with the recognition of what is false as such: "this is the way reason begins" (ibid.). Nietzsche's deconstructive genealogy of the discursively theoretical character of truth in contrast with its first, mythic or primitive origins patterns a similarly minded history of the problem of enlightenment civilization, as of true religion, and of science, social and natural.(14)For Nietzsche, the drive for knowledge begins with an impossible demand in the fantastic judgment that "to be true means to be true always." Such a totalizing and infinite demand cannot have grown out of experience but only on the basis of the seduction of the words that are always the same: seemingly tokens of eternity. The philosopher is "caught in the nets of language" (KSA 7, 463; cf. 474) and "logic itself is merely slavery within the fetters of language" (625). We strive for noumenal apprehension -- pure knowledge, pure form -- of the "thing in itself" but all we grasp -- and all we can ever grasp -- in any conceptual or perceptual apprehension, no matter how precisely refined an apprehension, is never the essence of ideal apprehension but always and only "eben diese Welt" (465).Because "this very world" is reality itself, in flux away from what has been and toward what is not yet, reality -- that is: empirical nature -- is always change. It is, like ourselves, part of that species of being hostage in time to the immutable reality of the dynamic mode of becoming -- as both what is and what is not. Although the later Nietzsche mocks the philosophers' "idiosyncracies" most evident in what he calls their Egyptianism, as "their hatred of even the idea of becoming," he had earlier acknowledged the very human condition that would end in this adimadversion to "change, age, as well as procreation and growth" (TI, 'reason' 1) At the start of his unpublished essay on The Pathos of Truth, the first of the unpublished "Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books," he writes "We observe every passing away and perishing with dissatisfaction, often with astonishment, as if we had witnessed therein something fundamentally impossible... Every New Year's Eve enables us to feel the mysterious contradiction of being and becoming" (KSA 1, 756). But because of the "stone" fact that no fact is stone, the supreme law of philosophic knowledge lacks any purchase on the empirical world because what is is never beyond change or time.(15)What this humanely tragic reflection means for science and the theory of truth is that when Nietzsche celebrates the sciences of nature in antiquity and in the works of his contemporaries such as Robert Mayer and Ernst Mach, he celebrates natural science but not science's own (idealist and ideological) ideal of itself as neutral instrument of pure knowing. In spite of its logical self-image (eagerly polished and continually renewed by the reigning philosophy of science), science, for Nietzsche, especially and particularly natural science, is and can only be a discipline of the body.(16) Thus construed as an ultimately sensual (more complex, more nuanced) rationality, (physical) science for Nietzsche must be a science not of ideal conceptions (paradigmatic or theoretical projections) but constantly artful, a praxical techne of recondite reality becoming in time. This practical or real technical object of science is the dynamic "truth" of what works as real (be this the working of artful belief or "willed" illusion) not the ideal and literal "truth of truth." Nietzsche does not stop here (he is not a pragmaticist, Emersonian, Quinean, or, indeed, Davidsonian) but adds that the so-called (scientific and logical) truth of truth (ideal truth) is purely unreal: not figuratively but literally insofar as it is theoretically ideal. This logical ideality is the truth of tautology: logical truth. The becoming and changing nature Nietzsche recalls to us, as scientists and as philosophers of science, is and can only be an illogical nature and Nietzsche calls us to that same natural world for what he ultimately regards as the honest sake of science: "We possess scientific knowledge today to precisely the extent that we have decided to accept the evidence of the senses -- to the extent that we have learned to sharpen and arm them and to think them through to their conclusions" (TI, reason 3). Taking his own thinking on logic, on truth, and reality to its "conclusions" or "ultimate consequences," Nietzsche describes his anti-atomistic ideal of the non-lawlike working of the will to power as an alternative account of "'nature's conformity to law'" (BGE 22).(17) For Nietzsche, "knowledge" as a purely logical enterprise strives for what is humanly or naturally impossible (all natural knowledge is inherently anthropomorphic and hence the human and the natural are inevitably convertible). The impossibility of a logical description of the world is thus not an impossibility enjoined by Nietzsche's terms of analysis but and precisely following upon the logical, unchanging terms philosophers set as the (unconditioned) conditions of knowledge.(18)As a master of polyphonic genealogical variations, Nietzsche not only articulates a genealogy of morals (out of the creative force of action denied action, that is reactivity or ressentiment) but he began his life's work with a genealogy of tragedy (from ancient dithyrambic modes to its contemporary decline as an 'artform") and we shall see that he renders the genealogy of logic itself (out of the spirit of illogic or illusion). Beginning from the foundations of his original tragic genealogy and following the scheme of the moral genealogy of the thinking that has today found itself in an exclusive concern with the problem of ethics/politics (we are incorrigibly pious, Nietzsche, tells us, even without the church), Nietzsche simultaneously carefully outlines a genealogy of science (out of the spirit of myth and magic and alchemy but ultimately, precisely on the occluded paradigm of religion).(19)In the case of logical thinking, Nietzsche finds the origins of logic on the side of metaphor, metonymy, and the other tropes of language groping towards an apprehension of a reality in transit, an illogical real. Thus logic, for Nietzsche as for the traditional philosophical account of logic, begins in illogic, in its antithesis (cf. BGE 2; GS 111). In this Nietzsche concurs with every account of the pre-history of philosophy. From myth, we advance to logos. From superstition we progress to reasoned belief and thence to scientific truths. We acquire a sense of the correct from error or falsity, not from any revelation of truth. But, it is the great merit of Nietzsche's critical exigence that he never fails to remind us that a post-lapsarian history of logic following upon a lost moment of golden insight into (or "experience" of) truth can only be invented. In sense perception, as in our anthropomorphic linguistic and epistemological constructions, we literally (albeit not figuratively) have only what we call the false: that is, perception, representation, and not the thing in itself. For Nietzsche, taken exactly, this means that our terms are imprecise apprehensions of what is intended: they do not and cannot touch the individual object or thing. Nietzsche names our practical knowledge of real things in the real world "essentially illogical" because it incorrigibly involves "the identification of things which are not the same, of things which are only similar" (KSA 7, 493). No one can capture reality: that is the achievement and the beauty (art) of language, if it is also the judgment of time. Nietzsche's reservation here differs from what he calls the "Prejudices of the Philosophers" in Beyond Good and Evil, (or the "idiosyncracies" of Twilight of the Idols) for his is an unflichingly epistemological and not a moral reservation. Our knowledge accounts of the real or natural world incorrigibly leave out or omit "what is individual" by subsuming it under a "concept," and with this subsumption what we call "knowledge begins: in categorizing, in the establishment of classes" (493).(20) For Nietzsche, real knowledge of individual or real things, i.e., the modern knowledge of natural science, must be essentially illogical if it is to have any kind of approximative or tentative correspondence with the real world, as a practical or real science of nature. And, it must be noted that the objection Nietzsche raises here has to be answered by alternative accounts of truth, eg., coherence, pragmaticist, or, indeed, aletheic accounts. For Nietzsche, different theories of truth -- coherence, pragmaticist, etc., -- are always and inevitably variations upon or weak correspondence or identity theories. The object of modern science is nature not logic and above all not the counterfeit or wooden nickel of a "logic" of nature. Thus, the patron saint of modern science is less Aristotle or even Descartes than Giordano Bruno or Francis Bacon or Robert Boyle or some other alchemical adept.(21) This utilitarian focus is what Nietzsche means when he writes that "science in its entirety is directed toward becoming, not toward being" (KSA 7, 633). Beyond the forceful arguments of efficiency (cf. KSA 6, 433), which are sufficient for pragmatic purposes, Nietzsche is concerned with the problem of truth and logical rationality.If it may be said that the epistemic point of the Birth of Tragedy is that the critical snake of theoretical knowledge bites itself in its own tail as the logical ourobouros, an argument in Twilight of the Idols points to the desperate rather than the blind circumstances of this achievement. With the loss of the true, we are condemned to sacrifice the rubric (along with the whole Platonico-Christain rhetoric) of the apparent world as well.(22) At the same time, it is clear, as Nietzsche says, that insight into this illusion, changes nothing about it ("Wissen um das Irren hebt es nicht auf." KSA 9, 504). Thus after declaring that "We live only by means of illusions: our consciousness skims over the surface," Nietzsche can add that "it is quite possible that the schema of everything might become known." But, he continues, such a revelation of construed and constructed apearance, as illusion, willed or not would "change almost nothing regarding our lives" (KSA 7, 435).At the tragic limit of critique, such reflections remain no more than formulae for absolutely unknowable precisely qua noumenal forces or things. What Nietzsche, speaking of "Kant's tragic problem" (KSA 7, 453-4), names "the tragic conflict" is the insight that human society and culture are consequences of art, predicated upon art and thus unable to exist apart from art, i.e., without the untruth or illusion of art. For Nietzsche, the history of modern culture since the Greeks (the only reference point he ever considers in the context of culture) has demonstrated that it is "impossible to found a culture on the basis of knowledge" (KSA 7, 453-54) because the exclusive ideal of truth (and that is the earmark of truth) "kills -- it even kills itself (insofar as it realizes that error is its foundation" (623).In Nietzsche's tragic history of the illusion of knowledge, the post-tragic or Platonic/Socratic faith of theoretical (Kantian/Schopenhauerian and more recently: Habermasian) science is "the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of logic, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it" (BT 15). This same ideal persists throughout modern technological science.(23) But for Nietzsche, "all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error" (BT, Preface 5). Nietzsche saw that the critical self-immolation of knowledge ("the truth that he is eternally condemned to untruth" [KSA 1, 760]) as the limit of the critical philosophic enterprise is to be conjoined with the sober notion that insight into illusion does not abrogate it. This conjunction is the tragic limit of critique. Thus Nietzsche argued that from "every point of view, the erroneousness of the world in which we live is the surest and the firmest thing we can get our eyes on ..." (BGE 34) in order to advocate a transfigured perspective on error (illusion, deception, fault). The answer to the tragic limit of critique will not be science. The tragic is not the problemmatic for tragedy is not a problem and it has no solution but the redemptive power of art: transfiguration, nobility. This redemptive possibility is found in what Nietzsche named the highest tragic art. The key to this high redemptive power of tragic art goes beyond truth and lie, to overcome the thought of "error as the evil par excellence" (BT 15).Here, the tragic limit of critique is two fold. It is, on the one hand, the tragic insight which came only too late to the sight of the blinded Oedipus, and Nietzsche parallels this to the critical limits of the theory of knowledge: "When carried to its limits the knowledge drive turns against itself in order to proceed to the critique of knowing. Knowledge in the service of the best life. One must even will illusion -- that is what is tragic" (KSA 7, 428). For Nietzsche, "we live only by means of illusions... (KSA 7, 434; cf. 435). But what that means, he continues is that: "owing to the superficiality of our intellect we indeed live in an ongoing illusion, i.e., at every instant we need art in order to live. Our eyes detain us at the forms." (434-435). The philosopher who realizes this, simultaneously realizes the need for art: absolute knowledge would be deadly precisely given the limits of what we can know of the world. Thus "the philosopher [and here Nietzsche means Kant as much as Schopenhauer as much as Heraclitus and Eastern philosophy as much as he means himself], recognizes the language of nature and says 'we need art' and 'we require only part of knowledge'" (KSA 7, 435).On the other hand, there is the tragic ideal, the ideal of tragic glory, the ideal of nobility. For Nietzsche the human "longing to be completely truthful in the midst of a mendacious natural order is something noble and heroic. But this is possible only in a very relative sense. That is tragic" (KSA 7, 453; cf. 467). This, we recall, is "Kant's tragic problem" and Nietzsche claims that at this tragic limit" illusion or art attains "an entirely new dignity," while the sciences "by contrast, are degraded to a degree." The tragically noble "longing to be completely truthful in the midst of a mendacious natural order" is not the base longing born of the "optimistic metaphysics of logic" which found its anti-tragic and unabashedly vulgar expression in the person of Socrates (cf. BT 15).(24) By contrast this is a drive to truth which Nietzsche articulates in terms of love -- the same love he claims to find far too little of in the so-called lovers of wisdom, that is, in philosophers (KSA 7, 721). (25) The alternative "feeling for truth is one that grows out of love. ...Uttering blissful truth out of love: this is based upon the kind of knowledge which the individual is not obliged to communicate but which he is forced to communicate by an overflowing bliss" (453).Nietzsche's tragic critique challenges the philosopher to aspire not to the rigorous image of a scientist, in Kant's good sense, but instead, and exactly, to the ideal of the lover, the ideal of an artist of life, taking the idea of art and life beyond the scientific. Conceived on its own foundations, the scientific ideal is an ascetic or intrinsically nihilistic ideal. By contrast, Nietzsche claims that art "is more powerful than knowledge because it desires life, whereas knowledge attains as its final goal -- only annihilation" (KSA 1, 760). Against the metaphysical faith that generates logic out of illogic, the true from the untrue, such artistic "refinements" are proposed not as a pragmatic making-do or "as good as" true but in order to begin to pose the question "Why truth? Why not error?" This last therapeutic provocation is not merely to be idly proposed for thought: error is not to be mined for truth: what began in approximations and error cannot pull itself out of the swamp of its own illusions into the heaven of truth. Nietzsche's perspectivalism is not a relativism. When Nietzsche speaks of "shades of apparentness" or seeming, beyond opposites or antitheses, he seeks to suggest that truth be conceived in continuity with the lie: truth is a type, species, "kind of error" (WP 49), just as the living is "merely a type of what is dead" (GS 109). For Nietzsche, like the painter's valeurs, oppositions as we see them "do not exist in themselves" but express "only variations in degree that from a certain perspective appear to be opposites" (WP 552). Thus Nietzsche challenges the basis of the subject/object distinction. The persistence of the ideal tradition of ideal truth reduces this critique to subjectism and thoroughly confounds the question of critique as such.Science Contra Art and LifeReflecting on the "Conflict Between Art and Knowledge," Nietzsche argues that the task of philosophy is the poetic task of a physician of culture. In order to speak in this way, art and knowledge are not to be ordered as disparate categories or separate cultural realms but in continuity with one another. Since science cannot critique itself, since the problem of science cannot be posed on the ground of science, Nietzsche proposes the perspective of the healing power of art. As "physician of culture," the philosopher is to be an artist of science, a composer of reflective thought, refusing the calculations of science as the thick "stupidity" deadly to the "music" of life (GS 372; 373). Against such deliberate deafness, letting "those who have ears hear" (GS 234), the "only" help for science is not more science (or better scientific understanding), as Jacques Ellul has claimed to be the essential dynamic of our culture as the thoroughgoing (systematic) culture of technology (or what Ellul names technique) but rather the therapeutic resources and risks of art (KSA 7, 428-9). Beyond the threats to the environment posed by uncontrolled technological research and industrial productivity, beyond the threat of biological, chemical, or atomic warfare, beyond the threat of genetic insanity (in the order of time) that is the promise of the Human Genome project and the appeal of human and other animal cloning, the unlimited drive of pure science or knowledge is, for Nietzsche as much an intrinsically nihilistic endeavour as it is in Martin Heidegger's expression of the "danger" of technology.(26)Still, perhaps such a Heideggerian expression of danger is in need of modulation. Otto Pggeler, as an otherwise sympathetic reader, has warned us that it can prove to conceal a quite historical complicity with the Levinasian "consent to horror" in Heidegger's thinking.(27) Likewise Nietzsche seems to go astray as he equates the "nihilism" of pure science as the pure drive to know. The "passion" to know which Nietzsche claims to find in the modern age seems much rather opposed to the pure drive to pure scientific knowledge as such. Manifest and real dangers to life to be found in the impure, politicized, or ideological drives that can contaminate (and have in the past contaminated) science but are not, it seems clear, the same as "science" itself. Whatever Nietzschean nihilistic currents or Heideggerian dangers there may be in science, they are the literally nihilising dangers of exactly applied science as can be observed with the examples of well-known and specifically historical applications, such as, for example, the contamination of certain and transient political regimes (such as the influence of Nazism or Stalinism in the infamous Lysenko case or American social racism in the lamentable Jensen). Particularly on the level of technology, the dangerous element appears not to be the essence of science or technology per se, but rather the danger emerges on the sheerly cultural (and, therefore, not techno-scientific) level of and therefore fluid (and, therefore, scientifically, theoretically corrigible) practice (due to shoddy engineering controls, consumerism, lack of adequate reflection on issues of sustainability or inefficient waste management, etc.).(28) Habermas offers the most sophisticated contemporary illustration of this rationalistic (Platonico-Aristotelian) legacy. Thus Marxists, positivists, and rationalists agree in their contention that to the extent that science or knowledge (or logic) is an expression of human life it is inconsistent to claim that science as such threatens human life. Only the (incidental and not essential) misuse or abuse of science is nihilistic or dangerous. This ideal of scientific progress remains the distinguishing conviction of the modern age: i.e., if science is given pure and unlimited or free reign, human culture and life will reap the benefits of limitless improvements in security and advantage.(29) If Nietzsche's critique of the purity of the unlimited drive to know conceals a challenge to this liberating aspect of the pure ideal of pure science, the conclusion that Nietzsche's philosophy is anti-science seems unavoidable.Beyond superficiality and simplisticism, the above reading of Nietzsche mistakes the importance of Nietzsche's philosophic preoccupation with science as well as the significance of his avowed admiration of science. He regarded his own critique as thorougly, intrinsically "scientific," (to wit: "Die frhliche" Wissenschaft") which canonically catholic German expression, Wissenschaft, he understood to be coterminous with the unflinching height of critical reflection. Nietzsche's critique of the limitations of the scientific project never calls for the "destruction but [always only the] mastery of science" (KSA 7, 424; cf. PT 8). What Nietzsche means by thinking in the critical service of science (as the "mastery" of science) can only be expressed in its contextual connections to topics in other kinds of philosophic reflection traditionally regarded as distinct. Nietzsche links epistemology and politics in an aesthetic rather than practical or moral resonance. This connection means that the problem of science will be nothing but the problem of art and life. This is neither a perspective opposed to (anti-) science nor is it traditionally on the side of science. Instead, Nietzsche's interpretive touchstone contrasts what affirms or serves life with what denies or opposes life, which last is what Nietzsche means by nihilism. The problem of Nietzsche's philosophy of science addresses the problem of life where "knowledge and becoming" mutually and incorrigibly exclude one another (KSA 12, 382; cf. 313). Writing that "our art is the reflection of desperate knowledge" (KSA 7, 476), Nietzsche sets art and knowledge on the same level. For this reason, both art and knolwedge can be used in the service of life, or indeed: against it. Yet the claim that "science can serve either goal" (GS 12) does not amount to a positivistic or nave expression of science's celebrated neutrality. As a logical or theoretical project, science is the kind of illusion (or convention) that remains inherently nihilistic. Because science as such is not objectively neutral, science must always be critically reviewed not on its own basis but rather on the ground of what makes science possible and that is what Nietzsche names the "light" of art and that is life.Nietzsche proposes a critical philosophy of science, that is, a reflection on the limits of knowing and truth, conceived as a philosophy of "tragic knowledge" (KSA 7, 427f.), as the highest task for the philosopher. The uncritical "philosopher of desperate knowledge" -- whether scientist or philosopher of science (in its "received" or established tradition) -- is absorbed by the project of "blind science: knowledge at any price" (428). Far from advocating consumer awareness or political initiatives for public controls of science, further still from the hysteria of political moralizing and its very recent development into "epistemological correctness,"(30) Nietzsche argues the part of the philosopher of tragic (as opposed to desperate) knowledge. This means that Nietzsche will be more radical than Feyerabend and other critics of professional philosophy who triumphantly acclaim the laissez-faire ideal of grass-roots democratic controls in the face of the tepid presence of any such consciousness. It is not that a grass-roots movement is undesirable rather is it that such a movement has proven itself materially absent again and again, and exactly the need for such a movement remains greatest at the most human, most common, most public level. As the advertising and media complex in the US (and increasingly the globalized "Euro" world) understands so well, "the people" are indeed a great beast. And controls are best practiced not in the guise of prohibitions and restraints but with consumer idealisations and distractions. Nietzsche's reflections take him to just this level of representational, creative culture.The ideal of art, the ideal of the grand style, is the ideal of reality: "To realize in oneself the archaic tragic ideal is the eternal joy of becoming -- the joy which also encompasses joy in destruction." Nietzsche's "archaic tragic ideal" affirms "transitoriness and destruction."(31) By means of such an ideal Nietzsche can speak of art as a truth to life, regarding life as the reality opposed to and opposed by the ideal world of metaphysics as of logic, of religion and of science: where "the lie of the ideal has hitherto been the curse on reality..." (EH, Preface 2). This conception of life or reality as fearful necessity or chance, is taken in the pre-Socratic sense of the term, and echoes not only in Aeschylus and Sophocles but may also be heard in philosophy from Anaximander to Plato's Pythagorean Timaeus. But for grandness of style, for greatness or nobility, Nietzsche has an astonishing formula, which must be understood in conjunction with the above noted connection with the transitory and the destructive, that is of course to say, in connection with time and life as its own passing or evanescence. It is a formula of love: "that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity, still less to dissemble it -- all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity -- but to love it" (Clever, 10). The "love" of life resonates in the equation Nietzsche sets "between tears and music" (7) which Nietzsche cannot dissolve. This same love is the "divine malice" Nietzsche hears in Heinrich Heine, apart from which sublime cruelty Nietzsche "cannot imagine perfection." Exactly such an amor fati becomes the word he gives to his life in the story he tells himself at the Zarathustran moment of his life's decision.(32) The consummation of love take everything that will be and everything that has been all together.(33) The affirmation of the eternal return is a selective benediction -- transfiguring everything with the same golden or silver glance (Nietzsche liked to think of mountain lakes as "eyes"), like the glittering main of the setting sun "pouring its riches into the sea" (GS 337), a vision of pure magnificence: the light of art.(34) This gleaming vision denies nothing, changes nothing, resolves nothing: but transfigures and thus redeems everything, blessing everything with gold.Opposing the pure ideal of knowledge as an end in itself, Nietzsche proposes the admittedly maculate and limited definition of "knowledge in the service of the best life" (ibid.). Because, as Nietzsche writes, "Wissenschaft vertrgt sich mit Barbarei" (511), more than a new Daedalus (Plato), the task of philosophy at its tragic limit requires an Aeschylus as yet undreamt of (not Wagner and not Weber, not Heidegger and not Habermas: we are the ones who are to come, it is what we do that will be decisive for all that is to come, and for everything that has been).(35)As science, for Nietzsche, is a kind of art, so science is inevitably in the service of life, most desperately so even in its intrinsically nihilistic dynamic. "We live only by means of illusions. ... we need art at every instant to live" (KSA 7, 435). For Nietzsche, the creative power of art is its selective power, as the forwards and backwards glance in the epigraph to Ecce homo is a selective and selecting device, all art (science) involves "omitting, overlooking, and ignoring" (KSA 7, 441). But on this level art and science ae the same: all "thinking" whether aesthetic or scientific, "calculates with artistic magnitudes" (ibid.). It is in this sense that recent modern science must be said to lack integrity: it is an artless art, an art that does not affirm its own illusions or conventions. And whenever Nietzsche praises science, as he does when he cries "Long live physics!" (GS 335), he never fails to emphasise that he means this praise because of his own honesty. The emphasis is important because integrity is not an automatic characteristic of science as an ascetic ideal (GM III: 26). For Nietzsche, "the falsest judgements (to which synthetic judgements a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us, without granting as true the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a continual falsification of the world by means of numbers, mankind could not live" (BGE 4). It is because "the truth is ugly" that we "have art, so that we are not undone by truth."(37) Yet if it is needful as a countermeasure against the ascetic ideal, it is not the goal. The saving virtue of art is not its honesty alone (truth is not end of art) but its end is in joy or celebration. "The man of science calculates the numbers of the laws of nature; the man of art gazes at them. In the one case, conformity to law; in the other, beauty" (PT, 53). Thus the coolness of Nietzsche's critical project -- "I aim to regard the question of the value of knowledge like a cold angel who sees through the whole shabby business, not with cruelty but without amelioration" (KSA 7, 493) -- is the very antipode of Benjamin's theoretically becalmed figure. The beauty of art is a terrifying insight into the transfiguring necessity of art even in science -- the very same tragic insight with which Nietzsche began his reflection on the art of ancient Greek tragedy (BT 8-10) and to which he always returned.

Endnotes1. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragdie in Nietzsche, Smtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden, G. Colli & M. Montinari, eds., (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980) [KSA] Volume One, section 14. Cited as BT followed by section number. See also Nietzsche's later reflections on the "Problem of Socrates" in Gtzendmmerung, KSA 6. Cited as TI followed by a truncated section title and number.

2. I discuss this issue further at the start of my "Truth, Art, and Life: Nietzsche, Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science" in Babich, ed., in cooperation with Robert S. Cohen, Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), pp. 1-24; NSII. Cf. KSA 12, 264-266; WP 530.

3. BT, "Attempt" 2. Beyond the focal interest of traditional parsings of this self-reflection on the conjunction of science and art, Dieter Jhnig offers a complex and unusual reading in his "Die Befreiung der Kunsterkenntnis von der Metaphysik in Nietzsches Geburt der Tragdie" [translation forthcoming as "The Liberation of the Knowledge of Art from Metaphysics in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy," in New Nietzsche Studies, 3:3/4 (Summer/Fall) 1999] included in his intellectually challenging book on the material history or physical archaeology of culture and history: Welt-Geschichte: Kunst Geschichte. Zum Verhltnis von Vergangenheitserkenntnis und Vernderung (Kln: DuMont Schauberg, 1975).

4. See Alasdair MacIntyre's "Preface" in NSII. Babich, ed., Nietzsche, Epistemology, Theories of Knowledge, pp. x-xii. See also George Levine, "What is Science Studies For and Who Cares?" in A. Ross, ed., Science Wars, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Pp. 123-138.

5. See David Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry (London: Routledge, 1993).

6. Daniel Breazeale likewise argues that the array of themes is not a set of alternative drafts or separable approaches: "Nietzsche wished to use his analyses of knowledge and culture to illuminate the history of Greek philosophy at the same time that he used the history of Greek philosophy to illustrate and explain his conclusions regarding knowledge and culture." Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed., and trans. Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1979) p. xxii.

7. Thus Nietzsche's early Nachla listing of the key notions of ancient Greek philosophy terminates with the Latin expression that becomes the dominant instrument of philosophy in its scholastic efflorescence: "quidquid est est: quidquid non est, non est" (KSA 7, 572). See Andrea Nye's reading of the history of the adversarial function of logic in her book Words of Power, (London: Routledge, 1990) tracing the development of logic from its beginnings in Parmenides through Plato's sophistic forays and continuation in Aristotle's syllogistic to its renascence with the medieval inception of the universities, which yoked logic and science (or philosophy) to the bond-service of the then-queen of the sciences, theology, thence to its final, "totalitarian" (to use Nye's own term in her chapter, "A Thought Like a Hammer: The Logic of Totalitarianism," pp. 163-172) expression in Gottlob Frege's Begriffschrift.

8. The logical field of science and philosophy has traditionally been regarded as a battle (eristic) where exactly the best argument wins, and "losing" claims are consequently silenced as irrational or irrelevant. Logic determines the standards for such a contest. Hence the conflict Nietzsche insinuates between art and knowledge must be played out on the terms of a logical contest.

9. This is more properly named a social science skirmish (or indeed sociology of science scuffle) because, with the exception of the present author, almost no philosophers of science have been heard to weigh in on the topic, except as does Ian Hacking, in a belated and oblique manner. Fora rare instances of philosophical commentary on this debate, see my essay, "The Hermeneutics of a Hoax: On the Mismatch of Physics and Cultural Criticism," Common Knowledge 6 (1997) 2:23-33. Apart from the specific details of the science wars, and a more general overview, see my "Against Postmodernism and the 'New' Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche's Image of Science in the Light of Art" in Robert S. Cohen and Dimitri Ginev, eds., Issues and Images in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 27-45.

10. To name this debacle the "science wars" is more than a little inane. To characterize a battle than never came to a stand as such a war in the plural form represents an inflationary absurdity where both the popular as well as the academic media took enormous pains to represent only the side of establishment science, opposing to this perspective only the free associations and the multifarious and overburdened agendas of sociologists of science and other cultural critics, and overall excluding philosophical oriented critique and debate. It is telling of this rather than a personal confession that the present author had more difficulty getting the above cited philosophic analysis (indeed hermeneutic account) of the Sokal hoax into the published fray than any other in a career of submitting less perspicuously composed and certainly less relevant or contemporary essays. It was refused by the editor of the leading or only) journal of continental philosophy although first presented at a conference the entire proceedings of which were published as a separate monograph issue of the journal because of manifestly political anxieties and because an another scholar might possibly "contribute a piece" on the topic -- as if different readings of a theme did not add (as they ordinarily do, and as was of course the case with the majority of the contributions of the collection in question) to the philosophic utility and point of publishing the proceedings of a given conference. The resistance was even greater on the part of analytic editors when I subsequently took my article to them -- reviewers foamed at the mouth, refused the essay even the title of philosophy and so on. The singular, and for me, deciding issue in the Sokal case is the relative silence of received philosophers of science, a silence very tellingly giving full consent. For the majority of philosophers of science, it seems that the Sokal hoax was merely an excellent joke and by no means significant for the philosophy of science. Science can and should (and at its best) speak for science. It should be plain that I do not concur.

11. It is thus significant to review studies of aesthetic values in science, studies which superficially appear to overlap with Nietzsche's account of the relation between science and art in terms of the artistry of scientific invention. By contrast, contemporary studies take the aesthetic as the symmetrical (and the notoriously banal MIT study of paradigmatic human [i.e., to make no mistake here: feminine] beauty averaged precisely such symmetries). The height of art in science is thus the design of the chambered nautilus. This reverses Kant's defining of the aesthetic as [if] a product of nature. Here art is regarded as if a product of scientific or technical drawing or graphic, computer-aided design.

12. Hence when we speak of art (or aesthetics) and science, for example, when we talk of the beauty of science, it is significant that we are prepared to parse such beauty as a scientist -- and not as an artist or an art historian or even an art critic much less a philosopher of art, would mean the term. Almost every study of art (or aesthetic value) and science (apart from Bernard d'Espagnat, Penser la science. Ou les enjeux du savoir [Paris: Bordas, 1990]), exploits this privilege and this conceit. In the same way, and this is important, if we evidently find it fruitful to order art to the rule of scientific investigation and measure, (in practice) science is not judged by the changing aesthetic mores of artistic style and cultural taste. This is not a recent bifurcational phenomenon to be traced back to C.P. Snow's 1959 identification of the distinction (Published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.[New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961]) as historians of philosophy and philosophers of science are wont to do. Invoking Whitehead's sense of the metaphor for historical affinity, the clear difference between art and knowledge, the lies the poets tell, are patented footnotes to Plato, like all contemporary philosophy.

13. It is precisely on the terms of such an ordered account that art itself, as Plato argued, is to be restrained or suppressed where it threatens to contaminate or weaken science, or the knowledge of the true. For contemporary purposes, in the modern as in the postmodern era, philosophy has hardly gone beyond Plato: it not only endorses science's supreme self-determination, but seeks itself to imitate the rigour and ideal of science. Seeking over the course of the last century to model its values on those of science, particularly the sciences of the natural, logical kind, yields the paradoxical circumstance that in its received views and its internal discipline, the philosophy of science utterly ignores the philosophic stakes of but merely assumes the fact/value distinction.

14. For another and comprehensive account, see Josef Simon, "Grammar and Truth: On Nietzsche's Relaionship to the Speculative Sentential Grammar of the Metaphysical Tradition" in Babich, ed., Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory: Nietzsche and the Sciences I (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), pp. 129-15; NSI. See also Tilman Borsche "The Epistemological Shift from Descartes to Nietzsche: Intuition and Imagination," NSI, pp.66. See too David Allison's iconology of the enlightenment cum postmodern condition: "Twilight of the Icons," NSII, pp. 179-185.

15. Thus Aristotle introduces the distinction of time in order to express the principle of non-contradiction: "the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect" (Meta. 1005b 20). From the beginning, then, the definition of the principle of non-contradiction sidesteps the problem of time by conceding it. When it is said, as Heraclitus does say, that "the same thing" both is and is not, the opposition between immediate actuality and an immanent potential transformation is not an optional but a temporal tension.

16. Nietzsche names the body as the "great reason" in contrast to the smaller or "square little reason" (GS 373) of mathematics and logical theory. See for a discussion, the broader German literature on this same bodily thematic, for example, the rather excessive but thoroughly exemplificational, Gnter Remmert, Leiberleben als Ursprung der Kunst: Zur sthetik Friedrich Nietzsches (Mnchen: Johannes Berchmans Verlag, 1978), etc.

17. It is important to emphasize that this notion of necessity and law reflects the cosmologies of the first philosophers, or presocratic thinkers. For different approaches, first on the question of atomism, see, Howard Caygill, "Nietzsche and Atomism," NSI, pp. 27-36, and Stephen Gaukroger, "Beyond Reality: Nietzsche's Science of Appearances," NSI, pp. 37-49. See also Robin Small, "We Sensualists," NSII, pp. 73-89, as well as, contra atomism, Greg Whitlock, "Roger J. Boscovich and Friedrich Nietzsche: A Re-Examination," NSII, pp. 187-201. It can be argued that the term necessity as Nietzsche uses it reflects the sense of chance in Plato's expression of Pythagorean cosmology in the Timaeus. The Timaeus also provides the locus for Nietzsche's definition of the world as a closed organic system -- feeding on its own excrement. For a contrary claim, see Duncan Large's discussion of Michel Serres' interpretation of Nietzsche, "Herms contra Dionysus (Serres et Nietzsche)," Horizons philosophiques. 8/1 (Autumn, 1997: Le Monde de Michel Serres): 23-39. Translation in NSII, pp. 151-159.

18. Cf. KSA 7, 519-520.

19. See Barry Allen, "Forbidding Knowledge," The Monist. 79/2 (1996): 294-310. On the question of the relation of science to religion, see Paul Valadier, "Science As New Religion," NSII, pp. 241-252 and Carl Friedrich von Weizscker, "Nietzsche: Perceptions of Modernity," NSII, pp. 221-240. See also Holger Schmid "The Nietzschean Meta-Critique of Knowledge," NSI, pp. 153-163.

20. See Simon, "Grammar and Truth," cited above.

21. See, on Bruno, Francis Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1964); for Bacon, see Allen, "Forbidding Knowledge" cited above, and in addition to Steven Schapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and Airpump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), see also Lawrence Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and the Alchemical Quest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). See for background, Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience.

22. See, in particular, David B. Allison "Twilight of the Icons" and David Owen "Science, Value, and the Ascetic Ideal," NSII, pp. 169-177.

23. This is what Willima Barrett meant (but did not write) in his The Illusion of Technique. It is the substance of Jacques Ellul's many studies of technology, in particular, The Technological Socity, trans. J. Wilkinson (New York: Continuum, 1980).

24. Such a longing for truth is grounded in an unknowing faith in knowledge, or illusion. "When logic is thought to be the sole ruler it leads to lies; for it is not the sole ruler" (KSA 7, 453). Now, the early Nietzsche argues, as after an immense detour through the rationalist fantasy of Socratico-Aristotelian clarity, which is also to say Christianity, "we again return to the natural condition (that of the Greeks)

25. "Ach dieser Mangel an Liebe in diesen Philosophen, die immer nur an die Ausgewhlten denken un nicht so viel Glauben zu ihrer Weisheit haben. Es muss die Weisheit wie die Sonne fr jedermann scheine: und ein blasser Stahl selbst in die niedrigste Seele hinabtauchen knnen" (KSA 7, 720-721; cf. Nietzsche's discussion of the sun in Die frhliche Wissenschaft, KSA 3, section 337 (henceforth cited as GS, followed by the section number) as well as the ironic relevance of his subtitle to Also Sprach Zarathustra and his reflections on being understood throughout his work. For a discussion of one aspect of this irony and its subtle paradox see my "Nietzsche et Eros entre le gouffre de Charybde et l'cueil de Dieu: La valence rotique de l'art et l'artiste comme acteur - Juif - Femme." Revue Internationale de Philosophie. 2000. Forthcoming.

26. The meaning of this "danger" -- as Heidegger borrows a term from Hlderlin's poetry -- is complicated beyond the ordinary accounts given in most philosophical reviews of Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology." Heidegger is precisely not talking the technical problems -- risks or dangers -- of technology. Discussion of such issues for Heidegger must always be approached after the question has been posed as a question of the essence of modern technology. See my "The Essence of Questioning After Technology: Techne as Constraint and the Saving Power" in the British Journal of Phenomenology, 30/1 (January 1999): 106-124. Because Nietzsche's ultimately philosophical concerns are more fundamental than matters of praxis alone, the most stringent practical (socially promulgated or politically legislated) controls cannot address the danger he sees.

27. Otto Pggeler, "Does the Saving Power Also Grow: Heidegger's Last Paths" in C. Macann, ed., Critical Heidegger (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 206-226..

28. This concern with the "neutrality" of technology remains pressing as is evient in contributions to this still-new discipline. See, for example, Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (London: Routledge, 1999) especially chapters 1, 7, and 9.

29. See Barry Allen, "All the Daring of the Lover of Knowledge is Permitted Again," NSII, pp. 123-140.

30. I owe the phrase to Dominique Janicaud characterizing Alan Sokal's hoax and his continuing campaign (then in France, now and again with less heat in the US) against the supposed "enemies" of science, specifically the intellectual advocates of feminism and alterity, i.e., the less than redoubtable Parisian intellectual trend setters, Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida.

31. Nietzsche, Ecce homo, KSA 6. Cited as EH followed by a truncated part title and section number: BT 3

32. "On this perfect day, when everything has become ripe and not only the grapes are growing brown, a ray of sunlight has fallen on to my life: I looked behind me, I looked before me, never have I seen so many and such good things together" (EH, Epigraph).

33. Amor fati affirms the past and the future turning like the path the walker traces on either side of the lake at Silva Plana: ahead and behind, the physical circuit (that is not a circle, perfect or rough) -- but the recursive course of the eternal return. Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return had come to him, so he says, on just such a cyclical route -- at the gateway of the pyramidal rock at Surlej. This rock stands like a tower or port at the entrance to a town where the two colliding paths of past and future meet at the stopping point of the paired contours of the tipped points of the cleft rock echoing the double mountain peaks on the other side of the same course across the lake. At that rock one looks ahead at, one looks back upon the paths that run straight away from one another as the same paths that will and already recur, not as a perfected circle but, nonetheless, as the mirrored contours of a protracted reflective circuit turn into one another.

34. See Wolfgang Mller-Lauter's comprehensive articulation of the scope of affirmation or amor fati in his essay "On Judging in a World of Becoming," NSI, pp. 165-185.

35. The decisive difference between Nietzsche's own critical theory of knowledge, art, and life and the tradition of critical theory in this century is the difference between Nietzsche's (not Foucault's) critique of morals/truth as power and as knowledge and the critique of political praxis as a moral program. See Klaus Spiekermann's concise summary account of the origins of critical theory in Horkheimer and Adorno's more Nietzschean schematic vis-a-vis Habermas's current domination of critical theory in NSI. See also J. M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Jrgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 1995). Bernstein recognizes Spiekermann's "Nietzschean" element as the importance for the future of critical theory of taking account of Adorno's "a more romantic Marxism" (p. 2). Noting that contemporary critical theory finds itself defined by Habermas's "liberal" Marxist relation to the latter tradition of critical theory, Bernstein finds that the future of critical theory "will depend upon taking more seriously Hegel's causality of fate doctrine and Adorno's comprehension of the problem of universal and particular" (p. 8). See also for a similar account aligned to the need to retrieve the contributions of Adorno (and Horkheimer), Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance trans. M. Robinson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994; originally published in 1986). It is also the difference between social, practical or political science and art or philosophy. Because the regulation of science or its politics cannot be effected via science, they can in no wise be achieved via calculation,(36)36. Nietzsche points out the difference between art and knowledge in terms of ends or stylistic intentions. "Das Bild ist das eine, das Rechenexempel das andere" (KSA 7, 440). For Nietzsche, the end of art is thus pleasure or delight. ' ' "' "

37. "Die Wahrheit ist hlich: wir haben die Kunst damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zu Grunde gehn." KSA 13, 500. Cf. BT, Preface 5.