Plato and Nietzsche by Anderson Mark;

Author:Anderson, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Their Philosophical Art
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Nietzsche and science

Nietzsche has been a subject of curiosity and controversy in the English-speaking world since early in the twentieth century, and no strand of his thought has inspired more scholarly activity than his ideas about the nature and accessibility of reality and the value and even the very existence of truth. On these topics, as on others, his work has been for many a screen on which to project images of their own ideals and aspirations. The only other philosopher who has been made so often to serve a similar function is Plato, from the intricately woven dramatic context of whose works scholars have long been in the habit of wrenching arguments, which they then interpret and analyze according to their own preferred terminology and intellectual concerns. Thus Plato has been in turns an optimist and a pessimist, an advocate of tyranny and a proponent of democracy, a dreamy metaphysician and a sober linguistic analyst.34 This tendency has begun to decline in recent years as subtle readers have demonstrated the integrity of the dialogues as artistic-literary-philosophical wholes whose individual components cannot be detached without distortion. As for Nietzsche, there is undeniably a degree of unity and consistency among his ideas—and even when he changes his mind we can, generally, track the transformations and discern the rationale behind them—but he organized the contents of his books at times according to so mystifying a plan, and he adopted such a diversity of rhetorical postures, that it never is a simple matter to find the thread through the labyrinth of his argument. This is not to everyone’s taste; but a certain type of reader is drawn to Nietzsche, as he is drawn to Plato, precisely because of the richness, complexity, and occasional ambiguity of his ideas. These same qualities, however, are problematic to the extent that they provide opportunities for the sort of projections I described in connection with Plato.

In 1908, H. L. Mencken published the first book-length treatment of Nietzsche’s ideas in the English language. In the course of the following two decades Mencken became an intellectual force with a national influence unparalleled by any but the rarest of public intellectuals today, and throughout the period of his greatest power he wrote constantly about Nietzsche. Mencken was a social-Darwinist, a rebel against authority (especially as exercised by the masses via democratic and religious institutions), and a passionate advocate of fallibilist science. His Nietzsche is all these things as well. Most relevant to our present concerns, Mencken’s Nietzsche is a truth-seeker who charts his course by the guiding star of science. “It is evident,” Mencken writes in his early study of Nietzsche, “that science … will eventually accomplish with certainty what philosophy … is now trying to do in a manner that is not only crude and unreasonable, but also necessarily unsuccessful.”35 The critique of philosophy may remind one of Nietzsche, but the naive faith in science does not. Mencken acknowledges that Nietzsche’s views on truth are “so abstruse” that he cannot provide “an understandable summary” of them in his book.

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