Nietzsche made antique Greek paganism the basis of modern postmodernism, a sophisticated worldview that now dominates much of the intellectual West. His views provide a powerful philosophical and psychological basis for the postmodern critique of science to be discussed in the next chapter.

Besides being philosopher and prose stylist, Nietzsche was also a religious prophet. He presented himself in his popular quasi-religious book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in this guise. His writings are a widely read gospel preaching the replacement of Christianity with a vision inspired by archaic Greek paganism. His life, a story of loneliness, pain, and overcoming, was instruction in his doctrine. His worldview, a passionate reaction to the hidden nature of God, was religious in scope:

His gospel is a modern terminus on the road of religious paganism where pagan heroes dispense with idols that they finally realize represent only themselves. Yet he vehemently rejected being characterized as a religious prophet. Understanding Nietzsche requires handling paradox.

He preaches attitude over dogma, this by preaching his own dogma, always with fervor, often (always?) with irony. He will not lie by pretending that he has access to Truth (certain and absolute hence capitalized); and yet because Truth is hidden, his heroes are liars. His dogma states that they unselfconsciously create their own cosmos out of chaos by exercise of an superabundance of 'will to power'. Nietzsche's heroes are like the antique gods--subject to fate, yet masters of the universe. They are 'overmen', ubermenschen, who lose out, however, to losers, the untermenshen. The latter win by arguing with logic, a weapon of the weak; an ubermensch merely asserts his (no women here!) will to power. No need to wonder why so many of his postmodern followers disdain logic. This story will be a rocky and chaotic ride to a very new and also very old worldview.

Recognizing that an answer to E is beyond us, Zarathustra says

And elsewhere, Nietzsche states:

These statements contain much of the rationale for moving from E to philosophical paganism. They state that:

1. The necessity of a basis for existence, a God, is a conjecture.
2. Any attributes given God are created, and bounded, by human imagination.
3. Experience provides no evidence of any effects of such attributes.
4. Given this, there is no point in speaking about a God that is, or is effectively, non-existent

Many people more or less agree with these points, but few follow them on to their Nietzschean conclusions.

If God exists then an other-than-human basis of absolute Truth exists. If there is only one all-powerful God then there is one source of universal natural law. For many (most?) people "God is dead" as a source of absolute Truth, but they nevertheless believe that such Truth exists. For example, they believe that either it is True that God exists, or that it is True that God does not exist. If the latter, they are either unconsciously heroic liars or sloppy thinkers, or both.

Nietzsche emphasizes that all sources of Truth are merely human conjectures, and Truth claims derived from them are therefore also conjectures. At one point, he mockingly lists some of these sources :

His references are, first and second, to the Platonic One/Good that stands at the apex of the world of (intransitory) fixed ideals, the Platonic world of Being; third, to the hidden God of monotheism--hidden referring to our inability to see (know) It; and last to a phrase associated with the philosopher Kant: the thing-in-itself (ding-an-sich) that is "out there"--an absolute, objective Reality that almost everyone, including most scientists, believes exists independently of themselves. It is also called the noumenal world to distinguish it from the phenomenal world perceived through the senses. The relation between noumena and phenomena is, again, conjecture.

The monotheistic God, the God of Plato, and objective reality, all function as purely conjectural sources of Truth. None are directly perceivable, so all assertions of Truth inferred from their existence are really just conjectures.

We perceive and understand things in science only indirectly, and such understanding, Nietzsche states:

and understanding this limitation is

A Maimonidean would agree.

Nietzsche's writing style, as well as his disdain for logic, makes it difficult to clearly sort out logically distinct strands of his argument, but at least some part of what is quoted above, taken in conjunction with his remarks about sources of absolute Truth, relates to the commonly held misconception that science is in the business of asserting absolutes. He points out that logic cannot lead us to them--to anything outside the world of experience. The discussion of the independence of science from religion in chapter three needs merely to be extended to include all purported sources of absolute Truth to support this. Indeed, physicists never worry about absolutes; they only try to reduce data accessible to the senses, either directly or via instrumentation.

The elimination of this pseudo-problem, however, exposes the foundation of scientific truth to serious attack. If science is based on a reality the existence of which we can only conjecture--something that might not even exist,--how solid is it? The gravity of this question is unappreciated because of a widespread unconscious assumption that our senses play a passive role in perception.

The assumption is that the brain does nothing but map an external reality onto mind; that although we cannot perceive things in themselves, we do perceive relations in themselves. Just as the image in a mirror is but an image, it nevertheless conveys true relations. There is even the naive idea that sight amounts to little more than the focussing of an image of reality on a screen in the brain. That is not to say that an educated person will agree to this when asked, but it is to say that something like it unconsciously underlies most uncritical thought about the basis of human knowledge. Serious thinkers going back to Plato (as we shall see) have doubted the passivity of perception, and this being so, the very foundation of science--observational data--becomes open to an attack that we now begin to investigate.

We are less sure of ideas than of sensual perceptions. We consciously create and recreate the former, and are therefore conscious of their ability to be wrong and to change. In contrast, we are not normally conscious of any contribution the mind makes towards what the senses perceive.

The immediate source of Nietzsche's understanding of the consequences to be drawn from this was probably his reading of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). The title of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, and his statement within it that The world is my idea, dramatically emphasize these consequences.

Some of the psychological evidence for the brain's active role in perception was given by Nietzsche as follows.

The first fact he notes here is that people often skim along while reading, filling in between words, they actually read with the help of already possessed information. For example, most of us have stored in memory the phrase "Once upon a time" that acts as a template especially in the context of reading a fairy tale. Once we read "Once upon" the brain can fill in the rest without bothering to actually read the words. The more information acquired in life, the more of such filling-in can be done.

The second fact refers to a property of the visual system: its ability to fill in the color and texture of whole surfaces on the basis of information it gathers from parts of that surface. For example, the eye never focuses on all parts of a surface it perceives as uniformly colored; instead, the visual system fills in the color from samples, taken especially at the surface's edge. This unconscious process is the visual analog of the filling in of a phrase on the basis of clues given by sample words, especially those read at its start (edge).

The third fact connects and extends the filling in mechanism beyond pure perception to the level of conscious thought. A portion of the brain, called the interpreter seems to have the job of filling in not colors or words, but whole experiences on the basis of clues such as incidents and scenes. Similarly, the cartoonist draws a few lines which fit templates of personality types we have stored in memory. Related to this is the Rorscharch test in which a person is asked to interpret an ambiguous, symmetric ink-blot, uncovers favored and perhaps surprising templates stored within us. The interpreter sees what it expects to see, and remembers what never occurred. It connects characters to cartoons, and story lines to partially observed, understood, or remembered experiences--all by fits to stored templates, models, ideals, and prejudices.

Thus, Nietzsche's remarks:

1. Group together, as part of one continuum, perception of images, phrases, and experiences. The continuum connects image perception to idea creation. An idea helps to form a perception which is itself a kind of idea.
2. Indicate that whole perceptions are fabricated from samples. Nietzsche tells us that we fabricate all perceptions whether or not we are conscious of the fact.
3. Illustrate fabrication as a process of completion. At one end of a continuum of perception, the visual system does this according to biologically hardwired rules; at the other end, our interpreter follows learned rules
4. Through use of words like "lying", "inventors, and "guesses", also suggests that we have considerable freedom in how things are perceived--more than we normally believe.

In contrast to those made about Truth, these statements do not transcend human inquiry and judgement. They are central to the Nietzschean and postmodern critique of science and also to the concept of data reduction. The discussion of Nietzsche will therefore be interrupted to develop them somewhat further.

Nietzsche's remarks on perception point out that we commonly fill in details according to internally stored 'templates'. The original meaning of a template is a form used to reproduce a shape. The simplest example is a straight edge, which allows one to fill in the points on a straight line as determined by two of its points. Since there are many points on a line, a straight edge is an instrument for producing many points out of two.

Suppose you wanted someone to draw a straight line segment in a definite position. You could communicate to that person the position of the endpoints and the fact that they were to be connected by a straight line. The message would require no further data. It would be unnecessary to additionally communicated the positions of any intermediate points along the line. You would not normally communicate such redundant data because it would take effort which could be otherwise turned to better use.

Communications systems, whether of cable or nerves, act similarly. None waste their finite capacities on transmitting redundant data. All try to minimize the amount of data necessary to transmit a message. They do this by eliminating irrelevant and redundant data. Data reduction achieved by elimination of redundancy is often called data compression. (Normally some redundancy is actually used in communications to correct errors in data transmission, but the length of this redundant data is relatively small and can be ignored for present purposes.) In keeping with this terminology, one might say that the straight edge is an instrument of data decompression.

Thus suppose there is a line segment, possibly in your mind, but more simply, suppose it is physical. You compress the many data points which comprise it into: two endpoints + 'straight line'; these specify a set of parameters and an instruction, respectively. This is what you communicate. The message is decompressed by the recipient back into its original form--the many points along the line--when the recipient uses a straight edge to construct the line segment.

Note that the meaning of the instruction must already be in possession of the message recipient. Without it, ‘straight edge’ has no meaning and the data reduction is impossible. The more the recipient already knows, the more data reduction is possible. What the recipient knows is its fund of learning and experience.

This is a paradigm for all communication including that between humans, within humans, and between humans and nature. These categories include science as well as perception. Indeed, even included is the process in which data concerning two humans are compressed to DNA, transmitted, and decompressed into a new human. Through these connections, Nietzsche's remarks about perception relate not only to science but to one's whole worldview.

Sensory stages of perception are unconscious and must be investigated neurophysiologically. This is a major field of current research that will be touched upon later. But there are also consciously accessible modes of perception, and we turn to these to provide some additional insight before returning to Nietzsche.

Consider again the example of skimming while reading. You read "Once upon" and your eyes are directed to skip the next two words thereby, in effect, compressing the data in the message "Once upon a time" into its first two words. The compression avoids the transmission and processing by the visual system of the words "a time".

The visual system sends its output to other parts of the brain; they can be collectively called the recipient of its messages. In our basic paradigm, compression is done solely by the sender but in this case, as we shall see, the recipient actively participates in the process

Compression uses the template "Once upon a time" which exists not in the visual system but in memory, part of the recipient. After the first two words reach the recipient, they are found to 'fit' the template. A signal is then fed back to the eyes instructing them to skip forward. Thus the template can be used for compressing as well as decompressing (filling-in or completing) the message .

Signal feedback like this pervades all perception and saves time and effort, but also tends to make us see what we want or are prepared to see, just as Nietzsche noted. The two go together. The question occupying much of this and the next chapter is the extent of feedback effects. How inventive is our fabrication. To what extent is science lying and prejudice?

Another example: you look at an object and quickly determine it is a face. Informed by the object's classification, this determines the eye's strategy with respect to where and when it focuses next The template for face, equivalently, the defining set of interconnected properties shared by all faces--the set which defines this particular abstraction--is linked to, and helps the motor control of the eyes.

Remarkably, neurophysiological research strongly suggests that the determination that it is looking at a face occurs already within the visual system. Individual axons have been found in animal visual systems which signal only when the animal sees a hand or a face. It is certain that simpler components of pictures such as lines are determined early on in the visual system. It is not hard to infer from these and similar indications that the determination of abstractions such as ‘line segment’ and ‘face’, is distribute throughout the nervous system.

The determination of a particular face must be a multi-stage process. First edges are located, then boundaries, then colors and textures are filled in, then a face as a particular kind of set of boundaries, colors, and textures, then the kind of face (human/animal, male/female), then perhaps a particular individual. These stages are arrayed from the first stages of visual processing to well within the brain when, for example, the face of an old acquaintance is retrieved from memory.

This must be true throughout the nervous system, with each portion of it reducing incoming data and feeding its product to other portions, and in the process, regularly receiving feedback. Object perception is distributed within the nervous system, and merges with idea perception as Nietzsche implied when he connected the determination and perception of texture to that of whole experiences.

When a template or abstraction is determined--a particular one identified on the basis of sampling--it is not normally decompressed. If it were, the brain would be flooded with unnecessary data, exactly what it is seeking to avoid by reducing data in the first place. This is especially apparent at the conscious level. We normally think in terms of abstractions themselves, not in terms of a list of their defining attributes. When I think of a dog, I am not aware of all the attributes which define being a dog as I think.

Similarly, when I think of a continuous line, I not only do not think of all the points on the line but could not do so because there is no limit to their number. I mentally perceive a continuity and think I perceive all its points, but that is untrue. Only a finite number of electrochemical signals correspond to the perception of a line segment.

Perception is a form of data compression which is not reversible. Fitting (or compressing) some data points to a continuous line creates something new which, however it is 'decompressed', can never yield the original. This is commonly understood when people say, for example, that geometry deals with perfect mathematical lines and points as opposed to real ones.

Thus the perception of a line is not only a mental fabrication but is also a kind of 'lie', just as Nietzsche said. He would also say this when a scientist explains some isolated data on the basis of some theory and is thereby able to fill in between data points by running a smooth theoretical curve through them.

Nietzsche's remarks go even beyond this. They suggest that the phenomenal world, the "hard fact" upon which all true knowledge is supposed to be based, is actually mental fabrication. And if what we observe--the basis of all knowledge, including that of science--is a mental fabrication, then one has the basis of Nietzsche's view of the problematic nature of all truth. The special importance of the sciences in this regard--its relation to one's whole worldview if you will--is that they are our exemplars of truth so that an attack on them is automatically the sharp and hardened point of an attack upon truth in all its forms.

This is a key element in Nietzsche's epistemological critique. The will to power is another.

How order is supposed to grow from Chaos depends on tradition. The archaic paganism of Hesiod, still present in Ovid, imbued Chaos with an inherent coherence producing power: coherence as an outgrowth of incoherence. Seeds produce forms from formless soil, and sex produces life in an act of abandonment of restraint (order); these, our most immediate models of how order arises, both also examples of the association of life with this process, are featured in the poems of Ovid and Hesiod respectively.

The later pagan traditions--Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Hermetic-- differ from the archaic in conceiving of order imposed from above rather than in growing from below. Their independent guiding principle of order is Mind under which the Demiurge fashions the imperfect order of this phenomenal world. In the Hermetic tradition, Man becomes a brother of Demiurge with the power to build his own Cosmos--an image that first appears in the Christian dominated world as Faust.

Nietzsche is very close to the archaic tradition. The coherence producing power within Chaos is his will to power. At one point, he describes it as:

Thus, words like 'will', 'power', and 'desire' are to be understood as both analogies and as examples. He uses the phrase will to power to suggest properties we associate with feelings (affects) of will, power, and desire, but its role is to be universal, not only psychological. All order appearing out of chaos is due to one form or another of the will to power. It is a unifying concept--in fact, he is reducing everything to it.

He proposes to derive all psychological drives from a will to power:

Freud theorized that sex (reproduction) was the basic drive (primitive form of affect), and others had proposed that a will to happiness played that role. Nietzsche noted how will to power can explain and therefore supplant will to happiness as a basic drive:

Elsewhere he similarly explains other affects in terms of the will to power.

The same passage then again reminds us:

which leads to the comment:

He is saying that an equation such as Newton's famous F=MA (Force equals Mass times Acceleration), which is often interpreted as pointing to force as the cause of acceleration, in fact says nothing about cause. It merely states the equality of two quantities. The driving force mentioned,-- that which is lacking,--should be understood as that which actually causes things to obey this equality: that which, in general forces laws to be obeyed.

We have laws but why must things actually follow them?

This kind of question is the same as others already discussed. Why do things even exist for to laws apply? Why do laws exist for them to obey? Why does existence sustain itself from one instant to the next? What keeps it going? Why is there anything to keep going--anything at all? Nietzsche correctly points out that science is not about such questions.

Religious monotheism provides a vocabulary for answering such question in which the key word is God. Nietzsche seems to be proposing his own metaphysical vocabulary in which he replaces God by will to power. Now this very strange, for he is proposing the very same metaphysical system building--a system built upon the unifying concept of a will to power--that he continually mocks at other places in his writings.

[the ass arrived, beautiful and most brave]

Is the will to power Nietzsche's ass?

Nietzsche appreciates that there are problems with the psychological concept of will, and tries to ensure that they are not mistakenly attributed to his will to power.

There is only a will to power, one thing, assuming many forms. In particular, he understands that to believe in free-will is to believe in miracles:

The last remark has been verified by measuring the timing of signals from different portions of the brain: the start of the signals corresponding to the conscious sense of "willing" follows those for the onset of the execution!

Let us call them illusions rather than lies. All our great cultural accomplishments--art, philosophy, and even science appear as higher forms of such illusions. Great culture is formed by those artists of life, the Ubermenschen, who dip into the seething vat of Chaos, dissolve their old mental structures in it, and drink new sensations from it--the seeds of new creation. Having been deserted by God, who can limit our creativity? Only those too timid to dare, to stand on their own, subscribe to the illusion that we are not free to create what we will. The timid are slaves, the brave are masters, of illusion.

On journeys back and forth from Chaos to Cosmos, from dissolution and dissipation to construction and creation, great artists are led by Dionysos and Apollo respectively. These gods are guides, paragons of ways of thought, representative instincts, characteristics of lifestyles--all concepts that relate directly to psychology (the realm in which the ancient gods still live in their modern guises of instincts, powers, and such).

Nietzche’s original conception of these gods was set forth in his first book, published at the age of 28 in 1872 entitled The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. In a retrospective introduction he introduced Dionysos as follows:

Dionysians realize

And they experience

Dionysos was originally an Asiatic god of the vine, and the Dionysian ecstasy Nietzsche mentions originated with alcoholic or drug-induced intoxication and orgy. He refers at the start of The Birth of Tragedy to

Festivals of Dionysos, from those of the Bacchae to those of the flower-children, are ways dissolve the self, to be… not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative lust we have become one. The Dionysian becomes one not with Cosmos, as in Platonic, Stoic and pantheistic traditions, but with Chaos, also conceived of as a living being.

The mind immerses in Chaos to dissolve old verities, to experience exuberant fertility from which grow new forms of thought. This is often painful and dangerous, for Chaos is a strong solvent and may dissolve too much mental structure; it may destroy the self, the personality, and the Dionysian may be lost.

Nietzsche characteristically addresses himself to art and the artist because the Cosmos, a creation of Man, should be thought of a work of art. He evaluates everything according to aesthetic criteria. Thus:

The artist exposes himself to fertile Chaos, the unconscious beneath the conscious mind--raw sensory impressions, unfiltered reactions, deep instincts--and from these create values, visions, theories, artifacts: all the components of a culture. The great artist must brave exposure to the pain and danger of dissolution in this roiling cauldron of chaos.

But then, artists must create. At some point, after their Dionysian phase they must turn to Man's other guide, Apollo, the god/genius personifying the principle of individuation. This key concept for both Neitzsche and this essay--the identification of individuals–denotes a wide range of processes by which we create our world: organize our Cosmos from Chaos. The sensory system creates objects from chaotic external stimuli; the mind creates categories, laws, systems. and so on to organize these objects. All these creations are the 'individuals' which populate our Cosmos. Plato identified them as externally fixed eternal forms; Nietzsche, as forms that artists, driven by their will to power, internally create in endless variety. Thus he wrote:

…where Transfiguring genius means giving shape to otherwise formless material, sculpting Cosmos from formless Chaos.

A reminder of his historical situation at the end of the 19^th century will help explain the form of his response. Then as now, science and scientific technology, were continually and massively disturbing the world, world orders, and worldviews, and in the process, exposing weaknesses in their foundations, both true and imagined. The dominant worldviews of the West were those of the various flavors of Christianity and that of science. The true foundations of the former lay concealed behind rotting intellectual timbers: two millennia of false constructions from the idols of the Catholics to the gnostic fundamentalism of the Protestants. Given the strains imposed by science, rotting timbers could no longer support religious monotheism upon the intellectual landscape of educated Europe.

Science faced the opposite problem: foundations that were too young rather than too old. Although the practice at least of physics, as I shall later discuss, had been essentially settled since Newton, its meaning within the larger scheme of things was still in an early stage of explication. We do first and understand later. We worked with number for millennia before attaining a understanding of it commensurate with our skill, and so also with science. Thus the massive misunderstandings of the meaning of science--all types of misunderstandings and at all levels of society--that continue to this day.

I have already pointed out that the content of science, as distinguished from attitudes towards it, is impervious to religion. On the same basis, the essential content of religious monotheism, a firm belief in an completely unknowable God, is impervious to scientific investigation. For as Nietzsche stated

But neither of these points have ever been widely appreciated, and so as belief in the monotheistic God began to die, people either ran to the hope of science or to the despair of Nihilism. As Nietzsche observed, in the passage begun in Ref.:

Theism no longer appeared as a viable option to the educated classes of the West as a result of the intellectual, technological, and social revolutions engendered by science. The transcendent meaning to life provided by religion was thereby destroyed. Some turned to science as a religion, but many others turned to nihilism--a pessimistic retreat from life associated with Schopenhauer who in turn associated it with Buddhism. Nietzsche called it saying No to life.

In this context, Nietzsche major objectives were to show that science could not satisfy the false absolutist hopes many had claimed for it, that neither could religion and philosophy, the older sources of such authority, but that the nihilist alternative to this was ignoble. Nietzschean heroes, bred with an overflow of a form of will to power,--a will to life,--said Yes to life!

The assault on all standards and beliefs begun by Nietzsche over a century ago, continues to this day. It produces and is produced by chaos--a natural reservoir of which already lies within everyone's psyche. Nietzsche, the artist, constantly exposed himself to this part of his psyche, and he forces readers to do the same. Settled beliefs must be uprooted, encrusted institutions and ideas, hammered, their protective surfaces cracked by hammer-shocks. He called it philosophizing with a Hammer.

Soil must be cracked open and overturned in order that new seeds enter and grow. For the greatest artist, person, or society, such destruction and re-growth is a never ending process. But just as soil can be left dangerously exposed by continual disturbance and overworking, so also can society, by this kind of powerful philosophizing.

Thus Nietzsche is often known merely in terms of the chaos producing part of his teaching, for it can be superficially understood and copied by anyone. At one level they merely amount to the everything-is-relative philosophic sophomores, the builders of nothing, but at another level, not so far removed, appear more dangerous types whose thoughts are characterized by Karl Jaspers as

For historical reasons that will not be discussed here, included under violence, hostility, mendacity are ever-enduring types of fascistic and crypto-fascistic philosophers; and, under resentment, an extensive assortment of haters of science and modernity. To appreciate what Nietzsche has to offer, it is important to see past these misuses of him.

In summary, the two major characteristics of Nietzschean philosophizing mentioned here can both be related to characteristics of chaos. The first has to do with the use of hyperbole. Chaos is unconstrained--anything goes. Nietzsche refused to restrain his thoughts, to hide from any of the thoughts and conjectures, however extreme, that bubbled up inside his head. He forced himself to explore them all. If no external authority is accessible to us, everything can and should be questioned. And he exposes his inner thoughts to his readers, demonstrating what they too must do, and shocking them into doing it.

His hyperbole shocks to get your attention; it demands your critical engagement; it drives you to doubt, to crack tight little walls of thought, and to open paths beyond their safe and tidy intellectual borders. Is an opinion of his outrageous? Or some fact outrageously wrong? Fine! He challenges you to answer him and question everything. A hero is unafraid to think outrageously.

The second characteristic of Nietzschean philosophizing is its chaotic time behavior. Nietzsche's writing swings rapidly from one interpretation to another, always experimenting, unable to stay fixed for very long. This is closely related to the metastability previously discussed in reference to ironists. The Nietzschean cannot long rest on any one view when none can be True.

In all, a continual and joyful probing of life, evidence of an excess supply of will to power and a joyful, positive, and assertive reaction to man's aloneness (or abandonment by the hidden God), is the core of the Nietzschean style.

The single most important and contentious principle of Nietzschean thought, especially as applied to physics, is often summed up in the credo All is interpretation, quite the parallel--and as we shall see, closely related--to the Pythagorean All is number. Nietzsche has given us a clear statement of what this should be taken to mean.

As an old philologist, Nietzsche was trained in the interpretation of texts. He notes that the common phrase nature's conformity to law, is not text, but interpretation. What is the corresponding text? We are tempted to say, with Galileo, that it is the book Nature has written in number--that it is (as far as it has been read) the formula of mathematical physics--but Nietzsche would say that such a book would also be an interpretation. Nevertheless, it is useful to suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is the True text, because it provides a model that will illustrate the relation between text and interpretation.

Next comes a lengthy anti-democratic rant. He ascribes talking in terms of nature's conformity to law to base humanitarianism, plebeian antagonism to privilege, and a refined atheism. He proposes another, very different, interpretation based on his will to power concept: that apparent lawfulness can appear as a result of lawlessness--that order can emerge from chaos.

He probably got ideas for how this might actually be seen to happen from certain popularly discussed scientific concepts of that era, the most important of which would have been that of entropy. The law that entropy increases in any natural process is related to the fact that microscopic constituents of systems move through space, occupy it, and arrange themselves within it, in essentially all ways open to them. The classic example is a gas whose molecules bounce about, apparently at random, and as they do so, chance upon and move through essentially all of the space accessible to them within an enclosure. As a consequence, when a valve is opened making accessible a new volume of space, we see that a gas rushes in to occupy it. This increase in the volume occupied by a gas results in an increase in its entropy.

Many physical laws similarly reflect a degree of underlying chaos found in nature. Not only the expansion of a gas into an empty container, but the cooling down of hot matter to surrounding temperature, the settling down of disturbed systems, and so on, are all natural regularities typically ascribed to obedience to natural law, and yet are all manifestations of entropy increase, and hence of underlying chaos. In this sense, law can arise from lawlessness, and order from chaos.

This example illustrates various Nietzschean ideas to varying degrees. Best illustrated is the relation between language and interpretation. Whenever we use words like obedience to law when referring to natural regularities they carry unwarranted implications; in fact so do words like natural regularities themselves. If we take the mathematical expression of the laws of physics as text, then the mere act of communicating them verbally, and of giving them meaning in the ordinary sense of the word, forces an interpretation upon them.

This point, already stressed in the Introduction, bears further analysis. Nietzsche, in the quotation being discussed, emphasizes social aspects of such interpretation ( e.g. social equality versus inequality). These are important because of the social lessons thinkers often attempt to draw directly from fundamental natural law. The lessons Nietzsche himself drew from his will to power doctrine are a good example of this, as he himself admitted. And as he also admitted in his last sentence above, they are also unwarranted (neither could they be True, if Truth does not exist).

But social interpretations of physical law are less in fashion today, and are in any case not of central concern here. What is, is called physical interpretation. This comes in two flavors, the first associated with words like molecules, temperature, and random, the second with words like volume, valve, new. The latter are words connecting theory to phenomenal reality. They are used in the operational definitions of the experimentalist.

The former connect mathematical symbols to various concepts, some from basic theory (as when one talks about current in terms of moving charges) and some from phenomenal reality. The purpose of all of them is to provide concepts--objects of thought--supplementing mathematical symbols which also play that role. Most creative thought is in terms of concepts or of the images they suggest.

Both flavors constitute interpretation but of very different character. The words interpreting formula in terms of phenomena are tied to our physical condition: human size, sensory apparatus, and the particular environment provided by planet Earth. Imagine, for example, organizing experience from the viewpoint of a creature of the size of an electron. Such a creature might not find the concepts of temperature, pressure, volume, and entropy useful. It might organize experience so that these concepts never appeared. On the other hand, since we are in fact embedded in one particular physical condition, it is improbable that the interpretive vocabulary dependent upon it will ever become lose its utility or become 'untrue'.

Theory dependent physical interpretation is another matter. It has and must continue to be expected to change along with theory. Because it is central to the postmodern critique of science, its character will be discussed in the next chapter.

Of course, Nietzsche does not accept the idea that mathematical physics is the text of the book of nature. It comprises (the text of) an interpretation, apparently, of Chaos. But this Chaos must also be interpretation. Can we ask of what, or is this a meaningless question because it leads to a regression similar to that of why-questions?

The Nietzschean spirit is to dispense with this level of metaphysics. It is the spirit Zarathustra expressed when he bid us not to try to imagine gods, to extend our imagination beyond its bounds. This leaves us with a world of chaos in which humans appear and upon which they impress their interpretive will to power. It seems similar to the world as interpreted by Hesiod and Ovid except that humans create/imagine not gods but their functional equivalents, principles of organization (e.g. a variety 'wills' that are expressions of the will to power).

Poetical metaphysics aside, what is the resultant Nietzschean vision of physics? What does it imply to say that physics is interpreting chaos in terms of mathematical regularity? Three sorts of inferences can be identified.

The first simply generalizes previous remarks. Interpretations require motivations. If the equations of mathematical physics are not inherently unique, there must be a motivation for their choice, and other motivations will lead to other choices. Nietzsche continually emphasizes that mathematical physics must ultimately serve the purpose of life. This is a point being made in this essay--the biological basis of science. It is also implied in the discussion of The Birth of Tragedy: we cannot live in chaos, it requires the great courage of the Dionysian even to expose oneself to it.

The second is the virtual impossibility of reductionism (in the sense previously discussed in which axioms of one field are reduced to theorems of another). There is simply no reason for there being a unity of knowledge, of science, or even of one science. If each branch of knowledge, of science, or of a particular science results from coherence artificially impressed upon an incoherent reality, all knowledge must be like a fleet of lifeboats tossing about on a sea of chaos.

The origin of modern science was dependent on this question, the outstanding example (to be discussed later) being that of the unity of the laws governing heaven and earth, the so-called super- and sub-lunary spheres. The future of modern science is similarly dependent. Outstanding questions of this sort are currently concern the origin of species, and of mind. If these questions were to become patently ridiculous in the eyes of social opinion-makers--if a pagan worldview were to become dominant--, only self-funded eccentrics could investigate them.

The last sort of inference follows from the previous: when unity is present, since it is not intrinsic, there must be an extrinsic reason for it. From this follows the current opinion amongst many that the evident unity of physics (and of the other hard sciences)--the fact that almost always, almost all physicists march in step and agree on what properly constitutes their field--is the result of social forces. That physics is socially constructed and solidified.

All of these attitudes flow if not necessarily then certainly reasonably from a worldview that does not believe in some sort of coherence underlying existence.