§63. Experimental Life

The idea of an experimental life plays out on several levels in Nietzsche’s work. One is a theory of knowledge that emphasizes experimental values. Another is the ethical idea of life lived experimentally.

Though Nietzsche had a low opinion of English philosophers, two of his arguments exploding the “prejudices of the philosophers” seem obviously to derive from Hume (perhaps via F. A. Lange’s History of Materialism, which Nietzsche read carefully). One argument is against the belief in an entita- tive self. Hume also looked for something enduring in consciousness and could not find it. A self, he decided, is a bundle; its continuity like a rope, with many overlapping fibers. Nietzsche underscores discontinuity in the bundle. Instead of a neatly twined rope, we have a harlequin cloak. We are not one thing, not even one bundle.¹¹¹

A second prejudice concerns the idea of cause and effect, which Nietzsche says is a convenient way of relating and organizing events but does not ex­plain them. What we call a cause is never a true sufficient condition. Causes do not produce their effect, which is merely an association of perceptual qualities. The argument is again Hume’s (better, Ockham’s). “We should not erroneously objectify ‘cause’ and ‘effect,’” says Nietzsche, and must avoid the “mechanistic stupidity” that has “the cause push and shove until it ‘effects’ something.” He says we should “use ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ only as “con­ventional fictions for the purpose of description and communication, not explanation.”¹¹²

Nietzsche’s exact position on causality is difficult, however. On the one hand, the idea of sufficient, generating, productive powers in nature is no more than a useful error. A few pages on, however, he says, “We must make the attempt to hypothetically posit the causality of the will as the only type of causality there is.” He proposes “the hypothesis that everywhere ‘effects’ are recognized, will is effecting will”; that “every mechanistic event in which a force is active is really a force and effect of the will”; and finally, that “all ef­ficacious force” is “will to power” To me, this passage raises three questions.

To pronounce the essence of the world to be will to power is a dramatic way to say that physical interaction is other than mechanical. That was the ar­gument of Spinoza and Leibniz against Descartes’s idea of inert extension as the essence of body. Interaction is dynamic, agents and patients, active forces and forceful reactions. To be active is to be changing in a way that enhances the power with which environing forces are dominated, inciting and surmounting their reaction. Nietzsche was reading Maximilian Drossbach, On the Apparent and Real Causes of Occurrences in the World (1884), who, having referred to Leibniz, writes, “Entities do not move because—from where one does not know—they are pushed or driven, but because they strive to expand themselves. One only has the correct concept of force when one recognizes it as the striving toward expansion.” Nietzsche’s marginal note: “I say will to power.” This “will to power” is not essentially different from the conatus of Spinoza, a tendency of all things to enhance their power of exist­ence, a tendency to j oy if they are alive and conscious.¹¹⁴

In what way is this a hypothesis? Simply, that it cannot be deduced from more evident principles, and is introduced hypothetically to explain some­thing. Yet if this “will to power” is a hypothesis on natural causality, why does Nietzsche also say that “in the ‘in itself’ there is nothing like causal associ­ation... [or] necessity”? I think we have to distinguish between the causal beliefs of common sense, which are (at best) useful errors, and the palpable fact of power in nature. Hume did the same thing. On the one hand, the ten­dency to believe something to be “the cause” or “an effect” is natural, irresist­ible, human nature, but no more, and in no case do these naive descriptions express rational understanding.

But of course that is exactly what Nietzsche does, immodestly proposing a hypothesis on those ultimate springs and principles. It is, in effect, the hy­pothesis of Spinoza and Leibniz, that the power productive in nature has the quality of a will to power, meaning a tendency to growth, expansion, enhanced vitality, dominating local conditions of existence. “The victorious concept ‘force’... needs a supplement: it must be accorded an internal world [i.e., a tendency, a finality] that I designate ‘will to power,’ i.e., an insatiable demand for the demonstration of power, or utilization, exercise of power, as creative drive.”¹¹⁶

The most insidious of philosophy’s errors are Plato’s ideas of Mind and the Good in Itself. Mind is immaterial being, intellect without body or sen­sation, and the Good in Itself is a value unconditioned by perspective. This Good does not depend on who you are or what you can do, which are lesser, relative, conflicting goods. Above them is the Good Itself, which makes all those relative goods really good. As Nietzsche says, this is a bad idea. Values are values for living beings, evolved organisms. There is no good in itself, no value in itself, and truth be told, no “in itself.”¹¹⁷

Nietzsche aligns himself with the philosophers who struggled against these errors, which means, in effect, the empiricists and materialists. Plato described the struggle to establish the right idea of Mind as a battle between gods and giants, the gods being idealists from Pythagoras and Parmenides to Anaxagoras and Socrates, and the giants the materialists, especially Leucippus and Democritus, a lineage Plato despised.

All of these thinkers read humanity back into nature, which all in their way understand to include the thesis—an elementary empiricism—that thought begins with affect, a body feeling, to which it is a response. Nietzsche’s first theory of concepts, in the early unpublished essay “On Truth and Lie in a Non-moral Sense” (1873), was of this sort. Nerve stimuli are translated into images, which become metaphors of their distal cause. All that we have to think with are these images, these metaphors, evocations of a form we never take in whole. The movement from stimulus to image to metaphor is an un­conscious work of art, like a dream, this unconscious artistry creating the world that consciousness naively thinks is given and present.¹¹⁹

Nietzsche wrote the essay shortly after his first book appeared, The Birth of Tragedy, and Dionysus is still on his mind. He invokes an artistic drive to metaphorize perception, of which language, science, myth, and art are offshoots. Useful, widely advantageous metaphors are candidates for be­coming concepts, which are dead metaphors, audacious juxtapositions fi­nally reduced to rules of usage. The move from image to concept volatilizes perception in a schema, leaving porous cinders of once-burning vision. Nietzsche likens concepts to the columbaria in which the ancients deposited their ancestors' bones. That’s what concepts are: cubbyholes collating friable relics of once-living sensation.

Concepts are doubly removed from truth. Their content derives from per­ception, which is a human reaction and an evolutionary artifact; and their form, their logic, depends on systematic mistakes introduced by the use of language. “Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent.” Two perceptions, different in countless respects, are illog- ically ascribed to the same object.

In later work, Nietzsche’s arguments become subtler, but I do not think he ever repudiated this much empiricism, which is clearly in the line of Democritus, Epicurus, Hobbes, and a tendentious reading of Spinoza. All our ways of thinking and representing the world pass though the body and are conditioned by its habits, needs, and instincts. That is the thesis Nietzsche calls perspectivism, and describes as “the fundamental condition of all life.” We see as we are, we cannot look around our own corner. Seeing is contin­uous with action; knowing is a form of doing, not disinterested contempla­tion; and what we do, and can do, and want to do, even need to do depends on who we are.¹²¹

What especially makes Nietzsche relevant to our look at empiricisms is his view of experimental life and existential, philosophical experiments. “We are experiments: let us also want to be them!” “We may experiment with our­selves! Yes, mankind now has a right to do that! The greatest sacrifices have not yet been offered to knowledge.” Nietzsche’s free spirits enjoy “the dan­gerous privilege of being permitted to live experimentally” Their virtue is a “courage for error, for experimentation, for accepting provisionally.” Even their truthfulness is experimental. “I think well of all skepsis to which I may reply: ‘Let us try it.’ But I no longer want to hear anything of all those things and questions which do not permit experiments. This is the limit of my ‘truthfulness’; for there courage has lost its rights.”¹²²

Error is the matrix of knowledge, which is a refinement of error, not some­thing categorically different. In a text on the origin of knowledge Nietzsche invokes the archaic epoch when those species-preserving errors and erro­neous articles of faith—concepts like substance, identity, cause, and soul— were first laid down.

against these errors, a struggle to overcome ourselves, against the grain of adaptive mental habits, learning to doubt the obvious and value surprises. Habits of intellectual honesty and skepticism were slow in coming; seen from prehistorical times, disinterested inquiry is a late birth. But gradually some of our ancestors trained themselves to prefer knowledge, to need truth, to re­pudiate faith and dogma, and be dissatisfied with conclusions that are merely convenient.

Humanity has by this experiment made itself a battleground of opposing forces. On the one hand, the inherited errors of adaptive common sense; on the other, the refined skepticism and will to truth of scientific culture. In the tension between these two tendencies—one evolved and ancient, the other convened, and not long ago—Nietzsche finds posed “the ultimate question about the condition of life”; namely, “to what extent can truth stand to be incorporated?—that is the question; that is the experiment.” Will we rise or fall, transform ourselves or decline into Zarathustra’s “last human beings,” be hard and farsighted or soft and fixed on the day?¹²³

Skepticism and disinterested inquiry run against inclination, which favors adaptive habit and useful error. The pursuit of knowledge is not something we evolved to do, not a strategy for ancestral survival. Survival is much better served by selective error than knowledge, which requires we turn against instincts, against the grain of our evolved nature, and struggle for something that was not meant to be, and for which we are not evolved or adapted. That requires cruelty, discipline, commitment, even what Nietzsche calls violence, meaning action without reserve, indifferent to consequences. Such a life lives for the challenge of knowledge, for new problems, new inquiry, new things to know. Life itself becomes the experiment of trying to know what nobody knew can be known.

To try this experiment is to seek the limit of what is currently known and experimentally settle down there. Experiments under these conditions are experiments in experimentation. “The procedures of science are at least as important a product of inquiry as any other outcome.” Ernst Mach, Nietzsche’s favorite philosopher of science, made this point too. “The forma­tive features of experiment... [are] not complete, for ingenious enquiries go on adding new items to it.” The principles of experimentation are exper­imental discoveries. No timeless test or rule defines acceptable operations, which must instead emerge from experimental history and practice.¹²⁴

Nietzsche explains that his title Die Froliche Wissenschaft was inspired by an expression of Provencal, the archaic language of medieval troubadours, who spoke of la gaya scienza. Those troubadours were poets and musicians as well as knights and warriors. Nietzsche describes them as a “unity of singer, knight, and free spirit,” which is presumably how we should under­stand “gay science.” It is science, that is, inquiry, experiment, the pursuit of knowledge; it is artful, poetic in how it merges life and knowledge; and its practitioners have trained themselves with a certain violence to be indifferent to consequences. With that we have the elements of gay science—knowledge, art, self-overcoming.¹²⁵

Nietzsche’s best statement on experimental life describes a liberation that he attributes to his realization “that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge.” He says that “with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too.” He really is recounting his experience. Writing privately to a physician he was consulting, Nietzsche said, “My existence is a dreadful burden: I would have rejected it long ago, had I not been making the most instructive experiments in the intellectual and moral domain in just this condition of suffering and almost complete renunciation—this joyous mood, avid for knowledge, raised me to heights where I triumphed over every torture and all despair.”¹²⁶

Nietzsche claimed one philosophical experiment as specially his own. Beyond Good and Evil opens with a reference to “that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers so far have spoken with respect.” Philosophers have been surprisingly reticent to question this value, leaving a curious lacuna in every philosophy—truth is “simply not permitted to be a problem.” As he pondered the philosophers and thought about the question, another ques­tion dawned on him. “What in us really wants ‘truth’?... Why not rather un­truth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?” The sheer novelty of the question surprised him. “It is as if we were the first to see it, fix it with our eyes, and risk it.”¹²⁷

This is truly Nietzsche’s question. Unlike so much in philosophy, you will not find it thrashed out in dialogues of Plato or chapters of Aristotle. Hegel did not get to it, nor did renegades like Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard bring it up. Nietzsche is therefore entitled to be emphatic. “The will to truth is in need of a critique—let us thus define our own task—the value of truth is for once to be experimentally called into question” Turn the page and he says, “After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question ‘what is the meaning of all will to truth?’ ” At this point, he says, “I touch again on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet I know of no friend): What meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?”¹²⁸

Are Nietzsche's experiments seriously experimental? An obvious differ­ence from laboratory experiments is the absence of controls. Is an uncon­trolled experiment still an experiment? How can we learn from it, if we do not know what the outcome depends on? However, existential experiments such as Nietzsche's are things we try just to see if they can be done at all. '1 here is nothing to control; you just try, say, tango or kung fu. The experimental question is, what will the experience do to you? No one knows, oneself least of all. You might last a month, or stick with it for years and change your life. Was it not an experiment, especially if you do it consciously, deliberately set­ting yourself a trial? Voyages of discovery are experiments. Columbus made an experiment. When there is uncertainty and doing something proves it can be done, controls are superfluous.

In these existential experiments controls are not merely absent, they are lifted. '1 hat is the experiment, to lift usual controls and see whether we can live with the outcome. Instead of using controls to make visible what was always there but unseen, we lift controls to see whether something new and different emerges. Applying controls, a controlled experiment, is theo- rematic, meaning that it aspires to make present something active but un­seen. Alternatives to theorematic demonstration are experiments in lifting controls, which may be called problematic experiments, using the term from Euclid that I introduced earlier (§1) and will return to (§98). Rather than disclose the unseen, problematic experiments create new possibilities. It was not possible for any life, aphorism, book, or mustache to be “like Nietzsche” until after Nietzsche lived. Nietzsche's experiments find out what happens when certain controls are relaxed. Experimentally release from control the assumption that truth is the highest value. What happens? Experimentally release control by the assumption that myths are always to be eschewed, or that error is intrinsically undesirable. What happens?

These experiments must be uncontrolled. The more consistently and radically uncontrolled they are the more we gain from their experience. “Moderation is foreign to us, let us admit this to ourselves; our thrill is pre­cisely the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured.” '1 hese experiments also ad­vance no hypothesis. The experimenter has no idea what the experiment might prove. “Becoming what you are presupposes that you do not have the slightest idea what you are. If you look at it this way, even life's mistakes have their own meaning and value.” To demand a hypothesis subverts the experiment, which could then only confirm something we already thought of, a routine possibility. What about when we lack the words? “Our true experiences are completely taciturn. They could not be communicated even if they wanted to be. This is because the right words for them do not exist” Not yet. Experiments may aspire to change the future rather than confirm the past, to create new possibilities rather than verify old ones. The more cre­ative the experiment in possibility, the more we shall feel the lack of concepts that will only make sense in the future. “Do not be afraid to stammer”¹²⁹

John Stuart Mill spoke of “experiments in living” and though Nietzsche would cringe at the comparison, I think there is something to it. Of course, Mill and Nietzsche are incommensurable, but they have asymptotes. One of them is when Mill explains the value of experiments not in the lab but in life. “There are but few persons, in comparison with the whole of mankind, whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be of any im­provement on established practice. But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist; it is they who keep the life in those which already exist”¹³⁰

Mill has a strong feeling for the value of diversity in character and giving full freedom to human potential to expand in all directions. Europe, he says, is “wholly indebted to this plurality of paths for its progressive and many­sided development.” Nietzsche makes the same point when he describes European virtues as mongrel virtues—Greek, Roman, Christian, Florentine, Goth. The result is hybrid vigor. “We have secret entrances everywhere, like no noble age has ever had, and, above all, access to the labyrinth of unfin­ished cultures and to every half-barbarism that has ever existed on earth”¹³¹

Referring to this argument in Mill, Paul Feyerabend wrote of the epis­temological value he calls proliferation, meaning the multiplication of experiments in lifting controls. Proliferation was Mill's “solution to a problem of life: how can we achieve full consciousness; how can we learn what we are capable of doing; how can we increase our freedom so that we are able to decide, rather than adopt by habit, the manner in which we want to use our talents?” Feyerabend thinks this problem arises in the sciences no less than for the existential experiments of Mill and Nietzsche. “We must be prepared to introduce ideas inconsistent with the most fundamental assumptions of our science even before those assumptions have exhibited any weakness” Like Mill, like Nietzsche, Feyerabend regards “any prolonged stability, either of ideas or impressions or of background knowledge,” as an “indication of failure, pure and simple. Any such stability indicates that we have failed to rise to a higher stage of consciousness and of understanding. It is even ques­tionable whether we can still claim to possess knowledge in such a state.” Or perhaps even to be alive! Zarathustra spoke thus: “And life confided its secret to me: ‘Behold’ it said, ‘I am that which must always overcome itself. ”¹³²