Nietzsche as Critic of Science — Philosophising with the Hammer

Whoever reads Nietzsche encounters a thinker who works with a wrecking ball. Morality is dismantled, religion exposed, metaphysics dismissed. So far the popular reading. What is almost always overlooked: Nietzsche directed his hammer against natural science as well. He struck it at a point that remains sensitive to this day.

Perhaps you have yourself felt that unease when a scientific explanation is presented to you that works perfectly well yet explains nothing. When you notice that behind the formulas and models, the questions that truly matter are disappearing. Nietzsche took that unease seriously. He reached deeper than individual research findings. He asked about the presuppositions on which the entire edifice rests — and found fictions where others saw foundations.

#What Nietzsche Criticises About Science

Nietzsche’s critique of science has three layers that must be distinguished if it is to be taken seriously.

The first layer concerns Nietzsche’s position within science itself. He was no enemy of natural knowledge. On the contrary: he studied the physical debates of his time with an attentiveness that most philosophers lacked. The Dalmatian natural scientist Ruggero Boscovich particularly fascinated him. Boscovich had already in the eighteenth century replaced the notion of material atoms — tangible, indivisible particles — with a model of extensionless centres of force. Nietzsche saw in this the greatest triumph over the senses that had yet been achieved on earth. His own words in Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 12 (Nietzsche, 1886): Boscovich had pulled the ground from under the belief in substance, in matter, in that earthly residue and particle-atom.

What excited Nietzsche about this was the break with surface appearances. Just as Copernicus had shown that the earth moves, though the senses say otherwise, so Boscovich showed that matter is not a solid substance at all but a web of forces. Space becomes the carrier of a force-field continuum, into which ideas flow that can be found in Leibniz and Giordano Bruno. Nietzsche’s dynamic natural philosophy is no mere speculation. It is a serious attempt to break open the rigidity of the mechanistic worldview from within.

#Can Natural Science Explain Nature — or Does It Merely Describe It?

The second layer lies deeper. Here it is no longer about a theory within science but about the question of what science can achieve at all. Nietzsche gives a simple but effective answer: explanation is the reduction of the unknown to something known. Whoever wants to explain something must build a bridge to what the other person already understands. They must connect to what has already been grasped.

And precisely here lies the problem. Physics can describe phenomena with astonishing precision. It can find formulas that work. It can make predictions and build machines. That is no small achievement. But it is not yet an explanation. Between description and explanation lies an abyss that natural science typically bridges in silence. Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, the nineteenth-century physicist, had expressly stated in his lectures on mechanics: natural science cannot explain, it can only describe. Because the description is so sophisticated, many people think it is an explanation. It is not.

What does it mean that magnetism brings iron filings into a particular shape? It is named, but not explained. What is a field? What is a force? What carries light through space? These are questions that physics still evades by positing concepts that organise the phenomenon but do not allow it to be understood.

And here a thought comes into play that is central to Nietzsche’s critique of science: fiction. Nietzsche exposes that many fundamental scientific assumptions are not hypotheses that could be tested but fictions — posits presented as reality. The philosopher Vaihinger later developed this systematically in his work The Philosophy of As-If (Vaihinger, 1911): before we know it, fictions are rebuilt into hypotheses, and suddenly it is reality. Suddenly we are inside a worldview and expected to find our way around. But one fiction has chased another.

#Nietzsche’s Critique of Monocausality

The third layer concerns causality. Nietzsche doubts the concept of causality in natural science, though in a way more nuanced than it first appears. He does not reject causality because he believes in pure chance. What he criticises is the fixation on a single, superficially graspable cause — monocausality.

This critique is remarkably current. Think of any debate in recent years in which a single cause was held responsible for a complex event: in medicine, in politics, in the history of science. Everywhere the same confusion of correlation and cause. This is supposed to have caused that. But is it true? What is the real cause of an illness, a social change, a historical development? Nietzsche shows: it is a total phenomenon. The pinning down to a single culprit, a single causa, is itself a perspectival error. Whoever confuses cause and effect (and this happens, as Nietzsche shows in Twilight of the Idols under the heading “The Four Great Errors” (Nietzsche, 1889), constantly in the handling of decadence) treats symptoms and mistakes narcotisation for healing.

At this point Nietzsche’s perspectivism, which many know only as an epistemological parlour game, becomes a sharp diagnostic tool. Whoever names a cause is projecting. Whoever fixes a causality builds a fiction. And whoever stacks enough fictions on top of one another can mistake madness for order. The next time you hear that science has established something, it is worth carrying Nietzsche’s question along: what exactly has been established here, and what has been silently presupposed in the process?

#What the Hammer Strikes — and What It Uncovers

What does Nietzsche mean when he speaks of philosophising with the hammer? In Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche, 1889) the subtitle reads: How One Philosophises with a Hammer. The hammer here is not a tool of destruction but an instrument of testing. Like a doctor’s hammer tapping the knee to test the reflex. Nietzsche taps the idols and listens for whether they sound hollow.

The idols of modern science sound hollow when tested with this hammer: the notion of eternal laws of nature, the absoluteness of the causal law, the fiction of an empty space in which dead matter moves. Nietzsche names the problem: natural science operates with mathematised fictions, builds machines on them, and because the machines work, the fictions are taken for truth. My computer works, therefore the Big Bang happened — this is a short circuit that Nietzsche would have dissected with relish.

In this he is not alone. Goethe, whom Nietzsche deeply admired and whose Theory of Colours he probably never read, had tirelessly warned against trying to explain nature with abstract fictions. The two are, as Jochen Kirchhoff put it (cf. Kirchhoff, 2024), the most intelligent critics of the nineteenth century in this field. Goethe criticised the abstraction from living perception. Nietzsche criticised the abstraction from the perspectival conditionedness of all knowledge. Both strike the same sore point: a science that has forgotten that its foundations are posits, not revelations. Jochen Kirchhoff summed it up (Kirchhoff, 2024): natural scientists do not interpret the world without presuppositions. They interpret the world according to very specific premises that are themselves no longer open to questioning. The philosopher aims to take up these premises.

#Nietzsche and the Tradition of Living Natural Philosophy

Here something becomes visible that is almost never addressed in conventional Nietzsche scholarship. Nietzsche rejected metaphysics, mocked Schelling, ridiculed even Schopenhauer, though he owed him much. And yet, on closer inspection, he is closer to German natural philosophy than he himself wanted to admit.

His thought that the world has an interior, that behind appearances a principle of will is at work expressing itself in countless centres of force, is in substance a profoundly natural-philosophical thought. Schopenhauer had formulated it thus: everything that happens in nature has an exterior and an interior. The interior is the will. Nietzsche sharpens this into his will to power. This does not mean only the political power of the tyrant but a primal force in things that drives them forward, intensifies them, lets them ripen into higher forms.

Can Nietzsche’s natural philosophy be brought into connection with Schelling’s transcendental natural philosophy? Jochen Kirchhoff pursued this question over decades and answered in the affirmative (cf. Kirchhoff, 2024). For if the will to power is conceived as the interior of the world, as that which operates in human self-overcoming just as it does in the growth of a plant or the binding force of a chemical element, then a dimension opens up that points beyond nihilism. Then the human being stands, through their powers of will, in living contact with the world. Not as an isolated subject in a dead machinery, but as part of a nexus of forces that carries them and which they help to shape.

This is what Alwin Mittasch called Nietzsche’s all-encompassing cosmic aim (Mittasch, 1952). It is the insight that self-overcoming and cosmic events are not separate domains but expressions of the same will. Dante put it in the Divine Comedy in a formula that points beyond Nietzsche: L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle — it is love that moves the sun and the other stars. What Nietzsche thinks as will to power can, against his own resistance, also be read as that force which binds, sustains, and moves toward care. Not only the force that overwhelms, but also the one that builds.

#What We Can Learn from Nietzsche — and Where He Does Not Lead Further

Nietzsche’s critique of science is a gift to anyone willing to question the foundations of their own thinking. His distrust of absolute claims, his unmasking of fictions that pose as facts, his critique of monocausality: none of this is outdated — it is of an urgency that only increases in an age of algorithmic world-explanation. If you question the premises on which your own worldview rests, not out of destructiveness but from the desire for honesty, then you stand in a tradition that Nietzsche helped to found.

And yet Nietzsche stops at a decisive point. He sees the illness clearly, more clearly than most diagnosticians before and after him. But he has, as Jochen Kirchhoff once put it (Kirchhoff, 2024), no cosmos in which he can stand. His rejection of metaphysics cuts him off from the ground on which a genuine alternative to the mechanistic worldview could grow. The hammer tests, but it does not build.

What Nietzsche breaks open, others carry further: Goethe in his contemplative perception, Schelling in his philosophy of living nature, Jochen Kirchhoff in the connection of science critique and cosmological thinking. Nietzsche stands at the beginning of a question that has not yet been answered: what would a knowledge look like that does not separate the human being from the world but leads them deeper into it?

Whoever recognises this question as their own has already begun to philosophise with the hammer. The hammer tests the idols — but your ear must be able to hear whether they sound hollow.

#Sources

• Kirchhoff, J. (2024). Nietzsche als Wissenschaftskritiker — Mit dem Hammer philosophieren. YouTube: Gwendolin Kirchhoff [tP9zNqZG5pI].
• Mittasch, A. (1952). Friedrich Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph. Stuttgart: Kröner.
• Nietzsche, F. (1882). Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Chemnitz: Schmeitzner.
• Nietzsche, F. (1886). Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Leipzig: Naumann.
• Nietzsche, F. (1889). Götzen-Dämmerung. Leipzig: Naumann.
• Nietzsche, F. (1901). Der Wille zur Macht (Nachlass). Leipzig: Naumann.¹
• Vaihinger, H. (1911). Die Philosophie des Als-Ob. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard.

#Footnotes

1. The Will to Power is not an authorised Nietzsche work but a posthumous compilation from his notebooks, assembled by Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast. The philologists Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari demonstrated that the selection and arrangement of fragments are editorial constructions. In this article, the “will to power” is treated primarily as a philosophical concept, not as a textual citation. ↩