Experimentation in Nietzsche’s Dawn

In Dawn [D] Nietzsche claims “We are experiments [Experimente]: let us also want to be such!” (D 453). In this chapter, I address the question of what, for Nietzsche, it means to be an experiment. I argue that Nietzsche advocates that we take up an experimental method at an existential level. This method combines experiments in philosophy and knowledge seeking with experiments in living. Bamford has previously explored Nietzsche’s “experimentalism” as she terms it in relation to the practice of a new ethics, in which experimentalism is itself a form of virtue (Bamford 2016, p. 15). To practise a new ethics is a form of experimenting in how we live. And Bamford also notes the importance of experimentalism to Nietzsche’s method of knowledge. Further, Ansell-Pearson and Bamford more recently suggested that experimentation as a means to knowing can be partly achieved through “ways of living” (Ansell-Pearson and Bamford 2020, p. 89). I use Hadot’s concept of philosophy as a way of life to further elucidate how these two aspects, experimenting in knowledge and experimenting in life, are inseparable (Hadot 1995, p. 265). It is only by breaking certain habits, evaluative judgements, and ways of feeling that we can reach a new understanding of the world, and this requires active practice and effort. Doing philosophy thus involves taking up certain practices and even living differently. On this understanding philosophy is potentially transformative of how we live and who we are.