Science, Human Flourishing, and the “Metaphysical Need” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works

Throughout his corpus, Nietzsche speaks of science [Wissenschaft] with a high degree of ambivalence, sometimes blaming it as a primary contributor to an increase of spiritual illness and decay in societies and individuals, sometimes praising it as a means of alleviating that same illness and promoting spiritual health and intellectual cleanliness. In this chapter, I identify what factor(s), for Nietzsche, distinguish science which is inimical to life from science which is life promoting. Focusing on the (so-called) middle period, I argue that the crucial difference between the two is the health of the thinker and the resultant reason why they are employing science: out of a “metaphysical need” or as part of a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” Nietzsche’s project can be understood as an attempt to undermine this metaphysical need inhabiting so much of our science (especially speculative and theoretical thought) with a hermeneutic of suspicion, and he argues that scientific knowledge and methods in the narrow sense (especially psychology), are instrumental for this task. In fact, he views scientific knowledge as uniquely capable of cooling down our overheated metaphysical imagination, replacing our need for, and trust in, certainty and systematicity with an attitude of skepticism and indifference to such absolutes. Nietzsche thus hopes that science properly used can become a tool for health, liberation, and flourishing rather than a cause of Western cultures’ continued decline.