Why Nietzsche Now? — Reinterpreting His Thought at the Crossroads of Philosophy and Science
The “Common Failing” of Philosophers and Nietzsche’s Scientific Perspective
What kind of image do we generally have of Nietzsche?
For a long time, I myself saw him as the epitome of a “humanities-oriented” thinker, as someone deeply introspective, immersed in literature and the arts, and wielded poetic expression as a tool to explore personal emotion and subjectivity. This impression likely stems from the fact that Nietzsche is often grouped with existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Sartre, whose primary focus was placed on the inner self.
However, this image of Nietzsche began to crumble the more I engaged with his work. In books like Human, All Too Human (1878) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche approaches themes such as humanity, morality, and culture with surprisingly detached objectivity.
Nietzsche did not merely investigate his own inner world but adopted a critical, relativizing stance toward humanity itself. This detached viewpoint allowed him to acutely identify the psychological structure behind ressentiment embedded in Christian morality: the transformation of weakness and defeat into a moral sense of superiority. Such a perspective recalls the mindset of contemporary evolutionary biologists, cultural anthropologists, and cognitive scientists.
This scientific orientation is also evident in Nietzsche’s critique of fellow philosophers:
Family failing of philosophers. — All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of ‘man’ as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time.
— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Here, Nietzsche identifies what he calls the “family failing” of philosophers: the tendency to treat “modern man” as if he were a universal constant. They unconsciously regard humanity as an aeterna veritas, or an eternal truth, unchanging amid the flux of history. But for Nietzsche, human nature is not static; it is shaped by time, culture, and circumstance. Thus, he criticised philosophers’ common conceptions of “man” as no more than snapshots of a particular historical moment.
This insight aligns closely with post-Enlightenment scientific thought, especially the evolutionary perspective introduced by Darwin, where morality, culture, and our modes of thinking are thought to evolve under the influence of biology, environment, and social context. Furthermore, Nietzsche’s relativistic view shares uncanny familiarity with the sociology of Émile Durkheim, who in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) sought to understand religion through its social function. It’s likely Nietzsche developed this orientation through his training as a philologist and his deeply historical sensibility.
Relativized Morality and Its Future
Nietzsche also makes remarks in Human, All Too Human that can be read as warnings about the future:
If mankind is not to destroy itself through such conscious universal rule, it must first of all attain to a hitherto altogether unprecedented knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals.
This passage, on the surface, critiques Kantian ethics, which pursues a universal moral law. But it also suggests that morality and culture may need to be reconstructed on the basis of scientific understanding. Nietzsche envisions a future where morality is no longer grounded in faith or tradition, but redesigned in accordance with a dynamic understanding of human nature.
This points toward the possibility of reintegrating once-pluralised values through a new kind of “scientific foundation.” It is as if Nietzsche anticipated our current age, in which evolutionary biology and neuroscience offer emerging, if contested, frameworks for thinking about ethics and culture. Of course, the limitations of this approach, such as the risk of committing the naturalistic fallacy or overextending scientific authority into moral domains, should not be overlooked. Nietzsche’s vision nevertheless challenges us to examine our inherited or revealed morality, and reimagine and recreate it.
From Eternal Recurrence to the Block Universe
Nietzsche’s ideas also resonate surprisingly with modern physics. Take his concept of eternal recurrence: the notion that all events repeat infinitely in the same form. This bears a striking resemblance to the “block universe” theory in physics, which posits that past, present, and future all coexist within a fixed, four-dimensional spacetime structure.
While the block universe model contrasts with interpretations of quantum mechanics, it remains a serious cosmological framework compatible with Einstein’s theory of relativity. In this light, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, even though it is a metaphysical thought experiment urging us to affirm life in a deterministic universe, takes on profound existential weight, not as a scientific theory, but as a philosophical metaphor echoing the implications of the block universe model.
Free Will and the Power of Affirmation
Although I accept a deterministic view of the universe, I still believe that human beings retain the freedom to pursue happiness in meaningful ways. This aligns with the perspective of contemporary cognitive scientists like Anil Seth, who argues that although free will may be illusory, the ethical and psychological roles it plays are real and significant.
Even if our choices and desires are causally determined, we can still live in ways that reflect our values and personalities, taking full ownership of our lives. This kind of positive attitude towards life is what Nietzsche’s amor fati—the love of fate—neccesitates. It tells us to love our lives no matter what hardships and misfortunes they carry, in such a way that even if life were to repeat eternally, we could embrace it wholeheartedly.
Conclusion: Nietzsche at the Intersection of Modern Thought
Nietzsche was undoubtedly a philosopher of literary sensibility and aesthetic flair. His impassioned, expressive style, written “in blood,” in his words, stands in contrast to the dry prose of academic treatises. Yet this stylistic boldness coexisted with a keen historical awareness and a spirit of scientific skepticism.
Today, with the rapid advancement of science, our biological understanding of humanity deepens; the mysteries of time and the cosmos continue to unfold; and artificial intelligence capable of dialogue and empathy-like interaction is beginning to permeate daily life. In such a context, traditional values and inherited self-understandings are undergoing unprecedented shifts. This is precisely why Nietzsche is so vital to our moment.
He urged us to question inherited ideals and to courageously create our own. Perhaps no other time in history has so urgently called for the philosophy he offered.
Postscript: On Nietzsche and Nazism
Finally, I’d like to briefly address a common misunderstanding: that Nietzsche provided ideological support for Nazi atrocities. In truth, Nietzsche consistently expressed skepticism toward authoritarianism and nationalism. The “power” and “nobility” he praised referred not to racial or physical traits, but to ethical, spiritual, and cultural strength. This interpretation is widely supported by modern Nietzsche scholars, and his texts, upon my limited but careful reading, offer little to support the fascist misappropriations of his thought.
(This essay was originally composed in Japanese for my other blog and was later edited and translated by myself. All quotations are taken from A Nietzsche Reader, written by Friedrich Nietzsche, selected and translated by R. J. Hollingdale, and published by Penguin Classics.)