ABSTRACT
Friedrich Nietzsche argues that critical philosophy takes the culture of scientific reason or logic to its utmost, but fully logical, consequences. He makes specific claims regarding logical truth and concerning mathematical representations of phenomena and the theoretical and experimental practice of natural science as such, going as far as to single out physics in particular for a series of radically provocative but unmistakably focused observations. By equating chaos with nature, understood in its original Greek or primordial sense, Nietzsche repudiates the traditional Western opposition between nature and art. From beginning to end, Nietzsche affirms the origin of knowledge in error and illusion, and hence, or ultimately, in art. Nietzsche invokes the simplified world of everyday and theoretically mediated perceptions as a matter of sensible, aesthetic ‘refinement’, even in the case of science. Nietzsche regards his own pursuit of knowledge as thoroughly, intrinsically, if exactly joyously ‘scientific’.
