NIETZSCHE AND THE MACHINE

I’m going to start an on-going and semi regular blog project where I take some major and minor philosophers and quote their discussions of machines, our relation to artifacts and technology, and their relation to the natural world. Nietzsche is an odd place to start, granted, but I happen to have some quotes on hand.

Nietzsche’s relation to machines is rather complex. On the one hand, he is one of the first naturalists, embracing the idea that man himself is merely a machine, on par with animals. On the other hand, his view of nature and life is grounded in error. Life might require error; man is imperfect and prone to mistakes; nature itself is not a machine. At the bottom of human reasoning lies contradiction. This seems to fit in nicely with Turing’s insistence that we stop holding machines to ideal standards of perfection, thereby opening it to the possibility of intelligence.

All italics are original.

From The Gay Science

§ 109

Let us now be on our guard against believing that the universe is a machine; it is assuredly not constructed with a view to one end; we invest it with far too high an honor with the word “machine.”

§ 111

The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretely does this primitive mechanism now operate in us.

§ 121

Life is no argument; error might be among the conditions of life.

§ 354

Consciousness is properly only a connecting network between man and man… for this conscious thinking alone is done in words, that is to say, in the symbols for communication, by means of thinking of which alone the origin of consciousness is revealed. In short, the debelopment of speech and the development of consciousness (not of reason, but of reason becoming self-consciousness) go hand in hand.

From The Will to Power

Man, in contrast to the animal, has extensively cultivated an abundance of contrary drives and impulses: owing to this synthese he is master of the earth. Morals are the expression of locally limited rank-orders in this multifarious world of drives: in order that man should not perish from their contradictions.

From Beyond Good and Evil

§ 21

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction hitherto thought up; it is a sort of logical rape and perversion. But man’s extravagant pride has managed to tie itself up deeply and dreadfully with just this nonsense. The demand for “freedom of the will,” in that metaphysical superlative sense in which it still rules the minds of the half-learned, the demand to assume the total and final responsibility for one’s own actions, thereby relieving God, world, ancestors, accident, and society; this demand is nothing less than to be the causa sui oneself, to pull oneself up by own’s own bootstraps into existence out of the bog of non-existence- a feat dreamed up with a recklessness exceeding that of Baron Munchhausen!
§ 32

In the last ten millenniums, on the other hand, we have progressed step by step in several large areas of the world to the point where we let not the consequences but the origins of an action determine its value… It constitutes the first experiments in self-knowledge. Origin instead of consequences: what a reversal of perspective! A reversal surely arrived at only after long struggle and wavering! To be sure, it produced the rule of a new fateful superstition, a peculiar narrowness of interpretation. The origin of an action was interpreted to rest, in a very definite sense, on an intent.

From The AntiChrist

§ 14

As regards the animals, Descartes was the first to have dared, with admirable boldness, to understand the animal as machina: the whole of our physiology endeavors to prove this claim. And we are consistent enough not to except man, as Descartes still did: our knowledge of man today goes just as far as we understand him mechanistically