Abstract

Babich implicitly takes as her starting point a statement from the 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche praises his first book for having raised "a new problem--... the problem of science itself," and for having "dared... to look at science from the point of view of the artist, but at art from that of life." Indeed, though she focuses on the later texts, particularly the later Nachla, the interpretive framework of Babich's book is drawn from The Birth of Tragedy. There, Nietzsche sought to reveal how the "Socratic optimism" that eclipsed the "tragic pessimism" of the early Greek dramatists was, in reality, a profound form of decadence, the sign of a sickly and declining culture. Babich argues that the descendent of "Socratism," modern techno-science, is also decadent, seeing life and nature as needing to be corrected. On this view, science is essentially reactive and conservative insofar as it seeks to halt and to master the ceaseless becoming, change, suffering, and death that characterizes natural life. Moreover, instead of granting its status as a pragmatic function in the service of a reactive form of life, science takes its perspective to be absolute, to reveal the way the world really is, and thus denies the irreducible ambiguity and multiplicity of the world. By contrast, the "aesthetic," "tragic," or "Dionysian" world-view suppressed by science remains the truly life- and world-affirming perspective. Acknowledging its status as Apollinian illusion, the aesthetic perspective simultaneously reveals the Dionysian chaos, the fundamental ambiguity and multiplicity that lies at the heart of what Babich, following Jacques Lacan, calls "the Real". Just as Nietzsche's book is not simply a study of Greek culture but a polemic against the present age, so too is Babich's book not simply an exposition of Nietzsche's philosophy of science but a call for a new tragic culture.