Alistair Moles
New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1990
William Plank
Foreign Lang. and Literature
Eastern Montana College
Walter Kaufmann began the serious rehabilitation of Nietzsche in America in the 1950s and Richard Schacht's Nietzsche brought that project near to completion for alert readers in 1983. Moles's book puts the capstone on that rehabilitation. It is probably the work which ultimately makes of Nietzsche a thinker for the modern world, especially showing that his intuitions are consonant with those of modern physics and biology and possibly psychology. Both quantum mechanics and Nietzsche's will to power are intuitions which must reject idealist and traditional reality from a holistic point of view, therefore calling into question linear causality, time, space, and substance. They then must draw the conclusions from that rejection of what Nietzsche called the Socratic Judaeo-Christian metaphysic, a metaphysic easily translated into a physics of substance and irreducible particles and unitized time.
Moles's very logical order of presentation begins with showing (1) Nietzsche's rejection of substance, then continues with (2) how the will to power operates on the inorganic, the organic, the social and human level, (3) the rejection of a necessity based on linear causality and the illusions of the perceiving intellect, and (4) the rejection of a unitized time. All these points are necessary in order to maintain the idea of flux in which the will to power operates and in order to maintain the definition of the will to power as a process of interrelated energy discharges among finite force-centers which are co-existent with space and which form the flux.
The chapter on space is one of the most important in the book because it brings together the previous ideas by what I would call the concept of force-space, although Moles does not use that precise term. For just as space and time are not separate in the General Theory of Relativity and encourage the idea of space-time, so force and space are not separable in Nietzsche's cosmology. Space is thus a function of force, as Moles explains, and these force-centers are connected by knowing, recognizing, and concluding, an aspect of communication expressed by Wiedererkennen and Schliessen, making communication among force-centers a reality which supersedes distance and space (which, after all, is not separable from force). I feel justified in concluding that if this is the case, Nietzsche's intuition of force-spaces and communication as Wiedererkennen would very well supply an explanation for the mysteries of causality and local reality in the double-slit experiment, in Bell's paradox, in the experiments of Aspect (see Peat's Einstein's Moon: Bell's Theorem and the Curious Quest for Quantum Reality), and would cast some light on Heisenberg's and the Copenhagen school's claim that quantum reality is created mathematically.
Moles reveals that Nietzsche had read Friedrich Zollner's introduction to Riemann's non-Euclidean conception of space (1872) and suggests that Nietzsche had available to him the idea of curved space later develop by relativity. Based on this idea and Nietzsche's idea of the finitude of space (since space is not the equivalent of the void, but is coexistent with force), Moles makes an excellent apology for the reality, the scientific reality, of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, an idea built into the very internally coherent cosmology of Nietzsche.
Moles reviews occasionally the possible ancestry of some of Nietzsche's ideas, especially in Hume, Leibniz, and Kant. Yet he keeps these reviews clear, succinct, and to the point. How refreshing it is to see a writer who is willing to find more in Nietzsche than a post-Kantian or an aesthete and to show beyond a doubt his consonancy with some of the best modern physical theory. I say beyond a doubt because of the astonishing documentation demonstrated by the 1,977 endnotes (especially from the Nachlass) which are bound to intimidate an unfriendly critic.
Any writer and scholar who is concerned to study the connection between Nietzsche's cosmology and his other ideas, such as the aesthetic and moral, will find that Moles has saved him or her several years of work--and ought to be very grateful, as I am.