尼采及海德格尔哲学研讨会摘要和论文
ABSTRACTS & PAPERS
摘要和论文
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Philosophy,
Religious and Postermodernism
安希孟
An Ximeng
山西大学哲学系
后现代主义在以下十个方面与现代主义形成鲜明的对照：这些对照可以多于10个，也可以少于10个。下列每组对比中，前者是后现代特征，后者为现代主义特征：
后现代主义与现代主义（postmodernism
and modernism）
客观性与主观性（objectivity
and subjectivity）
碎片与整体（fragmentation
and totalization）
个别与一般（particalar
and universal）
它者与自我（other
and self）
相对与绝对（relative
and absolute）
多元与一致性（pluralism
and uniformity）
情绪与理智（passion
and intellect ）
两可与清晰（ambiguity
and clarity）
意见与真理（opinion
and truth）
三位后现代哲学家：
列维纳斯（Emmanuel
Levinas 1906-1995）
利奥塔（Jean-Francois
Lyotard 1924-1998 ）
德里达（Jacques
Derrida 1930- ）
三位后现代神学家：
泰勒（Mark
Taylor 1945- ）
沃德（Graham
Ward 1955- ）
马里昂（Jean-Luc
Marion 1946- ）
以上后现代主义者并未解决我们时代神学与哲学的全部问题，但他们值得我们聆听，也有些教训值得我们吸取。
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On
Thinking Nietzsche as a Philosopher, On Reading
Heidegger as Poet
Babette E. Babich
Fordham University, NYC / Georgetown University,
Washington, DC
To call
Nietzsche a philosopher, rather than a poet or poet-philosopher, and, indeed,
to say of him, as Heidegger did, that Nietzsche knew “what philosophy is,”
says a great deal. For it counters the traditional way of reading Nietzsche,
emphasizing that, for Heidegger, more than Kant or Hegel, more than Aristotle
or Plato, Nietzsche shows us what philosophy can be. By contrast, reading
Heidegger as a poet promises to do much less. Indeed, and on the face of it,
emphasizing the poetic quality of Heidegger’s philosophic voice gives us what
is no more than a softer or gentler name for that same philosophical obscurity
notoriously associated with his writing.
Reading
Heidegger as a poet in a context that would also reclaim Nietzsche’s thinking
as philo-sophy could seem capricious were it not for Heidegger’s own reminder
that “poetry and thinking belong together.”
Proximity, nearness, belonging together, these are all words for the
relationship Heidegger finds between poetry and thought, all words
corresponding to the aim of inclination, which is for the Greek philosophers
of nature and for the poet Hölderlin another word for love.
If
philosophy, as the love of wisdom, involves thinking and thought has knowledge
as its object, then insofar as the defining character of human nature is to
seek to know, all human beings can be said to be philosophers in
nuce. Hence Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the assertion
that “All men by nature desire to know.”
Nevertheless, the desire for knowledge and the love of wisdom are not the same
and a philosopher is a lover of wisdom. Thus, in a lecture presented ten
years after the end of World War II in Normandy on the topic, What is
Philosophy, Heidegger reminds us that when we use the word philosophy we
inevitably speak Greek, recalling that it was Heraclitus who first “presumably
coins the word philosophos [φιλόσοφος].”
The lover of wisdom is like the lover of anything, in the same hierarchical
cadence of love familiar to us from both Plato and Aristotle — “like
philarguros, loving silver, like philotomos, loving honor.”
Thus an “aner
philosophos is hos philei to sophon, he who
loves the sophon.”
For Heidegger, such love, as harmony, understood in the cosmological way
Heraclitus speaks of the physical meaning of love, is an accord with the
sophon. This for Heraclitus is expressed by saying “hen panta
(one is all).” Heidegger continues: “The sophon says — all being is in
Being ... being is Being.”
This is the that of thuamazein — the sheer that that things are which
is the beginning of philosophy in astonishment or wonder. But for Heidegger,
the love of the sophon (“the being in Being”) is from its inception
almost immediately lost, in that it becomes striving (orexis),
philosophy becomes a sundered longing for the sophon. “Because the
loving is no longer an original harmony with the sophon but is a
particular striving towards the sophon, the loving of the
sophon becomes ‘philosophia.’ The striving is determined by Eros.”
But ancient Greek Eros and philia (eros and love) are two
different if affine things.
Heidegger
holds that philosophy is exemplified by a particularly provocative relation to
thought and he turns to Hölderlin in his lecture course Was heißt Denken?
to trace the relation between thinking or philosophy and love. Reflecting on
thought and poetry, Heidegger claims that poetry, as its “standing in itself,”
in the “beauty” of its word, must be seen as “its own truth.”
For Heidegger, this self-standing in the truth “does not exclude but on the
contrary includes what we think in the poetic word.”
The poet’s word as Heidegger reads it is drawn from the center of a poem by
Hölderlin entitled Socrates and Alcibiades
— “Who the deepest has thought, loves
what is most alive.” Heidegger’s reading stresses thought and love as
the two words are placed side by side, “the two verbs, ‘thought’ and ‘loves’
form the center of the line. Inclination reposes in thinking.”
Inclination for Hölderlin — or love, for Heraclitus (and Empedocles) — is a
vulnerable and impermanent disposition: a harmony, which needs to be held,
tuned in being, or it vanishes.
We begin by talking about love and find ourselves talking about longing or
yearning, eros not love.
Giorgio
Agamben has written about the tempting topic that is love for Heidegger (and
it is a seductive topic not only because the French philosopher Luce Irigaray
also writes about Heidegger, but because Heidegger goes so far as to claim
that — outdoing Nietzsche for sheer provocation — “the essence of eros is
nothing erotic.”) Agamben refers not to the later Heidegger’s reflections on
the love of wisdom as above, but begins instead with Being
and Time by noting that apart
from Pascal and Augustine, the theme of love is hardly mentioned. Given, so
Agamben claims, Heidegger’s familiarity with Max Scheler’s views on the
preeminence of love (and hate) and considering (this is his trump card) the
circumstantial romantic involvement of Heidegger and Arendt, attested in a
backwards look from a letter Heidegger wrote to Arendt later in life, Agamben
contends that “the writing of Being and
Time had thus taken place under the sign of
love.”
Agamben’s enthusiasm is admirable, particularly as Nietzsche once chastized
philosophers for what he called their “lack of love.”
But, like most philosophers who concern themselves with love, Agamben assumes
that he, like everyone, already knows what love is. For Nietzsche, this
presumption excuses us from learning how to love (as Descartes critiques the
common conviction concerning “good sense,” whereby “every one thinks himself
so abundantly provided with it”
one thinks to forego the acquisition of rules for the direction of thought).
Heidegger himself does ask about love in his discussion of philosophy. In the
philosopher’s love for what Heidegger calls the sophon — being in Being
— Heidegger finds that from the beginning the disposition of love turns to
desire. The philosopher becomes a scholar, aspiring to wisdom; worse, for
Heidegger (in what he called cybernetics and what today can be seen as
cognitive science), the philosopher becomes a man of science, calculating
practical knowledge, a calculation of security that is for Heidegger and for
Nietzsche no different from the calculation of the man of faith.
To inquire
philosophically into the love of wisdom, we turn to Heidegger as poet.
Although
Heidegger writes about poetry, and literary critics engage his interpretations
with unabated vigor, Heidegger himself is not read as a poet. Nor does Robert
Bernasconi do so even when giving a reading of one of Heidegger’s poems but,
and arguably, actually, more importantly, seeks instead to hear what Heidegger
says, adverting to Heidegger’s silence as “a language whose words have already
broken.”
To listen to Heidegger’s silence is to attend to the articulation of the
needful connection between saying and thinking, so that, as Heidegger reads
Parmenides, for his own part, in the musical space of the punctuation marks
Heidegger adds for our eyes, so literally transposing a voiced break that can
only be heard in ancient Greek: “saying speaks where there are no words, in
the fields between the words which the colons indicate.”
Silence speaks between the word — between the lines: it echoes as the unsaid
in what is said.
Referring
to Heidegger’s poem, Sprache, Bernasconi recalls the poem-question
“when will words again be words?”
Heidegger’s answer is given in the highest tone: “when they bear us back to
the place of ancient owning (uralter Eignis) where the ringing of
stillness calls.”
These words are Heidegger’s own but we can barely read them as poetry. As I
emphasize a musical or sounding reading, such a reading entails that we
hearken to what is said, as Heidegger — and as anyone who has to do with
poetry — will tell us to do. Thus as beautiful as “ancient owning” is as the
translation of uralter Eignis,
this impeccable rendering cannot invite us to hear what Heidegger says with
the words uralter Eignis because to read Heidegger, like Nietzsche,
like Hölderlin, we need to read German.
Like any language, the foreign can only be mastered in order to return us to
what is native to us, as both the poet Hölderlin and the linguist philosopher
[Wilhelm] von Humboldt have differently emphasized in the spirit of
eighteenth-century hermeneutic reflection.
Given this poetic, hermeneutic limitation, to read Heidegger’s Sprache,
to read the poetic word uralter Eignis, we need to be able to
catch a resonant, metonymic reference to the penumbra of sounding words that
echo in the word as word: eignen [fit, suit attempt] as much as
eigen [own, ownmost] and Ereignis [event, happening, occurrence].
And, perhaps one even ought to hear Eigentlichkeit [authenticity], as
Eignis in Heidegger’s 1972 poem may recall the key word of his 1927
masterpiece.
In a
letter to me, Reiner Schürmann notes the difficulty of reading Heidegger on
language, as on poetry and thought, as the need for a critical familiarity
with German. Thus for Schürmann, we are advised to learn not only German but
Greek where Schürmann recommends that we recognize the necessity of
Heidegger’s claim concerning the “inner” affinity of Greek and German.
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Interlude: Nietzsche and Heidegger: The Politics
of Reading
To talk
about Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, it is important to note that Heidegger
does not merely refer to Nietzsche (as a symbol) and that Heidegger does not
simply quote Nietzsche but and in the way that Heidegger read Hölderlin,
Heidegger reads Nietzsche. This kind of reading might seem to have
been widespread. The physicist, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, recalls “When I
was young, everyone read Nietzsche.”
This prefatory recollection served von Weiszäcker as an apology or an excuse
for writing on Nietzsche but the same comment betrays him (and others who
write on Nietzsche or Heidegger, or even Hölderlin) because there have been
political questions associated with reading Nietzsche from the start and there
have certainly been political problems associated with reading Heidegger. If
the British could name the first Great World War, “Nietzsche’s War,”
a more notorious association is made between Heidegger and the causes of
Nazism and hence with the Second World War. Now although the connection of
philosophy with two World Wars and hence with the course of world history
(i.e., as thinkers who either inspired or singularly failed to prevent
political movements like fascism and Nazism or events like the Holocaust) is a
captivating perspective — it flatters any philosopher who supposes that
philosophy might work this way — it is wholly tendentious.
Philosophy is not merely traditionally defined as the discipline that “bakes
no bread” but is essentially useless — and hence beyond price or value
for the whole of Western philosophy. This alienation from the practical and
the worktasks of the day means that Hegel only looks for the flight of the owl
of Minerva at dusk. It is a weak corollary to note that the energies of
philosophy have declined to the extent that today’s philosophers no longer
propose, as Karl Marx once proposed, to transform the world. Instead they seem
reduced to the challenges of what Nietzsche criticized as moraline thinking,
i.e., delineating the ethical liabilities of others.
This decline in philosophical ambition is, of course, part and parcel of what
Nietzsche meant by nihilism or decadence but it is important to emphasize that
for Nietzsche himself such moraline thought does not correspond to the
praxical concern that asks the Kantian question: What should I do? or
the Schopenhauerian: How can I help?
or How can I
minimise the suffering of others? Instead,
moraline thought asks: Who is to blame? Moraline thought thus connects
Nietzsche and Heidegger with fascism and this kind of thinking is endemic to
readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger.
I cannot correct this tendency here, but in the second half of this short
essay I shall turn to thought and poetry as an alternative way to approach the
question of what philosophy can do, in Heidegger’s sense of the question which
asks what philosophy might be able to do with us.
Nietzsche as Thinker
If I mean
to read Heidegger as a poet, Heidegger for his own part seeks to avoid reading
Nietzsche as such. Instead, Heidegger means “to take Nietzsche seriously as a
thinker”
in his 1951-52 Freiburg lecture course, Was heißt Denken? Following
the thought-provocation essential for thinking, throughout his study, to the
annoyance of scholarly ears, Heidegger writes again and again that what is
“most thought provoking is that we are still not thinking.”
The word for this “lack of thought” Heidegger finds in Nietzsche’s “simple,
because thoughtful words, ‘The wasteland grows.’”
Die Wüste wächst. And Heidegger emphasizes Nietzsche’s next
reflection on the consequences of nihilism, “‘Woe to him who hides wastelands
within.’” (WD 30) Not a matter of negative judgment or pessimism, it is “that
which gives us food for thought, which is what wants to be thought about.” (WD
30) Such things are not merely sombre matters but the thought of love and joy
“and beautiful and mysterious and gracious things give us food for thought.”
(WD 31) In calling things to mind in all that belongs to thought about them,
“what is most thought provoking — especially when it is man’s highest concern
— may well be also what is most dangerous. Or” — as Heidegger here asks us to
reflect — “do we imagine that a man could even in small ways encounter the
essence of truth, the essence of beauty, the essence of grace — without
danger?” (WD 31) Thus to think about what is called thinking or what provokes
thoughtfulness is to engage in thinking about danger. Here, Heidegger’s
reflections take him to Nietzsche as the ultimately dangerous thinker: “I am
no man,” Nietzsche wrote, “I am dynamite.”
There is
an important sense in which, unlike Hölderlin or Pindar or any other poet, but
like Kant, and as a philosopher, even as Nietzsche claims to invert Plato,
Nietzsche remains in thrall to Plato and thereby to Aristotle. Thus Nietzsche
turns within the orbit of Western metaphysics as the culmination of Western
thought. What is important to observe about this compulsion is that it is not
a mistake that could/should be corrected but a matter of perspective, which is
also to say that thinking with all the means at its critical disposal cannot
overcome this confinement. At the conclusion, we will be able to return to
the question of Nietzsche’s critique of Western reason.
When
Heidegger cites Nietzsche’s pronouncement, “The wasteland grows ...” (WD 50),
borrowing this dictum from Nietzsche’s sardonic fourth (and appended) part of
his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Heidegger, claims both that these words
express Nietzsche’s heart (“Nietzsche put all that he knew” into them)
and that of all philosophers, Nietzsche is “the representative of traditional
thinking who is closest to us in time.” (WD 55)
For
Heidegger, as the traditional thinker closest to us, what Nietzsche sees is
“the necessity of a change in the realm of essential thinking.” (WD 57)
Reading Nietzsche as a philosopher, we are not only to“refer everything in his
thought that is still unthought back to its originary truth” [WD 54]), but we
are to see him as the one thinker who “sees clearly that in the history of
Western man something is coming to an end.” (WD 55) This transition Heidegger
names with a word from Hölderlin, “das Gefahr” — the danger,
(a term he also uses in his essay on technology).
This threat is today the totalizing domination of Western, perfectly
technological humanity as the measure and definition of all that is and it is
what Heidegger names the “end of philosophy” — in a very different sense than
the oddly Hegelian sense intended by Frances Fukuyama when he speaks of the
“end” of history. For Heidegger, the end of philosophy “proves to be the
triumph of the manipulable arrangement of the scientifico-technological world
and of the social order proper to this world.”
It is in this humanistic context that Heidegger recalls Nietzsche’s
anti-philosophical (arch-philosophical) definition of the human as (the
non-exclusively rational) and (not specifically) political animal. “Man,”
Nietzsche writes, and as Heidegger quotes him, “is the always yet
undetermined animal.”
Citing the limits of the physical and psychological sciences, as the limits of
cosmology and metaphysics, such an undetermined being must find a bridge “to
that nature by which man can overcome his former nature, his last nature.”
(WD 59) This bridge is, of course, the Übermensch, which Heidegger
reads not in terms of race but mere verticality, sheer transcendence.
Nietzsche’s critique of subjectivity and therewith his critique of
intentionality — the knowing consciousness of the knower who knows, as this
may be addressed to Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Husserl — addresses
language in the poetic sense so important for Heidegger. Language is thus what
speaks us: thoughts come when they, not the thinking subject, are moved to
come. As the most radical and most individually free thinker of our time, for
Heidegger, Nietzsche “neither made nor chose his way himself, no more than any
other thinker ever did. He is sent on his way.” (WD 46) As the thinker of
thinking, thinking what is called (or calls, sends us to) thinking,
Nietzsche’s reflection on subjectivity as Nietzsche critiques the notion of
the subject is the patent reason Heidegger engages Nietzsche as he does in
Was heißt Denken? As in the associative couple, Denken/Dichten,
thinking becomes a kind of poetizing. With Nietzsche’s observation — that a
thought comes when it wants — thinking becomes a species of the same kind of
enthusiasm or inspiration that is poetry and which, for Heidegger, works to
transform thought as Dichtung. This way of conceiving thought yields
a kind of love or a cross over between thinking and poetry: “a secret kinship”
[eine verborgene Verwandtshaft].
Heidegger as Poet: The Relation Between the Poetry and
Music/Silence of Language
Heidegger
is not typically denied the title of philosopher as Nietzsche is. Nor is he
named a poet as Nietzsche has been. A mystic, yes; a theologian, yes, but
not a poet — if only because, we are told, Heidegger writes too poorly for
that — his “bad” writing seems obvious, Es liegt, as the Germans say,
auf der Hand.
And yet it can be seen that Heidegger does not write poorly (or unclearly) if
we attend to the poetry — the music or the style — of Heidegger’s own writing.
By proposing that one read Heidegger as poet, I do not pretend that Heidegger
is to be read as a real or actual poet, especially not in the high
foundational significance of wirklich — the meaning Heidegger gives to
being a “real poet” in his Introduction to Metaphysics.
To read
Heidegger as a poet means only that in the same way that Nietzsche’s style is
decisive for his thought, Heidegger’s style determines what he says and it is
whether we have or can develop an ear for that style that will determine
whether we can hear what he says or merely find it unclear or “badly” done.
As
thinker, Heidegger is consigned to use language to understand the essence of
poetry and language and thought, as of being itself. But the philosopher as
writer is subject to the readings of the critics and their judgment has been
harsh. Thus George Steiner concludes of Heidegger’s expressive gifts in his
own 1991 preface to his book on Heidegger, “Words failed Heidegger and, at a
pivotal stage in his life and work, he failed them.”
Neverthless, Steiner adverts to what I call the musicality of Heidegger’s
expression or voice in a strikingly literal and surprisingly phenomenological
way: emphasizing (countering Derrida) the “central orality in
Heidegger’s teaching and concept of the enterprise of serious thought,”
explaining this diction as that of a specifically poetic or lyrical kind: “I
have found that passages in Heidegger which are opaque to the reading eye and
stony on the page come to more intelligible life, take on a logic of an almost
musical kind when they are read aloud.”
Heidegger’s poetic voice is plain as he writes, “Language speaks by saying,
this is, by showing. What it says wells up from the formerly spoken and so
far still unspoken saying which pervades the design of language. Language
speaks in that it, as showing, reaching into all regions of presences, summons
from them whatever is present to appear and to fade.”
Heidegger
is not unaware that when he writes “Language itself is language,” his style
of writing can leave him open to the charge of unclarity. As Heidegger
observes, “The understanding that is schooled in logic, thinking of everything
in terms of calculation and hence usually overbearing, calls this proposition
an empty tautology. Merely to say the identical thing twice — language is
language — how is that supposed to get us anywhere?”
Heidegger answers this simple question with even more simplicity. He agrees
with the accusation, admitting “But we do not want to get anywhere.”
An advocate of releasement [Gelassenheit] and hence the liberating
uselessness of philosophy, Heidegger nevertheless could expect philosophy
utterly to transform us: “granted that we cannot do anything with philosophy,
might not philosophy, if we concern ourselves with it, do someting with
us”?
I have
elsewhere argued that a particularly resonant interpretive style or musical
concinnity, that is, the ability to read as a singer sings, reading as a
musician reads (with one’s ears),
is indispensable for reading Nietzsche as philosopher — and not merely as
cultural provocateur or to use the language of a past generation, a
“poet-philosopher.” Here, I have been arguing that a philosophical reading of
the Heidegger who links poetry with thinking must be poetically accented, or
attuned as Heidegger preferred to say. A poetic and musical attunement is
required to read the Heidegger who took continual pains to remind us that we
are “still not thinking.” Such reminders punctuate or interrupt the rhythm
or poetic seduction of Heidegger’s texts and we are called to a different
music than that often sounded by Heidegger’s most sincere commentators.
Where Heidegger can speak of the nearness of thinking and poetry, the saying
or ringing of the same that is said in silence is the inherently musical
silence of Heidegger’s favourite emphasis: the cæsura.
To sketch
this with an abbreviated illustration, the later lecture course Was heißt
Denken? not only offers an acoustic resonance in the German of the title —
an allusiveness which cannot be heard in the English, What is Called
Thinking? — but exemplifies the work’s stylistic advance. I have already
noted that it also turns reflexively on a reading of Nietzsche, where
Heidegger writes (in a fashion which would inspire Derrida’s stylistic
appropriation of the same trope in Spurs), “We ask: what is called
thinking — and we talk about Nietzsche.”
Beyond
what Heidegger names “one-track [or academic] thinking,” Heidegger’s strategy
in his style of writing is sustainedly paedagogic: he provokes as the effect
of a deliberate shock, as a claim dropped contrary to expectations, running
against the grain of ordinary academic discourse. This strategy famously
backfires (it leads to frustration at one extreme, and violent denunciation at
another) but I argue that it can also teach the forbearance necessary for
poetic renunciation or thoughtful attention. The three point strategy
(provocation, intensification, return) works against what Heidegger regards as
the ordinary tendency of scholarly thickness: one-sidedly dogmatic statements
heard and perceived as such by thinkers locked into “one-track thinking.”
In this serially musical strategy, Heidegger does more than remind us that we
“still need an education in thinking,”
as Nietzsche emphasised we need to learn to think, read, love. And part of
such an education in thinking, as Heidegger takes it from Nietzsche, will be
learning to listen, in a musical key, to what is said and to what is unspoken.
These are the silences Heidegger asks us to hear.
Reflecting
on the paratactic framing of Parmenides’ gnomon — “needful: the saying also
thinking too: being: to be.” Heidegger illuminates this same ringing silence:
“We call the word order of the saying paratactic in the widest sense ... For
the saying speaks where there are no words, in the field between the
words which the colons indicate.”
For Theodor Adorno, the same paratactic character captures the modern essence
of a-tonal music as well as Hölderlin’s poetry.
Adorno is far from Heidegger’s defender but his suggestion offers us a way to
approach a hearing of the serial spareness of Heidegger’s reflection on the
participial construction of “thinking” and “being,” taking both together
(altogether against traditional readings of Parmenides) to catch the mutual
relation, the backwards/forwards movement of the participial form as
musical.
Once
serialism is counted in place of the paratactic tact of Heidegger’s reading of
Parmenides, the answer to what is called thinking may be sounded forth:
“Thinking means: letting-lie-before-us and so taking-to heart also: beings in
being.”
One can repeat: And so taking-to-heart also, also.
As an
atonal tonality, a modern or musically serialist (rather than a classicist)
reading of the philosophical text can teach us to interrupt our own always
“already-knowing.” In this interruption, we literally take a step back, and
in this way, but only as a sheer and fading possibly, we may yet come to hear
Heidegger’s resonant word, as the melos of the appropriative event.
Expressing
the musical way in which we might be so appropriated or caught up into the
melos of Ereignis, “the melodic mode, the song which says something
in the singing” is the frame of song, arraigned as what lets be, what “lauds,”
all present beings, allowing “them into their own, their nature.”
These are the words of song: “das Lied das singend sagt,” sung between
mortal experience and mortal converse when Hölderlin promises in his poem
Friedensfeier: “...but soon we shall be song.” “...bald sind wir aber
Gesang.”
Regarding
Heidegger as a kind of poet, as I have sought to do, his play with language
may be seen as opposed both to the received sense of philosophy and to the
received use of language as a mere playing. As poet, as a “mere poet,” as
just and only and no more than a poet through whom what is said is said, what
Heidegger writes is gainless, and that in the highest sense. Thus Heidegger
suggests that rather than attempting to attain to something by means of or
with philosophy — doing things with words or theory in the pragmatic or
praxical sense — we might, like Nietzsche, make the effort to allow philosophy
or thought “to do something with us.” And, in
Nietzsche’s case, to regard Nietzsche as Heidegger proposed to do: to read him
as a thinker in the most rigorous sense is to read his critical writing on
thinking, as a critique of logic and scientific rationality. Such a critique
examines the rational foundations of logic and rationality itself as a means
of knowing the world to be known. Such a radical critique is turned upon
reason even as means of knowing the knower. In this way, Nietzsche’s thinking
offers a critique of reason: simply or purely and as such. And it is in this
properly Kantian sense that we are also to understand Nietzsche’s own avowed
ambition to doubt more radically than Descartes. But when and if we can do
this, we find, as Heidegger did to his own ultimate frustration as a
philosopher, that Nietzsche’s project may well undermine or destroy the
project of thinking. When you begin from the critical proposition that an
instrument of criticism (rationality) cannot as such be turned upon itself
(this is the critique of critique as Nietzsche dares to pose this question)
and if what you are doing is fundamentally reflexive, critical
thinking, the result is an unsustainable project as such and on its own
reflexive, fully critical terms. Philosophy in this sense reaches an end —
not a culmination.
And yet it
may belong to the nature of philosophy as a useless, ultimately vulnerable and
unsustainable passion, that it not succeed: perhaps, assuming recourse to
Greek rather than Latin, we can hear passion as a pathos, an
inclination, a “being attuned to [Stimmung].”
Consummation is the death of desire and possession is the end of love. But the
love of Being in being, as Heidegger speaks of philosophy, could turn out to
be neither desire nor need and so require neither satisfaction nor fulfillment
but rather as what Heraclitus calls the hidden attunement, philosophy itself
would be the harmonious variance of Pindar’s ποικλία,
exemplifying, at least on Hölderlin’s reading, the tension of a fragment he
notoriously mis- or over translates from Heraclitus as “the one differentiated
in itself” έν διαφέρον εαυτω — (das Eine in sich selbst unterschiedene)],
that is, attuned to the music of the heart, the music of life, but above all
attuned to the singular possibility of attunement itself: the backstretched
connexion.
Heidegger,
Nietzsche and Biologism
Robert
Bernasconi
The
University of Memphis, USA
In this
paper I reexamine Heidegger's defence of Nietzsche against the charge of
biologism in THE WILL TO POWER AS KNOWLEDGE. I reject that suggestion that
this gesture is best understood as part of Heidegger's attack on National
Socialism, a suggestion that Heidegger himself promoted after the end of the
Second World War. By locating Heidegger's treatment of Nietzsche's biologism
both within the context of Heidegger's discussions of biologism over a twenty
year period and within the context, more generally, of the discussions of
Nietzsche's biologism by Heinrich Rickert and Alfred Baeumler, I provide the
basis for understanding Heidgger's discussion as part of his more general
effort to extablish a double reading of Nietzsche as a metaphysician. That is
to say, Nietzsche on Heidegger's reading escaped biologism by thinking
metaphysically in the double sense of thinking the Being of life and yet doing
so in a way that held that thinking within the confines of Western metaphysics
in Heidegger's sense of the term.
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Nietzsche
David E. Cooper
University of Durham
Within a
few years of his death in 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche was widely recognised as a
thinker and writer of genius, a devastating critic of religion, an acute
diagnostician of the cultural ills of Europe, and a master of German prose. It
was later - first among continental European philosophers, then among
English-language philosophers - that the originality of Nietzsche’s treatments
of perennial questions in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical psychology
and ethics was appreciated. By the end of the millennium, it was clear that no
other nineteenth century thinker had so decisively shaped the contours of
contemporary philosophical discussion. This ‘professional’ appreciation did
not eclipse the earlier reputation, for much of the excitement in reading
Nietzsche owes to an interplay between philosophical speculation and diagnosis
of the parlous modern condition of humanity. Nietzsche is sometimes treated as
a ‘playful’, unsystematic thinker revelling in ‘masks’ and contradictions. In
this paper, a different view is taken. Although not written in a systematic
style, the works of Nietzsche’s mature years articulate a cohesive general
position, one that, arguably, flows from convictions expressed in his very
early essays. While this paper will focus on Nietzsche’s contributions to
philosophy, to the relative exclusion, therefore, of more ‘empirical’ ones to
psychology, sociology and history, no sharp distinction is intended here.
Nietzsche himself certainly denied such a distinction.
Another
sharp distinction Nietzsche denied was that between someone’s philosophy and
their life. ‘Every great philosophy’, he wrote, has been ‘the personal
confession of its author’ (BGE 6). Since any great philosophy will ‘command
and legislate’, will ‘make and create’ concepts, not just ‘accept [them] as
gifts’ (WP 409), its author must be something of an outsider - an eagle rather
than a starling (WP 989) - uncomfortable with the intellectual habits of his
times. Certainly Nietzsche’s life was, in the main, closer to that of the
eagle than the starling.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
(1844-1900) was the son of a Lutheran pastor who died when Friedrich was only
four. Educated at Germany’s best known school, the Schulpforta, and at the
universities of Bonn and Leipzig, the precocious Nietzsche became a Professor
of Classics in Basel at the age of twenty-five. The years at Basel were marked
by intoxication with the writings of Schopenhauer and with both the music and
personality of Wagner - influences which accelerated Nietzsche’s disillusion
with academic scholarship. Illness and the hostile reception of his first
book, The Birth of Tragedy, further induced him to abdicate from university
life. For twelve years, the pattern of Nietzsche’s life was one of lonely
wandering - from hotel to hotel, in the Swiss mountains or Northern Italy -
occasionally punctuated by intense, usually difficult meetings with friends.
(He ended relations with Wagner in 1876, appalled by the philistine atmosphere
at the Bayreuth festival and by the gushing religiosity of Wagner’s last
opera.) In 1888, Nietzsche’s health and mind collapsed, the result of
excessive work and perhaps of syphilis either inherited or contracted through,
possibly, his sole sexual encounter. For the remainder of his life, Nietzsche
was a vegetable, a childlike man nursed by his mother and sister.
It is familiar to divide
Nietzsche’s writings into ‘early’, ‘middle’ and ‘late’ periods. The most
substantial ‘early’ works are his reappraisal, imbued with a Schopenhauerian
vision of a blind cosmic ‘will’, of Greek thought and art, The Birth of
Tragedy, and a number of Untimely Meditations critical of contemporary culture
and education. Attention, however, is now deservedly paid to some unpublished
sketches of the 1870s in which Nietzsche develops a distinctive, radical
account of the relation between thought or language and the world. During the
‘middle’ or ‘positivist’ period, in works such as Human, All-Too-Human,
Nietzsche’s primary concern is the more ‘scientific’ one of exposing, often
with wit and venom, the facts of human psychology which, he believed, would
both explain and discredit the pretensions of religion, metaphysics and art to
reveal an ‘eternal’ realm of ‘absolute truth’.
The ‘late’ period, during which
Nietzsche develops such famous notions as ‘eternal recurrence’, ‘will to
power’, ‘perspectival knowing’, and ‘the Overman (Übermensch)’, begins with
the later sections of The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. While that
latter work - a philosophical fantasy woven around the life of an imaginary
wandering sage - may be Nietzsche’s literary masterpiece, its main themes are
made clearer by the two great works which shortly followed, in 1886-7, Beyond
Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals. The writings of the final year
of lucidity, such as The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, while full of perceptive
material, are marred by shrillness and excess, symptoms of Nietzsche’s
impending descent into madness.
Throughout his career, Nietzsche
wrote notes and plans for books that did not materialise (his Nachlass).
Commentators differ on the weight to be put upon these writings, especially
those from the 1880s subsequently assembled by Nietzsche’s sister under the
title The Will to Power. In this paper, and in opposition to some recent
commentaries, the immensely interesting material found in those notes is
freely drawn upon. Where there are tensions with the published works, I do not
pre-emptively settle the issue in favour of the latter.
2.
‘Catastrophe’
Like other
nineteenth century thinkers, including Marx, Nietzsche thought that western
civilization was at a critical juncture, indeed that it was facing a
‘catastrophe’ which he called ‘the advent of nihilism’ (WP Preface). The
symptoms of the crisis were various, even anomalous: political anarchism,
revolutionary socialism, world-weary apathy, undiscriminating tolerance,
vulgar hedonism, religious hypocrisy, and so on. All these, for Nietzsche,
were symptomatic of the erosion of beliefs which had, for centuries, given
‘meaning’ to civilized life. In a famous passage, he wrote that ‘God is dead
... we have killed him’ (GS 125. cf. Z Prologue 2). Enlightenment rationalism,
the natural sciences and modern psychology, with their ‘cultivation of
“truthfulness”’ (WP 3), had made it increasingly difficult to maintain
religious belief and, therefore, to subscribe to moral values which
presupposed the existence of God.
By ‘the death of God’, however,
Nietzsche has much more in mind than the erosion of specifically religious
beliefs and values. God is only an especially vivid instance of a being
imagined to exist in a ‘true world’ set against an ‘apparent’ world of
everyday sense-experience. Other instances would be Plato’s ‘forms’ and Kant’s
‘things in themselves’. ‘The advent of nihilism’ spells the loss of belief in
any such ‘higher’ or ‘true world’ and, consequently, in the ‘ascetic ideal’
which has grounded our hitherto ‘highest values’ on the nature of that world -
on the will of God, say, or ‘the Form of the Good’.
Despite the catastrophic
upheavals it occasions, Nietzsche largely welcomes this ‘war on ... a true
world’ (WP 583), since it is one waged by ‘truthfulness’ on illusion. He
welcomes it, moreover, despite his appreciation of just how radical it must
be. To begin with, it is a war which must eventually be waged against many of
those - including scientists - who are busily dispelling the old illusions.
This is because they too are guilty of setting up a ‘true world’ - of natural
laws, particles, and so on - set against, and allegedly underlying, an
‘apparent’ world of ‘becoming’. Indeed, it must be waged against all those
‘articles of faith’ - including ‘bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects,
motion and rest’ - without which all of us, and not just scientists and
philosophers, must find it hard to ‘endure life’, so engrained are they in our
familiar ways of thinking and speaking (GS 121). For Nietzsche, these
‘articles of faith’ are as much ‘fictions’ as God or platonic ‘forms’. Second,
the war cannot be ended by hitting upon new beliefs even remotely analogous to
the discredited ones. If nihilism is to be overcome, and life reaffirmed and
invested with meaning, this will be because human beings are able to dispense
with ideals of the kind hitherto embraced. Whether they can do this and still
‘endure life’ is uncertain. So, therefore, is our future history.
To understand how Nietzsche
arrives at his perception of the modern ‘catastrophe’, we need, first, to
grasp both why he concurs in the ‘assassination’ of the illusion of ‘the true
world’ (§3), and how he explains our proneness to this illusion (§4). Second,
we need to appreciate why Nietzsche thinks that science, despite - or because
of - its urge to ‘truthfulness’, falls victim to the same illusion, and to
understand how he tries to exonerate his own ‘truths’ from such a criticism
(§5). Special attention must be paid, third, to religion and morality (§6):
for it is here that the illusion has both its origin and most damaging impact.
We will then be in a position to revisit Nietzsche’s vision of the modern
condition and the prospects for ‘overcoming’ it (§7).
The
confluence of two lines of thought resulted in Nietzsche’s total rejection of
‘the true world’ - of any structured, ‘objective reality’ deemed to exist
independently of human concerns, judgements and valuations. The first of these
is already visible in his earliest essays, where he argues that any account we
can give of the world is indelibly ‘anthropomorphic’. There can be no reason
to suppose that the concepts and judgements employed to describe the world
capture its antecedent, objective lay-out, since these are the outcome of
various humanly-wrought ‘transferences’ or ‘metaphors’. In particular, it is
we, not Nature, who divide the flux of sensory experience into classes or
species, such as leaves or dogs - something we do by imposing a ‘sameness’
among the data which they do not themselves possess. ‘Every concept arises
from the equation of unequal things’ (PT, p.83). That these, but not those,
objects fall under a certain concept, is due to us, not to the pre-given
structure of reality. This ‘nominalist’ or ‘constructivist’ view inspires
Nietzsche’s much-quoted remark that ‘truths are illusions which we have
forgotten ... metaphors that have become worn out’ (PT, p.84). So habitual
have our concepts become that we imagine them, and the judgements which employ
them, to record the objective lay-out of the world. That is an illusion, and
none of those judgements is true, therefore, in the traditional sense of
corresponding to the way things objectively are.
The formation and use of concepts
is not, then, due to the demands of the world. It owes, rather, to practical
human interests - in organizing the relative chaos of experience, in
predicting and controlling the course of experience. For the young Nietzsche,
these claims were compatible with the postulation of ‘things in themselves’:
it’s just that, as Kant rightly emphasized, we can have no knowledge of what
these are like. In a second line of thought, however, the mature Nietzsche
comes to reject the very intelligibility of things in themselves, of a domain
of reality inaccessible to human beings. ‘The “true world” finally became a
fable’, he writes, with the move from the Kantian view of it as ‘unattainable’
to the recognition that it is ‘superfluous’ - that, indeed, the very contrast
between a ‘true’ world and a merely ‘apparent’ one must be abolished (TI IV).
If the ‘apparent’ world of leaves, dogs and people contrasts with anything,
this is the ‘chaos of sensations’ which we have brought to order, to something
we can cope with, in that ‘apparent’ world. It cannot contrast with some more
‘real, truly existing’ order of things, for no sense can be made of such an
order. This is because the very meaning of terms like ‘real’ and ‘exist’ is
tied to what ‘concerns us’, what has ‘efficacy’ for us, what engages with our
life and experience (KGW VIII 1.5.19). The question earlier allowed, ‘what of
the world would still be there’ if the ‘human head’ through which it is viewed
were ‘cut off’ (HAH 1, 9), is now proscribed.
As these remarks suggests,
Nietzsche’s first line of thought did not expire. He continues to emphasize
the manner in which our concepts are actively ‘constructed’ or moulded by us
in keeping with our interests and practical concerns. For example, the concept
of punishment is really a ‘whole synthesis of “meanings”’ in which has
‘crystallized’ a whole ‘history of [the] employment [of punishment] for the
most various purposes’ (GM II 13). To suppose that concepts could mirror an
independent reality is to ignore their subjection to ‘form-giving forces’ at
work in our ‘fundamental ... activity’ (GM II 12), their role in a ‘general
economy of life’ which Nietzsche comes to equate with ‘will to power’ (BGE 23,
WP 675).
Nietzsche’s ‘abolition’ of ‘the
true world’ means that he is, in recent parlance, a robust ‘anti-realist’, who
denies that there is a way the world anyway is independent of human interests,
perspectives and judgements. Some commentators (for example, Clark, 1990 &
1998) suggest that, in his late works, Nietzsche retracted this position and
embraced a ‘commonsense realism’ which rules out only a ‘metaphysical
realism’, according to which there may exist a reality closed to ‘any possible
knower’. This suggestion, however, requires one to ignore many late remarks in
the unpublished notes, such as ‘we can comprehend only a world that we
ourselves have made’ (WP 495). It also requires one to suppose that his
prolonged criticisms of realistic conceptions of truth and knowledge - ones of
which, incidentally, he thinks ‘commonsense’ is guilty - were levelled against
a position which, arguably, almost no one has ever held (see Poellner 1995).
If ‘commonsense realism’ is the view that there are true statements which
correspond to a reality independent of human perspectives, it is one which
Nietzsche consistently rejected.
Nietzsche’s rejection of ‘the
true world’ indeed raises the question of the status as ‘truths’ both of
perfectly acceptable everyday statements, such as ‘It’s raining’, and of the
philosophical claims which he himself advances. Nietzsche does not want to
deny the availability of truth and knowledge in some sense of those terms. His
relatively sketchy remarks on this question will be considered in §5. One
reason his remarks are sketchy is that he is less interested in this question
and, hence, in the analysis of truth, than in the question of why people value
truth (see Pippin 1998). Why, especially, have they needed the illusion of a
‘true world’ for their beliefs to correspond to? To understand Nietzsche’s
answer to that question, we turn to his philosophical psychology.
Nietzsche’s account of human psychology is doubly important. First, it mounts
a robust attack, often prescient of Wittgenstein, on a traditional, entrenched
conception of mind. Second, it plays a key role in explaining the illusion of
‘the true world’. Attack and explanatory role are closely connected, since it
is Nietzsche’s view that the conception he rejects is itself a model instance
of ‘the true world’ illusion. Hence, understanding why people are so attracted
to the mistaken conception of mind will aid in understanding people’s
proneness to the broader illusion. If, in particular, we can account for
belief in a substantial mental ‘subject’, we will have done much to explain
the view that reality consists of substantial objects distinct from ‘the
medley of sensations’, since ‘it is only after the model of the subject that
we have invented [that] reality’ (WP 552).
The mental subject is, in fact,
Nietzsche’s central critical target. Whether referred to as a subject, self,
ego, I, mind or soul, it is ‘a fable, a fiction’, the product of a ‘crude
fetishism’ which postulates some entity as the hidden cause of thoughts,
feelings and actions (TI VI.3, III.5). To suppose that there must be a doer
‘behind’ the deed, a thinker ‘behind’ the thought, is like supposing that the
lightning is something distinct from its flashing. These wrong suppositions,
Nietzsche remarks, are encouraged by verbal forms like ‘I did/thought/felt X’
or ‘The lightning flashed’, which tempt us to postulate a substantial subject
corresponding to the grammatical subject.
Nietzsche’s rejection of the
self, subject or ego as ‘only a word’ (TI III.5) registers his ‘nominalist’
hostility, akin to Hume’s, to thinking that there must be some entity in
common to, or causing, the diverse thoughts, feelings, and actions attributed
to a person. More importantly, he thinks that the notion of self or subject
has become irretrievably invested with wrong-headed conceptions of what human
beings are like. It is not only philosophers like Descartes, but educated
commonsense, that conceive of a person as being, essentially, a rational,
conscious (and self-conscious), self-directing agent possessed of free will,
only contingently connected to a body. Nietzsche rejects this whole
conception. People hardly ever act rationally, in the sense of acting for
reasons - these being, typically, ‘rationalisations’ after the event which
‘cause nothing’. Neither reason nor conscious thought plays anything like as
large a role in bringing about behaviour as does ‘the nervous system’ (WP 529,
476, 526). More generally, there is no ‘helmsman’ serving as the ‘directing
force’ behind our behaviour (GS 360). As for self-consciousness, far from
being an essential property of human beings, it is something which ‘developed
only under the pressure of the need for communication’ (GS 354).
Self-reflective concern owes to the practical need to let others know of one’s
condition, and hence presupposes the development of language. Freedom of the
will, to which our notion of self or subject is especially in hock, is another
fable or fiction (TI VI.3), incompatible with an honest recognition - itself
at odds with the traditional conception - of the inseparability of mental and
bodily life. ‘Body am I entirely’, proclaims Zarathustra, and ‘soul is only a
word for something about the body’ (Z I.4).
Nietzsche does allow for the
possibility of certain individuals achieving what deserve to be called
freedom, self-direction and, hence
