This intervention was written as a reply to the thoughtful and incisive comment (as always) to our last post by Dan. Rather than a direct reply to the various perspicacious points he raises, I thought better to write a piece of greater depth that I hope other friends may find useful, if not interesting. Clearly, these matters seem to be of greater relevance in the light of recent geopolitical events that are buffeting and cosseting what Neruda styled as our "residencia en la Tierra". This post will be followed by one on "Heidegger and History" that will seek to elucidate further some of the matters raised and covered here. Cheers to all!
Vivo ergo cogito! I live, therefore I think. The Nietzschean
riposte to the Cartesian cogito aims
at reaffirming the primacy of experience (even of perception) over reflection
and deduction. It’s not that the cogito is a false syllogism; it is also that
all syllogisms are false, unless they are tautologies, in which case they are
devoid of any real content and meaning. Initially, in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche had developed this philosophy in a
positivist scientific perspective. As early as The Gay Science, however, but more explicitly in Beyond Good and Evil, he had extended
his critique of logical deductivism to all scientific or “natural laws”. By
attacking the legality of science,
Nietzsche was thereby reasserting the primacy of experience and perception over
any “scientific theory” that could reconcile or con-nect (link indissolubly together, from Latin nexus) objects and ideas.
Central to his attack on “theory”
was Nietzsche’s demolition of the metaphysical Subject, of Ego-ity (Ich-heit), because the Ego itself, the
I, is a phantomatic notion, as Hume’s skepticism had warned. Yet Nietzsche
lacked the language to affirm these propositions, because even the concept of
“vivo” (I live) contains the first pronoun – “I”. The ontology of thought
points also to this – the misconceptions in which our language is mired as a
result of our “physio-logical” development. Heidegger may be right: “Language
is the house of being” (in Letter on
Humanism): but it is a house with frail imperfect foundations. Language is
the most evident proof of the interpenetration of perception and meaning, of
experience and thought, of instinct and reflection. The intuition of this
interpenetration, of the con-naturation (to
borrow a word from the Italian language) of instincts, perception, experience
and thought, constitutes the essence of Nietzsche’s naturalism – “the true phenomenology”, as he called it.
Heidegger’s notion of Dasein (being there) falls far short of
capturing the Nietzschean ontogeny of
thought. Despite his ambitious pretensions of originality – and even
conceding that he was certainly the greatest philosopher of the last century –
Heidegger’s philosophy remains a series of footnotes to Nietzsche (just as, for
Whitehead, Western philosophy was “footnotes to Plato”). Little wonder that
Heidegger’s voluminous, imponent study on Nietzsche
remains a work of perhaps even greater significance than Being and Time – the fruit of an obsession that nearly drove him to
madness!
The dif-ference between Heidegger’s Dasein
and Nietzsche’s ontogeny of thought is all here: although both notions are
“ontogenetic” in nature, Heidegger’s Dasein
is purely transcendental, whereas Nietzsche’s ontogeny is far more
physiological, biological even. Husserl was right to criticize (vehemently if
not bitterly) Heidegger’s divagation from phenomenology as “philosophical
anthropology”; yet even what is anthropological and sociological in Heidegger
(see above all, not just Sartre’s first section of Being and Nothingness, but also Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality)
remains steeped in the “metaphysics” that he wished to overcome - whereas
Nietzsche’s ontogeny is inextricably tied to immanence, from instincts to
exploitation, to domination, to ideology, politics and art. (Small wonder,
then, that Sigmund Freud purchased a copy of Nietzsche’s collected works very
early in his psychoanalytic career!)
Heidegger’s claims concerning the “historiality”
of Dasein are not just excessive:
they are unjustified, if not incorrect. Dasein
is pure transcendence where Nietzsche’s ontogeny is an attempt, however inchoate
and incomplete, at immanence – an attempt at rooting the primacy of experience
over reflection in the bio-physio-logical evolution of human beings. (I will
post again soon my essay on this thesis, “Heidegger and History”.) Of course,
Nietzsche never even suspected that phylogeny could replace ontogeny: he always
saw “human beings” as “individuals”,
as separate beings, not as “being human”, as aspects of a single “being” (cf. Leibnitz, “a being is a being”). His notion of life as
exploitation – of all life as exploitation – is too abstract to withstand
critique: Hegel saw right, life is objectification, not necessarily
exploitation – but he, too, as Marx asseverated, confused objectification (an
ineluctable aspect of existence) with alienation (a historically specific
aspect of social reality). The weakness in this confused notion, Nietzsche
inherited from Schopenhauer’s vision of the body as “the objectification of the
Will [to Life]”. Even so, Nietzsche’s
vision of life as exploitation and his injunction “to love fate” (amor fati)
provides us with a priceless caveat against all world visions
(Welt-anschauungen) and religions and teleological ideologies that would lull
us into an catastrophically false sense of security over the fatidic “triumph
of Good over Evil” in human history!
For both Nietzsche and Heidegger,
“history” is a fictitious notion in that history is inevitably the sum of all
interpretations of past events – where ‘events’ are themselves a process of
selection and interpretation (cf. Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations). Time, and by extension history, is not a
“thing” – a separate reality with a past, a present and a future. The only
“time” possible is the here and now, the nunc
stans – everything happens at once, and it happens now! (Colloquially, one
might quip that “back to the future” or “time travel” is an absurdity for both
philosophers.) For Nietzsche, all being is “being-as-becoming”, just as for Heidegger
Being must above all not be
“presence”, sub-stance, re-ality (thing-iness), per-manence (what persists, what remains unchanged). Time is not
measurable; it is not “space”; time is a “place” (Ort). It is the reification of time, and therefore of human
ec-sistence – of Dasein – that leads
to ‘inauthenticity’ for Heidegger. Authenticity is the seizing of consciousness
by Dasein that existence is mere
possibility, contingency – ultimately, Dasein
is “being toward death”.
It is this contingency, this dispensability
of Dasein – its in-essentiality, or
rather, the awareness of its
inessentiality, of death - that seals its “thrown-ness” (Geworfenheit) in the world of beings (Seiende). In its “thrown-ness”, Dasein
is not at home in the world of “things”. Indeed, it is possible to argue that Dasein is at bottom a solipsistic notion – one that is
irreconcilable with “the life-world” (which confirms Husserl’s own reservations
on the Heideggerian project – “is this philosophy or anthropology?” he queried in
his margin notes to Heidegger’s Kantbuch)!
(Perhaps the most profound and incisive critic of Heidegger in this regard was
his erstwhile pupil, Karl Lowith – cf. his essays in Heidegger.) That is why Heidegger’s cognate notions of Zu- and Vor-handenheit are probably
among the least convincing of his entire philosophy. A coherent account of
these “aptitudes” or “orientations” of Dasein
would require an immanentist foundation that Heidegger’s philosophy thoroughly
lacks.
By contrast, Nietzsche’s
“instincts of freedom” (later “will to power”), however incoherently outlined
by the philosopher of Rocken, require as a conceptual premise the positing of
the immanence of perception, of the materiality of being human. The
transcendental nature of Dasein, its
ineluctable a-historicity, its complete lack of immanence, belie Heidegger’s
strenuous attempts – most ill-advised in his Nazi period – to give his
existentialism a historical and socio-political flavor (cf. above all, Introduction to Metaphysics, a most despicable
apology for the Nazi regime).
Because of its transcendental
character, because of its thoroughgoing a-historicity – regardless of his thorough
misconstrual of historicity -,
Heidegger’s philosophy can be said to be “innocuous” from a sociological
viewpoint – certainly with regard to the dramatic experience of the Nazi Lager. (But I still esteem Karl Lowith’s
profound and deeply humane truncation of Heidegger’s political aberrations as
arising from deficiencies in his phenomenological project – see his Heidegger.) Woefully, instead, it is
Nietzsche’s doctrine of Un-ver-antwortlich-keit
(literally, “unaccountability” or “innocence” in the sense of
“blamelessness”) that is certainly very relevant to the Nazi death-camps!
Contrary to what foolish epigones from Foucault to Deleuze (the summit of
foolishness) to Agamben and other neo-Nietzscheans have propounded as zoe (naked life) as against bios (politicized existence), the Nazis never ever (!) saw their Jewish victims
as “stateless” or as “lacking citizenship”! As Hannah Arendt saw – with the
astounding perspicacity that characterized her political philosophy -, the Nazi
German dictatorship fundamentally obliterated the very notion of “citizenship”
by substituting it with race or “Volk” – which is a fluid concept incapable of de-finition (Latin, finis, boundary, border, end) - legal, historical, or even
biological - that made possible the utterly arbitrary unbounded removal of all legal attributes from German Jews, first,
and then just about all “enemies of the Reich”. (The mandatory reference is, of
course, to Arendt’s The Origins of
Totalitarianism.) For the Nazis, the inmates of concentration camps were as
“blameless” as they saw themselves to be! In executing the orders of the
Fuhrer, they were simply carrying out “the laws of Nature”, - a brutish
misappropriation of Nietzsche’s “instincts of freedom” - just as
contemporaneously the Bolshevik executioners were carrying out “the laws of
History” in the Soviet Union – in the name of Karl Marx!
(We shall return soon to the
importance of superseding the ontogenetic
approach adopted by the near entirety of Western philosophy with the novel phylogenetic one enucleated explicitly first
by Karl Marx and then reprised by many later thinkers.)
Thank you for this helpful reply. I will try to acquire the Karl Lowith work that you mention and will look forward to your piece on the phylogenetic approach.
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