Studies in Continental Thought

Power, Life, Subjectivity

Élodie Boublil, Christine Daigle

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780253009449
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

What are the challenges that Nietzsche's philosophy poses for contemporary phenomenology? Elodie Boublil, Christine Daigle, and an international group of scholars take Nietzsche in new directions and shed light on the sources of phenomenological method in Nietzsche, echoes and influences of Nietzsche within modern phenomenology, and connections between Nietzsche, phenomenology, and ethics. Nietzsche and Phenomenology offers a historical and systematic reconsideration of the scope of Nietzsche's thought.

PART I

LIFE AND INTENTIONALITY

1	Husserl and Nietzsche
	Rudolf Boehm

Just as the same city viewed from different directions appears entirely different and, as it were, multiplied perspectively, in just the same way it happens that, because of the infinite multitude of simple substances, there are, as it were, just as many different universes, which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one, corresponding to the different points of view of each monad.

—Leibniz, Monadology

EACH POINT OF VIEW limits our view.¹ However, a point of view is needed in order to see anything at all. “All life is taking a position,” said Husserl²; it is “an engaging.”

Philosophers’ lives do not seem exempt from this rule. In the end, philosophers are able to reach such a point of view—which is essential for them to see anything at all—only when they “engage,” when they “take a position.”³ Nevertheless a philosopher’s point of view—as little as any other—does not essentially concern itself with what is uncovered by her gaze, since, although indispensable for seeing, points of views rather indicate the limits within which philosophers are able to grasp what they see.

As clear and lucid as this reflection may seem, it shall here be given a more detailed explanation: to elucidate it is almost my only intention in the following account. As my example, I choose Husserl and Nietzsche. The latter took a position for the right and the power of life—against the insolence of a reason, which is, secretly or openly, an enemy to life, to its right, and to its power. The former advocated a new kind of rationalism, which alone, so he thought, would be able to restore life’s meaning. In light of what is raised by such an opposition, there is presumably no other choice but to take a stand for one side or for the other—to take “life’s side” or “Reason’s side”—if, in the end, one wishes to reach a standpoint or insight on this level. Yet the affirmation still holds that whatever becomes open to view does so only despite the boundaries that are proper to these two opposite points of view. This will become more perspicuous not when we manage to overcome these two divergent points of view (which would mean, at best, adopting a third one) but rather when we intercept the path that links the two viewpoints together at this level. It becomes essential, then, in the following pages, to attempt to delineate, albeit provisionally, the path that links together the two—unarguably opposed—points of view of Nietzsche and Husserl.⁴

However, before we explore this path, let us note that it is always such a “change in position” or such an “entering of a path” that endows a philosopher with a plurality of viewpoints.⁵ But this does nothing to change the problem.⁶ Let us note also that with precisely such a “change in position” a philosopher exposes herself usually to objections and criticisms from those who take a philosopher’s commitment to be the essence of philosophy. Such critique forgets that the fundamental is not what is essential, and that the essential is not the fundamental.⁷ The requirement to have gained a viewpoint is fundamental in order to see, yet what is essential is to see.

I

It seems surprising that the far-reaching analogy—if not the agreement between Husserl’s analysis of the crisis of European rationalism, especially in the treatise on The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology⁸ and the one developed by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols,⁹ for instance—has been barely noticed.¹⁰ For Husserl, as well as for Nietzsche, what is ultimately at stake in this crisis is the Socratic-Platonic ideal of philosophy and the knowledge inherited and renewed from the modern era by the West. For both Husserl and Nietzsche, this ideal has proven to be abstract and unrealizable; the attempts that have been undertaken—since the beginning of the modern world (defined precisely by these attempts)—to realize this ideal have, on the one hand, engendered merely grandiose constructs, the meaning of which grows more and more distant from a meaning that real life would require. On the other hand, these attempts have brought to light facts and situations that, as seemed evident, would resist all attempts at being subjected to the reign of reason and the relevance of which would in fact make the ideal of rationalism itself appear doubtful, questionable, and even suspicious.

It is to nothing else but the “life-world” (Husserl’s concept of Lebenswelt) that any rationalism remains abstract and ultimately blind; that is precisely the world in which rationalism should take its roots in order to implement itself. For both Husserl and Nietzsche, this life-world is the “only real world.”¹¹ However, since the life-world constitutes a unique system of subjective relativities, it will never be able to conform to an actual rationalization nor to serve as ground for the merely theoretical construction of a truly rigorous science or philosophy. What is real in this life-world is so not depending on whether it is more or less “true” or “false”; in this world, everything is expression, realization, and effectivity. What truly causes effects in this life-world is that which gains access to the motivations of this world’s life. What in particular—if one can here speak of something merely particular—determines the effective course of events in the domain of the history of ideas is not the “objective” meaning, objectively “true” meaning, of any fact or situation, but rather it is the conception, analysis, or interpretation of a fact or situation that will successfully establish itself independently of its “truth” or “falsity.” On this plane of the real history of life, it is completely useless to ask oneself, for instance, whether or not the dominant Renaissance conception of the meaning of Antiquity really and objectively expressed the “true” and “genuine” meaning of Antiquity itself. Insofar as the meaning of Antiquity is indeed still determined for us by the image of Antiquity, which the Renaissance conveyed, Antiquity acquires its meaning from it: it is that meaning.¹²

One can say in general that the historical life-world, the only real world, is the world of absolute meaning if one understands by “absolute” meaning one that is simply and entirely independent from any “objective” ground, since, as a matter of fact, every meaning escapes as such the reign of the principle of noncontradiction and therefore escapes being grasped by genuine knowledge. Indeed nothing satisfies the demand of signifying and not signifying the same thing at the same time and in the same respect if one does not add: for someone, for us Europeans, for our time, and so on. But such an addendum precisely reduces the principle of noncontradiction—as Husserl showed like no one else¹³—into a merely empirical judgment about psychical facts.

However, it is well known that for Nietzsche the crisis of rationalism, which breaks out when the latter is confronted with the realities of the life-world, is more than a mere crisis: it is the definitive ruin of this ideal. For Husserl, on the other hand, the contemporary crisis of traditional rationalism can and must initiate a reflection from which a renewed rationalism would have to emerge, at last truly absolute, truly all-encompassing, and really concrete. According to Husserl, this new rationalism will have to give up on settling on the ground of the life-world itself, which has shown itself to be simply unable to support the construction of absolute knowledge—and must rather be founded on a basis that it would first have to make for itself: namely, the basis of absolute subjectivity, upon which the relativities of the life-world must be traced as phenomena of relative subjectivity.

Here an opposition between the perspectives of Husserl and Nietzsche already opens up, one that seems insurmountable. But as soon as we attend to a reflection offered by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols, this impression fades away. Nietzsche ends the famous passage where he recounts the “History of an error” and which is entitled “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable” by asking the following question: “The true world—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps?” To which he answers: “But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.”¹⁴ For Nietzsche, this conclusion means—as he continues within brackets—“Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.”¹⁵ What does this mean for us?

It is obvious that when Nietzsche talks here about the Abschaffen (Abolishing) of the wahren Welt (true world) and of the scheinbaren Welt (apparent world), he means something different each time with the same word abschaffen. Yet indeed, if the “true world” of the Reason of the old rationalism is to be disposed of as an illusion, since the apparently, or perhaps assumed “apparent” world proves to be the “only real world” (Husserl), then no “rational ground” will any longer justify referring to the life-world as the “apparent” world. Dismissing the illusory idea of a “true world” of which rationalism dreamed, one has thereby also dismissed the illusion of thinking of our life-world as merely an “apparent” world. Our life-world is throughout and absolutely constituted by what the rationalist notion of truth forces us to take as “mere appearances,” but it is therefore not an apparent world. Rather, these appearances themselves and their life-world-constitutive system are the whole reality and, consequently, in this sense of reality, the entire truth even if the latter is quite different from the one imagined by traditional rationalism: if the truths of the life-world are no longer to be measured according to their degree of correspondence to the truth of a “true world” (because this exemplary world proves to be inexistent), then truth and appearance—and incidentally appearance and phenomenon (Schein und Erscheinung)—cease to stand against each other and instead merge into each other.

Was the task of the “transvaluation of all values” (Umwertung aller Werte) that Nietzsche posited at the end of his intellectual journey—and the solution of which was supposed to be provided by his major work—not precisely the task that, evidently, emerged because of the lucid reflection with which he concludes in Twilight of the Idols the story of the “longest” error of humanity: “With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one”? We must content ourselves here with posing this question. In any case, as is well known, Nietzsche was not able to finish this work and, moreover, left behind only outlines of a draft for a transvaluation of the truth-value of the “apparent world.” The task, if indeed it was Nietzsche’s task, was enormous, as we can now concretely assess in light of the dimensions of Husserl’s work, which become slowly perceivable while remaining utterly impossible to take in with one glance.¹⁶ We should demonstrate indeed that the Husserlian conception of a new rationalism grounded upon a reference back to absolute subjectivity—the Husserlian conception of a new “first philosophy” that would not be metaphysics anymore but “transcendental phenomenology”¹⁷—corresponds, in its essentials, exactly with the task of the transvaluation, as we have indicated it following Nietzsche’s conclusion to the history of the “longest error” of mankind. For Husserl, the point is to grasp and ground the Absolute implied by the life-world’s system of relativities; it is as such that subjectivity concerns him. Or, put differently, Husserl needs to “make true” (wahrmachen) what skepticism has so far objected to and opposed to the rationalist ideal of truth:¹⁸ to force antirationalist skepticism, by leading it back to its ultimate consequences, to admit and to reveal what must be “true” about antirationalist skepticism itself. This is even one of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I. Life and Intentionality
• Part II. Power and Expression
• Part III. Subjectivity in the World
• Index
• Contributors