Incorporation and Individuation: On Nietzsche's use of Phenomenology for Life

References

• Paul Ricœur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard & Lester E. Embree. Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1967, p. 29.
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• Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: Allen & Unwin 1931, pp. 44–5.
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• On phenomenology's creation of concepts see ibid., p. 27.
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• Ibid, p. 256.
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• Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (Ideas 2), section 64, trans. R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer 1989.
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• Ibid., section 55.
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• I have used the following editions and translations of Nietzsche's work, often with modifications: Beyond Good and Evil (BGE), trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House 1966; Daybreak (D), trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press 1982; The Gay Science (GS), trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House 1974; Human, All too Human (two volumes) (HH), trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press 1986; On the Genealogy of Morality (GM), trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (second, revised edition) 2006; Twilight of the Idols (TI), trans. Duncan Large. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press 1998; Writings from the Late Notebooks (WLN), ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press 2003. References to the German are to the following edition: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli & Mazzino Montinari. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter 1988.
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• On phenomenology as a philosophy of life, see Renaud Barbaras, ‘A Phenomenology of Life’, in Taylor Carmen & Mark B. N. Hansen (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press 2005, pp. 206–31: “…the question of life, the question concerning the status, the meaning of the being of life, as that which comprises the natural and the transcendental, is the main question of phenomenology” (p. 208).
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• Husserl, Ideas 2, section 64.
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• Ibid., section 34.
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• Ibid., section 59.
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• Nietzsche has something quite specific in mind when he analyses ‘morality’ and subjects it to ‘critique’. Simplifying somewhat, we can say that he is concerned with how the world becomes subject to a ‘metaphysics’ of morality, a moralization, with the creation of a range of fictitious entities and beings. Nietzsche understands ancient societies and prehistory (the morality of custom, basic human animal psychology, and so on) as free of this moralization which comes later with the advent of Christian culture, a culture that we moderns remain very much in the grip of. A good example of his approach can be found in the analysis of bad conscience and its fate (Verhängnis) conducted in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche outlines a remarkable story about the origins and emergence of feelings of responsibility and debt (personal obligation). He is concerned with nothing less than the evolution of the human mind and how its basic ways of thinking have come into being, such as inferring, calculating, weighing, and anticipating. Indeed, he points out that our word “man” (manas) denotes a being that values, measures, and weighs. Already in The Wanderer and His Shadow Nietzsche had noted: “Perhaps all the morality of mankind has its origin in the tremendous inner excitement which seized on primeval men when they discovered measure and measuring, scales and weighing (the word ‘Mensch’, indeed, means the measurer, he desired to name himself after his great discovery!). With these conceptions they climbed into realms that are quite unmeasurable and unweighable but originally did not seem to be” (WS 21). Nietzsche is concerned with how a Christian-moral culture has cultivated a type of bad conscience in which the feeling of debt can never be relieved. This is because it becomes attached to a set of sublime metaphysical fictions, such as eternal punishment and original sin, in which release is inconceivable. For Nietzsche, the sense of “guilt” has evolved through several momentous and fateful events in history. In the earliest societies a person is answerable for their deeds and there is an obligation to honouring debts. In the course of history this material sense of obligation has been subject to increasing moralization and reaches its summit with guilt before the Christian God. Now a person is answerable for their very existence, regardless of any of its actual conditions. Nietzsche is keen to draw the reader's attention to what he regards as an important historical insight: the principal moral concept of “guilt” (Schuld) descends from the material concept of “debts” (Schulden). In this sphere of legal obligations, he stresses, we find the breeding-ground of the “moral conceptual world” of guilt, conscience, and duty (GM II, 6). See also D 78. “Morality” for Nietzsche is that which involves the positing of imaginary causes and imaginary entities.
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• Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, London: Athlone Press 1983 p. 3.
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• The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson & Duncan Large, Malden MA & Oxford: Basil Blackwell 2006, pp. 238–9.
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• Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Christopher Middleton, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996, p. 177.
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• I have hitherto attempted to subject this sketch to a treatment in my contribution to Ansell Pearson (ed.), A Nietzsche Companion (Oxford and Malden MA, Basil Blackwell 2006), pp. 230–50. I draw on some of this material in this contribution.
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• Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche I, Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1961, p. 332; Nietzsche. Volume Two: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell, New York: Harper & Row 1984, p. 76.
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• Nietzsche. Volume Two, p.75 note.
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• Novalis, ‘Miscellaneous Observations’ 124 in Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret Mohoney Stoljar, Albany: SUNY Press 1997.
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• Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005.
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• Martin Heidegger, ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’, section IX, in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2003, pp. 84–110, pp. 91–2.
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• Foucault contrasts the ancients and the moderns, arguing that the oracular task of ‘knowing oneself’ was not conceived as an epistemological task of abstract theoretical knowledge, but rather as a care of the self in which the incorporation of discourses of the ‘true’ was directed towards “preparation for life”, that is, a statement or a discourse is not of value for its own theoretical content, even when what is at stake is the theory of the world or the theory of the subject. Here it is not a matter of learning the truth either about the world or about oneself, but of assimilating, in the physiological sense of the term, discourses of the true that are aids for confronting external events and internal passions. Foucault says that the point is not to discover the truth of oneself, but rather of knowing with what true principles one is equipped, to what extent one is in a position to have them available when necessary. This entails disciplines of purification and transfiguration, involving techniques of meditation, uses of memory and forgetting, and the examination of conscience—regards the latter, the task is not to track down latent truths and buried secrets but to gauge how far one has got in one's appropriation of truth as a principle of conduct.
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• Jan Patočka, ‘Phenomenology and Gnoseology’ in Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2002, pp. 38–51, pp. 42ff.
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• Heidegger, Nietzsche I, p. 551; Nietzsche. Volume Three: The Will to Power as Truth and Knowledge, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, Frank A. Capuzzi, San Francisco: Harper & Row 1987, p. 67. In Daybreak 550 Nietzsche suggests that in spite of the enormous differences between them, both Plato and Aristotle took supreme happiness to reside in knowledge (Erkennen), “in the activity of a well-trained and inquisitive mind” (as opposed to finding it in visionary and mystical intuition). With his reference to the ‘ancients’ Heidegger seems to have in mind pre-Platonic thinkers.
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• In the sketch of 1881 Nietzsche uses the two main words in German for knowledge, Wissen and Erkenntnis. Incorporating knowledge refers to Wissen, whilst the passion of knowledge and the weightiest knowledge refer to Erkenntnis. Although there is a difference between them as forms of knowing—Erkennen involves a process of coming to know, it is a form of re-cognition or realization, as when we come to know a truth by knowing we have made an error or were mistaken about something, whilst Wissen denotes epistemic certainty (‘truth’ in this sense)—it is difficult to determine whether Nietzsche attaches any great significance to this. In GS 11 he uses Wissen for incorporating knowledge, but in GS 110, entitled ‘Origin of Knowledge’, the word he uses throughout in discussing this topic, including the forms of knowledge humankind has incorporated to date, is Erkenntnis.
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• John Richardson, Nietzsche's New Darwinism, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2004, p. 102.
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• Heidegger, Nietzsche I, p. 332; Nietzsche. Volume Two, p. 76.
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• Nietzsche is indebted to Schopenhauer for aspects of his appreciation of the evolution of knowledge and his understanding of the chief function of the intellect (it is a tool of self-preservation and self-enhancement, not something that can help us solve metaphysical riddles). Schopenhauer does speak of the assimilation or incorporation of knowledge (The World as Will and Representation II, chapter VII), but when he does so it is in the context of distinguishing between intuitive perception (Anschauung), which is to be regarded as the source of all knowledge (Erkenntnis) and the mode that is fully worthy of the name, and which can be assimilated, and concepts which merely ‘cling’ to us. Nietzsche's question in GS 110 leaves open what kind of knowledge and truth it is that we are now being asked and challenged to incorporate and does not simply refer to or name the truth and knowledge which we think we can assimilate or that we already know is possible for us to do so. In short, his question is meant to work as a genuine question.
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• Heidegger, Nietzsche Seminare 1937 und 1944, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman 2004, p. 28.
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• Heidegger, Nietzsche I, p. 359; Nietzsche: Volume Two, p. 100.
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• Ibid., p. 331; p. 75.
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• Ibid., p. 337; p. 80.
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• In a note of 1885–6 Nietzsche writes: “—all movements are to be taken as gestures, as a kind of language through which the forces understand each other. In the inorganic world misunderstanding is absent, and communication seems perfect. It's in the organic world that error begins. ‘Things’, ‘substances’, ‘qualities’, ‘activities’…They are the specific errors that enable organisms to live. Problem of the possibility of ‘error’? The opposition is not between ‘false’ and ‘true’ but between the ‘abbreviation of signs’ and the signs themselves…” For further insight into this important aspect of Nietzsche's thinking, see Werner Stegmaier, ‘Nietzsche's Doctrines, Nietzsche's Signs’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 31, 2006, pp. 20–42 (originally published in German in Nietzsche-Studien, Band 29, 2000, pp. 41–70).
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• A very good account of Nietzsche on consciousness, which helpfully distinguishes between kinds or types of consciousness, is to be found in, Steven D. Hales & Rex Welshon, Nietzsche's Perspectivism, Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press 2000, pp. 130–57, especially pp. 133ff.
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• See Hales & Welshon, Nietzsche's Perspectivism, p. 145. For instructive insights into the issue of epiphenomenalism in Nietzsche see also, Paul Katsafanas, ‘Nietzsche's Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualisation’, European Journal of Philosophy, 13: 1, 2005, pp. 1–32.
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• Nietzsche identifies Saint Paul as the inventor of the original “thought of thoughts”. See D 68, 72.
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• For insight into the way in which Nietzsche legitimately holds conscious states to be epiphenomenal, see Hales & Welshon, Nietzsche's Perspectivism, pp. 145ff. They note that for Nietzsche: “…psychological events, whether conscious or not, whether cognitive or not, are all refined drives and affects, and drives and affects are causally efficacious” (p. 148).
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• I am grateful to Duncan Large for assisting me with the translation of this and other notes from Nietzsche's notebooks used in this essay.
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• For instructive insight into Nietzsche's relation to Kant on questions of probity and sovereignty see Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘“Our Probity!” On Truth in the Moral Sense in Nietzsche’, in Laurence A. Rickels (ed.), Looking After Nietzsche, New York: SUNY Press 1990, pp. 67–89; and, Werner Hamacher, ‘The Promise of Interpretation: Remarks on the Hermeneutic Imperative in Kant and Nietzsche’, in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1996, pp. 81–143.
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• I am unable to probe the nature and extent of Nietzsche's commitment to this issue in this essay. For further insight see Hamacher, ‘“Disgregation of the Will”: Nietzsche on the Individual and Individuality’ in his Premises, pp. 143–81.
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• Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to his Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz, Chicago: Henry Regnery 1965, pp. 359–60. The first commentator to see a connection between the categorical imperative and Nietzsche's articulation of eternal recurrence as an ethical maxim was Georg Simmel in his study Schopenhauer and Nietzsche of 1907. Most contemporary readers of Nietzsche are perhaps familiar with this way of approaching Nietzsche's thought from the way Deleuze construes it in Nietzsche et la philosophie.
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• See Nietzsche, Daybreak 339, where he writes: “To demand that duty must always be something of a burden—as Kant does—means to demand that it should never become habit and custom: in this demand there is concealed a remnant of ascetic cruelty”. It is not one of my tasks in this essay to deliberate over the correctness or adequacy of Nietzsche's interpretation of Kant.
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• For further insight here see Peter Pöllner, ‘Phenomenology and Science in Nietzsche’, in Ansell Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, pp. 297–314.
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• For Husserl on the significance of Leibniz see Ideas 2 section 26 and, of course, the fifth Cartesian Mediation. See also Ricoeur, Husserl, p. 78. On Nietzsche's relation to Leibniz see Hamacher, ‘“Disgregation of the Will”’, pp. 151 ff.
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• Ricoeur, for example, suggests that Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality—the text that many, in the wake of Foucault's influential essay of 1971 ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, regard as an anti-phenomenological work—can be read as an exercise in a critical phenomenology: “The Genealogy of Morals… is a genuine phenomenology, at once reductive and genetic, applied to the totality of moral phenomena…long before the Husserlian phenomenology issued from the technique of reduction, the philosopher of ‘suspicion’ followed the path from the derived to the originary. It matters little to us that he mixed in with this technique of truth a dogmatism of instinct and an evolutionistic scientism which are antiquated today. It even matters little that Nietzsche should have lost himself in his destructive passion…The genesis of the spirit of humility from the will to power and the demonic form from the project of saintliness are the most remarkable, and in certain respects the most frightening, examples, of this critical phenomenology, a phenomenology noticeably more inclusive than the phenomenology of cognition to which the greatest part of Husserl's work had to be limited”, Husserl, pp. 207–8.
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