References
- A version of this paper was presented at the conference on ‘Phenomenology and its Futures’ at the University of Johannesburg on the 29th of March 2013 and at a colloquium in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Witwatersrand on the 16th of May. I want to thank the students and staff at the conference and at the colloquium for their comments and suggestions. I especially want to thank Daniel Dahlstrom and the anonymous reviewer for taking the time to read this paper and for their incisive comments, which helped me sharpen my argument.
- F. Nietzsche Writings from the Late Notebooks (hereafter cited as WLN) ed. R. Bittner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 16.
- M. Heidegger “Plato's Doctrine of Truth“ in Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 179.
- It is well known that Heidegger's attitude toward Nietzsche becomes more critical from his first lecture courses in 1936–7 on art and the eternal return to these courses on knowledge and nihilism. See, e.g., H. Arendt The Life of Mind (Harcourt, Inc., 1981), p. 173. Heidegger's shifting attitude toward Nietzsche is not my concern here. What interests me is the content of these last two courses.
- For example, Aquinas explains in Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. T. McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 171, 178, 185, that truth is primarily in the intellect and secondarily in the thing: in the former, because the conformity of the intellect to the thing cannot be expressed anywhere but in the intellect; in the latter, because the thing has a quality or form that makes it adequate to the intellect in the sense that it causes knowledge of itself by means of its species received in the soul. Let me add that both Aristotle and Aquinas offer non-propositional accounts of truth as well. Aristotle speaks of the truth of noncomposite essences at the end of Metaphysics IX.1051b24–25, which are had in a direct intuition rather than in a judgment. On seeing Socrates, for example, I have a direct understanding of what he is: a man. So also for Aquinas: truth is known by the divine intellect intuitively not in a judgment.
- M. Heidegger Volume III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics in Nietzsche (hereafter cited as NIII), ed.D.F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 80.
- Heidegger insists in Parmenides, trans. A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 51, that Luther is the first to connect truth with justice: “Luther asks how man could be a ‘true’ Christian, i.e., a just man, a man fit for what is just, a justified man.” Truth here becomes a matter of justice. See B.W. Davis Heidegger and the Will, On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p.166.
- T. Colony suggests in “The death of God and the life of being: Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche” in Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays, ed.D. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 207, that this formulation of both concepts in the 1936–7 courses on art and the eternal return is a late editorial addition of Heidegger's.
- Although I cannot explore this here, Heidegger contends in section 110 of his Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (hereafter cited as CP), trans. R. Rojcewicz and D. Vallega-Nue (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 173, that there is in fact no discontinuity between modern idealism and the emerging naturalism of the mid-19th century, as they are both offshoots of Platonism.
- M. Heidegger Volume IV: Nihilism in Nietzsche (hereafter cited as NIV), ed.D.F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 143.
- It is odd that Agamben makes no mention of Heidegger in his discussion of bare life in Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 9. He says that what defines modern politics is the coincidence of bare life, i.e., man taken as an animal without qualification, with the political realm. But can we make sense of this event of the political, which is supposed to be exclusively modern, without taking into account Heidegger's extensive descriptions of the change in the essence of truth, the reign of value-thinking and the positing of the body as the metaphysical subject? See also Derrida The Beast and the Sovereign Volume I, trans. G. Bennington (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 315–17, who takes Agamben to task for this lack of an explicit engagement with Heidegger.
- M. Heidegger Basic Questions of Philosophy, Selected ‘Problems’ of Logic (hereafter cited as BQP) trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 19.
- Heidegger early on interprets the correspondence relation between what there is and what we say there is as a relation of identity following Husserl, i.e., as the experienced coincidence between the intended as it is intended and as it is given, and insists that this relation of identity presupposes in turn Dasein's self-disclosure as being-in-the-world, the clearing. At this later stage of Heidegger's itinerary, Dasein qua the essence of man and the clearing no longer coincide, but are thought in terms of the relation of belongingness/call and need/use.
- NIV 245; 1994: 132f; The phrase ‘the advent of being’ does not mean that being is a future event, i.e., an event that will one day come to pass; it means that being is the event of the future: it lets things appear by staying away (from the present or what there is), i.e., by enduring as a future ecstatically-historially.
- See J. Derrida Spurs Nietzsche's Styles, trans. B. Harlow (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979).
- F. Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (hereafter cited as GM) trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 108.
- M. Clark Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 30–31.
- It might be asked at this point how this neutrality fits with Nietzsche's claim in his 1881 note in The Nietzsche Reader, ed.K. Ansell-Pearson and D. Large (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 239, that we are “to look into the world through as many eyes as possible, to live in drives and activities so as to create eyes for ourselves”. This passage and its cousin in the Genealogy (GM 119) would cause a problem for my reading if Nietzsche was saying that we are to enter into and explore perspectives in order to know the world. But as I read him, Nietzsche is not interested in knowing what there is. After all, if, as Nietzsche insists, neither the self nor the world has a nature then there is nothing for us to know, or put differently, it makes no sense to sustain a cognitive relation to self and world. Nietzsche is saying that perspectives, drives or passions are conditions of our human, all-too-human knowledge. To explore these perspectives, to enter into them, is to expose the errors, simplifications or creations on which our knowledge rests. And my claim is that, in order to explore such perspectives, in order to become attentive to the conditions of knowledge, we must assume an attitude of neutrality with respect to what our knowledge represents about the self or the world.
- F. Nietzsche The Will to Power (hereafter cited as WP) trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 550.
- F. Nietzsche The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 163.
- R. Havas Nietzsche's Genealogy, Nihilism and The Will to Knowledge (hereafter cited as NG) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 163.
- T.B. Strong Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (hereafter cited as FN) (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988), p. 77.
- T. Stern contends in “Nietzsche, Amor Fati and the Gay Science” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Vol. CXIII: 2 (2012–2013), pp. 9–10, that “what Nietzsche wants us to learn to love and make beautiful is the error that conditions our existence […] What he recommends is the artistic appropriation of these errors at a second-order level—to make these errors beautiful.” Nietzsche does say in a brief parenthesis in the Genealogy that art is the only antidote to the ascetic ideal—“art, in which precisely the lie is sanctioned and the will to deception has a good conscience.” (GM 153) But there are signs in the text that suggest that Nietzsche may not think that art is a sufficient response to nihilism and the ascetic ideal (why does he allude to it only parenthetically?), and that what is required in addition is an ethical appropriation of these errors, i.e., an appropriation of them as obstacles to the way we ordinarily understand ourselves and in relation to which we are to test the strength of our character or will.
- F. Nietzsche Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 91.
- Nietzsche is close to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in this respect in which the trajectory of ordinary consciousness is described as a pathway of doubt and despair. When I commit myself to the truth of p, I stake my being on it. So when I become conscious of the untruth of p, I lose my sense of self as well.
- L. Hatab and C. Acampara have argued that the sovereign individual does not function as a positive exemplar for Nietzsche, but I am not convinced by their argument. Acampara contends in “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity” in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, ed.C.D. Acampara (Rowman & LittleField, 2006), p. 152f, that the standard view cannot be supported because “reference to such a being is limited to the one section under consideration”, i.e., GM II 2, and because it commits Nietzsche to certain ideas about subjectivity that he rejects, such as the distinction between the doer and the deed. Hatab's point is roughly the same in Nietzsche's Life Sentence, Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 54: “the sovereign individual names […] the modern ideal of subjective autonomy, which Nietzsche rejects”. Acampara's first claim is incorrect: Nietzsche emphasizes the importance of learning to keep one's word on two other occasions in his late notebooks, which I cite in the main text. Secondly, as I read Nietzsche, being able to stand security for one's word, aside from being a test of one's strength and character, is an achievement: it is achieved by overcoming internal resistances, such as the power to forget. In that sense, it exemplifies the Nietzschean notion of freedom (not the modern idea of autonomy as self-determination). Both authors appear to assume that Nietzsche has one ideal type under which all his descriptions of what is übermenschlich has to fit. But it is not clear that this is true.
- Cicero On Duties, ed.M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 139.
- F. Nietzsche Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ (hereafter cited as TI) trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 96, 104.
- Nietzsche provides further examples in Twilight of the Idols of what this training and exercise of the will involves. In order to see well, for instance, we must learn to defer judgment: “not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-tacking instincts in one's control.” The incapacity to resist a stimulus, the need to react and obey every impulse, is a sign of “decline” and “symptom of exhaustion.” (TI 76) We must submit to these kinds of exercises to have our volitional and cognitive resources in our control.