[Editor's Note: Thanks to new blogger David Crohn for this glimpse into one aspect of Nietzsche's relationship with his idol.]
In ep. 84 PEL touches briefly on Nietzsche's criticism of Schopenhauer—or rather, the ways Schopenhauer's readers have, according to Nietzsche, accepted the weakest aspects of his philosophy first (aphorism 99). Nietzsche was a great admirer of Schopenhauer, however, not least because they shared a rejection of the Kantian thing-in-itself.
Briefly, Kant's epistemology treats the senses, as well as the concepts of time and space and causality, as the conditions that make experience possible. These conditions limit our access to the objects of experience, however, so that things as they actually are, without the shape, size, duration, etc. that these conditions give them, cannot be perceived and are therefore unknowable. Kant is agnostic about the real nature of things-in-themselves (noumena), instead focusing on the way things appears to us (phenomena).
Post-Kantian philosophy has wrestled with the concept ever since. Many of his contemporaries (including Hegel) rejected the notion, seeing it as an empirically unverifiable and unnecessary addition—clutter in an already overstuffed ontology. In The Gay Science, 120 years later, Nietzsche continues the Kant-bashing, calling it a "very ridiculous thing" obtained "by stealth" (his italics). And in the Preface, Nietzsche seems to imply that the phenomenon/noumenon distinction is not just superfluous but entirely irrelevant to the point of doing philosophy. The Greeks, he writes, "knew how to live" because they "adored appearance...forms, tones, words... the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity.” This is a characteristic take on Aristotelian metaphysics, in which a thing is a substance plus its attributes. Nietzsche celebrates the Greeks for their close attention to surface, whose actual texture of forms and tones and words need not be somehow subordinate to what a thing actually is.
Schopenhauer, on the other hand, lived in roughly the same time and milieu as Kant, and was moved to engage Kantian epistemology directly, critiquing it in his 1813 doctoral dissertation (later published as On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason) and refining his critique even further in his magnum opus, The World As Will and Representation
-David Crohn
Wayne Schroeder says
November 19, 2013 at 11:48 amThanks David.
Just to add to your comments on appearance (from Will to Power, p. 568):
“Appearance” itself belongs to reality: it is a form of its being; i.e., in a world where there is no being, a certain calculable world of identical cases must first be created through appearance: a tempo at which observation and comparison are possible, etc. Appearance is an arranged and simplified world, at which our practical instincts have been at work; it is perfectly true for us; that is to say, we live, we are able to live in it: proof of its truth for us the world, apart from our condition of living in it, the world that we have not reduced to our being, our logic and psychological prejudices, does not exist as a world “in-itself”; it is essentially a world of relationships; under certain conditions it has a differing aspect from every point; its being is essentially different from every point; it presses upon every point, every point resists it-and the sum of these is in every case quite incongruent.”
Appearance is the nonmetaphysical reality which makes possible constructed forms of meaning which are at once groundless as noumena and necessary for life. This represents two levels of truth for Nietzsche, 1) the tragic truth of the primal, formless flux of becoming and 2) the livable truth of meaning/perspective.
Between the opposites of sheer flux and sheer being lies a multiplicity and plurality of truths. “There are many kinds of eyes . . . and consequently there are many kinds of ‘truths,’ and consequently there is not truth” (WP, p. 540).
“In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. — ‘Perspectivism.’ (WP, p. 481)
Nietzsche’s perspectival pluralism resists either atomistic relativism or wholistic ideology, and instead insists on a Heraclitian agonistic pluralism founded in the conflict and tension between and within perspectives–an oscillating dynamic.
So much for truth. The next level up is value. (Hint: The agonistic will to power)
My take: True agency (strength) is against the other, with obstacles and resistances, not denying but affirming the Other –in the absence of certainty–in the presence of self-sufficiency and of rationality, and in the existential enactment of the will to power.
“Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and *look* for trouble.” ― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
David says
November 19, 2013 at 4:58 pmWayne- What a fascinating and rich addition to my post!
As someone who has spent years wrestling with Heidegger and Foucault, I think the quotes you pull out might shed a lot of light on FN’s considerable influence on them.
But that is the subject for an altogether different (or not) blog post…
-DC
dmf says
November 19, 2013 at 12:05 pmthis is an important reminder thanks, many folks in the US come to folks like Freud in the shadow of Nietzsche and or even Heidegger and forget that Schopenhauer and Goethe are so foundational to such Germanic thought.
David says
November 24, 2013 at 11:06 amAnd don’t forget that in his “late phase” Heidegger turned to close readings of Holderlin et al.
And Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants is a fantastic treatise about organic form that was beloved by Wittgenstein and offers some of the best of what I suppose could be called Germanic thinking.
Wayne Schroeder says
November 19, 2013 at 7:34 pmdmf:
Interesting–can you elaborate? Doesn’t get better than Goethe.
dmf says
November 25, 2013 at 11:12 amjust noting that most American readers of figures like Freud may get a taste of FN, Heidegger, or even Wittgenstein, but haven’t read foundational figures like Schop & Goethe, of course a PEL podcast on Goethe might help remedy that…
http://www.janushead.org/8-1/index.cfm
Daniel Horne says
November 25, 2013 at 4:20 pmYes, I second the Goethe suggestion, particularly if we see it as a “philosophy of science” topic.
I’ve been intrigued by the idea of “Goethian science,” and a good episode might be comparing Goethe’s Theory of Colors (1810) with Schopenhauer’s On Vision and Colors (1816) with Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Color (1991).
Maybe don’t read all 3 books cover-to-cover, but take representative chapters from each text to discuss Goethe’s more “holistic” approach to scientific inquiry. Even if their conclusions on color are now obsolete (are they?), I see the primary value in these discussions of color as a kind of “case study” to discuss this more “morphological” Germanic scientific method.
Clearly Freud saw himself working in Goethe’s / Schopenhauer’s tradition, though of course that’s as much an indictment / cautionary tale as a vote in favor.
So, on one hand, I’m keen to hear Dylan’s assessment of Goethe’s/Schopenhauer’s conclusions.
On the other hand, I feel it can’t be complete antiquated claptrap, as no less than Schrödinger was taken with Schopenhauer’s on color.
David Crohn says
November 25, 2013 at 7:30 pmDaniel’s point about color is very well taken—another important connection I was not aware of. Could there be something about the German mind that likes system building, architectonically linking one point to the other so that everything has a place and there is a place for everything? To go even further out of the realm of philosophy, we might think of Poe’s notion of the Organic Principle in fiction, which he almost certainly took from German Romantics like Hoffmann, and Schlegel, who probably carried their dogeared copies of Aristotle’s Poetics with them on their ramblings through the Black Forest.
Organicism is def. antiquated as it doesn’t fit with today’s preference for the decentered, authorless text, i.e., postmodernism in all its manifestations—but it ain’t claptrap either!
I do wonder though how much Freud really fits into this discussion, as he posited an unknowable substratum as the source of all our drives. I always viewed the Id/Ego/Superego as a pretty messy assemblage, a model for the self based on conflict and ambiguity negotiated haphazardly by the codes and metaphors that create us rather than the other way around. That’s far removed from the Hegelian notion of an entire tree contained in a tiny seedling and the tree coming into being through a process by which the seed “discovers” its “true” form. Certainly Schopenhauer can be found in Freud, but Goethe too might be a stretch.
On the other hand, though I don’t count myself as an essentialist when it comes to nationality, I bet some case could be made that it’s no coincidence that it was Germany (in its various configurations) who gave us Eckhart, Luther, Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Wagner, Freud and Heidegger—and then made all these ideas seem potentially obscene with, I had to say it, the Holocaust. But that is definitely a subject for another podcast…
Wayne Schroeder says
November 26, 2013 at 1:06 amDavid, et. al:
Interesting–am only familiar with Goethe through his literature. The following makes connections with Freud and Goethe: http://www.answers.com/topic/goethe-and-psychoanalysis.
Leibniz was apparently the first philosopher of the unconscious (http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia02/parrhesia02_smith.pdf)
While Hegel’s seed concept is most consistent for the emergent concept of the self, Freud’s Id/Ego/Superego assemblage is amazingly powerful in being able to describe many phenomenological elements of the human condition. In fact, the Superego helps to explain the German/human/Superego authoritarian (Master) split with the Slave/obsequious philanderer/repressive “selflessness.”
“Adorno, et al. (1950) viewed the authoritarian personality as having a strict superego that controls a weak ego unable to cope with strong id impulses. The resulting intrapsychic conflicts cause personal insecurities, resulting in that person’s superego to adhere to externally imposed conventional norms (conventionalism), and to the authorities who impose these norms (authoritarian submission).” (Wikipedia, Authoritarian Personality). This explains, for example, Heidegger’s (and the German people’s) eventual ethical demise under Hitler.
dmf says
November 26, 2013 at 8:33 amhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/