Heidegger on Nietzsche: Heidegger argues that Nietzsche really never asks the fundamental question, "What is Being?" This fundamental question, states Heidegger, "remains as foreign to Nietzsche as to the history of thinking before him." Nietzsche not only asks, but answers in his doctrine of the will to power. Heidegger then goes on his own tangent. Heidegger feels that knowledge can be understood only in terms of the essence of truth and also in terms of knowing as techne, but the essences of truth must be grasped in the sense of "correctness" as an "establishing of value", which notion, Heidegger insists, must be approached through Nietzsche's "biologism." Nietzsche's biologism to be coupled with "logic", since it is the "trust in Reason" that creates "truths" are projected by man in his confrontation with Chaos, which is understood in relation to the "collapse" of the Aristotelian law of contradiction. This "collapse" of the law of contradiction results in a "destruction" of the distinction between the real and the apparent world. Heidegger feels, therefore, that the metaphysics of truth is subjectivism understood as anthropomorphism and the "ground" of the "justification" for truth is "justice" or "correctness". This endlessly involved discussion merely presents Heidegger's own views and indicates he is, in all probability, critiquing transcendentalism, not Nietzsche.
This also permits Heidegger to accuse Nietzsche of anthropomorphizing knowledge, or "humanizing" metaphysics, instead of "overcoming" it. He goes far beyond an interpretation of Nietzsche and offers the absolute conditions to which he subjects him. "Every representation of the totality of entities, every world interpretation is therefore unavoidable humanization. Such considerations are so obvious, that even one who has followed this out only roughly must see that the human being with all of his representing, intuiting and determining of entities is always pushed into the blind alley of his own humanness." Heidegger continues that world-interpretation is inextricably bound up with humanizing. The project of "de-humanizing" is also a human project and thus is also humanizing. The solution to this problem is an inquiry into the Being of man, or, more accurately, into the Being of Dasein. This, of course, is an implicit reference to Heidegger's own philosophy, an analytical project that seems to advocate an analysis of a fundamental sense of life systemized under ontology. Specifically, Heidegger's ontology, in an Epimenidean predicament, would, nonetheless, be humanizing. If Nietzsche had succeeded in "overcoming" the "humanization of metaphysics", he would, implies Heidegger, of course, have come to the same conclusions as Heidegger. For a philosopher that advocates an extreme in a dehumanized historical autonomy, Heidegger spends much time in advertising his own personal doctrines. And leaves the reader wondering whatever happened to Nietzsche, who virtually disappears by the last volume.
Her attitude toward Heidegger was unfair for the same reason he had been unfair to his predecessors. They had screwed up what she wanted to say. She studied hard during this period and learned extremely fast and kept her mouth shut. But it would be wrong to think she was any sort of good student. A good student seeks knowledge fairly and impartially. She didn't do that. She had an ax to grind and she sought things that helped her grind it and the means of knocking down anything that got in her way to grind it. She had no interest in the muck in her own head, secondary sources or Great Books. She wanted to write one of her own and was searching for a method.
Psychological and methodical explanations are inadequate, if not entirely absurd, in the face of PMI (we called it). Nor could stage fright sustain that kind of fanatical intensity month after month. Her one lack was a lack of faith in reason and it was her lack of faith in reason that made her so fanatically devoted to it. No one is completely dedicated to something they have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun will rise because they know it will. When people are fanatically devoted to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogma, it's because they are in doubt. Many were contemptuous because they didn't understand the rational process. She was contemptuous because she did and furthermore, where she lived, in winter, the sun did not rise.
Heraclitus (c470 BC): "Everything is fire" Heraclitus understood this in the metaphorical sense. He felt there was something about the nature of fire which explained both the appearance of stability in the phenomenal world (the flame's form is stable) and the fact of change (in the flames, everything changes). Heraclitus drew some striking conclusions from this observation. Reality is composed not of things, but of a process of continual creation and destruction. "You can't step in the same river twice", said H, because it is constantly flowing and changing it's course. Heraclitus is called the "Dark One" and his ideas have generally been interpreted pessimistically. Like Adorno, Heraclitus' ideas create not only a philosophy, but a mood, almost a world view of nostalgia, loss and melancholy. Nevertheless, there was something positive in the Heraclitean philosophy. There existed an unobservable logos governing change which made change a rational phenomena rather than the chaotic one it appeared to be. This logos doctrine impressed Plato and eventually became (changed, of course) the basis of his natural law.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831):
Being is the rational and the rational is (bes?).
Schopenhauer, one of the few contemporaries of Hegel who refused to be intimidated by his immense fame, once said of him, "Hegel, installed from above by the powers that be as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense."
And if Kant believed that his "critical philosophy" would be the end of speculative metaphysics, he was sorely mistaken. Even in his lifetime there was emerging a generation of metaphysicians, some of whom, ironically enough, were using Kantian principles to advance speculations well beyond the limits which Kant lay down in his Critique. Kant was especially embarrassed by the use of his ideas and terminology by philosophers who were calling themselves Kantians while creating a highly metaphysical idealism of the type Kant had repudiated.
Kant had argued that the appearances of ultimate reality are processed by the human mind, which then creates a world for humans to inhabit. Hegel went further (and further) and claimed that the mind not only structured reality, but that it generated and constituted it. That is, reality is mind and spirit. This left Hegel with a philosophy that even he called "Absolute Idealism". It is absolute idealism in the sense that absolutely nothing but ideas exist but also because ultimately Hegel equated "mind" with "absolute (divine) mind". This meant that if mind = reality, then reality = God. This view is in a vague way, similar to Spinoza's. But Hegel took it further (and further) and besides equating mind with reality and God, he also equated it with history. According to Hegel, if the mind has a universal abstract structure, its content changes evolutionarily through time. There exists a kind of philosophical introspection which reveals the structure of mind and allows a reconstruction of history in an a priori manner. In an attempt to investigate the nature of the mind, it is possible to reconstruct the logical beginnings of creation. In case some haven't reached this sort of philosophical introspection or their universal abstract structure is having mechanical difficulties, Hegel spelled it out. It goes something like this:
In the beginning, God, pure Mind, and therefore, pure Being, attempted to think himself. But pure Being is unthinkable, so when God tried to think Being, he thought nothing. That is, he thought the opposite of Being. Being <==> Nothingness.
But remember, in the...uh....unusual system being discussed here, God is God's thought, so in his failure to think pure Being, God has distanced himself from his essence. This is what Hegel calls God's self-alienation. The "truth" of Hegel's insight can be seen in several of H's biblical references. One example is God's answer to Moses when he talked to him via the burning bush. When the shrub burst into flames, Moses asked it, "Who art thou?" and God answered, "I am that which is" (or, in ungrammatical Hebrew, "I am that what am"). Here God cannot say himself without dividing his essence into a subject-object relationship. ("I am [subject]" ==> "that which is [object]". If the subject is the object then it is not itself as subject). Hegel's God, therefore is having an identity crisis. And if God experiences an identity crisis, so does the human, because the human mind is a manifestation of the divine mind. The history of an individual's mind, like history itself, is the process of self-awareness and self-recovery.
Returning to the dichotomy Being <==> Nothingness -- these two impossible thoughts represent the absolute limitation of all thinking and all reality. All thought and all reality fall between the two and Hegel's term these between things is "becoming". It is possible to call Being a thesis (positive, +), Nothingness an antithesis (negative, -) and becoming a synthesis (combination of positive and negative, +/-). This structure of thought and reality, Hegel calls the Dialectic.
Given anything in the world, a wolf, for instance -- it is in fact, a process synthesizing a positivity and a negativity. It is a wolf by not being a window or a philosopher. Hegel defined thought, language and reality as systems of positivities created by negativities and vice-versa. Every thought, word and thing exists only as a part of a system of exclusion. Again, a thing is what it is by not being its Other, yet that "otherness" is what defines it as being. This is why the thoughts of pure Being and pure Nothingness cannot be thought; thought and language only function in a system of contrasts, yet pure Being encompasses all and there is nothing to contrast it with except pure Nothingness, which is nothing. (Hegel called this discussion "logic") Furthermore, it can be deduced from all this that every synthesis must become a new thesis and, defined as it is by its opposite, this new thesis must spawn its own antithesis. So history is an eternal recurrence process of the Dialectic with each historical moment being a course of contradictions -- the tension between the positive and negative. These forces are opposed to each other, yet mutually dependent on each other. Eventually the tension between the thesis and the antithesis destroys the historical moment but out of its ashes a new historical phoenix is born which brings forward the best of the old moment. Here is Hegel's optimism; there is progress built into history. If it looks like regression and backsliding at specific times in history, this is because humans are blind to the "cunning of reason" which uses apparent retrograde movements to make hidden progress. Such is the nature of Reason's ("God's") process of self-recovery.
And Hegel takes it further (and further). What happens in history, happens individually. Each human passes through various stages of conception of self and freedom. There is the stage at which one believes freedom can be achieved by escaping the domination of others and by dominating them. Then there is the stage where one realizes that in dominating, one is dominated because one becomes dependent on those dominated, both materially and in terms of self-identity, eg, "Who am I? I am the wolf. But only as long as I am recognized as such by the caribou. Without this recognition, I would be nobody. In effect, the caribou is the wolf and I am the caribou." Only by acknowledging that neither wolf nor caribou is free can one transcend the unfreedom of relationships of domination and discover higher forms of freedom, which is to say, discover the path of Reason and Divinity. (One smells Foucault in all this somehow.)
This is an example of Hegelism. There is an inkling here of the psychological, sociological, historical and theological dimensions of Hegel's thought. But what is missing in this sample is the absolute, one hesitates to say pure, systemization of his philosophy. An outline of one of his proposals for such a system follows:
I. The Idea-in-itself (logic)
A. Being
B. Nothingness
C. Becoming
II. Nature (Nature, ie, the material world is the opposite of spirit)
III. The Idea-for-itself (spirit) - the idea recovered from itself into its opposite
A. Subjective spirit - mind as self-conscious and introverted
B. Objective spirit - mind projecting its own laws outward
1. Law - exterior, comes to individual from without
2. Morality - interior, comes from within individual
3. Ethics - synthesis of laws
C. Absolute spirit
1. Art
2. Religion
3. Philosophy
(and further...)
Hegel proves the phenomenal world does not exist.
The whole system is structured in terms of interrelating triads of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis (Hegel rarely used those terms himself) and the State is the highest form of "objective spirit". Many of Hegel's critics point this out when they call attention to his eventual worship of the authoritarian Prussian state. Some even claim his whole system was contrived to be in the political service of the newly restored Prussian monarchy, Hegel's employer. But it also must be noted that it was not "objective spirit" which is the apogee of Hegel's system, rather it was "absolute spirit" and the highest pinnacle of absolute spirit was not the state but philosophy--and one must assume that meant Hegel's philosophy.
Hegel has a certain fatal attraction. Some of the best philosophical minds of the 19thC & 20thC have tangled in his triads. Those who escaped this mythos, (and often developed their philosophies as escape plans) include young Bertrand Russell, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Marx (more or less). Truda did not have one of the best philsophical minds. Her extrication from this mythos was
Hell: It was a curious period in her life, her brief life as a Hegelian idealist. She was utterly terrible, so full of murderous rage that she frightened herself. She felt as though she'd turned into a dark star capable of obliterating all the tiny pinpricks of hope in the firmament. She wandered around, spitting her poisonous interpretation of what she had read into the faces of everyone she met. She wanted to contaminate them, too. She wanted to wipe the pious smiles off their faces and trample their flowers into the dirt. She could out-argue anything from socialisms to fascisms to _____________(fill in the blank), going mad in the details (rather like Carl Orff did).
Hume, David (1711-1776): "Being? Beats me!"
David Hume is recognized as one of the most acute, if most perplexing, of the British empiricists. It would be fair to say that the history of philosophy would have ended with Hume if his views had prevailed and this paper would be one hell of a lot less problematical if it had.
Hume referred to the Liebnizian distinction as "relations of ideas" (analytic) and "matters of fact" (synthetic). In accepting this distinction, Hume was admitting that there are such things as a priori necessary truths. It would seem that any empiricist who accepted this was jeopardizing the program of empiricism by recognizing the legitimacy of the rationalist's dream, but Hume defused this by adding one more characteristic to the list of features of "relations of ideas". He said that they are all tautological, that is, repetitive, redundant, merely verbal truths which provide no new information about the world, only information about the meaning of words. Thus, given the conventions of the English language, it is certainly true that "all wolves are mammals" but saying this tells nothing about any particular wolf that wasn't already known by calling it a wolf in the first place. So the rationalist dream of a complete description of reality which is a priori and necessarily true is but a dream. a priori truths aren't descriptions of anything, according to Hume. Only synthetic claims, "matters of fact" can correctly describe reality and these are necessarily a posteriori. Therefore, all knowledge of the world must be based on observation. This, of course, is the central thesis in all empiricism.
What Hume was claiming was that there are basically only three categories of analysis. Given any proposition whatsoever, that proposition is analytic, synthetic or nonsense. Hume said, "When run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume -- of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance -- let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number (analytic truths)? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence (synthetic truths)? No. Commit it then to the flames for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." (Hume, incidentally, did lose his job as a librarian.)
There is then a clear "Humean" method of philosophizing. One takes any claim which one would like to test and asks a series of questions about that claim. If it can be traced back to sense-data, eg., "the wolf is on the snow", it passes the empirical criterion. If it cannot be traced to a sense impression, then, according to Hume, it is nonsense. In this manner, Hume was able to get rid of the notions of "God", "material substance", "world". But most important to Deleuze, was Hume's questioning of the notion of "causality" and "self".
Hume and windows.
If the sentence "x causes y" is taken, where x and y are both events, "x" as the event of a bullet striking a wolf and "y" as the event of the wolf moving after being struck, Humean questions can be asked about this proposition. Is the sentence "x causes y" analytic (that is, is the sentence "x does not cause y" a contradiction?) Obviously not, because it is perfectly possible to conceive of a bullet striking a wolf and the wolf not moving. (already dead wolf, stunned wolf...)
Is the sentence synthetic? Now it seems that the answer would be affirmative because there should be no difficulty tracing the idea back to sense-data. But Hume, being Hume, found a difficulty. When he analyzed the concept, he could find no necessary connection, that if x happens, y must happen, yet this is what needed to be found if the concept of causality was to be sensible. "Causality" proved to have the same status as "God" and "material substance". This had far-reaching consequences. It means that whenever one says that x causes y, it is really only reporting the human expectation that y will follow x in the future. This is a psychological fact about humans and not a fact about the world. There is no rational grounding of the expectation.
Hume's discovery is known as the "problem of induction". What makes humans so certain that the future will behave like the past? If it is answered, "because it has always done so", it is begging the question. The real question is: "must it do so in the future, just because it always has done so?" There can be no appeals to the "laws of nature", because then the question is, "what guarantees that the laws of nature will hold tomorrow?" Hume concluded from all this that there are no necessary connections between any two events in the universe. This idea led to what one philosopher has called "dustbowl empiricism" -- the view that reality proves to composed of unrelated entities casually (not causally) associated with each other in a tenuous and ephemeral manner.
"Hume's Fork" (the analytic/synthetic distinction) has equally significant results for the concept of "self". There can be no sense datum to which the concept can be traced. Far from finding the self to be simple, indubitable, absolutely certain, eternal soul which Descartes claimed it to be (and actually attempted to physically locate it somewhere in the pineal gland), Hume used his method to find that "there is no such idea" as "self". The so-called "self" proves to be a "bundle or collection of different perceptions...which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement." (which Lyotard follows up in the 20thC)
Hume had consistently and vigorously followed empiricism to its vanishing point. The results were that rationality was found to be very small, reduced to verbal truths and descriptions of sense data; yet nearly everything that interested people, especially philosophers, fell beyond these limits. Hume believed that he had shown that human life was incompatible with rationality and that human endeavors always had to be irrational. (rationally one can never know that the wolf that sustained one yesterday will sustain one today, hence one can never be rationally motivated to eat wolves).
Humeleuze: Deleuze takes from Hume the method of transcendental empiricism, which allows him to dissolve idealism and to reach for atomic and distinct. Empiricism and Subjectivity: an essay on Hume's theory of Human Nature, is among D's earlier writings. True to his own "reading by the middle", D refuses to define empiricism on the basis of the postulate that the validity of ideas depends strictly on corresponding sense-data or reflection. He rather believes that the principle of empiricism rests with Hume's doctrine of the externality of all relations: relations are always external to the terms they relate (even in the case of analytic relations). The principle of empiricism, therefore, Deleuze argues -- is a principle of differentiation and of difference: ideas are different because they are external to and separable from one another. It is easy to understand, therefore, why the question "how to relate or associate entities which are different" finds in Hume, and in D, an urgency that it never had before. Hume's associationism leads Deleuze, in the final analysis, to a theory of inclusive disjunctions and a theory of paratactic discourse, that is, to the triumph of the conjunction "and" over the predicative "is". (the wolf and the snow and window and the otiobiographemopedia...) and forms the theoretical basis of nomadology and the nomad arts.
Humeleuzwitt: And she adapted. If that is what you call it. And learned to live with a different set of claws in her brain, the claws of no convictions, the claws of knowing there is no rational way to make a choice.
