DOCSLIB.ORG

Nietzsche and Spinoza from Ontology to Ethics — Kim André Jacobsen Master’S Thesis in Philosophy FIL-3900- November 2014

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Nietzsche and Spinoza from Ontology to Ethics — Kim André Jacobsen Master’S Thesis in Philosophy FIL-3900- November 2014 Department of Philosophy (IFF) Nietzsche and Spinoza From Ontology to Ethics — Kim André Jacobsen Master’s Thesis in Philosophy FIL-3900- November 2014 Table of Contents 1 Forord ................................................................................................................................. 4 2 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 5 3 Nietzsche ............................................................................................................................ 9 3.1 Nietzsche's style of writing .......................................................................................... 9 3.2 Different definitions of the will to power .................................................................... 9 3.3 Nietzsche's ontological understanding of the will to power ........................................ 9 3.4 Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis .................................................................................. 11 3.4.1 The problem with the mechanical philosophers’ understanding of collision ..... 11 3.4.2 The Law of Continuity ....................................................................................... 12 1.1.1 Repulsive force ................................................................................................... 14 1.1.2 Boscovich’s atomic point particle theory ........................................................... 16 3.4.3 Force points are homogeneous ........................................................................... 16 3.5 Boscovich’s legacy and Nietzsche’s pan dynamic world view ................................. 18 3.6 The human body as a battle between wills ................................................................ 20 3.7 The human spirit ........................................................................................................ 23 3.8 The practical effects of the will to power in humans ................................................. 24 3.8.1 Blissful forgetfulness .......................................................................................... 25 3.9 Nietzsche’s intention behind his metaphysical sketch ............................................... 26 3.10 Why the universe is not necessarily governed by laws .......................................... 26 3.11 Perspectivism ............................................................................................................. 29 3.12 Amor fati ................................................................................................................ 30 4 Spinoza ............................................................................................................................. 32 4.1 Spinoza and the enlightenment .................................................................................. 32 4.2 Spinoza's style of writing ........................................................................................... 32 4.3 Spinoza's theory of God ............................................................................................. 33 4.4 God and the laws of the universe ............................................................................... 33 4.5 Spinoza's critique of religion ..................................................................................... 35 4.5.1 The distinction between the “true self” and the “other parts” ............................ 35 4.5.2 Spinoza's critique of the teleological world view ............................................... 36 4.5.3 Spinoza's critique of secondary qualities ........................................................... 37 4.6 A causal universe ....................................................................................................... 38 4.7 Spinoza's fundamental assumption and the definitions that must follow from it ...... 38 4.8 The Principle of Sufficient Reason ............................................................................ 39 4.9 Substance ................................................................................................................... 39 4.9.1 Substance monism .............................................................................................. 40 1 4.10 Attributes and modes ............................................................................................. 41 4.11 God ............................................................................................................................ 42 4.11.1 What can be inferred from the fact that substance is infinite? ........................... 44 4.12 Realitas ................................................................................................................... 45 4.13 God is the cause of the continual existence of modes............................................ 45 4.13.1 God as the cause of actions in modes ................................................................. 47 4.14 In which way Spinoza understands natural laws ................................................... 48 4.14.1 God has no free will ........................................................................................... 49 4.15 Spinoza's understanding of humans and their potential ......................................... 49 4.16 Modal parallelism .................................................................................................. 49 4.17 Conatus .................................................................................................................. 50 4.18 Activity .................................................................................................................. 52 4.19 The essence of man ................................................................................................ 53 4.20 Affects .................................................................................................................... 54 4.21 Amor intellectualis dei ........................................................................................... 55 5 Nietzsche and Spinoza ..................................................................................................... 57 5.1 Greg Whitlock – Roger Boscovich, Benedict De Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche: The untold story ................................................................................................................... 57 5.1.1 Nietzsche’s discovery of Boscovich’s atomic point particle theory ................... 57 5.1.2 Spinoza as Nietzsche’s adversary ....................................................................... 58 5.1.3 Nietzsche’s rejection of substance ...................................................................... 59 5.1.4 Nietzsche’s rejection of infinite force ................................................................ 61 5.1.5 Boscovich’s and Spinoza’s role in Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power 63 5.2 Richard Schacht – The Nietzsche-Spinoza Problem: Spinoza as Precursor? ............ 64 5.2.1 Nietzsche’s and Spinoza’s shared naturalism ..................................................... 65 5.2.2 Spinoza as Nietzsche’s predecessor ................................................................... 67 5.2.3 The fundamental difference between Nietzsche’s and Spinoza’s philosophies, and Nietzsche’s critique of Spinoza ................................................................................. 68 5.2.4 The teleological nature of conatus ..................................................................... 70 5.2.5 Schacht’s claim that Nietzsche is criticizing Spinoza to prepare the way for a more favorable reception of his own alternative interpretation ....................................... 70 5.3 Yirmiyahu Yovel – Nietzsche and Spinoza: amor fati and amor dei ......................... 72 5.3.1 Similarities between Nietzsche and Spinoza ...................................................... 72 5.3.2 Knowledge ......................................................................................................... 73 5.3.3 The fundamental nature of the world ................................................................. 74 5.3.4 Amor fati and Amor Intellectualis Dei ............................................................... 75 5.3.5 The immanent world .......................................................................................... 77 5.3.6 Nietzsche’s problem with Spinoza ..................................................................... 79 2 6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 80 6.1 Nietzsche ................................................................................................................... 80 6.2 Spinoza ...................................................................................................................... 81 6.3 Nietzsche and Spinoza ............................................................................................... 82 6.4 The complex relationship between Nietzsche and Spinoza ....................................... 83 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 84 3 1 Forord Jeg begynte å studere filosofi fordi jeg ville fine svar. Noe av det viktigste jeg har lært i løpe av mine studier er at målet med filosofi er ikke nødvendigvis å finne svar. Jeg tror at en filosof
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Catholic Christian Christian
    Religious Scientists (From the Vatican Observatory Website) https://www.vofoundation.org/faith-and-science/religious-scientists/ Many scientists are religious people—men and women of faith—believers in God. This section features some of the religious scientists who appear in different entries on these Faith and Science pages. Some of these scientists are well-known, others less so. Many are Catholic, many are not. Most are Christian, but some are not. Some of these scientists of faith have lived saintly lives. Many scientists who are faith-full tend to describe science as an effort to understand the works of God and thus to grow closer to God. Quite a few describe their work in science almost as a duty they have to seek to improve the lives of their fellow human beings through greater understanding of the world around them. But the people featured here are featured because they are scientists, not because they are saints (even when they are, in fact, saints). Scientists tend to be creative, independent-minded and confident of their ideas. We also maintain a longer listing of scientists of faith who may or may not be discussed on these Faith and Science pages—click here for that listing. Agnesi, Maria Gaetana (1718-1799) Catholic Christian A child prodigy who obtained education and acclaim for her abilities in math and physics, as well as support from Pope Benedict XIV, Agnesi would write an early calculus textbook. She later abandoned her work in mathematics and physics and chose a life of service to those in need. Click here for Vatican Observatory Faith and Science entries about Maria Gaetana Agnesi.
    [Show full text]
  • Averroes's Dialectic of Enlightenment
    59 AVERROES'S DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT. SOME DIFFICULTIES IN THE CONCEPT OF REASON Hubert Dethier A. The Unity ofthe Intellect This theory of Averroes is to be combated during the Middle ages as one of the greatest heresies (cft. Thomas's De unitate intellectus contra Averroystas); it was active with the revolutionary Baptists and Thomas M"Unzer (as Pinkstergeest "hoch liber alIen Zerstreuungen der Geschlechter und des Glaubens" 64), but also in the "AufkHinmg". It remains unclear on quite a few points 65. As far as the different phases of the epistemological process is concerned, Averroes reputes Avicenna's innovation: the vis estimativa, as being unaristotelian, and returns to the traditional three levels: senses, imagination and cognition. As far as the actual abstraction process is concerned, one can distinguish the following elements with Avicenna. 1. The intelligible fonns (intentiones in the Latin translation) are present in aptitude and in imaginative capacity, that is, in the sensory images which are present there; 2. The fonns are actualised by the working of the Active Intellect (the lowest celestial sphere), that works in analogy to light ; 3. The intelligible fonns-in-act are "received" by the "possible" or the "material intellecf', which thereby changes into intellect-in-act, also called: habitual or acquired intellect: the. perfect form ofwhich - when all scientific knowledge that can be acquired, has been acquired -is called speculative intellect. 4. According to the Aristotelian principle that the epistemological process and knowing itselfcoincide, the state ofintellect-in-act implies - certainly as speculative intellect - the conjunction with the Active Intellect. 64 Cited by Ernst Bloch, Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke, (1953), in Suhrkamp, Gesamtausgabe, 7, p.
    [Show full text]
  • Einstein Conspiracy Was the Start of the 20Th Century’S Attempt to Cover up the UFO Mystery and All Its Related Topics
    Article One Article Two Article Three Article Four References E-mail the Author Home Roger Anderton © 2000 DESIGN: SOLAR-FLAIR.COM WWI was started by Germany because it was being surrounded by countries it perceived as enemies, and thought before its enemies united that ‘attack first was the best kind of defence’. Germany lost WWI in 1919 in the same year as Einstein became a world famous scientist. As is human nature, when failure occurs a scapegoat must be blamed. The ordinary people looked for a scape goat and thought the blame lay with pacifists that it perceived as being unpatriotic i.e. did not contribute their fair share in helping the war effort. This opinion is of course erroneous but due to human emotion, people like to perceive matters in simplistic manners like this. It was unfortunate that a large number of pacifists were Jews. This reawakened latent anti-Semitism, the ordinary German person ignored the fact that the majority of Jews had been patriotic and concentrated its hatred against the few Jews who wanted peace not war. As is human nature, erroneous irrational thinking was applied and all the Jews were blamed for what a few Jews erroneously have been perceived as having done. Einstein was a pacifist, and a Jew. In 1919 he had become famous and had made himself a big target for a hate campaign that was conducted against him. This hate campaign eventually led to the formation of the Nazis, and Hitler used the momentum of this movement to gain power, and start WWII.
    [Show full text]
  • The Shortcomings of a Concept Inertia and Conatus in the Philosophy of Spinoza
    http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/8142-286-4.36 Alexandre Rouette Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Canada THE SHORTCOMINGS OF A CONCEPT INERTIA AND CONATUS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA n the third part of the Ethics, Spinoza express the desire to talk about “human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies” (E3, Appendix).1 With this sentence, it seems clear that Spinoza sides with Hobbes and Descartes and that he wants to con- struct a mechanistic theory of the affects. In the same part of the Ethics, Spinoza also introduces the concept of conatus: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being” (E3P6), Spinoza says. One will immedi- ately understand this concept of conatus as the core concept of his mechanistic theory of the affects, the concept without which this mechanistic account of the affects would be impossible. However, in the second part of the Ethics, there is another concept that could have accomplished that same goal, namely, the principle of inertia. In the words of Spinoza, “A body which moves or is at rest must be determined to motion or rest by another body, which has also been determined to motion or rest by another, and that again by another, and so on, to infinity” (E2L3). Inter- estingly enough, in the philosophy of Hobbes, the concept of endeavour/conatus is much nearer to the Spinozistic principle of inertia in its meaning than it is to the Spinozistic version of the conatus.
    [Show full text]
  • SPINOZA's ETHICS: FREEDOM and DETERMINISM by Alfredo Lucero
    SPINOZA’S ETHICS: FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM by Alfredo Lucero-Montaño 1. What remains alive of a philosopher's thought are the realities that concern him, the problems that he addresses, as well as the questions that he poses. The breath and depth of a philosopher's thought is what continues to excite and incite today. However, his answers are limited to his time and circumstances, and these are subject to the historical evolution of thought, yet his principal commitments are based on the problems and questions with which he is concerned. And this is what resounds of a philosopher's thought, which we can theoretically and practically adopt and adapt. Spinoza is immersed in a time of reforms, and he is a revolutionary and a reformer himself. The reforming trend in modern philosophy is expressed in an eminent way by Descartes' philosophy. Descartes, the great restorer of science and metaphysics, had left unfinished the task of a new foundation of ethics. Spinoza was thus faced with this enterprise. But he couldn't carry it out without the conviction of the importance of the ethical problems or that ethics is involved in a fundamental aspect of existence: the moral destiny of man. Spinoza's Ethics[1] is based on a theory of man or, more precisely, on an ontology of man. Ethics is, for him, ontology. He does not approach the problems of morality — the nature of good and evil, why and wherefore of human life — if it is not on the basis of a conception of man's being-in-itself, to wit, that the moral existence of man can only be explained by its own condition.
    [Show full text]
  • Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.Pdf
    Leo Strauss Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil A course offered in 1971–1972 St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland Edited and with an introduction by Mark Blitz With the assistance of Jay Michael Hoffpauir and Gayle McKeen With the generous support of Douglas Mayer Mark Blitz is Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. He is author of several books on political philosophy, including Heidegger’s Being and Time and the Possibility of Political Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 1981) and Plato’s Political Philosophy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), and many articles, including “Nietzsche and Political Science: The Problem of Politics,” “Heidegger’s Nietzsche (Part I),” “Heidegger’s Nietzsche (Part II),” “Strauss’s Laws, Government Practice and the School of Strauss,” and “Leo Strauss’s Understanding of Modernity.” © 1976 Estate of Leo Strauss © 2014 Estate of Leo Strauss. All Rights Reserved Table of Contents Editor’s Introduction i–viii Note on the Leo Strauss Transcript Project ix–xi Editorial Headnote xi–xii Session 1: Introduction (Use and Abuse of History; Zarathustra) 1–19 Session 2: Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorisms 1–9 20–39 Session 3: BGE, Aphorisms 10–16 40–56 Session 4: BGE, Aphorisms 17–23 57–75 Session 5: BGE, Aphorisms 24–30 76–94 Session 6: BGE, Aphorisms 31–35 95–114 Session 7: BGE, Aphorisms 36–40 115–134 Session 8: BGE, Aphorisms 41–50 135–152 Session 9: BGE, Aphorisms 51–55 153–164 Session 10: BGE, Aphorisms 56–76 (and selections) 165–185 Session 11: BGE, Aphorisms 186–190 186–192 Session 12: BGE, Aphorisms 204–213 193–209 Session 13 (unrecorded) 210 Session 14: BGE, Aphorism 230; Zarathustra 211–222 Nietzsche, 1971–72 i Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil Mark Blitz Leo Strauss offered this seminar on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil at St John’s College in Annapolis Maryland.
    [Show full text]
  • Descartes' Optics
    Descartes’ Optics Jeffrey K. McDonough Descartes’ work on optics spanned his entire career and represents a fascinating area of inquiry. His interest in the study of light is already on display in an intriguing study of refraction from his early notebook, known as the Cogitationes privatae, dating from 1619 to 1621 (AT X 242-3). Optics figures centrally in Descartes’ The World, or Treatise on Light, written between 1629 and 1633, as well as, of course, in his Dioptrics published in 1637. It also, however, plays important roles in the three essays published together with the Dioptrics, namely, the Discourse on Method, the Geometry, and the Meteorology, and many of Descartes’ conclusions concerning light from these earlier works persist with little substantive modification into the Principles of Philosophy published in 1644. In what follows, we will look in a brief and general way at Descartes’ understanding of light, his derivations of the two central laws of geometrical optics, and a sampling of the optical phenomena he sought to explain. We will conclude by noting a few of the many ways in which Descartes’ efforts in optics prompted – both through agreement and dissent – further developments in the history of optics. Descartes was a famously systematic philosopher and his thinking about optics is deeply enmeshed with his more general mechanistic physics and cosmology. In the sixth chapter of The Treatise on Light, he asks his readers to imagine a new world “very easy to know, but nevertheless similar to ours” consisting of an indefinite space filled everywhere with “real, perfectly solid” matter, divisible “into as many parts and shapes as we can imagine” (AT XI ix; G 21, fn 40) (AT XI 33-34; G 22-23).
    [Show full text]
  • Reading Plato (After Nietzsche & Co.) DAVID FARRELL KRELL Depaul
    Plato Nietzsche & Reading (After Co.) DAVID FARRELL KRELL DePaul University Just for the record: Socrates stands so close to me that I am almost always fighting a battle with him. Friedrich Nietzsche, 1875 ["However, I believe that Plato was sick"]. Plato, Phaedo 59b10 Nietzsche and Plato: a frightful confrontation. From the many discussions of Plato in Nietzsche's works-there are well over five hundred direct references-we learn that Nietzsche viewed his life's task as overcoming Platonism. And, all reservations and qualifications aside, we know that Plato had something to do with Platonism. If the history of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, if philosophy itself consists of variations on the theme of Platonism, then Nietzsche wants to write the last variation, the one that will exhaust all remaining possibilities for Platonism and bring philosophy as such to a close. It seems we can read sympathetically either Plato or Nietzsche, but not both: read Plato alone, and rest assured that Nietzsche is a dogmatist of the nastiest sort, more destructive even than Thrasymachus or Callicles; read Nietzsche alone, and rest assured that Plato is a decadent of the most contemptible sort, and a charlatan besides. Nietzsche calls him "a grand Cagliostro." Reading Plato after Nietzsche: is that possible at all?' It would not be too much to say that every indictment in the Nietzschean oeuvre of otherworldly metaphysics, morals, religion, and art directly involves Plato and Platonism. Philosophers are people who 46 want to hurry up and die, we read in Phaedo, so that they can float up to the ethereal realm of the pure ideas; to this end they despise the body and preach crusades against it, and lending death a hand, they mortify the flesh; they invent a God as anemic as themselves and invest their wretched hopes in him, dreaming heavenly dreams; even their music is lugubrious and bathetic, their dance a kind of solemn mummery.
    [Show full text]
  • The Practical Origins of Ideas
    The Practical Origins of Ideas Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering MATTHIEU QUELOZ Under contract with Oxford University Press Abstract Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the practical point of coming to think in these terms? This book uncovers, develops, and defends a philosophical method that aims to answer such questions. This is the method of pragmatic genealogy: the telling of developmental narratives that seek to make sense of ideas in terms of their practical origins. Two principal theses structure the book. The first is that there is a pragmatic genealogical tradition which cuts across the analytic-continental divide, a tradition running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to more recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalising and historicising in ways that even those sympathetic to genealogy have found puzzling. Hence the book’s second, systematic thesis: we understand why both the fictionalising and the historicising are called for if we interpret these genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation to generic and socio-historically local needs. Pragmatic genealogy then emerges as having two attractive features. Far from issuing in the kind of reductively instrumental view of things often associated with naturalism, pragmatism, and genealogy, the method offers us explanation without reduction, helping us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. And far from being normatively inert in the way that genealogical explanations are commonly taken to be, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having.
    [Show full text]
  • What Was the Cause of Nietzsche's Dementia?
    PATIENTS What was the cause of Nietzsche’s dementia? Leonard Sax Summary: Many scholars have argued that Nietzsche’s dementia was caused by syphilis. A careful review of the evidence suggests that this consensus is probably incorrect. The syphilis hypothesis is not compatible with most of the evidence available. Other hypotheses – such as slowly growing right-sided retro-orbital meningioma – provide a more plausible fit to the evidence. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) ranks among the paintings had to be removed from his room so that most influential of modern philosophers. Novelist it would look more like a temple2. Thomas Mann, playwright George Bernard Shaw, On 3 January 1889, Nietzsche was accosted by journalist H L Mencken, and philosophers Martin two Turinese policemen after making some sort of Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Derrida, and public disturbance: precisely what happened is not Francis Fukuyama – to name only a few – all known. (The often-repeated fable – that Nietzsche acknowledged Nietzsche as a major inspiration saw a horse being whipped at the other end of the for their work. Scholars today generally recognize Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his Nietzsche as: arms around the horse’s neck, and collapsed to the ground – has been shown to be apocryphal by the pivotal philosopher in the transition to post-modernism. Verrecchia3.) Fino persuaded the policemen to There have been few intellectual or artistic movements that have 1 release Nietzsche into his custody. not laid a claim of some kind to him. Nietzsche meanwhile had begun to write brief, Nietzsche succumbed to dementia in January bizarre letters.
    [Show full text]
  • Nietzsche's Naturalism As a Critique of Morality and Freedom
    NIETZSCHE’S NATURALISM AS A CRITIQUE OF MORALITY AND FREEDOM A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Nathan W. Radcliffe December, 2012 Thesis written by Nathan W. Radcliffe B.S., University of Akron, 1998 M.A., Kent State University, 2012 Approved by Gene Pendleton____________________________________, Advisor David Odell‐Scott___________________________________, Chair, Department of Philosophy Raymond Craig_____________________________________, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTERS I. NIETZSCHE’S NATURALISM AND ITS INFLUENCES....................................................... 8 1.1 Nietzsche’s Speculative‐Methodological Naturalism............................................ 8 1.2 Nietzsche’s Opposition to Materialism ............................................................... 15 1.3 The German Materialist Influence on Nietzsche................................................. 19 1.4 The Influence of Lange on Nietzsche .................................................................. 22 1.5 Nietzsche’s Break with Kant and Its Aftermath................................................... 25 1.6 Influences on Nietzsche’s Fatalism (Schopenhauer and Spinoza)
    [Show full text]
  • CG Jung and the Inheritance of Immanence
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Middle Tennessee State University: Journals@MTSU C. G. Jung and the Inheritance of Immanence C.G. Jung and the Inheritance of Immanence: Traces of Spinozistic, Nietzschean, and Freudian Influence in Analytical Psychology Christopher Myers Abstract Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, was heavily influenced by both Nietzsche and Freud, both of whom were influenced, as Yovel notes in his The Adventures of Immanence, by Spinoza. Through his years of collaboration with Freud and his long-lasting fascination with Nietzsche (combined with Jung’s own semi-mystical tendencies, Jung became more of a Spinozian, than Nietzschean or Freudian. These Spinozistic traces can be detected in the framework of analytical psychology. A comparison is presented on the views of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung on historical religion, the source of human motivation, and the liberating power of self- knowledge. Middle Tennessee State University 69 Scientia et Humanitas: A Journal of Student Research his investigation explores the intellectual genealogy that links seventeenth-cen- tury rationalist and Jewish ex-communicant, Baruch Spinoza, to the founder of analyticalT psychology, Carl Gustav Jung. In Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence, Yirmiyahu Yovel describes Spinoza’s influence upon Nietzsche and Freud. In Philosophical Issues in the Psychology of C.G. Jung, Marilyn Nagy investigates the inspiration of Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer and others on Jung. However, no effort has been made to in- vestigate the possibility that Spinozism might have trickled into Jungian thought through Nietzsche and Freud.
    [Show full text]