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Nietzsche and the Pathologies of Meaning

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Nietzsche and the Pathologies of Meaning Nietzsche and the Pathologies of Meaning Jeremy James Forster Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Jeremy James Forster All rights reserved ABSTRACT NIETZSCHE AND THE PATHOLOGIES OF MEANING Jeremy Forster My dissertation details what Nietzsche sees as a normative and philosophical crisis that arises in modern society. This crisis involves a growing sense of malaise that leads to large-scale questions about whether life in the modern world can be seen as meaningful and good. I claim that confronting this problem is a central concern throughout Nietzsche’s philosophical career, but that his understanding of this problem and its solution shifts throughout different phases of his thinking. Part of what is unique to Nietzsche’s treatment of this problem is his understanding that attempts to imbue existence with meaning are self-undermining, becoming pathological and only further entrenching the problem. Nietzsche’s solution to this problem ultimately resides in treating meaning as a spiritual need that can only be fulfilled through a creative interpretive process. CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter I: The Birth of Tragedy and the Problem of Meaning 30 Part I: Background 33 Part II: Meaningfulness in Artistic Cultures 45 Part III: Meaningfulness in Tragic Cultures 59 Part IV: Meaningfulness in Socratic Cultures 70 Conclusion: The Solution to Socratism 78 Chapter II: Meaning, Science, and the “Perceptions of Science and Non-Science” 81 Part I: Meaning, Error, and the Domains of Non-Science 88 Part II: Science and the Critique of Concepts 108 Conclusion: Art, Aesthetics, Incorporation, and Meaning 143 Chapter III: Overcoming Nihilism and the Pathology of Meaning 160 Part I: Diagnosing the Problem of Nihilism 163 Part II: Nietzsche’s Solution to the Problem of Nihilism 234 Conclusion: The Eternal Recurrence Ideal and the Need for Meaning 307 Works Cited 314 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Of the many domains of our inner life that language is ill-equipped to express, gratitude is surely among them. There are too many to thank and too few words to express all that I have gained from friends, family, and professors. I could not have wished for a better dissertation committee. Frederick Neuhouser, my dissertation advisor, was throughout the whole process an intellectual mentor and guide. His acumen for interpreting and clearly conveying difficult philosophical prose and arguments is an ideal I strive to achieve. His help throughout writing this dissertation was invaluable, as well as his constant encouragement to keep my efforts directed toward engaging in philosophical problems I found interesting. Lydia Goehr ensured that my focus didn’t become too myopic, always having me keep in view the larger ideas animating my project. I drew heavily from her knowledge of Nietzsche, aesthetics, and German philosophy in general. Taylor Carman was a source of invaluable support and discussion. Axel Honneth helped me to think differently about issues of meaning and critique that allowed me to see connections between Nietzsche and various social philosophers from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School. Last, I would like to thank Bernard Reginster, the external reader for my dissertation defense, but also the member of my committee who has seen my full philosophical development from my time as an undergraduate. I am also thankful for the steadfast support from my friends and family. My parents, James and Shawn Forster, along my brothers, Christopher and Nicholas, provided much needed respite from my tendency to think myself into circles. I have countless friends to thank for helping to think about the issues in this dissertation in different ways, as well as for helping me to get out of my own head: Mark Berger, Michael Brent, Sidney Felder, Andrew Huddleston, Brian Kim, Katharine McIntyre, Michael Seifried, Bonnie Talbert, Jason Ueda, Chris Whalin, Porter Williams, and Jeremy Wolos. ii “Everything that happens may be meaningless, fragmentary and sad, but it is always irradiated by hope or memory. And hope here is not an abstract artifact, isolated from life, spoilt and shopworn as the result of its defeat by life: it is a part of life; it tries to conquer life by embracing and adorning it, yet is repulsed by life again and again. And memory transforms the continual struggle into a process which is full of mystery and interest and yet is tied with indestructible threads to the present, the unexplained instant. Duration advances upon that instant and passes on, but the wealth of duration which the instant momentarily dams and holds still in a flash of conscious contemplation is such that it enriches even what is over and done with: it even puts the full value of lived experience on events which, at the time, passed by unnoticed. And so, by a strange and melancholy paradox, the moment of failure is the moment of value; the comprehending and experiencing of life’s refusals is the source from which the fullness of life seems to flow” ~Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel iii INTRODUCTION The present dissertation develops an account of Nietzsche’s diagnosis of and solution to what I call the problem of meaning—that is, the debilitating sense that human existence is meaningless. Nietzsche wants to know if human life is, in light of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” worthwhile and affirmable. He hopes to show that it is—not by ignoring the objectionable aspects of existence, nor by positing a way to bypass them with some notion of an afterlife or other means of metaphysical escape from the ordinary, empirical world.1 Nietzsche assumes the ambitious task of showing that what sometimes seems to make existence objectionable, like suffering, is part and parcel of what makes it affirmable. What is remarkable about Nietzsche’s thinking on this subject is not just his realization that there’s no metaphysical escape, but that he comes to take this insight as his starting point. From here, Nietzsche goes on to consider various related issues, such as the implications of “death of God” on our potential for seeing existence as meaningful, or why a world in which all of our aspirations are realized is not necessarily more meaningful than one in which they aren’t. Later on in his career, Nietzsche questions what relation the structure of the world could have to questions about the meaningfulness of our existence within it. In the following pages, I offer a sketch of the problem of meaning and its philosophical importance. I will provide a discussion of key terms and a roadmap of how the present dissertation will unfold according to the development of Nietzsche’s understanding of meaninglessness and the solutions he envisages for it. 1 The early Nietzsche is an exception to this statement. From The Birth of Tragedy through the Untimely Meditations, he promotes a view about the fundamental nature of reality that permits a metaphysical escape. He later repudiates any metaphysical account that posits a distinction between the “real” world and the “apparent” world, and that lays claim to the idea that the objectionable aspects existence in the apparent world can be accounted for, justified, assuaged, or redressed by the real (metaphysical) realm. See: A 14; TI “Problem of Socrates,” “Four Great Errors” 8, “Ancients” 2-3; et al. 1 The Problem of Meaning Nietzsche’s philosophical focus is on meaninglessness, a state of affairs that he eventually comes to call nihilism. Nihilism isn’t a term he uses in his published works until relatively late in his career.2 Nevertheless, this dissertation aims to show that a deep concern about meaninglessness is at the center of Nietzsche’s thought from the beginning. Even before he understands the problem of meaning in terms of “nihilism,” there are similar—yet importantly different—conceptions of meaninglessness at work in his thinking.3 For instance, the conception of pessimism that permeates The Birth of Tragedy, while not identical to the nihilism that would come to concern him, shares features with it. What meaninglessness amounts to shifts throughout the various stages of Nietzsche’s thinking, and so too do Nietzsche’s proposed solutions for overcoming it. This dissertation will outline these different conceptions of meaninglessness— and their opposite, conditions wherein we experience existence as meaningful—that Nietzsche addresses. What’s at stake in the endeavor to diagnose states of pervasive meaninglessness is nothing less than the question of the possibility for human flourishing. In terms of methodology, I will investigate these issues by dividing Nietzsche’s philosophical career into three stages: early, middle, and late. The early phase contains unpublished works starting from about 1869, as well as published works from The Birth of Tragedy (1872) through the Untimely Meditations (1873-1876). Human, All Too Human (1878) marks the first published work of the middle phase, which ends with the publication of the first four books of The Gay Science (1882). The first published work of the late or mature period is 2 The first published instance occurs in section 10 of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), a work I attribute to Nietzsche’s later period. In Beyond Good and Evil, the term “nihilism” appears only a few times, suggesting that Nietzsche is at this point working out the details of his conception of it. One year later, with the publication of Book V of The Gay Science and The Genealogy of Morals, the term is used with greater regularity (e.g., GS 346, which provides a helpful characterization of nihilism). 3 I use “meaninglessness” to designate a general state of affairs that concerned Nietzsche throughout his career; the nature of this meaninglessness is what changes throughout his thinking.
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