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Formatted GSAS Copy NATURE, NIHILISM, AND LIFE IN HEIDEGGER AND NIETZSCHE: NATURALISTIC METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS BY David Storey BA, Boston College 2004 MA, Fordham University, 2007 DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AT FORHDAM UNIVERSITY NEW YORK APRIL, 2011 UMI Number: 3466721 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent on the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI 3466721 Copyright 2011 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346 Table of Contents 1 Preface Part 1: Heidegger's Philosophy of Nature 9 Chapter 1: Situating Heidegger in Environmental Philosophy 55 Chapter 2: Nature in Being and Time: Productive, Objective, and Poetic 105 Chapter 3: Nature in the Later Heidegger: Earth, Physis, and Poetic Dwelling Part 2: Nihilism and Nature 158 Chapter 4: Situating Nietzsche and Heidegger in the History of Nihilism 188 Chapter 5: Heidegger on Nihilism: the History of Being 219 Chapter 6: Heidegger's Confrontation with Nietzsche Part 3: Life, Value, and the Overcoming of Nihilism 260 Chapter 7: Heidegger on Life and the Animal 310 Chapter 8: Nietzsche's Naturalism: Biology, Evolution, and Value 357 Chapter 9: Nietzsche’s Naturalistic Environmental Ethics 381 Bibliography Preface My project flows from a simple idea: before we can address what our obligations to the environment might be, we have to determine what “the environment” or, more broadly, “nature,” is. In other words, we have to determine what is traditionally called the “metaphysical ground of ethics” with regard to the natural world. This dissertation operates on three fronts. First and foremost, it is an analysis and evaluation of the concept of nature in Heidegger’s thought. While Heidegger was mainly concerned with the meaning of being, Michel Haar observes that “beginning with the Turn of the 1930s, both in Introduction to Metaphysics and Origin of the Work of Art, a new thought of elementary nature emerges under the names of physis and earth. This nature…turns out to be very close to being itself.”1 While Heidegger’s retrievals of the Pre-Socratic and Aristotelian accounts of physis only come to the fore in his work in and after the 1930s, it is a mistake to frame his philosophical interest in nature as merely a later development. Already in the early twenties, Heidegger was mining Aristotle’s works in hopes of finding and forging a model that more adequately describes human existence than the primal Christianity of Paul and Luther that had dominated his thinking up until that time.2 1 Michel Haar. The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 10. 2 For an overview of the role of primal Christianity in Heidegger’s early thought, see John van Buren, The Young Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), chapter eight. For his lecture courses on Aristotle, given in the early 1920s, see Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: an Indication of the Hermeneutic Situation,” in Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 111-47; Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); “Being-There and Being-True According to Aristotle,” trans. Brian Bowles, in Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910-1927, ed. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 214-38. For Heidegger’s early interpretations of Aristotle as pre-cursors to Being and Time, see The Young Heidegger, chapter ten; Franco Volpi, “Being and Time: A ‘Translation’ of the Nicomachean Ethics?” in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought, ed. Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 195-213; Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; Thomas Sheehan, “On the Way to Ereignis: Heidegger’s Interpretation of Physis,” in Continental 1 2 The notion of factical life that Heidegger employs in some of these early lectures and that would serve as the backbone of his existential analytic in Being and Time is largely a phenomenological re-interpretation of some of the seminal concepts in Aristotle’s De Anima and Physics. As I aim to show in this dissertation, it turns out that for early and later Heidegger the meaning of being has much, if not everything, to do with the meaning of nature. While Heidegger’s ambitious overhaul of the Western philosophical tradition is in many ways of a piece with some ecocentric environmental philosophies and ecophenomenologies, and though in places he appears to offer the fundaments of a non- anthropocentric ethic through notions such as “letting be” (Gelassenheit) in his later philosophy, his approach to nature is unique and can only be assimilated with or collapsed into extant approaches with great difficulty and distortion. I argue that Heidegger’s thought cannot be so easily construed as a viable environmental philosophy. His analysis of human existence in Being and Time, his “History of Being” explicated in works from the 1930s, and his ambiguous position on the ontological status of life, animals, and the latter’s relation to human beings paint a dualistic picture of the relationship between humanity and nature. In my analyses of nature-related themes in his early and later works, of his accounts of nihilism, Nietzsche, and Western metaphysics, and of his treatment of the concepts of life and the animal, I aim to expose the fundamental problems with his philosophy of nature. These problems are chiefly 1) Heidegger ignores the concept of evolution, 2) he rejects the concept of value entirely, and 3) he does not adequately deal with the concept of life and the human/animal divide. Philosophy in America: Prize Essays, Volume I, ed. John Sallis (Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press), 131-164. 3 While Heidegger does effectively critique scientific naturalism, he does not resolve the residual problem of articulating a vision of nature in which humans, animals, and other beings fit along a common ontological continuum. Though he offers promising sketches of a neo-Aristotelian philosophy of life in his earlier work and appropriates the ideas of pioneering biologist Jakob von Uexkulll, he abandons these projects in the late 1920s and never works out a coherent philosophical biology. Second, at a more general level, the dissertation is an attempt to show the connection between the rise of nihilism in modern philosophy and the conquest of scientific naturalism. I suggest that the common sense of the loss of meaning, value, and purpose in modernity is part of what motivates the attempt by many environmental thinkers to work out an alternative conception of nature more hospitable to meaning and value. Nietzsche and Heidegger are the best candidates for exposing this connection because they engage the problem of nihilism more than any other thinkers. While Heidegger traces nihilism to the technological mindset of modernity, which issues from the mysterious way in which being reveals itself throughout human history, Nietzsche thinks the solution to nihilism involves the creation of a new set of values that is at the same time a revaluation and in some sense redemption of the natural world, a recognition and appropriation of humanity’s natural heritage and kinship with all life. For Nietzsche, overcoming nihilism means accepting evolution but transcending its materialistic and mechanistic interpretation; for Heidegger, overcoming nihilism seems to involve ignoring evolution and “natural history” altogether. Third, the dissertation is a defense of Nietzsche’s thought from Heidegger’s influential interpretation and an argument for the relevance of Nietzsche’s thought for 4 environmental ethics and continental environmental philosophy. In sum, my view is that the problem of nihilism is a function of a view of nature that rises to prominence in modernity in which humanity and nature are ontologically dissociated, that the resolution to nihilism lies in a different understanding of life that bridges the two orders, and that Nietzsche’s view of life is more adequate than Heidegger’s. There are other ways of conceiving of evolution than the scientistic version that Heidegger rightly rejects, and Nietzsche’s notion of life as the evolution and development of the will to power is exemplary of the ways that philosophers are articulating evolutionarily progressive cosmological narratives that both preserve the uniqueness of humanity yet situate it along a common ontological spectrum with other beings. Nietzsche’s view of life and nature is a modern updating and recasting of the traditional great chain of being. Contributions of Research While the majority of environmental philosophy has been conducted within the Anglo-American analytic tradition and has focused on ethics, the last decade has seen the rise of continental environmental philosophy, which appropriates phenomenological thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty to explore broader ontological questions about nature and to analyze fundamental concepts in environmental discourse. My project contributes to this new field in three ways. First, I address the ongoing debate in ecophenomenology about whether phenomenology can be naturalized, i.e., how and whether the orders of intentionality and causality can be reconciled. This is a contemporary form of a long-standing problem of idealist vs.
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