Nihilism and Revaluation

Nihilism and Revaluation. An essay on the role of perspectivism in the overcoming of nihilism. Leonardo Sias Student Number: 3699846 Research Master Philosophy Graduate School of Humanities Utrecht University August 2014 Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Bert van den Brink Second Reader: Prof. Dr. Rosi Braidotti Third Reader: Dr. Joel Anderson “Humans first placed values into things, in order to preserve themselves — they first created meaning for things, a human meaning!” On a Thousand and One Goals Thus Spoke Zarathustra Contents Introduction 2 1st Chapter: The concept of nihilism 13 1.1 The theoretical roots of nihilism and its historical necessity. 14 1.2 The theoretical necessity of overcoming nihilism. 30 2nd Chapter: The meaning of the earth 40 2.1 Bodies and meaning. 41 2.2 Perspectives and objectivity. 51 3rd Chapter: Our new infinite 62 3.1 Truth and interpretation. 63 3.2 The transcendental principle of revaluation. 74 Conclusion 83 Bibliography 86 Introduction This work deals with the problem of nihilism, mainly as we find it articulated in Nietzsche’s work, and some of the innumerable interpretations that followed. Jacobi first introduced this term in his Spinoza Letters (1785), where he meant with it the tendency philosophers had, particularly during the Enlightenment, to interpret reality according to conditions of explanation that are too abstract to account for our personal experience, where the meaning of reality itself is revealed. The improper use of rationality as an instrument to determine existence led in his opinion to an ethical void, because truly free subjects could not be affirmed as existing anymore; they were instead reduced to phenomena that had to answer the rational rules required for their explanation.1 As we will see, Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism, however different, mainly because he employs it to characterize Christianity instead of defending it, presents similarities with this intuition. The term was then appropriated by Russian writers and political activists during the 19th Century,2 and finally became widely famous through the work of Nietzsche and his huge influence in contemporary thought. Given this complex history of the concept, it should not come as a surprise that no agreement exists as to what the definition of nihilism should be. Nevertheless, even if conflicting in various ways, mostly because of the accentuation of only one of its many possible forms, all interpretations share a common denominator, which the famous Nietzschean formulation ‘God is dead’ aptly synthetizes. This is taken to be here the ‘nihilistic thesis’, which consists in affirming that meaning and value cannot be grounded metaphysically. In other words, the possibility of meaning on all levels, from our words to our lives considered in their wholeness (as a sum of connected events), and the purpose of life in its most general character (abstracted from any particular life), cannot be grounded, made possible, and guaranteed through the affirmation of anything beyond the world in which life itself takes place: our world. One of the most employed alternatives to this conception of nihilism is that, following from the nihilistic thesis, meaning and universal values cannot be grounded at all. This is often expressed in sentences such as “Existence is meaningless”, “Everything that happens is meaningless”, and “Everything is permitted.” Here, this problem will be called the ‘nihilistic 1 On Jacobi’s concept of nihilism, see, for instance: G. Di Giovanni, 2010. 2 Nihilism Now!: 22-31. 2 crisis’. This is considered to be the case because, in this world, a universal, necessary, and univocal meaning associated with what is presented to us in experience is never to be found. The alternative to a transcendental ground of meaning and value, then, would be only mere relativism. Meanings and values are only expressions of the contingent experiences each of us encounter in our own, limited, and particular life. There is not one meaning, and there is not one value, to which the presence of life in the universe can be led back and justified. Life is unjustified, meaningless, and consequently not worth living. In this work, I will argue that Nietzsche hopes to overcome nihilism by going through and fully accepting it. This is to be understood in one, precise sense: that the overcoming of the nihilistic crisis is possible for Nietzsche only by accepting the nihilistic thesis, and by bringing it to its extreme consequences. This means that, in order to find an alternative to the mere relativism to which the rejection of any transcendent foundation seems to conduct, metaphysics must not only be rejected, but also understood as valuable in a certain context, and explained within a broader framework. The nihilistic thesis denies in fact all metaphysical grounding whatsoever, so the value of metaphysics in the history of Western thought must be conceived as dependent on the contingent need to which it was an answer. To deny this value from our current perspective represents in Nietzsche’s account an implicit reassertion of metaphysics through the criteria we use to evaluate metaphysics itself. Even though this evaluation is negative with regard to metaphysics, since it explicitly denies it, it remains nonetheless metaphysical in character, as it will hopefully be shown during the course of the first chapter. From this point of view, then, the nihilistic crisis is the result of an incomplete, partially naïve understanding of nihilism. Its problematic character springs from its incompleteness, which constitutes a deadlock for reason when left implicit, unaddressed, and neglected. By contrast, Nietzsche – who called himself the perfect nihilist – hoped to offer a means of overcoming the nihilistic crisis that he saw coming from a cultural, incomplete awareness of the nihilistic thesis. This reading has the advantage of coherently interpreting Nietzsche as both the nihilistic philosopher par excellence and the philosopher who first undertook the heavy task of overcoming nihilism. This task brought him to elaborate a possible alternative to our metaphysical need, a theory that could offer a different ground for meaning and value. The question around which this thesis revolves is precisely whether Nietzsche managed to offer a coherent solution to this problem: how to ground meaning and value in a non-metaphysical, non-dogmatic interpretation of the world, without falling in a relativistic philosophy that would only nourish a solipsistic individualism. The theory he 3 comes up with is widely acknowledged, and bears the name of perspectivism. Yet, the question of whether this theory withstands the twofold challenge mentioned above is left unanswered. The challenge is thus to show whether Nietzsche, the perfect nihilist, succeeded in offering a viable path to overcome nihilism. Before approaching a detailed explanation of what perspectivism is, and why Nietzsche saw in this theory a solution to the nihilistic crisis, a preliminary exposition of nihilism is necessary, which will also be useful to understand the research question lying behind this work. After this part, I will be in a suitable position to explain how the entire work has been organized in order to reach its aim. Nihilism, conceived as the impossibility of a metaphysical foundation of meaning, concerns primarily human reason. For practical reasons, in Nietzsche’s opinion, prehistoric humanity started to conceive of objects and events as being identical to the concepts with which we refer to them. Through this practice, we have eventually come to consider the possibility of this use of concepts as guaranteed by the existence of things in themselves, to which our concepts are supposed to correspond. Even if the world is a constant flux of becoming, where nothing is really the same as it was before, we learned how to master it – foreseeing what it would become and adapting our behavior accordingly – by taking different things to be expressions, however imperfect, of the same thing. Even if this operation was justified insofar as it could help us surviving and overcoming the fear of an always-unknown world, we then forgot its arbitrary character. We reconstructed the world through concepts, and then we posited that world as prior, antecedent, and truer than the world of impressions that we experience in our everyday life. This is, for Nietzsche, the origin and character of metaphysics. The abstraction of identity from differences responds directly to what is called our ‘metaphysical need’: the need to conceive of the world as something already determined, which can be known in advanced and predicted. Something is true, from this point of view, when it corresponds precisely to the concept we use to refer to it. This correspondence is thought to be possible because there are transcendent entities to which we implicitly refer when applying particular concepts to the imperfect, accidental, and contingent phenomena constituting our existences. From the basic, pragmatic abstractions of different events and objects concerning our survival – like, for instance, two different tigers behaving in more or less the same way, that is, like ‘a tiger’ – we have slowly come to abstract from those operations underlying abstraction itself. This is clearly visible, from Nietzsche’s point of view 4 – that of a learned and renowned philologist – in the pragmatic origin of our abstract concepts. A few examples should clarify this position: first, the concept of ‘concept’ is, etymologically – and, from a Nietzschean perspective, genealogically – related to the Latin word concipere, which literally means ‘to give existence to another being’, notably a child. Second, the concept of ‘abstraction’ itself: this concept directly comes from the Latin abstràhere (abs + tràhere), literally ‘to take something from something else’ or ‘to pull something from something else’. It means to consider, in things or ideas, one or more of their parts separately from the others. The concept ‘consideration’ comes from Latin consideràre, formed by con (with) and sidus (star).

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