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Interpretive Teleology Without Eschatology: a Study of the Hermeneutic Strategies of Nietzsche's Genealogical Project

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Interpretive Teleology Without Eschatology: a Study of the Hermeneutic Strategies of Nietzsche's Genealogical Project Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2010 Interpretive Teleology Without Eschatology: A Study of the Hermeneutic Strategies of Nietzsche's Genealogical Project Darin Sean McGinnis Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation McGinnis, Darin Sean, "Interpretive Teleology Without Eschatology: A Study of the Hermeneutic Strategies of Nietzsche's Genealogical Project" (2010). Dissertations. 207. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/207 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2010 Darin Sean McGinnis LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO INTERPRETIVE TELEOLOGY WITHOUT ESCHATOLOGY: A STUDY OF THE HERMENEUTIC STRATEGIES OF NIETZSCHE’S GENEALOGICAL PROJECT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY BY DARIN S. MCGINNIS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2010 Copyright by Darin S. McGinnis, 2010 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to many people for their assistance in the completion of this work. I have been aided tremendously by the faculty and staff at Loyola University Chicago, both in their help in formulating my ideas clearly and in their energy and sense of optimism. Particularly, I would like to thank Jennifer Parks, David Ingram, Dan Vaillancourt, Mark Waymack, Victoria Wike, and Julie Ward for their support and their examples. Also, I would like to thank the committee members of my dissertation panel, Jacqueline Scott and Adriaan Peperzak, for their invaluable advice and remarkable instruction. The concepts discussed in this text were first formulated and “experimented” upon in their seminars and in discussions with them. Also deserving of gratitude are my friends and family, without whose support this project would not have been possible. They have always provided the much-needed additional perspectives on the unity of life that I would have missed in the practical sense on my own. Christopher Anderson and Jason Barrett are due tremendous amounts of credit both for the formation of my positions as well as their timely assistance in the production of the same. I would like to thank the Arthur J. Schmitt Foundation for their material support of this work through the Arthur J. Schmitt Dissertation Fellowship. Finally, I reserve the greatest sense of gratitude for two people. I thank Andrew Cutrofello for the guidance he has given me as my dissertation director as well as for his iii iv seemingly unfailing confidence in my ability to meet those goals. He has provided me with help in every facet of my development as a scholar as well as with nearly infallible film criticism. And the most credit is due Laura Carroll for her unflagging support, friendship, and love. For Helen V. Romine, Catherine E. Carroll, and Margaret Ann Penry But a soul can only read within itself what is represented in it distinctly; it could never develop all at once everything that it enfolds, because it goes on to infinity. - G.W. Leibniz, Monadology TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii INTRODUCTION: NIETZSCHE AND THE MASKS OF INTERPRETATION 1 CHAPTER ONE: RICOEUR’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS AND THE POSSIBILITY OF CONCRETE REFLECTION 17 I. Ricoeur’s Critique of the Cogito 26 II. The Ricoeurian Reduction 37 III. The Ricoeurian Symbol 45 IV. The Hermeneutic Poles 52 CHAPTER TWO: ARCHAEOLOGY AND GENEALOGY IN HERMENEUTIC PRACTICE – FREUD AND NIETZSCHE 64 I. Freudian Suspicion 68 II. Nietzschean Suspicion 84 III. Two Archaeologies of Tragedy 103 CHAPTER THREE: THE TELEOLOGICAL MOVEMENT IN NIETZSCHE’S GENEALOGICAL METHOD 114 I. Interpretation and War 117 II. The Aesthetic Resolution 135 III. The Holistic Resolution 139 IV. The Naturalistic Resolution 145 V. The Hermeneutic Resolution 151 VI. Which God Is Dead? 160 VII. Nietzsche on Ends and Goals 163 CHAPTER FOUR: NIETZSCHE’S TEXTUAL SELF-INTERPRETATIONS 168 I. Nietzsche’s Genealogical Method 176 II. Nietzsche’s Self-Criticism of The Birth of Tragedy 191 III. Concrete Meaning, Great Health, and Philosophical Anthropology: Ecce Homo 204 CONCLUSION: NIETZSCHE AND A PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY 229 VITA 237 vii INTRODUCTION NIETZSCHE AND THE MASKS OF INTERPRETATION Of all the metaphors deployed by Nietzsche in his texts, perhaps none is as fitting to his own project as that of the ‘mask.’ In the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche presents a theory that in order to survive as a type, philosophers have found it necessary to adopt the garb of a priest or sage and represent the ideals of those types to the masses.1 This echoes his statement from Beyond Good and Evil, where he states, “Every profound spirit needs a mask: what’s more, a mask is constantly growing around every profound spirit….”2 In the act of representing a priest or a sage to the general public, the philosopher often comes to mistake himself as a priestly type and take seriously the mask of the ascetic that he is representing. Nietzsche’s argument is aimed at deciphering how philosophers have become moralizers and apologists for concepts and moral ideals that they themselves did not create. An immediate interpretation of Nietzsche’s text here would suggest that the philosopher adopts this mask to serve his own ends – ends which are, in actuality different than the priest’s or the sage’s. Therefore, it would seem that the philosopher must discard this mask if he is to be a true philosopher and avoid the pitfalls associated with the ascetic priest, the sage, and 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), Third Essay, Section 10. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, eds. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Section 40. 1 2 those types’ denials of life. However, one aspect of the appropriateness of the metaphor of the ‘mask’ lies in the manner in which the interpretation that it seems to suggest immediately is itself a mask for a deeper criticism that is being made in the text. The route out of asceticism is not the “resolute” adoption of a truthful “philosophical” existence in the face of this priestly interpretation of life. Instead, Nietzsche writes that the ascetic priest is the “classical representative of seriousness” who forces life to turn its powers against itself in search of a transcendent meaning with which it can justify its existence: [The ascetic priest] juxtaposes [life] (along with what pertains to it: “nature,” “world,” the whole sphere of becoming and transitoriness) with a quite different mode of existence which it opposes and excludes, unless it turn against itself, deny itself: in that case, the case of the ascetic life, life counts as a bridge to that other mode of existence.3 Thus, our initial interpretation of the relationship between the philosopher, the priest, and the metaphor of the mask must be supplemented with the caveat that the philosopher cannot avoid becoming a priest simply by removing the mask that he has adopted out of its necessity for survival. In taking seriously the ends of the philosopher as being true to himself, his nature, or his ideals, the philosopher interprets himself into becoming a priest; the mask, in being discarded, paradoxically becomes the philosopher’s ideal. This ideal that the philosopher now represents and takes seriously is freed to assume a position of judgment over life in the hands of the philosopher-priest, a situation which Nietzsche repeatedly warns his readers against. In this way, the “mask” is also an inappropriate metaphor for Nietzsche’s task because it shows that a traditional understanding of the 3 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Section 11 (emphasis in original). 3 way in which the meaning of Nietzsche’s text is revealed is not as simple as the deciphering or unmasking of a single metaphor. Nietzsche’s metaphor of the mask must be considered twice, both in what it suggests about philosophers being masked and in the impossibility of their moving past being masked. This “masking” and “unmasking” can also serve as a metaphor for the central concern of Nietzsche’s philosophical project. For Nietzsche, the relationship between what we have traditionally taken to be true and good and the methods by which these concepts have been justified has become problematic. Nietzsche argues that philosophers, when constructing their concepts, have not been attentive to their own masks; that is to say, following the preface of Genealogy of Morals, that “we are unknown to ourselves.”4 The effect that this has on the possibility of determinate philosophical knowledge is profound as far as Nietzsche is concerned and with good reason. With Descartes’s radical questioning of the objective nature of philosophical knowledge, the guarantee of the univocity of meaningful statements about the world has been located in the philosophical subject’s immediate reflective transparency to itself. Nietzsche, in doubting this transparent immediacy of the subject to itself opens a doubt into the possibility of knowledge that Descartes did not reckon with sufficiently: the doubt that the meaning of our own ideas is stable within the subjective consciousness itself. In some early unpublished writings, Descartes remarks: “Actors, taught not to let any embarrassment show on their faces, put on a mask. I will do the same. So far, I have been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage, 4 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Preface, Section 1.
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