A History of Philosophy | 69 Nietzsche and Introduction to Phenomenology

[Music] traceable to this willed power that runs through everything uh so that our non- egoistic values uh simply a Revenge turned inwards against ourselves so forth then as well we um we're talking about his naturalism because he finds a biological basis to all of this a biological basis in the sense that while he thinks as an evolutionary naturalist his evolutionary theory is not that of darwinian natural selection that is far too gradual a kind of process and it would produce is weak willed conformists adjusting to an environment rather than overcoming it his biology is rather biological vitalism that is to say that life is a creative force that pervades all of organic existence analogous in some ways if you like like to what you read about bergon in the chapter on Whitehead and beron who sees in all of nature a static as well as a dynamic or creative um aspect tendency which comes out in two different kinds of human thought the analytic and the creative intuitive um don't write about two sides of a brain that's not the kind of biology they're talking about uh biological vitalism rather now this um biological vitalism is plainly along with the volunteerism going to affect whatever he says about human knowledge human thought epistemology and in order to pick up on that in particular which nowadays I suspect is the most influential part of nature uh because it feeds into postmodernism uh in order to pick up on that would you turn in the Anthology to page 323 323 and and you'll be um be mused by the first paragraph even though um it's the second paragraph I'm after um the first paragraph will help you to get the continuity indeed says he um after Buddha was dead uh people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave and immense frightful Shadow God is dead but as the human race is constituted there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet in which people will show his shadow and we have still to overcome his shadow well this is his satirical way you see of saying as he does in other contexts uh God is dead but you must become the meaning of the earth you should be as God you see well um 109 there on 323 um says what this um new super human needs to guard against if this is going to be uh let us be on our guard against thinking that the world is a living being raises all sorts of questions and says that dis gusts me let and then uh eight lines down let's now be on our guard against believing that the universe is a machine it's assuredly not constructed with a view to one end we invest it with far too high in honor with the world word machine Let's be on our guard against supposing that anything so methodical as the cyclic motions of the neighboring Stars obtained generally in throughout the Universe um and the bottom line the general character of the world on the other hand is to all eternity chaos not by the absence of necessity but in the sense of the absence of order structure form Beauty wisdom whatever else our aesthetic human is a called and then on 324 about halfway through that first paragraph let's be on our guard against saying there are laws of nature there are only Necessities there's no one who commands obeys transgresses when you know there's no design you know also there's no chance for it's only where there is a world of design that word chance has a meaning let's be on our guard against saying that death is contrary to life the living beings only a species of a dead being a very rare species yes those are the weak will to just uh a living death let's be on our guard against thinking that the world eternally creates the new there's no eternally enduring substances matter is just another error as the god of the eleatics now um look back over that and you notice that what he is doing is and I use the word advisedly deconstructing every known theory about the universe you see here are these attempts at rational explanation none of which work that seems to be his point so you might just as well say let's be on our guard against thinking period you'll say and I take it that's his main point let's be on our guard against thinking and if you turn later on to three 40 now take it back three uh let's see let's see let's see what was the one I was after that was what 323 333 I think it is that I'm after no 3:26 first I beg your pardon 3:26 um section 111 on the origin of The Logical where has logic originated in men's heads undoubtedly out of the illogical yeah this creative impulse that's unpredictable irrational so forth the domain of which must originally have been immense and towards the bottom of the page no living being would have been preserved unless the contrary inclination to affirm rather than suspend judgment to mistake rather than wait to Ascent rather than deny decide rather than be in the right unless that had been cultivated with a extraordinary acidity the course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses which singly and in themselves are all illogical and unjust we usually experience only the result of the struggle so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism Now operate in us now you you remember that in people like um Hobs and spoda determinists there was the no that the process of reasoning is often just the alternation of alternative emotions alternative impulses of some sort now here this is you see in um um in nature with the difference that instead of one being just um weighing heavier than the other and so the decision is made this way here it's an it's an arbitrary creative Force which simply affirms one over against the other and um accordingly um uh the whole matter of rationality is ultimately an illogical process uh no ground to it and then on 333 333 um uh the paragraph four the falseness of an opinion is not for us an objection now it's here perhaps that our new language sounds most strangely the question is how far an opinion is life furthering life preserving species Pro preserving perhaps species rearing and were fundamentally inclined to make the falsest opinions to maintain that the falsest opinions are the most indispensable to us that without a recognition of logical fictions without comparison of reality to the purely imagined world without a constant counterfeiting of the world man couldn't live the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of Life a negation of life to recognize untruth as a condition of Life philosophy which Ventures to do so as thereby placed itself Beyond Good and Evil so that the Quest for truth is not an issue that's not the point he has a purely instrumental value to the theories and beliefs we come up with we create them for our own purposes an expression of the will to power and so on the next page 344 you get um some of his rather typical satire addressed to some of your favorite people uh so that half a dozen lines down on 344 he talks of the spectacle of the tarty of old K equally stiff and decent with which he entices us into the dialectic byways byways that lead to his categorical imperative makes us fastidious one smile we who find no small Amusement in spying out the subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical preachers you saying then he says or still more so the Hocus Pocus in mathematical form by means of which Spinoza has as it were clad his philosophy in mail and mask you know and how can you assault Spinosa with his rigid logic so he's uh taking this uh view of human knowledge of Truth claims and applying it to those 18th Cent y Enlightenment types completely and finally on page 366 where he's talking of moral knowledge moral knowledge uh you have this paragraph um my demand upon the philosopher is known that he take his stand Beyond Good and Evil that's the title of one of n's books from which this is taken beond Beyond Good and Evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself moral judgment is illusory this demand follows from an Insight that I was the first to formulate he's not afraid of egoism you see any rejection of egoism would simply be an attack on himself keep that in mind he's a thoroughgoing egoist uh but the first to formulate this there are altogether no moral facts moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities that are no realities morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena more precisely a misinterpretation moral judgments like religious ones belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real and the distinction between what is real and imaginary are still lacking thus truth at this stage designates all sorts of things which today we call imaginings moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally they always contain mere absurdity semiotically they remain invaluable uh semiotically that is to say they are a sign of something they reveal at least for those who know the most valuable realities of cultures and inwardness which did not know enough to understand themselves so we think our values are objectively real in some way but those understand realize it's uh simply The Wishful thing language mere symptomatology one must know what it's all about to be able to profit from it okay so um no such thing as Truth uh no objective moral qualities no basis in reality for moral knowledge no basis for any kind of knowledge now you see why I write on the board nature parenthesis uh and postmodernism because I suspect that in the radical postmodernism of our day um it's nii who's the most single influential force that is to say the postmodernism that has turned be from uh more modest epistemes still want to make truth claims but more modestly so um the radical postmodernism of today has turned from that from talking about truth altogether to essentially power politics you see and the politicization of the University which you read about in the press these days is simply in the Nan Willer power of certain interest groups you see um turning itself uh inside out in order to um assert that sort of thing so we create our own Truth by virtue of the utility that we force upon those who oppose it politization okay does that uh does that make sense you see where he's coming from I should say where he's going to a you okay um he says the same sort of thing in other places um let's see uh yeah here's one behind logic stand value judgments or to speak more plainly physiological demands for preserving a certain kind of life you see all your arguments prove is something about why you find it necessary to do that at all and he speaks of positivism with its objective empirical data as a democratic self- glorification of the free intellect Democratic because anybody can gain empirical data you think and skepticism as a vague physiological quality which in common language is called nervous weakness a sickness that lacks decisiveness lacks the will the truth you see if you don't have the will to power to assert something is true um you're weak will nervous weakness that's sick well um and uh if on the other hand you say to Nia well is all this that you're telling us true you see I remember asking that in a graduate school course one time uh to which the professor responded H need you would just have a good belly laugh at that and in fact I find um in one of his WR one of his books he says um one repays a teacher badly if one remains nothing but a pupil I bid you lose me and find yourselves and only when you've denied me will I return to you get the point the one thing n you wanted to insist is that nothing is true not even what I'm telling you not even that now you know that um obviously poses the old um liar uh dilemma in from Antiquity when um certain creton says all cretans a liar now if a creton tells you all creaters are liars is he telling the truth if he's telling the truth he's telling falsehood if all Catans are liars then he's a liar but if he's telling you a falsehood then he's not telling you the truth that all cretans are lies and it's not true that cretans are lies you see you got that dilemma well similarly need you don't know what he means Beyond repudiating The Quest for any kind of knowledge truth and um he uh is particularly emphatic about that when it comes to ethics and religion I think that's particularly PL okay well I said that he deconstructs various theories about the universe because of course deconstructionism is um post modernism in literary interpretation the interpretation of anything okay um do you want to comment at all about nature KCK good uh yeah Jess yes yeah referring to actual living organism or is referring to a social organism if so isn't it by their adaptation they overc um yeah keep in mind that um ne's underlying thesis and don't ask me if he thinks it's true he thinks it's useful at least you'll see his underlying thesis is about the will to power and it's biologically rooted this is his useful thesis now in that case what um drives the evolutionary process is not the desire for some Conformity you see it's not the desire for Harmony in resolving all of the adjustment problems what drives it is if you like red tooth bloody claw We Shall Overcome you see so not dhism but rather this vitalistic what in bergson is called creative evolution sudden outbursts of novelty that are unpredictable in terms of all the mechanisms okay that biological vitalism was um or popular through the 19th century until about 1940 19 50 um the um gradual development of biochemistry and the recognition of all the W what is it the Watson cck uh material and so forth about um DNA and such like um that so outdated vitalism you'll see that we no longer viewed life as itself a creative Force distinct from the material elements on which it works but rather life is a function of certain highly complex biochemical compounds different view so vitalism is not very popular now I didn't catch tivism oh the emotivism in his ethic yeah I should have linked that up that last um thing there are no moral facts that is to say there is no truth about right or wrong virtue and vice uh there are no objective moral facts at all that could be known well what then are moral judgments um expressions of emotion of Will To Power or weak wedness the case may be yeah uh what are we doing when we approve of something or disapprove of something you see we're we're asserting emotion about that so you get this emotivist interpretation of ethic uh which is paralleled of course in positivism as we'll be finding out in the anglo-american tradition does Roy see nature as making truth claims I don't think so but I'd want to go back and check Roy on that uh okay now I suppose that an inverted platonism would be to the effect that theory is down here or better still ideology is down here would that be it and um factual assertions are up here so that in that sense the factual assertions we make are driven by our ideologies okay now you see I think that would be sort of nichan if you're willing to say that the ideologies are basically expressions of Will To Power emotion in that sense yeah and that perhaps is helpful because it helps you to see that there are similarities between n Freud and Marx um did you get that uh you know this much about nature you you know something about Freud that he talks of the subconscious which um asserts itself in all sorts of ways in our thinking as well as our acting you see um the role of the udus complex in Freud his book Moses and monotheism in which belief in God is the projection of an idus complex you see um that is to say that um the uh the substructure here is the um emotional life to thr um marks yeah they're the uh the substructure is the um material conditions of existence and the alienation that creates and because of the conditions of alienation from one's own labor from one's own self and so forth you have again a uh if you like a nonrational substructure to the uh uh the theories that you develop and the social structures that you build you'll see and if you've read read The Communist Manifesto uh you find the assertion that um that all our moral standards are simply uh expressions of the class conflict so so you you have this sort of thing in these three and uh the name of Max vber the sociologist belongs um along here too uh because um while vber talks a great deal of values they seem to be relative the projection of ideologies yes now um You referred to Roy to royy but another writer who picks up on this very significantly is uh Alan Bloom um trying to pull out of my mind the title of Bloom's book um the closing of the American mind uh how many of you have read that um I suspect maybe except for the center section in which he deals with these people at least most people I talk to who've read Bloom haven't read the center section which is very philosophical maybe you had I hope so but um Bloom um begins that book with the complaint that the Contemporary University student talks as if there is no such thing as truth and falsity right and wrong have you heard that before GL you've heard it today um has lost any uh sense of personal identity and has no world view on which to ground any of those things you see and that's his complaint Alan Bloom is Professor of social theory and at um University of Chicago um well what what he does is to trace this situation to these Continental thinkers whom he takes to be the um source of the problem I I guess um my reaction to it and I wrote a piece um responding to it but my reaction is that that's not the whole story um that at least in the english- speaking world the influences is as much I think from the positivist tradition um with its assertion that um we well the pragmatist tradition that we only have an instrumental view of Truth meaning the positivist tradition that all values are just expressions of emotion you see that whole thing so there's a complex that is produced that in society um I think perhaps um one of the ways in which royalty is different from Bloom is that he does pull in the anglo-american influences as well as the Continental ones but this is part of the postmodernism of the day okay um all right uh the um the influence of nature philosophically I think of n around 1900 uh his influence uh philosophically certainly continued way through the first half of this Century um people who sort of Echoes what he's doing is Carl Jaspers and um most of the literature on existentialism talks about Jaspers uh even though I think by now he's um his influence is much diminished but in the first half of the century quite prominent um Jaspers was not satisfied with what nii was doing it seemed to him that um that people like kick good and nature put too much of a gap between human subjectivity that is to say this these depth dimensions of the inner life of which nature speaks uh K good um far too much of a gap between those inner dimensions and what he calls the empirical existence which we have as beings in this world uh if you like there's too much of a gap between the scientific and the existential and so um what jaspas does in a book of his called reason and existence existence being the mean for existential authenticity what he does is to uh point out that it shouldn't be either or but rather both and and um he distinguishes um three dimensions of um human being there is our empirical existence what he calls Des n literally being there being there just another object another entity there is uh Consciousness as such there he's thinking of K's emphasis on the transcendental ego dayarts Kito ego s there is that inner mental life then in addition there is uh spirit um the term G in the European sense that we got familiar with in Hegel that has to do with cultural creativity um the third has been stressed by the idealists the second by the enlightenment the third by empirical science and you don't really have have authentic human existence according to Carl Jaspers until you um have these uh three dimensions integrated appropriately embraced by virtue of some uh some ground of being of which we become aware some all-encompassing ground of being the um fender the term he uses um and uh what Jaspers um talks about then is transcending a purely um uh impersonal inauthentic empirical kind of existence uh transcending simply that Enlightenment um notion of being a conscious rational being um transcending even the life of the culture do you get the kicker Guardian note in this stages On Life's way you see transcending all of that in an act of uh faith that begins to sound almost as if it's religious um and the um the identity the nature of that Transcendent being the all encompassing being is something we only speak of in symbols and ciphers uh we can't conceptualize it it's as if in uh hegel's phenomenology of mind the um Triad of art religion and philosophy is such that you can have your artistic symbols you can have your religious symbols but there's no synthesis that is to say you can't have the philosophical conceptualization um and so um what is involved is an existential kind of attitude rather than a cognitive grasp in the Act of Faith well uh Carl Jaspers uh interesting person he his wife was a Jews and um when I forget which city it was was um liberated by the Allies in the invasion of Germany it was discovered that um Jaspers and his wife were listed to be deported to the extermination camp the following week so he just escaped in that way um all right nature um yeah and I think jaspas is a good critique of nature what he's caught is simply one limited aspect of um human concern um the creativity of the human spirit that uh that third dimension without the others um what I want to do then is to go on to our next um particular topic within this business of existentialism namely to um try and introduce what is phenomenology in the 20th century we um recognize that the the term the method is rooted in Hegel all right but 20th century phenomenology is much more developed much more complex uh and I think um even if we're going to Simply talk about existentialism we have to understand phenomenology the um the history of the thing goes um something like this that you have uh kick and good and need nature in the first phase of existentialism in reaction against the enlightenment okay kick aard in nature and you notice that their work is indeed descriptive it's more like an introspective kind of psychology of self-discovery or something of that sort uh than anything else uh there's no rigorous philosophical method involved but as you move into the 20th century you find that that influence of kard and nature is combined with the more rigorous phenomenological method that is being developed out of the original hegelian Roots um a phenomenological method that we usually ascribe in its most rigorous form oops to the um German philosopher Edmund huro though uh it also operates um earlier and parallel to her in a whole variety of other philosophers in the European tradition this sort of description of the structures of the inner Consciousness so um that combination then becomes evident in notably Martin heiger who at one time was The Graduate research associate working with Hur and um then in his thinking parted company with herur in some regards and um by the same token people like s so that sat whom you're reading next week uh represents this uh more um philosophically rigorous phenomenological method in an existentialist now um it's appropriate to call K good and Dena existential thinkers existentialist yes it's appropriate to call call these two people existentialists but they're often um delineated from the others as uh phenomenological existentialists by virtue of the phenomenology uh what they use that is to say their method is a kind of existential phenomenology a phenomen ology of human existence of the existential dimensions of human existence but that's not what hur's phenomenology was developed to do herur was more interested in a phenomenology of the transcendental ego and so his original work is spoken of as transcendental phenomenology to mark it off from existential phenomenology in no sense would you want to talk all huser all an existentialist you flunk if you do that you see yeah U what he's doing is developing a method now um there are other European writers who um appear who also I think are more influenced by the earlier Hass and among them I'd list the French philosopher Maurice Mero Ponte i' list the French philosopher Paul rur probably the greatest living French philosopher today um he's still alive uh retired um at University of Chicago for half a year for the last several years um teaching occasionally at the University of Montreal but still teaching um half a year at the suran now I think he's retired um incidentally he um or maybe 20 years ago we had him was the um keyote speaker for our philosophy conference when he was teaching in Montreal um he um a French Protestant in the French reform tradition um Paul recur now um another name uh influenced by the early hural very much is um uh Hans George gader uh who is really the the main figure that doesn't look very much like gam does it uh who's um really the um the major figure in the development of what we call phenomenological hermeneutics uh because the kind of hermeneutic um that talks about subjective grids and influences is intruding in the interpretive process you see to talk about that involves doing a phenomenology of how the subjectivity is at work in the interpretation and it's gader who has done that par Excellence you and uh that subjectivity is given excessive role in deconstructionists like Paul De man but um it's gader who really is the key philosophical figure in the development of that modern hermeneutic incidentally for those of you um oriented to theology let me say the word hermeneutic is used much more broadly than just in terms of theology it means interpretation so it's used in relationship to science in relationship to the social sciences yeah I said interpreting situations interpreting human actions you see it's used in history it's used in literature all the rest of it it's used in terms of reading a philosophical text so forth so um that now what um what we want to do first of all is to get clear on the phenomenological method we'll start on that today want to get clear on that want to say something about um what haer does with it then more extensively of course sat because you're reading sat as the sample of this phenomenological method and then I want to say something about the hermeneutical tradition um and particularly GMA okay so that's our agenda through to the end of next week now um what is phenomenology um which um as a philosophical method dominates European philosophy um in this country it is dominant in Roman Catholic philosophy due I might say to almost a clo and Dagger story the story being this that um um in the uh early days of World War II or was it just before um word got out to um hur's um former students um he was dead uh that the Nazis were going to seize all his writings and Destroy them uh because of his Jewish um background so in the depth of the night a Catholic priest who was one of these students secreted all of the hural papers in the back of his car and raced across the Belgian border to the University of louisan Catholic University University at Lan and secreted hural archives now University of Len had been major Catholic University in Europe very influential back in 1878 um the pope had issued an encyclical uh in the light of all of the religious and social and philosophical developments of the 19th century an encyclical called the 18 tyranny petris of the Eternal Father uh calling for a return to the philosophical and Theological resources of Thomas aquinus this marks the beginning of the neot toist movement uh that has continued into the 20th century University of Lan immediately seized initiative and got on the bandwagon and became the center for neotonus studies in Europe Cardinal Mercier French cardal located there um wrote um vigorously um along those lines um maintaining that tomis was the Christian Philosophy for the day this day incidentally some Catholic philosophers uh if you use the phrase Christian philosophy with them they'll be thinking of Thomas aquinus I remember when the Society of Christian philosophers was organized some 10 or 12 years ago we were discussing uh what the society should be called um the initial proposal was that we called it the Society of Christian philosophy then it became apparent that our Catholic friends in the group thought of Christian philosophy as um tomis and I'd been accustomed to using the term Christian Philosophy for a pluralistic tradition of doing philosophy in a Christian perspective and the ambiguity became evident so we called it the Society of Christian philosophers and uh that eliminated the ambiguity um but in any case um the fact that in 1945 46 45 I guess it was uh Lan woke up to find it had the hural archives changed its philosophical identity and it became the center for phenomenological studies and Catholics still going there became phenomenologically oriented among them incidentally was the present Pope who um going back to Poland uh has actually published phenomenological studies of his own so um Cloak and Dagger story well not quite cloak yeah yeah cloak but not quite dagger okay on that story um so the influence there um phenomenolog phenomenology is not a theory I underscore that again it's not a system of thought it's not a philosophical position it's a method a project and um phenomenological description as I've said goes all the way back to Hegel and informally in people like Jaspers and some of the other existential writers I've mentioned like Mar cell and bber and so on and so forth but the method as such was formulated by herur uh at least a more technical method was formulated by hurl who died in 1938 now hurl has three primary concerns one is what he takes to be the failure of philosophical naturalism the failure of philosophical naturalism now he's using naturalism in the sense of purely um um scientific explanations of things so that in terms of trying to find the foundations of logic yes on what grounds to the laws of logic rest or the foundation of meth of mathematics which is much the same thing or the foundations of Natural Science you see all of which have presuppositions about human knowledge and Truth uh in trying to provide those uh foundations for math Natural Science logic all the naturalist has done is to say they're all due to non rational processes psychological explanations in terms of certain psychological processes which give rise to identifying this that and the other if you like n is giving a psychological explanation isn't he Freud is or historical explanations this is the way it happened historically or sociological explanations cultural influences so herur is cred is criticizing psychologism historicism soci olism scientism now get the isms there the claim that everything can be explained through those scientific methods including the foundations of logic mathematics science all human learning now um that's what herur was opposed to he wants more solid foundations so that uh so that logic mathematics philosophy can really be founded on unquestionable premises in other words he wants a new foundationalism he wants a new foundationalism M and his idea is that the phenomenological method can get us back to those foundations in the very structure of human nature the structure of Consciousness uh incidentally um last year we had Dallas Willard from um you University of Southern California speaking did any of you hear him he gave a series of lectures against postmodernism against the anti-realism of the day now Willard is um a hural specialist and uh his argument was drawing on phenomenological method in order to oppose the postmodernism and anti-realism of the day in other words trying to say that phenomenological description can open up a sufficient understanding of certain structures of the cont ious as to avoid the skepticism the relativism that is involved in that anti-realistic view I'll come back to that in a little while uh the second concern which uh he has about naturalism is um that it perpetuates the subject object dichotomy perpetuates the subject object dichotomy because it wants to talk simply about object objective matters historical causes objectifying psychological processes sociological processes it's only interested in objectivist explanations that exclude the role of human subject there is therefore a loss of the creativity of the constructive contribution of the human spirit that is to say the naturalist has bypassed the Canan cernic Revolution so what hurl wants is a new foundationalism that acknowledges kernic Revolution it must be a science of the creative constructive activities of the human spirit in organizing experience you see and that is why it has to be a phenomenology of the transcendental ego yes see that ego that transcends all of the particulars of concrete experience that ego which is the incant the the thing that has the forms and the categories all nicely schematized into the transc in a transcendental Unity of a ception okay now he wants to take a much closer look at that sort of thing well next time we'll um try and say how he does it

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Published: Tue Jun 16 2015