Notes on Givenness and Hermeneutics: Intuition and Intentionality
A Comparison of Nietzsche and Husserl
These are notes about what gives to us in the influx or flow of lived experience and thinking about this topic with Nietzsche and Husserl. Though Husserl comes after Nietzsche, it should be noted that he didn’t respond to Nietzsche’s philosophy. Rather, these are what I have noticed are similarities.
With Husserl, there is an anti-Nietzschean, anti-will-to-power character of bracketing the natural attitude; relinquishing the drive to control alterity with apodicticity conquering of the will. Nietzsche’s theory of interpretation, i.e. will-to-power, of drive-life and force of will-to-power, is a way of understanding the intelligible character of the world and its field of interpretative forces. Nietzsche: “all existence is essentially interpreting existence.” This is what Nietzsche shares with phenomenology and hermeneutics in contemporary philosophy.
Nietzsche considers philosophy in this way as “the most spiritual will-to-power”. There is something comparable here with Husserl and even going back to Hegel. It is the implication of Nietzsche’s “What if?” of “eternal recurrence”, which he says is “the Greatest Weight”, and Husserl’s phenomenological method, the epoché (i.e. the bracketing) of the natural attitude and the phenomenological reduction for the infinite possibilities of givenness. An “infinite task” for Husserl, experience is understood as an infinite horizon of possible experiences; infinity of the experience of the lifeworld. Both thinkers do not explicitly approach metaphysics, though there are metaphysical implications to their philosophies. Interpretation (hermeneutics) and ethics are central in these philosophies. Dan Zahavi (Husserl’s Phenomenology): Husserl takes “the transcendental dimension as a regulative ideal, attainable only in an infinite historical process […]; [a] life in absolute self-responsibility.”
For Nietzsche’s concern of “saying yes to life”, Husserl says “yes” by inquiring into the lifeworld, our being in the world. Heidegger took up this inquiry in his expression of “Dasein”. Another similarity is Nietzsche’s analysis of history and genealogy and his criticism of antiquarianism. Similarly, Husserl, in inquiring into the lifeworld, makes an analysis on the “sedimentation” of traditions and the historical poeticizing tendency in human worldview building. I also see relations of this comparison in the religious ideas of repentance, return, conversion, and renewal which I am further looking into. In Straw Dogs, John Gray makes a good point in interpreting Nietzsche that “Nietzsche was an inveterately religious thinker, whose incessant attacks on Christian beliefs and values attest to the fact that he could never shake them off.”
To further argue for the religious dimension of these points, I leave us with this. In Donald Wallenfang’s Phenomenology: A Basic Introduction in the Light of Jesus Christ, he makes a good expression of the eternal implications of encounter with what gives to us as beings in the world: “Instead, I hazarded the possibility of encounter with what gives and this made all the difference. A radical conversion of the natural attitude was necessary and it will be necessary tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, into eternity. Is this not the meaning of the concept of eternity—possibility unlimited and, therefore, love unlimited, wonderful personal encounters unlimited that do not collapse into some tasteless and insipid reductionism that would disfigure the chaste good?”
This offers us the opportunity to appreciate the surprise of perplexity and paradox of what gives to our consciousness in the flow of experience. We are not the masters of phenomena. In Husserl’s phenomenology there is great care to clarify, understand, and interpret things as they are, “to the things themselves”, not to hear what one wants to hear or to navel-gaze, nor build a worldless or solipsistic theoretical worldview. One’s ideas, biases, prejudices, presuppositions, and general a priori assumptions about meaning and reality are bracketed in a first philosophy way before being analyzed and evaluated in second philosophy. This character of phenomenology is what I will explore in a future post. But I will also lay out in more detail the comparisons of Nietzsche and Husserl later.
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