The Anthropological Question, Part Three, The End of Anthropology

Notes on the End of This Book

May 12, 2023

All quotes are cited by page number; the reference is to Foucault M (2022) La Question anthropologique: Cours. 1954-1955 (Sforzini A ed), Éditions de l’EHESS-Gallimard-Seuil, Paris, France. The translation is my own. The one other quote is from Jaspers K (1997) Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity (Wallraff CF and Schmitz FJ trans), Johns Hopkins University Press, London, UK.

Introduction

Anthropology as realisation of critique was an attempt to actualise man’s truth such that in this truth man is at home. Metaphysics (as the “nature” of classical thought) is exiled from man, and man’s essence is ‘recalled from its exile to become human existence’ (2022:156). As such, the task of philosophy is the end of metaphysics, in the realisation of man’s philosophical essence. ‘But then, isn’t anthropology the end of philosophy, or rather, as connaissance of true philosophy, isn’t it the end of the truth of philosophy?’ (2022:156) Anthropology finds ‘its sense in a humanism in which man is completed at the same time as philosophy’ (2022:156)

Anthropology was also an attempt to discover the extent to which ‘man was not the truth of truth or the foundation of truth’ (2022:156). However, truth is only spoken by man to man, it is only ever a truth constituted by man. Philosophy, then, must be the philosophy of philosophy. It can no longer be supreme truth, only the ‘initial truth of its truth […] Anthropology then finds its sense in a destiny of man with which man begins and, with him, philosophy’ (2022:157); ‘philosophy will have to be prior to its truth and will have to unfold in a sphere where constitutions, life, and history are made’ (2022:157) [HENCE HUSSERL]

Anthropology oscillates between humanism, dawn, and original forms of life on the one hand, and, on the other, destiny, completion, and the end of history. Between these two sets ‘is divided the great discovery that the advent of man is the end of philosophy’ (2022:157)

In all anthropology, however, the initial form of man’s concrete essence was only given a methodological place. Beyond being a bad idea of “concrete”, that opened it up to a naturalist investigation of man’s existence, to evolutionism

Evolutionism is legitimately comparable to Kant’s revolution. Instead of critiquing the ‘forms of man’s alienation’ that are ‘illusions, errors, metaphysics’ (2022:157), one will critique man himself. Instead of investigating man’s truth, one will investigate the conditions that make man possible

Using Darwin as a beginning, Nietzsche and Freud will offer critiques of man that remove us from the domain of anthropology. Just as ‘Kant had realised that we were not yet doing metaphysics’, ‘Nietzsche realises that we are not on a level with man’ (2022:158)

Anthropology will be overcome in two ways simultaneously. First, truth and man will no longer be interlaced so intimately as they had been since Kant. Second, critique will not be critique of man’s consciousness, but of the conditions of his existence. ‘This renders anthropology impossible’ (2022:158)

A: Critique as Method and as Problem

From Feuerbach and Dilthey, Nietzsche takes the idea that critique of man should address ‘itself to forms of original experience in which man states his dawnmost truths’ (2022:158-159. The phrase ‘les plus matinales’ usually means ‘earliest’, but in this context the connection to dawn is important). This is what true philosophical connaissance deals with, but it is traditional for scholars to pass over it, to deal only with the thoughts that have already been had by others. We learn this in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘On Scholars’. Zarathustra lies ‘by the crumbling wall, beneath thistles and red poppies’ (Nietzsche, cited in Foucault, 2022:159) — amongst the youngest, the original, and out of shade, in the sun — and it is to these that he speaks. The scholars ‘prefer the shade to the sun’ and ‘play with loaded dice’ (Nietzsche, cited in Foucault, 2022:159). The imagery of dawn is essential to the passage

That philosophers play with loaded dice means that the philosopher is ‘the biggest dupe the earth has ever seen’ (Nietzsche, BGE §34, cited in Foucault, 2022:159), since he has been tricked into believing truth and reality are better than error and appearance. As such, ‘philosophy is the comedy by which truth allows itself to be defended’ (2022:159). Truth tricks the philosopher. At the same time, the philosopher tricks truth, since ‘It is just a satire, a farcical epilogue, only the continuing proof that the long, real tragedy has come to an end: assuming that every philosophy was originally a long tragedy’ (Nietzsche, cited in Foucault, 2022:159-160, passage modified by Foucault)

III

This original tragedy from which philosophy springs is the Greek tragedy of Dionysian delirium, intoxication. It must take place before truth, at a point where truth and error are not distinguished, where ‘the origin of truth is at one with the collapse of truth; or that point where the reason for being is also nothingness’ (2022:160). Philosophy must therefore be ‘the absolute freedom of the spirit’ (2022:160), the philosopher must be the free spirit. This free spirit cannot be ‘the freedom of the spectator, the traveller, the stranger, the freedom of indifference’ (2022:160). It is, first, the freedom of the desert and of isolation, which is opposed to all truth, from which the philosopher will be able to speak the truth of truth. It is, second, the freedom that must partake in the greatest possible sacrifice for philosophy, the sacrifice of creative thought (one sacrifices God to man, oneself to God, and God to nothingness). The free spirit is, then, ‘the spirit that has found the space of its freedom, in this questioning beyond truth, beyond being, beyond everything that allows the spirit to stand’ (2022:161)

The Kantian question is, for the first time, outdated, in both its initial and final forms

In its initial form, the Kantian question is how it is possible to make a synthetic a priori judgement. Nietzsche, instead, questions why we must believe these judgements to be possible. In other words, he allows the truth of science to be a falsehood

In its final form, the Kantian question is the question of man’s essence, the anthropological question. Nietzsche, having allowed the possibility of falsehood, has necessarily rejected the idea that the truth of truth must be found in the truth of man, since he’s rejected the assumption of any such truth of truth, and since, in doing so, he allows the truth of man to be falsehood. One can only investigate man by ‘bring[ing] about the power of his contradictions’ (2022:162), just as one could only remove the privilege of truth by investigating truth

‘Thus, in this critical space cleared by Nietzsche, in the form of the Dionysian freedom of the spirit, the implication of truth and man that has been the very problem of anthropology since Kant is unravelled for the first time’ (2022:162)

It is not that man and truth are entirely other to one another, it is that man’s truth is no longer the truth, that truth’s truth is no longer man’s truth, they have become an enigma to one another

B: Biology and Psychology

If we say that ‘man is not the truth of truth, or that truth is not the truth of man’ (2022:163), do we necessarily refer to a pre-philosophical investigation? To make the first of those claims would be posing an evolutionary problem, as man is an animal, and to make the second of these claims would be posing a psychological problem, as man forgets, correct? There would be a resort to naturalism, yes?

This seems to be the case at times, but ultimately, no

Evolutionism takes the possession of truth of himself and the world away from man. Yet evolutionism does not have the same meaning for Nietzsche: he critiques Strauss and Dühring for viewing evolution as progress in values, but for him evolution is a (deadly) test of becoming

This becoming is that in which ‘human essence dissolves’, of the multiple worlds which ‘rob man of himself’ (2022:165). One finds the absolutely serious fact of man as a beast; the rational animal is a reason sleeping (unconscious, unaware of its predicament) on the back of a tiger which drives it. One finds, also, man’s unwillingness and inability to accept any absolute sense, as if he were a bridge. At the same time, the matter of what man is in this becoming is weighty: man is the becoming itself, he can only be surpassed by himself. Evolutionism teaches that man’s truth is ‘the repetition of that which denies him’ (2022:166)

‘It can therefore be said [that evolutionism] is [the] royal road of the philosophical path insofar as, bringing man back to his origin, binding him to his animality, giving him back the mask of the beast, it frees him from his actuality, from his essence and from his truth. Animality is not the inferior form of human truth, it is what man must take back and repeat within himself to achieve that freedom which opens truth to error and falsehood’ (2022:166-167, square brackets editor’s)

Man and nature are not distinct. Also, see Twilight of the Idols, ‘Forays of an Untimely One’, §48

Whereas ‘for philosophical evolutionism, the animal is the primitive truth of man […] for Nietzsche, the animal is man’s functional freedom, that is, that in which truth for man dissolves, but in which it can be born’ (2022:167)

‘The same is true of psychology, which does not teach the truth of man, but serves as a path to free man from his truth’ (2022:167)

Psychology, as the discipline practiced by psychologists, is where man sees himself and deceives himself about himself, positing an illusion as objective truth, in the most radical way, it is man falsely imitating himself

Nevertheless, when we reverse the passage along this thread, we can identify the moment when man’s imitation of himself becomes, in forgetting its text, a betrayal. Nietzsche’s psychology is thus a psychology of psychology, an ‘analysis not of the soul but of the movement by which man gives himself a soul, not of consciousness but of the forgetting by which man pretends to reflect himself in his consciousness alone, not of the will but of the superstition by which man believes that his will is transparent to the actions in which he diversifies himself’ (2022:168)

As such, Nietzschean psychology will not be determinist. ‘Deterministic psychology is in reality a [determined] psychology that has become a slave to objectivity, and takes the ‘signs’ of that objectivity as the characters of the self’ (2022:168). It will be an interpretation, a philology, that finds the most general sense possible in its text, but also finds the reason for all the false interpretations. It is the truth of truth when it is the truth of error, when it can declare the psychology of the psychologist

Nietzsche’s psychology thus accounts for the origin of psychology, a movement that occurs in six steps

First, the psychology of the dream. One has overestimated consciousness, made it into a single unified being, when in reality it is a commentary on a felt (yet unknown) text. Consciousness is an interpretation, in essentially the same way as the dream is an interpretation

Second, thought is thought of as a cause, which is the result of two errors. First, we ignore that thinking is not a thing; it is the selection of one element of the thing, and the forgetting of the rest. Second, the belief that thinking is subjective, which is a needless belief when thinking does not exist. Thought is a forgetting of most of the thing that occurs, and it is in that sense an imaginary process. The “knower” seeks to be united with things, because he forgets his original union with them

Third, consciousness is considered the highest form of being, that is, the unity of reason and language. In reality, reason has its beginning in the word, in that thought (as forgetting) is only possible within a horizon determined by language and bordered by certain words (the examples given are ‘I’, ‘do’, and ‘suffer’). It is within the rules of this language that reason comes to be, coming into existence in its modern form when the contingency and history of reason is forgotten. If we understand philosophy as the practice of this reason, it is only the remembering of rules that had been forgotten. ‘Since reason is detached from language, and language is absorbed into reason, then there must be, on the one hand, a truthful being’ (2022:172), and we must have faith in this truthful being, first expressed as faith in our sensations (even when questioned, it is at first taken as true); hence the necessity of God for Descartes and many others. If the death of God occurs, then, it does so first in philology [One can’t help but realise that, if we replace ‘language’ with ‘discourse’ and ‘word’ with ‘concept’, we end up very close to Foucault’s later position]

Fourth, the idea of a “will” is introduced to explain any effect. The errors of men on earth are forgiven and ignored in heaven, since the truthful being must guarantee that truth occurs in a definitive form. At the same time, the concept of will occurs, since all “truths” must be expressed in a language that necessitates a subject-object form. We investigate language to show the groundlessness of truth; we investigate instinct to show the truth of the will. ‘The psychology of instinct is not a biological philosophy; it is the end of a philosophy in which virtue and truth are involved: it is the end of Western philosophy’ (2022:173)

The fifth and six points are linked. Fifth, the world of truth is taken to be the world that is intelligible (not immediately but) through cognitions. Sixth, insofar as we believe ourselves to have knowledge, we conclude that we can have absolute knowledge. ‘This means that philosophy, by forgetting instinct and language, by refusing to take the definition of man as a ‘reasonable animal’ absolutely seriously, has enclosed man in the ideal world of a connaissance that would be originally open to truth and founded on truth. Yet this implication of truth and connaissance is precisely what the psychology of connaissance denounces’ (2022:174). In the same way that reason is a language, connaissance is a need to order and organise the world (to preserve life) and to pin the will into a single thing, it is the activity of organisation and the laziness of relaxation. Connaissance is the need for an organisation that will preserve life, but also for a relaxation that will stifle life. ‘Perhaps humanity will even be destroyed in this passion for knowledge!’ (Nietzsche, Dawn §429, cited in Foucault, 2022:175). If connaissancecannot establish life as absolute connaissance, it is because to do so would be its own death, because some connaissance is dangerous. ‘It is afraid of what is no longer the truth of connaissance, but the vertigo of connaissance in the face of truth, it is afraid of what this process, which can hardly be called psychology, finally reveals:’ that complete, concrete connaissance is death (2022:175)

‘Psychology frees man from the myths of connaissance, through the rediscovery of the foundation of being — as evolutionary biology had freed man through the rediscovery of his freedom’ (2022:176)

C: Dionysus

In philosophical thought about biology or psychology neither man is reduced to nor truth grounded in nature. The natural horizon is a limit on ‘the space in which man can reopen himself to truth, and render himself disposed to his freedom’ (2022:176), not a fixed form of either. Truth is to be freed ‘from human determinations’, and freedom is to be freed from ‘objective forms of truth’ (2022:176). ‘Nietzschean nature: 1. is the dissolving element of objectivity and determinism; 2. denounces and unmasks the belonging of man to truth, and of truth to man; 3. unveils that the relationship of their non-relationship, the bond of their non-linkage, is freedom’ (2022:176)

Nature, and the return to nature, becomes both the concern and the term of philosophy, which Foucault will establish in four steps

First, ‘The return to nature as the authentic form of existence is not a return to immediate determinations, but an access to the very limits of truth, an opening to the most impossible forms of freedom’ (2022:176-177)

Second, this return is a repetition, but it is neither a reiteration nor a rediscovery, because there has never been a human of nature, nature is only attained after work, nature is not at man’s origin

Third, ‘The return to nature is not even the mythical and reversed chronology of an ideal conformity’ to nature, ‘For conformity is meaningless if it is not based on a kinship of origin or on a system, implicit at least, of references’ (2022:177). The Stoics are unable to live “in conformity with nature” because nature has absolutely nothing to say about man, it gives man no role which he could either accord with or break

Fourth, the return to nature ‘is, on the path to the truth of nature, the discovery that this path is the dissolution of the truth of nature’ (2022:177). The return to nature thus denies the truth of nature that it seeks, goes beyond nature, and finds that the difference between man and animal is not freedom, in the course of which man is freed from the animal

This is why Nietzsche’s return to nature is repetition

This repetition is, and has been since the Greeks, ‘the death of man and the annihilation of nature’ in order to achieve ‘the liberation of truth and freedom’ (2022:178). ‘In contrast to the Rousseauist return to nature, as a return to a lost homeland, the Nietzschean return is a confrontation — beyond death, beyond the security of familiar landscapes — with foreign lands. The return to the Forgotten is also the repetition of the Unknown, the iteration of the Stranger’ (2022:178)

Dawn §446 sets out three levels of depth. First, which Foucault associates with classical metaphysics, are the thinkers who reach the depth of whatever topic is under consideration. Second, which Foucault associates with transcendental thought, are those who reach the foundation of this same topic. Third, and this is Nietzsche himself, ‘are those who stick their heads in the morass’ (Nietzsche, cited in Foucault, 2022:179). The morass is the nature that backgrounds critical thought, it is deeper than critique, ‘And if we can say that critique was a metaphysics of metaphysics, we can say that nature for Nietzsche, or rather the repetition of nature, uncovers the horizon of a metaphysics of critique’ (2022:179)

‘Nietzsche, through the deepening of the sense of nature and the overcoming of nature as such, discovers the whole horizon of a metaphysics that gives critique an absolutely new sense, and makes it possible to construct a critique of man, values, and the world’ (2022:179)

We begin this new metaphysics with the infamous phrase from Beyond Good and Evil, §39, to perish from absolute knowledge

It has several meanings. First, for something to be absolutely knowable is for it to be a concept, as far from being as possible. Second, knowledge is the will to nothingness. Third, it means that one refuses ‘to think of the world as a universe, that is, as a totality of being closed in on itself’ (2022:180). Fourth, it means that one refuses ‘to think being from an infinite understanding or sensibility which, while guaranteeing its ontological weight, would give it its absolute character of connaissable being’ (2022:180). Lastly, it is the realisation that there is no necessary correlation of thought and being, that we think non-being. ‘The life of being is thus impossible in the element of absolute connaissance […]: this can only ever be the death of being; but in a more profound way, the access to being as a process of philosophy can only make sense through a perpetual contestation, an incessant surpassing of oneself […] In other words, truth, in order to become the truth of being, must discover itself as the non-truth of truth and pass through this truth of non-truth’ (2022:181)

How can truth surpass itself and open itself to being? ‘This movement begins from the day when connaissance takes itself seriously as interpretation, as hermeneutics, as philology’ (2022:181). Knowledge is an interpretation (it gives unity and sense to an ensemble of elements), just as consciousness was. Like how reason was a language of which one has forgotten that it is a language, savoir (defined here as rational connaissance) will be an interpretation of which one has forgotten that it is an interpretation

Knowledge and consciousness are part of a group characterised by two features. First, the essence of a thing is in the being that creates a significant unity by combining elements. Second, this essence is presented perspectivally, to get rid of all perspectives (to understand everything) would be to understand nothing. ‘That is, the unity of the significant essence is the condition of the multiplicity of manifest senses’ (2022:182)

Interpretation is connaissance becoming self-connaissance, and thereby fulfilling itself as connaissance

This takes place through a four-part movement of interpretation. First, one removes the idea that there is a single (absolute and realised) form and manifestation of truth in a given sense, that there is a true interpretation. Second, one masters the interpretations to reveal that ‘the sense of sense is to be non-sense of essence […] The march of sense is not even towards truth, it has no effective relation to truth in itself’ (2022:182). Third, one discovers by investigating the non-sense of sense that which this sense indicates negatively, the text. ‘As interpretation, sense covers and disguises the text, and imposes a return to the text where the text only speaks of itself’ (2022:182); ‘sense as a possible reading of the text becomes sense as the autochthonous utterance of the text: there are several interpretations, there is only one utterance’ (2022:183). Fourth, insofar as this sense is an utterance, it is difficult to read, precisely because ‘it is the most fundamental, it is the movement by which being designates itself’ (2022:183). In all, ‘Interpretation has been transformed into an enigma and the possibilities of sense finally refer only to the fatality of being. The fatality of being and the enigma of the world set the positive and nocturnal background for all negatively clear interpretations of truth. The interpretations, in their mutual negation, both hide and uncover the impenetrable affirmation of being […] But then, is the most fundamental utterance of being only the negation of truth?’ (2022:183)

Being is designated by the negation of sense; is this the abolition of truth? What do we do with the claim that “everything is false”? We do not take it as a conclusion, but as ‘the principle of the reversal of philosophical investigation itself’ (2022:184). From Descartes until Nietzsche, philosophy’s scope was determined by the question “how is error possible?” Now it is measured by the alternative question “how, given that knowledge is false, is truth possible?”

One cannot conceive of truth as knowledge of the genesis of error, it can be neither transcendental nor gnoseological, since to do so is to ‘assume that truth is the condition of error’ (2022:184), when the opposite is the case

The knowledge of error, then, cannot be said to transcend error. We do not have the truth (opposed to the sceptical claim, which presupposes ignorance as error), ‘truth can only be illuminated in the instantaneous form of its own suppression; truth is only the lightning that indicates its own night’ (2022:185), and ‘truth as a position of sense is what is most and least conditioned’ (2022:185). It is conditioned, in ‘that it rests only on its contradiction; it is the lightning that is only possible through the night’ (2022:185). It is unconditioned, in that nothing is more open to freedom, since we must read sense into the world. ‘Truth is the unconditioned conditioned, that is, that the position of which is one and the same with absolute contradiction. And this is why the savoir of error does not transcend [error] at the same time[;] because, as savoir, it is nothing other than error, and as error, it is nothing other than its truth as savoir’ (2022:185)

Thought, now in a new form, returns to knowledge of the fact that it cannot think of its origin. The origin of thought is the will in two senses: ‘as a fundamental act of freedom, it is the beginning of that unconditioned beginning which is truth’; and ‘as a creative will, it is the destruction of this will to truth […] Truth is both the will and the decay of the will’ (2022:186). The task of being truth, once it has discovered its origin, is the task of willing itself away from the laziness of the will to truth, it is the freedom to will the ever-dissolving truth of appearances

‘Thus, thought and being finally come together in this nearby homeland of appearance, which is the night of truth but which was once the sun of the earth and of Greek beauty […] In the colour and light of becoming and appearance, being finally and already thinks — thought finally and already is’ (2022:187)

‘If, therefore, there is an overcoming of truth, it is in the closest of familiarities, in the closest of errors, in the most instantaneous of mirages. The uprooting of truth will be attachment and fidelity to the nearest land […] But this familiarity is not proximity to existence, a return to concrete forms of being. On the contrary, the familiarity of appearance is linked to the solitude of being. The labour of holding on to the merciless and recourseless light of appearance (to appearance as the overcoming of truth) is constantly punctuated: by the nostalgia of nocturnal truths; by the concern for stable truths; by the desire to be linked to the world by ties that are more solid and less dizzying than that of a diffuse light’ (2022:187)

The overcoming of truth is expressed ‘by the familiarity of thought in the homeland of appearance; […] by the solitude of the being lost in its own light; […] by the profusion of this light through which appearance appears, so that appearance gives itself to the light and in the light, but also so that the light is lost, as pure transparency, in the heat and the cries of colours’ (2022:187). ‘It is when being gives itself as light, but as pure transparency of light, that truth disappears and appearance immediately appears’ (2022:188), and in this we have the essence of the Dionysian

The standard interpretation of Nietzsche gives two senses to the Dionysian. First, it is opposed to the Apollonian, meaning it is the ‘opposition of order and disorder, of kosmos and hubris, of destructive and individualistic pessimism to the optimism that builds the city’ (2022:188). It is not totally clear, but it seems Foucault intends the Dionysian to be disorder, hubris, and (destructive and individualistic) pessimism. Greek tragedy, regardless, is the instance of balance. Second, the Dionysian is opposed to Christ, as life, will to power, and ‘the exultant joy of the strong’ are opposed to death, ressentiment, and ‘the rampant and democratic morality of the slaves’ (2022:188). The second sense of the Dionysian is a synthesis of the first sense with the Apollonian (of the first sense). In the standard interpretation of Nietzsche, then, Dionysus would be seen as the will to life, the opposite of Schopenhauer. This would have two consequences. First, ‘to make the philosophy of truth lead to a metaphysics of the will, which would itself be only a kind of fantastic cosmology of life’ (2022:188); second, ‘to present Nietzsche as a philosopher of becoming’ (2022:189) for whom the matter of eternity is an enemy to be overcome by the temporary, which would leave the eternal return and the Übermensch as empty paradoxes

The Dionysian must therefore be given a different analysis, in three parts

First. The dream, peak of appearance, is Apollonian; the Dionysian is the drunkenness opposed to the dream, ‘the destruction of appearance’ by which the dream falls ‘into the night, into non-being’ (2022:189). ‘Dionysus is the disappearance of appearance, the non-being of what gives itself for being in the form of truth’ (2022:189). Greek tragedy is a thin sheen of appearance over the fact of its non-being, accomplished by Plato. Dionysus, confronting Apollo, made ‘the metaphysics of the true idea’ (2022:189) possible, and philosophy has forgotten him

Second. The fact that appearance is lost in the realm of Greek tragedy, ‘its own enigma where it abandons all the prestiges of its truth’ (2022:189), it is precisely because of this loss that it survives its enigma and its truth. Here we encounter Ariadne. Theseus intends to lose himself in the Labyrinth, in order ‘to kill the night that kills the light’ (2022:190), the Minotaur. His salvation by Ariadne is due neither to the truth he intends to find, nor by her truth, only ‘by what is most opposed to this truth, by what is most dark: by his desire’ (2022:190). Also: ‘Annihilation of truth in desire’ (2022:190). And yet, when Theseus is saved by Ariadne, he has lost his own truth; he was the man who seeks truth, and he was saved from truth by the opposite of truth: ‘he has lost his own light and has become night’ (2022:190). And yet, again, ‘Ariadne, the discovery that man loses himself in his truth when he saves himself from the truth that he seeks at the bottom of the labyrinth of enigmas, Ariadne offers herself to Dionysus and loses herself in him’ (2022:190). ‘The myth of Dionysus, Ariadne, and Theseus is therefore, in this sense, the resumption of this overcoming of truth, but it is at the same time the discovery that in losing the truth man loses himself, and that if he overcomes the truth, in order to find himself again in the familiarity of appearance and solitude, it is no longer in the essential form of the authentic man, but in the form of the overcome man, in the Dionysian delirium’ (2022:190-191)

Third. What, then, has become of the face of man? The answer is in five parts:

1. In the Platonic metaphysics, and in its Christian offspring, the sacrifice of appearance to truth was a means of accessing one’s own truth. For the approach of the Dionysian, however, the sacrifice of appearance (Dionysus himself) is part of an earthly resurrection: ‘The man who has lost himself in the Dionysian loss of truth will find himself again, but freed from his truth, in a suffering without recourse […] Man’s loss in Dionysus is his deification, in the form of the tragic, whereas the Christian deification is the desperate holding on to a truth without appearance and without being’ (2022:191). Hence the exquisite quote: ‘The god on the cross is a curse on life and a sign to seek release from it; Dionysus cut into pieces is a prophecy of life: it will be eternally reborn and return from destruction’ (Nietzsche, cited in Foucault, 2022:191)

2. Whereas the Christian, in any situation, will find suffering enough to curse his god and take revenge, Dionysus will affirm the world, in every respect, for exactly the same reasons that it had once been denied. ‘Dionysus is thus the return to the world, the return to the appearance of the world in the light of being beyond the negation of the world’ (2022:192)

3. ‘The Christian God calculates, he does not philosophise: and it is when he calculates that the world is made, a world which is above all divine truth’ (2022:192). Note, on this point, the role of mathematics in Descartes. ‘Dionysus philosophises, that is, he is the very movement of destruction of the truth of the world. As Dionysus philosophises, the world is undone’ (2022:192)

4. Dionysus, opposed to the Christian God, never restores man to truth; rather, he only ever pushes man away from truth, he ‘is the man thrown ahead of himself out of his truth, he is the man pushed to the limits of his possibilities that contradict, deny, and destroy the rest of his truth’ (2022:192). ‘In other words, being cannot be interrogated either from the truth of man or by man in his truth, but metaphysics can only be one and the same with the overcoming of man himself’ (2022:193)

5. Thus, in the destruction of truth, man rediscovers the Greek tragedy, albeit with new promises. ‘Just as we saw earlier how philosophy, as a critique of the truth of appearance, was both the truth and the error of tragedy, we can now understand why tragedy is the truth of philosophy. The Platonic forgetting of the Greek sense of tragedy is now dispelled by the rediscovery of the absolutely tragic sense of philosophy’ (2022:194). For the Greeks, tragedy was a myth of the worst possible world, showing the place where the image of the world fades away, giving life to appearance. For us, philosophy ‘is also the festival of appearance, in the very disappearance of appearance. But this play of appearance is not accomplished in the movement of life […], it is now exalted in the light of being. This is why, if the Dionysian tragedy, in its Greek dawn, was of the order of myth, in its philosophical repetition, it is of the order of metaphysics […] metaphysics is the Dionysian movement of appearance which exceeds itself as truth, but appears in its appearance in the light of being’ (2022:194). Myth is replaced by metaphysics, new life by new eternities, and this discovery is the break with Wagner

D: Interpretations

‘What are these new eternities? What is metaphysics for Nietzsche? What is the metaphysical repetition of the Dionysian?’ (2022:195)

Note 124 says: ‘As indicated, the manuscript was originally titled ‘Repetition and Return’ as the last development devoted to Nietzsche. The elaboration of the Nietzschean concept of repetition (this term is present throughout the course and constitutes a real grid of intelligibility for Foucault) and its relation to the Eternal Return is present in an unpublished document in Box 65 (the first six pages of the file ‘Uppsala, 1955-1956’), which allows us to make the connection to the History of Madness, since it is there that the concept of unreason is also elaborated’ (2022:223n124)

For Jaspers, Nietzsche’s critique is where one finds that truth exists in phenomena (appearances), ‘without any reference to an absolute form or an original ground of objectivity’ (2022:195). Truth has a new sense as ‘the interpretation of being by life’ (2022:195). No longer universal, it ‘is inextricably involved with the being of a living subject and the world that he has constructed’ (Jaspers, cited in Foucault, 2022:195). Truth dissolves ‘in the life of existence’, but is at the same time ‘one with with this life itself’ (2022:195). This truth, which is that of living existence, ‘as a negation of the rational truth of understanding has a positive content: it is the historicity of existence, expressed by Nietzsche as becoming’ (2022:196)

Historicity originates within itself, exclusively, but it ‘becomes articulate only through the rational, by virtue of which it can, indirectly at least, lay hold upon its historical roots’ (Jaspers, 1997:121). This is why philosophy has a twofold aspect. In critique philosophy is carried out as a fall, through which it reminds itself of itself; from there, the historical is seized and removed from the sphere of the rational, to return to its positivity. It is a twofold relationship between historicity and rationality, expressed in the two sides of Nietzsche’s work: the critique of values, a rational negativity from which, ‘and within the framework, which it explodes, of biology, psychology, and history […] the urgency of its appeal is indicated’ (2022:196); ‘historical positivity, which is defined as Will to Power’ (2022:196) and has two forms, becoming and overcoming. This will to power is ‘the common psychological denominator’ (2022:196) of the critique and the ‘positive essence of all being’ (2022:196), it is that which ensures the unity of the two aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy

Historicity, in the motion by which it removes itself from rationality, ‘defines a relation to being that is both its horizon and its source’ (2022:196-197). This relationship to being is not that of ‘the whole of being in the form of the world to that foundation of being which has for Christian thought the face of God’ (2022:197). Rather, it is the relationship between each individual being in its becoming to ‘the always original source of being’ (2022:197). It is not a relation to subsistent being (which is rational negativity), but to ‘being as the radiation of the sun, as ontological effusion and profusion’, this being is ‘that from which the light that has illuminated experience flows’ (2022:197). Being is life and the transcendence which one deciphers through life. ‘The truth of living existence is this instantaneous relationship of being to being in becoming, within which the figure of the transcendence of being shines through’ (2022:197)

This transcendence of being is expressed in symbols, ‘which do draw its directions and vectors, but do not manifest its sense or source. In Nietzsche, there would only be ‘differentials’ of transcendence, but never a total restitution of the movement of transcendence’ (2022:198). Jaspers gives four differentials: objectivity is always overcome; overcoming never has an endpoint, a goal, etc.; becoming is incomplete, and this incompletion is renewed constantly; all forms of Geist, ‘of self-enclosed interiority’ (2022:198), are disabled. Nietzsche, however, refuses to identify the point to which all these differentials refer, ‘By refusing to cross the limits, he wants to assert transcendence within the limits themselves: and he reverses the sense of that transcendence whose direction he himself indicated’ (2022:198). This in three ways. First, instead of leaping into the eternal presence of transcendence, ‘he thinks of becoming in an immanent totality of being-there’ (2022:198), so the individual must eternally recur, he leaps instead into the world. Second, since Nietzsche refuses the transcendental, he cannot find in its clarity the source of man’s being, and must instead think of man’s being ‘within the plane of the connaissable, at the level of a planning of savoir, action, and the world’ (2022:199), that is, the project of the Übermensch. Third, in denying transcendence Nietzsche ‘tries to assert the truth of transcendence in the concepts of biology, psychology, and sociology’ (2022:199), where transcendence is only negative, and hence the death of God. For Jaspers, then, the conceptual trio of the eternal return, the Übermensch, and the death of God, all these ‘appear as empty concepts, whose emptiness can be explained by the fact that Nietzsche wants to remain in the world’ (2022:199)

‘But why this refusal of transcendence? It is here that Jaspers’ commentary turns in on itself and becomes interpretation; we move from reading the sense of the texts to elucidating his philosophical demand: the reason why Nietzsche would forget transcendence and refuse to give it its character as a foundation is that he is the heir of a whole Christian philosophy, whose impulses he follows while turning them against Christianity’ (2022:199-200)

First. Nietzsche rejects the Christian view of history as a totality, but his attempts to reject this view end up reinstating it. This is in the return to Hellenism, wherein man attained his highest point, and has now reached his lowest. It is also in the claim that becoming breaks down this totality, when it also allows for a new totalisation in the eternal return, a totalisation demanded in the form of the Übermensch

Second. Nietzsche retains the Christian claim that there is some basic imperfection to man. Whereas the animal is a perfect finitude, man is the being who is an imperfect finitude; he is on a constant march of becoming: ‘the very essence of man is his incompleteness, which gives him the power to surpass himself’ (2022:200)

Third. Nietzsche considers science, the will to knowledge, as the enemy of Christianity, but also as that by which Christianity ended the Greek kosmos. The kosmos is a group of discrete systems, closed rather than dynamic, with uncertain parts, and beyond which there is a nothing that cannot be known and does not deserve to be known. Christianity gives us the absolute science, by which we must decipher the truth, the hand of God, behind everything in order to escape the world; instead of a construction with doubtful parts, one finds a knowledge that searches beyond itself for absolute knowledge; instead of a nothing which doesn’t deserve to be known, Christianity rests ‘on that which exists most in being […] thought will be […] formulation of the object’ (2022:202-203). Nietzsche himself sensed this, when he acknowledged that science was born from Christianity

‘Nietzsche’s philosophy as a refusal of transcendence unfolds in a world of immanence to which Christian transcendence had given its sense. When we elucidate the historical sense of its existence, we discover that it represents the point of maximum tension within the Christian world: it is the moment when what Christianity has made possible now strives to become impossible’ (2022:203). ‘The existential elucidation of Nietzsche’s thought within its historical context reveals it as a limit of the Christian world developed in the inner conditions of modernity’ (2022:203)

The word “limit” here is key. It is not that Nietzsche didn’t go far enough (such that one would have to go beyond Nietzsche and beyond Christianity), it is that Nietzsche must be an epiphany for Christianity: ‘the overcoming of Christianity, whose impulse Nietzsche turns back against Christianity itself, this overcoming must be both a purification and a way back’ (2022:204). We begin with the elucidation of historicity, and arrive at the interpretation of the philosopher

How is this return to be achieved?

First. Nietzsche’s atheism is like Revelation. ‘Atheism is the absolute fact of the negative character of rationality; just as Revelation is the absolute fact of the positive possibility of existence’ (2022:204). Philosophy is not ordered by atheism or by Revelation, rather, they are provocations for it. Philosophy is a dialogue between self and transcendent, which occurs in the space that is both the abyss of absolute negativity and the field of possibilities of absolute positivity. To be actively willing to philosophise atheistically, as Nietzsche is, is to make atheism ‘into the full and solid ground of the philosophical path’ (2022:205). In doing so, Nietzsche’s atheistic philosophy becomes a nonphilosophy

Second. Because of this, Nietzsche the philosopher is the limit and negativity of philosophy. It is in Nietzsche that philosophy becomes nonphilosophy, the end of philosophy. His philosophical truth is kept within himself, it cannot apply beyond him, and so ‘the decisive character of his philosophy is thought as non-decision’ (2022:205). ‘Nietzsche himself becomes the negativity of the world: his act of philosophising is the self-destruction of the human being and of this human being that he is’ (2022:205). His madness is neither the truth nor the suppression of his philosophy, but ‘the expression of his unity with the negativity of the world’ (2022:206)

Third. The message that is manifested in Nietzsche’s madness ‘is that Nietzsche’s fall delivers us to our most radical freedom and forces us to philosophise without him, in the dimension of this transcendence that he liberated by wanting to deliver us from it’ (2022:206)

We thus see a threefold idea that expresses, quite succinctly, Jaspers’ approach to Nietzsche

First, we must ‘take seriously the night when Nietzsche leaves his disciples’ (2022:206). This is the paradox of Zarathustra, who blinds us with the lightning bolt of his wisdom

Second, we must ‘take seriously’ the ‘decisive character’ of ‘the liberation that came from Nietzsche’ (2022:206), which cannot be comprehended, only put into practice in a mobile thought

Third, we must seriously approach the task of our freedom, a task given in the face of Nietzsche and on which he depends: ‘the sense of his night must be asked of the lightning that passes through it’ (2022:207), and ‘Truth is only what Nietzsche brings out of ourselves’ (Jaspers, cited in Foucault, 2022:207)

Since the 1800s, interpretation has been ‘the historical critique of a work, the interpretation of the philosophical sense of a thought, and the semantics of the truth that is pronounced by this thought through this work’ (2022:207). From Hegel to Nietzsche, the fact that a philosophy is the necessary condition for the interpretation of philosophy’s history — an interpretation which this philosophy is — to be possible is what gives this philosophy its philosophical sense. This is itself an interpretation, one interprets philosophy as this type of interpretation. But, according to Heidegger, what is interpretation?

Dilthey asked this question, but his response was to interpret the history of interpretation. Heidegger, by contrast, ‘attempts to found the sense of interpretation in such a way that if his philosophy is interpreted as interpretation, it is because his philosophy is founded as foundation’ (2022:207)

Foucault here asks two questions, but the first one is answered in the course of answering the second. The first is how Heidegger grounds the sense of interpretation; the second, a twofold question, is ‘What is it to comment on a poem, what is it to interpret a philosophy?’ (2022:208)

To comment on a poem, according to Heidegger, is to make the thing that is “poematised” clearer, in such a way that the commentary becomes unnecessary. It is to uncover something that we feel we already understood. It does not give sense, it shows what is already there. Is the same true of the interpretation of philosophy?

To interpret a philosophy is not to say what has already been said, but precisely to say what remained unsaid. Interpretation doesn’t make it easier to see what was already there by a restating, it states what was not there (or not-quite-there). Heidegger says: ‘We not only can, but must understand the Greeks, better than they understood themselves’ (Heidegger, cited in Foucault, 2022:208-209). Interpretation does not disappear in that which it interprets, interpretation abandons that which it interprets. Nietzsche requested a friend do this to him in a letter only days before he went mad. ‘How can this enunciation of the Ungesagte [unsaid], how can this abandonment, which Nietzsche’s fate seems to place under the constellation of madness, escape the arbitrary and the fall into chance?’ (2022:209, square brackets editor’s)

To abandon thought is not to simply forget about it: ‘on the contrary, it [interpretation] must leave the thought its roots in the ground where it has sunk them; it is to leave it in its place, and to think about what it thinks in the free element of its essential content’ (2022:210). This is not, however, simply giving a representation of the thought, whereby overcoming would be finding a contradiction. Rather, overcoming is achieved ‘when one brings back to [its] original truth, to the first ground of its beginning, that which, within a thought, has not yet been thought’ (2022:210). Philosophical interpretation, in abandoning thought, does not forget and reject that thought

But what is it to say what has been unsaid? Löwith is mistaken to understand this as hermeneutics or depth psychology, which seek to return the thought or the text to the unconscious of the thinker or of history. These are always a reduction to the other, whereas interpretation for Heidegger is a reduction to the same. If interpretation ‘says what has not been said in the text, it is […] insofar as what a work has said and what it has not said are one and the same thing […] the interpreter thinks what has not been thought in a thought and says what has not been said in its silence […] but this light reveals at the same time that what has been thought is what has not been thought, and that what has been said is what has not been said’ (2022:210-211)

So the interpretation of philosophy is not all that different from the commentary on poetry. Enunciating the unthought allows the thought to be what it is, and abandoning the thought means leaving it where it is, so the thing discussed has the same freedom to be itself. Further, thought, like poetry, ‘is a struggle between the earth on which it rests and which conceals its night, and the world which it gathers in the space of its light’ (2022:211)

‘Now this point is the constellation under which the destiny of being unfolds. And just as the work of art is what it is only if it implements the truth, so thought only thinks if it implements the destiny of being. Consequently, the poetic commentary shows how truth is implemented in the work, the philosophical interpretation shows how the destiny of being unfolds in a thought’ (2022:211)

Thus one overcomes Dilthey’s circular interpretation of interpretation. ‘Insofar as philosophy is founded as a foundation, as an unfolding of the destiny of being’ (2022:212), it overcomes all philosophies that interpret themselves as interpretations

There are two things left to examine. First, ‘How are the commentary on the work of art and the exegesis of thought both based on the circularity of Verstehen [understanding]? A question that opens up to this other question, from which it emerges and becomes clearer: what is the relationship between the Geschichtlichkeit [historicity] of Dasein and the Geschichte [history] of Sein [being]?’ (2022:212, square brackets editor’s). Second, ‘How does the history of being come to take shape in a world, in a Sagen [speech/spoken-word]? Is this history not possible only from the Sagen, so that the commentary, as enunciation of the Ungesagte [unsaid] under the constellation of the destiny of being, would be what it is only because it is the repetition of the Sagen itself? If this is so, we would arrive at the idea that, if commentary is possible, it is not on the constituted horizon of a history of philosophy, but as a repetition of the Sagen, that is to say, [to this idea that,] as the bringing to light of that from which being has a destiny, commentary would be that from which a history of philosophy [is possible]’ (2022:212, square brackets editor’s)

Heidegger’s texts on Nietzsche take the form of this kind of interpretation, which says the unsaid by returning to the said in that space where ‘the destiny of being unfolds’ (2022:213

How is Nietzsche, in Heidegger’s reading, situated in this destiny? First, as the ‘moment when Western man’ will ‘establish his rule over the earth’ (2022:213); we have yet to do so, says Heidegger’s Nietzsche, because we have not yet become what we are, hence the last man and the Übermensch. Second, it is in Nietzsche that metaphysics, by achieving ‘unconditioned access to oneself in the form of the will’ (2022:213), reaches its fulfilment and end, discovers ‘that its completion is the destruction of its truth’ (2022:213), hence nihilism and the death of metaphysics. These two moments did not meet contingently, they are essentially linked

The man who cannot take control of the earth is, precisely, the rational animal, ‘man distributed according to the divided space of metaphysics’ (2022:214). Also, metaphysics, as ‘that form of thought in which the distinction between the sensible and the suprasensible masks the essential forgetting of being in favour of the truth of being’ (2022:214), must be ‘that form of thought for which the mastery of being, in the form of connaissance and technology, must exhaust the being of being’ (2022:214)

The two moments are linked. The moment when man, through his knowledge and technology, takes control of earth and takes up residence in the whole of being, must be the end of metaphysics; the moment when man discovers himself as unfinished, impotent animal is the moment when metaphysics finds itself to be baseless. Thus, ‘The overcoming of man can only be one and the same thing with the overcoming of metaphysics, but the presence of the present man as the last man is proof that we are still in metaphysics’ (2022:214). The destiny of Nietzsche’s philosophy is to be both the death of metaphysics and its fulfilment

Heidegger brings Nietzsche and Aristotle together for precisely this reason. For Heidegger, Aristotle is the one who ‘makes definitive for Western thought the forgetting of being in being with his definition of God as the most being of all beings. And Nietzsche, by proclaiming that God is dead and by making himself the prophet of a Dionysian world, does not pull man out of this forgetting by an awakening to being, but transforms this forgetting into intoxication, plunges the Apollonian dream of metaphysics into Dionysian delirium, but does not seek to dissipate it’ (2022:215). ‘The Nietzschean death of God is the intoxication of Aristotle’s cosmological God: the most serious irony of his dream, the moment of absolute intoxication when, at the point of completion of metaphysics, the God of being awakens dead’ (2022:215)

Nietzsche’s death of God is not the first, there have been such things in the works of Plutarch, Pascal, Hegel, and Feuerbach. Nevertheless, the death of God in Nietzsche is unique. What is it?

In the famous aphorism of The Joyous Science, the atheists do not take the death of God seriously, despite the fact that they played a part in it. Atheism ‘is the movement by which man is substituted for God, historical progress for salvation, connaissance for faith. It is democratisation’ (2022:216); beyond this, both democracy and atheism are ways in which man refuses to see the death of God. ‘The true experience of God’s death is not atheism, it is nihilism’ (2022:216)

Nihilism, in Nietzsche, is the ‘devaluation of the highest values […] It is the discovery that the distinction between truth and appearance must be reversed, and that in appearance we see what is truth, and in truth untruth’ (2022:216). This cannot be a reversal of the ideal. It is only, rather, the complete ‘negation of everything that constitutes the ideal world, the suprasensible world, the world of the most being’ (2022:217)

This negation, which ends Christianity, is possible only with Christianity. In order for Christianity to be possible in the first place, ressentiment and revenge had to already be present. ‘The nihilistic devastation that marks the end of Christianity merely prolongs the desert on whose sand Christianity has built its mirages’ (2022:217)

Nihilism and Western metaphysics are one and the same. One looks to the “most perfect of beings” in an attempt to find the “truth of being” — this is nihilism, and it is Western metaphysics. The opposition of the real and apparent worlds is only a symbol of this more profound nihilism. Nihilism is more than the end of Christianity, more than a historical catastrophe, it is the fundamental process of Western history, which, ‘as the destiny of being[,] was nihilism’ (2022:217)

‘But Nietzsche, by making nihilism only a Gegenbewegung [counter-movement], remains within this desert and its night. And instead of going beyond it, he completes metaphysics, at the very moment when he wants to make a positive, classical nihilism, based on the Will to Power and on the Eternal Return. By placing himself resolutely within nihilism, Nietzsche locks himself into metaphysics.’ (2022:217)

sarcanor’s newsletter

Discussion about this post