NietzschesGenealogyasEnlightenmentLectureOne：尼采的系谱学作为一enlightenmentlectu.ppt

Nietzsches Genealogy as Enlightenment Lecture One,Dr. Peter Kail St. Peters College, Oxford,Two Formidable Issues,What is Enlightenment? What is the character of Nietzsches philosophy?,The Enlightenment,The clich of the Age of Reason Paradigmatically the philosophe Kant and Enlightenment as humanitys emergence from self-incurred immaturity which is the inability to use ones understanding without the guidance of others.,Supposed Key Features,Unbounded optimism about reasons reach The fixity and uniformity of universal human nature Anti-traditional religion Scientific conception of social structures and their improvement Individual freedom and rational relation to authority,Scepticism about the Enlightenment,How many Enlightenments? And where? English, Scottish, German, French. Reason, Scepticism, Passion Religion and the Enlightenment (Berkeley, Reid, Butler.) Enlightenment and liberation (The so-called moderate and radical Enlightenments),Scepticism about the Enlightenment,How many Enlightenments and where? English, Scottish, German, French. Reason, Scepticism, Passion Religion and the Enlightenment (Berkeley, Reid, Butler.) Enlightenment and liberation (The so-called moderate and radical Enlightenments),Nietzsche Favourable to the Enlightenment?,1st edition of HAH dedicated to Voltaire Nietzsches continued admiration for the French D 197 German Hostility to the Enlightenment The ressentiment of the French Revolution as anti-Enlightenment Christianity as an unwitting contributor to Enlightenment (GS 122),One Enlightenment Trope,Optimism about empirical sciences and its application to traditional philosophical concerns by its application to the human creatures Methodological naturalism. Knowledge of humanity depends on methods continuous with the sciences Obvious exemplar. David Hume,Nietzsche on Naturalism,We must “translate humanity back into nature” so as to “gain control of the many vain and fanciful interpretations that have been drawn and scribbled and that have drawn over that eternal basic text of homo natura so far” (BGE 230). Two aspects. Getting the correct account of human nature and then gaining control,Methodological Naturalism,Fallibilist Empiricism The procedures of science are at least as important a product of inquiry as any other outcome: for the scientific spirit rests upon an insight into the procedures, and if these were lost all the other products of science would not suffice to prevent a restoration of superstition and folly” (HAH 1, 635) Scientific methods . . . are the essential thing, as well as the most difficult thing” a certain “factual sense, the last and most valuable of all senses” (A 59).,Methodological Naturalism II,Leiter (2002) methods continuity Nietzsche takes over from the sciences the idea that natural phenomena have determinate causes” (2002: 5) NB a speculative account of human nature characterized a posteriori. Not reductionism,Substantive Naturalism,What is the nature of nature? The Will to Power, lumpers and splitters Nietzsche as translating humanity back into nature The human animal Hume again. Humes account of human nature drawn entirely from models of animal cognition The “whole sensitive creation . . . every thing is conducted by springs and principles, which are not peculiar to man, or any one species of animals” (T 2.2.12.1/397),Substantive Naturalism II,“Formally, one has sought the feeling of the grandeur of man by pointing to his divine origin; this has now become a forbidden way, for at its portal stands the ape, together with other gruesome beasts, grinning knowingly as if to say: no further in this direction!” (D49) Humans nevertheless become beguiled by the sound of “metaphysical bird catchers” who sing “You are more! You are higher! You are of a different origin!” (BGE 230). Drives and German biology,Why Naturalism?,We need to understand human nature so as to “gain control of the many vain and fanciful interpretations that have been drawn and scribbled and that have drawn over that eternal basic text of homo natura so far” (BGE 230). One key aim of Nietzsches Genealogy is to understand how human animals about a particular moral interpretation of themselves Such an interpretation has been inimical to human flourishing,Two Objections,Doesnt Nietzsche reject the idea that there is human nature? Isnt naturalism committed to truth and its value in a way that Nietzsche is not?,Nature and History,Nietzsche and the congenital Defect of Philosophers who treat the human being an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of flux (HAH 1, 2) There are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is need from now on is historical philosophizing (HAH 1, 2) The notion of a fixed human nature is at odds with its historical character.,Nature and History II,However, Nietzsche also writes that Everything essential Wesentliche in human development occurred in primaeval times, long before those four thousand years with which we are more or less familiar. Man probably hasnt changed much more in these years (HAH 1, 2, Nietzsches emphasis on essential). There is a fixed set of principles against which evolutionary and cultural development takes place.,Nature and History III,This is still naturalistic and compatible with some 18th century naturalism, especially Humes Hume has a fixed set of principles whose manifestation depends crucially on contingency and history. “Human nature is inconstant” and “changeableness is essential to it” (T 2.1.4.3/283). The manners of men are different in different ages and countries, that they causally affect humans, mould the human mind from its infancy, and form it into a fixed and established character.,Truth Nihilism?,The falsification thesis and perspectivism What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetoricallytruths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are (On Truth and a Lie in a Non-Moral Sense 1873) What, then are mans truths ultimately? - They are the irrefutable errors of manGS 265,Truth Nihilism? II,Life is no argument (GS 121). Through immense periods of time, the intellect produced nothing but errors; some of them turned out to be useful and species-preservingsuch erroneous articles of faith, which we passed on by inheritance, further and further, and finally became part of the basic endowment of the species, are for example: that there are enduring things; that there are identical things; that there are things, kinds of material bodies, that a thing is what it appears to be.