Nietzsche in Context

Robin Small

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351746533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2001. Friedrich Nietzsche has always been recognized as an original thinker, one who stands apart from and outside the philosophical schools and tendencies of his time. This is the way he continually presented himself. Many readers have accepted this self-interpretation at face value. Yet there is another side to Nietzsche's thinking which shows not only an awareness of contemporary writers, but an engagement with their ideas which is often both intense and sustained. The intention of this study is to explore this side in detail, by surveying various themes in his philosophical thinking with such links in mind. It is important to avoid one misunderstanding though: this book is not designed to show that Nietzsche derived his ideas from various other thinkers. In that sense, it is not necessarily about "sources" or even about "influences". Rather, it shows that his independence and originality developed in dialogue with other thinkers.

Chapter 1
Spir and Time

Nietzsche’s commitment to the doctrine of becoming is expressed in many places in his writings, from his early lecture courses to his last notebook entries. He often uses expressions such as ‘eternal flow’ and ‘absolute flow’ to signal the concept he has in mind.¹ An eternal flow is one that has neither a beginning nor an end but extends throughout infinite time, both in the past and the future. An absolute flow is one that allows no exception to the rule of constant change. It cannot contain within itself any pause of the sort that an enduring substance, however brief its duration, would imply. Nietzsche is willing to assert infinite divisibility, not just for time, but in a very general way. In his lectures on early Greek thought, he says: ‘Nature is just as infinite inwardly as outwardly: we now get as far as the cell and the parts of the cell: but there is no limit at which one could say that here is the last point inwards: becoming never ceases, into the infinitely small.’² Ten years later, in the poetic ‘prelude’ to The Gay Science, he repeats the assertion: ‘Infinite is the smallest piece of the world!’³ The case of time is different in one respect for Nietzsche, since he is prepared to allow that it is infinitely great as well as infinitely divisible. Apart from that, he takes the world to be finite in all its features, and even asserts the finitude of space.⁴ In the case of time, he also asserts on several occasions that ‘time is infinitely divisible’ .⁵ Finally, he refers to ‘the absolute momentariness of the will to power’.⁶

What influences can we detect in these statements? First and foremost, no doubt, that of Heraclitus.⁷ But for any elaboration of the doctrine of becoming, we must look elsewhere. The problem here is that few later thinkers have considered the idea in its uncompromising form as worthy of serious consideration, and even fewer have been willing to adopt it as an account of reality, if only on an experimental basis. Nevertheless, Nietzsche did find in the work of one contemporary philosopher a useful treatment of absolute becoming.

Nietzsche and Spir

African Spir is a more interesting writer than his lack of continuing reputation would suggest.⁸ A Russian officer who served in the Crimean War, he retired on a private income to Germany and later Switzerland, in order to pursue an interest in philosophy. Working outside the university system, Spir published a number of books in German and French.⁹ The most important of these are Forschung nach der Gewissheit, published in 1869, and his definitive work Denken and Wirklichkeit, which appeared in 1873 and in a new edition in 1877.¹⁰ Nietzsche studied and drew on this work on its first publication, and returned to it more than once in later years.¹¹

Spir here presents a metaphysical system which rests on a sharp and uncompromising separation between the world of appearance and an absolute reality. What makes his position unusual is its insistence that there can be no relation between the two: what is unconditioned cannot be a condition of anything: ‘For it is already clear that no intermediate element at all is possible between the unconditioned and the conditioned, since the concepts ‘unconditioned’ and ‘conditioned’ form an exhaustive disjunction.’ ¹² All we can know of the unconditioned is that it must accord with the logical principle of identity, and from this we can infer that it cannot contain either plurality or change, since both of these would compromise its absolute identity. It is a kind of Parmenidean One. Spir’s development of his position proceeds mainly through criticism of the doctrines of Kant and Herbart. Unlike many of his German contemporaries, he also shows a good knowledge of the British philosophers of the empiricist tradition. The subtitle of the book is Versuch einer Erneuerung der kritischen Philosophie, but Spir is certainly not a neo-Kantian. He does not want to eliminate the thing-in-itself, as Otto Liebmann had proposed in initiating that movement a few years earlier.¹³ Rather, it is Herbart’s metaphysical system that comes closest to his own. One could say that if Herbart was ‘a Kantian of the year 1828’, then Spir is a Herbartian of the year 1873. This does not exclude important differences in doctrine, however. Spir rejects Herbart’s conception of an unconditioned reality consisting of a plurality of simple and changeless ‘reals’, which provide an ontological basis for the phenomena of our experience. He asserts that the absolute principle of identity rules out this plurality, as it does any such relation to the conditioned.

Nietzsche’s reading of Spir is evident in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, written in 1873, where Parmenides is presented as basing his system on the logical principle of identity, as the only certainty available to human knowledge.¹⁴ The expressions that Nietzsche uses here, and the line of thought, are very similar to those of Spir. In Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche several times refers more openly to Spir, not by name, but as a ‘distinguished logician’ .¹⁵ By ‘logician’ he seems to mean not a specialist in formal reasoning, but rather someone who believes in the absolute status of logical truth. It is Spir’s consistent application of this standard that leads to his conception of the unconditioned. Many philosophers, Nietzsche observes, think they can infer something from experience about the nature of the thing in itself.

As against this, more rigorous logicians, having clearly identified the concept of the metaphysical as that of the unconditioned, consequently also unconditioning, have disputed any connection between the unconditioned (the metaphysical world) and the world we know: so that what appears in appearance is precisely not the thing in itself, and no conclusion can be drawn from the former as to the nature of the latter.¹⁶

Nietzsche is open in his admiration for some metaphysical thinkers. In Beyond Good and Evil he praises those who have the integrity and courage to take their line of thinking to its ultimate consequence, even if this means holding a hopeless position. Such a will to truth ‘may ultimately prefer even a handful of “certainty” to a carload of beautiful possibilities’.¹⁷ The reference seems to be to Spir’s Forschung nach der Gewissheit, in which certainty is postulated as the sole aim of philosophy. A single proven proposition, Spir says, is worth ten philosophical systems in which nothing is really proven: ‘The only way for free thinking is thus, first and foremost, to establish what is immediately certain and then to investigate what consequences, drawn with certainty, can be derived from it.’¹⁸

Yet if the content of this certainty amounts to nothing, it is a form of nihilism. Here we should recall Nietzsche’s view that to push an idea to its utmost limit is to bring it ‘to the point of nonsense’.¹⁹ The postulation of an unconditioned reality wholly unconnected with the world of experience turns the notion of a ‘true’ world into ‘an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating – an idea which has become useless and superfluous – consequently, a refuted idea’.²⁰ As such, it is just a prelude to Nietzsche’s own view, that the world of experience is the only world. Thus, by driving metaphysical thinking to its point of destruction, Spir is preparing the way for his anti-metaphysical successors – the ‘new’ philosophers amongst whom Nietzsche counts himself.

Nietzsche himself is no ‘logician’. Much of Human, All-Too-Human is a systematic attack on what he sees as the ‘tyranny’ of logic over philosophy.²¹ Logic, he argues, presupposes that there are ‘identical things’, but this is an unfounded assumption, as indeed is the notion that there are ‘things’ at all. Moreover, the value of logic for life is doubtful. Human beings could not live without the illogical; everything that makes our lives worthwhile comes from drives and feelings to which no logical justification can ever be assigned.²² The same themes run through Nietzsche’s later writings: for example, in The Gay Science he suggests that the ‘logical’ has emerged from the ‘illogical’ through a process of natural selection, favouring those beings whose illusions give them an advantage in the struggle for life.²³ Many similar passages could be cited; to this extent, Nietzsche’s ideas are often developed in criticism of Spir’s doctrines.

In view of his rather austere view of ultimate reality, it may seem surprising that much of Spir’s philosophy is concerned with the world of experience. In fact, the lack of connection between the two is an advantage, for it enables Spir, like Parmenides, to give an account of the ‘way of belief’ which is not predetermined by the metaphysical ‘way of truth’. Here it is his treatment of time which particularly impressed Nietzsche. Arguing against both Kant and Herbart, Spir insists on the empirical reality of time, while denying its a priori status.²⁴ Kant’s error, according to Spir, is to treat space and time on the same basis, a bias attributable to his love of symmetry.²⁵ Succession in time is given to us immediately, and so its reality is undeniable. Space, in contrast, is merely our construction. Since time is nothing apart from succession, we cannot imagine an empty time, whereas we can imagine an empty space, and even assign it a definite size.²⁶ Time...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Sources and Translations
• Introduction
• 1 Spir and Time
• 2 Dühring and Time
• 3 Teichmüller and Perspective
• 4 Zöllner and Space
• 5 Mechanism and Beyond
• 6 Possibility, Probability and Finality
• 7 The Mathematics of Eternal Recurrence
• 8 The Physics of Eternal Recurrence
• 9 Sensualism and Knowledge
• 10 Ressentiment, Revenge and Punishment
• Bibliography
• Index