Philosophy, Revision, Critique: Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Emerson - Hardcover

Wittenberg, David

 
9780804734158: Philosophy, Revision, Critique: Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Emerson
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0804734151 ISBN 13: 9780804734158
Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Philosophers have almost always relegated the topic of revision to the sidelines of their discipline, if they have thought about it at all. This book contends that acts of revision are central and indispensable to the project of philosophizing and that philosophy should be construed essentially as a practice of rereading and rewriting. The book focuses chiefly on Heidegger’s highly influential interpretation of Nietzsche, conducted in lectures during the 1930s and 1940s and published in 1961. The author closely analyzes the rhetorical means by which Heidegger repositions Nietzsche’s thinking within a broad history of metaphysics, even as Heidegger positions his own reinterpretation as that history’s more “proper” reading.

The author argues that Heidegger’s revisionist project recasts the philosophical text as paralipsis, a special kind of ironic statement that when “properly” received by the philosophical rereader, expresses what the text did not and could not say. The study of such paraliptical revisionism within the philosophical canon offers a new way of understanding the basic historicity of the philosophical text, a text that is critically indistinguishable from its own future history of interpretations. Philosophy itself is revision, a deeply historicist rereading practice, a continuous reappropriation of its own improper textual past.

In addition to being the first book-length published study of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, the book also examines the work of Hans-Robert Jauss, Harold Bloom, and other critics of revision. In particular, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early essays on history, read both with and against Heidegger’s analysis of metaphysics, demonstrate why the historical intervention achieved by revisionist reading is not only a formal and thematic alteration of the past, but also a rhetorical coercion of future interpretive tendencies. No philosophical reader is simply a user or victim of revisionist methods: in rereading philosophical pasts, the reader is the very mechanism by which such interpretive tendencies are first formed into problems or thoughts within the philosophical canon.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Wittenberg is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Iowa.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Philosophers have almost always relegated the topic of revision to the sidelines of their discipline, if they have thought about it at all. This book contends that acts of revision are central and indispensable to the project of philosophizing and that philosophy should be construed essentially as a practice of rereading and rewriting. The book focuses chiefly on Heidegger’s highly influential interpretation of Nietzsche, conducted in lectures during the 1930s and 1940s and published in 1961. The author closely analyzes the rhetorical means by which Heidegger repositions Nietzsche’s thinking within a broad history of metaphysics, even as Heidegger positions his own reinterpretation as that history’s more “proper” reading.
The author argues that Heidegger’s revisionist project recasts the philosophical text as paralipsis, a special kind of ironic statement that when “properly” received by the philosophical rereader, expresses what the text did not and could not say. The study of such paraliptical revisionism within the philosophical canon offers a new way of understanding the basic historicity of the philosophical text, a text that is critically indistinguishable from its own future history of interpretations. Philosophy itself is revision, a deeply historicist rereading practice, a continuous reappropriation of its own improper textual past.
In addition to being the first book-length published study of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, the book also examines the work of Hans-Robert Jauss, Harold Bloom, and other critics of revision. In particular, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early essays on history, read both with and against Heidegger’s analysis of metaphysics, demonstrate why the historical intervention achieved by revisionist reading is not only a formal and thematic alteration of the past, but also a rhetorical coercion of future interpretive tendencies. No philosophical reader is simply a user or victim of revisionist methods: in rereading philosophical pasts, the reader is the very mechanism by which such interpretive tendencies are first formed into problems or thoughts within the philosophical canon.

Aus dem Klappentext

Philosophers have almost always relegated the topic of revision to the sidelines of their discipline, if they have thought about it at all. This book contends that acts of revision are central and indispensable to the project of philosophizing and that philosophy should be construed essentially as a practice of rereading and rewriting. The book focuses chiefly on Heidegger s highly influential interpretation of Nietzsche, conducted in lectures during the 1930s and 1940s and published in 1961. The author closely analyzes the rhetorical means by which Heidegger repositions Nietzsche s thinking within a broad history of metaphysics, even as Heidegger positions his own reinterpretation as that history s more proper reading.
The author argues that Heidegger s revisionist project recasts the philosophical text as paralipsis, a special kind of ironic statement that when properly received by the philosophical rereader, expresses what the text did not and could not say. The study of such paraliptical revisionism within the philosophical canon offers a new way of understanding the basic historicity of the philosophical text, a text that is critically indistinguishable from its own future history of interpretations. Philosophy itself is revision, a deeply historicist rereading practice, a continuous reappropriation of its own improper textual past.
In addition to being the first book-length published study of Heidegger s interpretation of Nietzsche, the book also examines the work of Hans-Robert Jauss, Harold Bloom, and other critics of revision. In particular, Ralph Waldo Emerson s early essays on history, read both with and against Heidegger s analysis of metaphysics, demonstrate why the historical intervention achieved by revisionist reading is not only a formal and thematic alteration of the past, but also a rhetorical coercion of future interpretive tendencies. No philosophical reader is simply a user or victim of revisionist methods: in rereading philosophical pasts, the reader is the very mechanism by which such interpretive tendencies are first formed into problems or thoughts within the philosophical canon.

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Philosophy, Revision, Critique

Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and EmersonBy DAVID WITTENBERG

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3415-8

Contents

Abbreviations................................................................................xiIntroduction.................................................................................11. The Art of Reading Properly, Part 1: The Discordance of Art and Truth.....................222. The Art of Reading Properly, Part 2: Nietzsche's Philosophy Proper........................413. Paralipsis, Part 1: A Rhetoric of Rereading...............................................624. Paralipsis, Part 2: Revision as History of Being..........................................81Interlude: The Reception of Revision.........................................................995. Revision as Canon Formation: Misreading in Harold Bloom...................................1126. Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Rereading in Emerson..........................................1317. Thought for Food (Eating Eternal Return)..................................................157Epilogue: A Suggestion About Canon Formation in Philosophy...................................193Notes........................................................................................207Works Cited..................................................................................251Index........................................................................................261

Chapter One

The Art of Reading Properly, Part 1: The Discordance of Art and Truth

The best insights are arrived at last. But the best insights are methods! -NIETZSCHE, The Will to Power

In a fragment dated 1888 and published after his death, Nietzsche writes, "Very early in my life I became serious about the relation of art to truth: and even now I stand in a holy terror before this discordance" (Ne, 1:74; Ng, 1:88). Heidegger, in his lecture course for the winter term of 1936-1937, sets out to rethink Nietzsche's philosophy in such a way that art and truth will no longer stand in this "Entsetzen erregender Zwiespalt," or "terror arousing discordance" (Ne, 1:142; Ng, 1:167). Instead, what Heidegger's interpretation will expose is an underlying "concordance [Einklang]" or "unity [Einheit]" between the concepts of art and truth. On the face of it, then, Heidegger's first revision of Nietzsche proceeds by means of a simple reversal, a tactic ostensibly borrowed from Nietzsche himself, whose characteristic "procedure," Heidegger writes, "is a constant reversing" (Ne, 1:29; Ng, 1:38).

Ultimately, Heidegger will not follow this procedure, although, as I will discuss, he will recast the relationship between art and truth in a number of more complicated ways. The full character of his engagement with Nietzsche's discordance can only be understood by pursuing his references to the underlying and overarching context of Nietzsche's essential "thinking," with respect to which reversals and revisions in Heidegger's reading acquire consequences far beyond those of any straightforward correction of Nietzsche's understanding of two concepts. Heidegger offers his entire analysis of Nietzsche in the light of a general concern with "Western metaphysics," a term which names an epoch of thought both he and Nietzsche also characterize as "Platonism," conceptions I will analyze in more detail. For Heidegger, the dispute between himself and Nietzsche over the relation of art and truth signifies a profound divergence in their respective interpretations of the character of Platonism and its influence on Western thinking. The discordance of art and truth within Nietzsche's thinking is symptomatic of his "failure" properly to understand this broader context and to understand his own immanence within it. Thus, quite in contrast to a reversal of Nietzsche's thoughts on art and truth, Heidegger's interpretation attempts to contextualize and "ground" Nietzsche's faulty stance with respect to Platonism overall, an essential revision not only of Nietzsche's position on truth and art, but of the entire metaphysics his position represents. And through this broader understanding of Nietzsche, and of the context of his thinking, Heidegger's reading aims, or at least begins to aim, at an overcoming of metaphysics itself.

The reading of Nietzsche that Heidegger offers is therefore revisionist in a quite fundamental sense, for in his effort to make Nietzsche "understood," Heidegger presumes to say what is most crucially implicit in the underground of Nietzsche's thinking, but often directly against what Nietzsche explicitly states. Heidegger's reading will expose meanings within Nietzsche's thinking truer than any Nietzsche would or could have thought of himself: indeed, he identifies such implicit meanings as Nietzsche's "fundamental metaphysical position [metaphysische Grundstellung]." So, for instance, although the discordance of art and truth is manifest and even obvious in Nietzsche's writing, the putatively more basic concordance that Heidegger uncovers and interprets out of the context of Nietzsche's thinking is a facet of Nietzsche's metaphysische Grundstellung, despite what the text says, and despite what Nietzsche might have thought it says. With the identification of such a basic divergence between Nietzsche's explicit statement and his underlying position, we have a first indication of the shape of Heidegger's revision, beyond simple reversal: the revision forms itself around a distinction between, and an evaluation of, at least two different levels of Nietzsche's thinking.

The big picture that will allow us to distinguish Nietzsche's immanent Platonism from its historical ground can emerge only in a historical epoch after Nietzsche, an emergence in contrast with which Nietzsche's own philosophy appears essentially nascent. Heidegger names this epoch with terms peculiar to his own historical self-description: for instance, he calls it the "epoch of the question of Being." Under such a hermeneutical umbrella Heidegger finds himself at a vantage from which to perceive a general economy of unity or belonging-together not only between art and truth but also between any number of Nietzsche's most adamant discordances and antipathies, indeed within his very tone of discordance. In general, Heidegger declares with respect to Nietzsche's texts, "only those [things] which are related to one another can be opposed to one another" (Ne, 1:189; Ng, 1:219). Or, more elaborately: "Discordance is present only where [the elements] which sever the unity of their belonging-together must diverge from one another by virtue of that very unity.... While truth and art belong to the essence of reality with equal originality [gleichursprnglich], they [must] diverge from one another and go against one another [gehen sie auseinander und gegeneinander]" (Ne, 1:217; Ng, 1:250). The discordance of art and truth, and indeed the typical (and strategic) discordant tone of Nietzsche's polemical conceptualizations generally, are viewed by Heidegger as an epochal prolepsis; they are the historically determined anticipations of their own unifications in a concordant reading such as Heidegger's own. Thus Nietzsche's own procedures are placed quite in a passive position by Heidegger's reading, as though the discordance of art...

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Verlag
Stanford University Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804734151
ISBN 13 
9780804734158
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
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