Abstract
Growing temporal distance allows a clearer understanding of the internal structures of Nietzsche’ s philosophy. The philosophical context is highlighted to the extent that ideologically motivated exploitations or rejections of Nietzsche’ s thought recede in history, illuminating Nietzsche’ s debts to the European philosophical tradition. Eugen Fink sees Nietzsche’s relationship to metaphysics as a relationship of “captivity and liberation.”1 In the fundamental themes of Nietzschean philosophy — the doctine of the will-to-power, the eternal return of the same, the death of God, the Apollonian-Dionysian play “generating all things as products of appearance,” and, finally, the Übermensch — Fink sees a return to the four principles of metaphysics: beings as such, the structural totality of being, the supreme being, and the “disclosedness” of being .2 Thus Nietzsche’s thought is itself absorbed in a doctrine of eternal recurrence, presented as a symbol of the unsurpassed condition of metaphysics.
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Notes
Eugen Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie, (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960), p 179.
Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, (New York: Macmillan, 1965).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann, (New York: Random House, 1966), 20, p. 27. Henceforth cited as BGE, followed by section number. Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 80–81. Henceforth cited as EH, followed by page number.
Cf. J. Simon, “Sprachphilosophische Aspekte der Kategorienlehre,” in Philosophie als Beziehungswissenschaft, Festschrift für Julius Schaaf, 3. Beitrag, (Frankfurt am Main: Heiderhoff, 1971).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Schriften, Band I, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), Philosophische Untersuchungen,Nr. 219 und 371. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe as Philosophical Investigations, (New York: Macmillan, 1958), No. 219 (p. 85e) and No. 371 (p. 116e).
Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 54. Henceforth cited in the text as UM, followed by the page number. 0 Human,All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 21 ff. Henceforth cited in the text as HH followed by the page number.
Wittgenstein, Schriften, Band I, (Frankfurt am Main, 1963), Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Satz 1.2 and 1.21, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 7, Proposition 1.2 and 1.21. [Translation modified by translator.]
The late Wittgenstein speaks of a “primitive idea of the way language functions. But one can also say that it is the idea of a language more primitive than ours.” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations No. 2 (p. 3e)).
Jürgen Habermas, `Nachwort,’ in Nietzsches Erkenntnistheoretischen-Schriften, (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1968), p. 252. English translation in the present volume as “A Postscript from 1968: On Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge,” p. 218 below.
Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. G. Lasson, (Leipzig, 1948), Vol. II, p. 3. Translated by A.V. Miller as Hegel’s Science of Logic, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1969), p. 389.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith, (New York: St. Martin’s, 1929), B142, p. 159.
Ibid., B143 (p. 160). Even more important in these contexts is the note to the preface to “Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft,” in which Kant proposes to solve the problem of “how experience is possible by means of these categories, and only by means of them,” from “the precisely determined definition of a judgment in general.” [Kant, in Werke, Akademie-Ausgabe, (Berlin: Reimer, 1911) Vol. IV, p. 475, trans. J.W. Ellington as Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, in Philosophy of Material Nature, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), p. 13.]
Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, 478 (16). Cf. also J. Simon, “Begriff and Beispiel,” in Kant Studien 1971, Heft 3.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (New York: Penguin, 1968), p. 48. Henceforth cited as TI followed by the page number.
Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 115, p. 71. Henceforth cited as D followed by the section number.
Cf. Nietzsche’s comments about Indo-Germanic grammar, BGE 20. “Precisely this is godlike, that there are gods but no God!” Thus Spoke Zarathustra,trans. W. Kaufmann, (New York: Penguin, 1966), p. 220. Henceforth cited as Z.
Since talent is an innate productive ability of the artist,“ that ”belongs itself to nature“ and ”through which nature gives the rule to art.“ Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 46. Trans. W.S. Pluher, Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 174.
There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks“ is, according to Nietzsche, ”simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed.“ ”Along the lines followed by Descartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief’ (WM 484), the “belief’ in grammar seen in this context as the final reason of the Cartesian proof of a ”perfect“ essence which does not deceive us. Cf. K.H. Volkmann-Schluck, Leben and Denken, Interpretationen zur Philosophie Friedrich Nietzsches (Frankfurt am Main, 1968), pp. 72 ff.
With this concept of consciousness, of course, the possibility of seriously allowing oneself to be deceived further by some object of consciousness or of deceiving oneself by holding it to be true is sublated [aufgehoben] as well. The alternatives, whether the perspectivity of life is the “truth” of the perspectivity of grammar or whether grammar is the “truth” of the perspectivity of life, seem equally pointless. With Nietzsche, grammar is presented as a structure every reflection presupposes as a condition of its possibility, including the reflection upon this structure itself as an object of consciousness as well as the reflection upon relations between objects of consciousness, e.g., upon the relationship between “life” and “consciousness.” This becomes clear when Nietzsche — here with reference to Leibniz — fixes “consciousness” as an “accidens of representation [Vorstellung]” The Gay Science, trans.W. Kaufmann, (New York: Random House, 1967), 357, p. 305; henceforth GS followed by section number], i.e., according to the (transcendental-grammatical) scheme substance-accident, thereby denying it its own being. Foundation, reducing one thing to another already follows from the “schematism of the `thing’” as the [“old] error of the ground” [WP 479]. Nietzschesche sees the “tragedy” of the philosopher precisely in the compulsion of such foundations according to the scheme of a reductive translation according to grammatical rules in “conditions more familiar to him,” i e., in “a language the individual understands” (ibid.; KSA 13, 460) [Kaufmann/Hollingdale translation altered to restore contextual meaning and italicization. — Ed.] in which it holds itself, as consciousness, in a universally binding “social or herd nature” (GS 354). “Knowledge” in general, even “philosophical” knowledge that believes that it is able to inquire into “knowledge of knowledge” (WP 530), is, according to Nietzsche, “nothing more than this: something strange is reduced to something familiar” (GS 355). Different names like “life” and “language” belong to this familiar “surface” (EH, p. 65) of linguistically borne consciousness (GS 354) as it simultaneously took form with language and the valuations sedimented within language. From the viewpoint of this consciousness, the “ground” of such estimations is called “life” in the dichotomy life-consciousness; it is the inestimable ground of all valuations. Through it, founding itself contents itself without grounds as if in an irrational element. “Life” stands as a metaphor for the insight into the groundlessness of the founding which follows grammar.
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. M. Cowan (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1962), p. 82–83. Henceforth cited as PT, followed by section numbers.
Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, p 480 (18).
Cf. J. Simon, Philosophie and linguistische Theorie, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971).
Letter, Leibniz to Varignon, 2 February 1702, in Philosophical Papers and Letters, Second Edition, translated by L. Loemker, (Dordrecht: Riedel, 1970), p. 544. [Translation by the translator.]
On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann, (New York: Random House, 1967), III:9; 113. Henceforth GM, followed by essay and section number.
Cf. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister, (Leipzig: Meiner, 1949), Vorrede, especially pp. 49 ff. Translated by A.V. Miller as Phenomenology of Spirit, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), see Preface, especially pp. 37 ff.
W. von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, Akademie-Ausgabe, ed. A Leitzmann, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968 [1903 ff.]) Vol. VI, p. 147.
Cf. especially Humboldt, “Über Denken and Sprechen,” Gesammelte Schriften,Vol. VII 1, pp. 581 ff. and “fiber das Entstehen der grammatischen Formen, and ihren Einfluß auf die Ideenentwicklung,” Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV, pp. 285 ff.
Nietzsche, Frühe Schriften, ed. H.-J. Mette, (Munich: Beck, 1994), Vol. I, p. 152. [Given that, in this particular context, the young Nietzsche refers to “Humbold” as the one who instigated in him a “Drang nach Erkenntniß, nach universeller Bildung,” and subsequently lists “Blumen and Pflanzen, die Hülle der Erde,” “Baukunst,” etc.“, tends to support Holger Schmid’s observation that Nietzsche’s reference is more likely to Alexander rather than Wilhelm von Humboldt. — Ed.]
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. W. Kaufmann, (New York: Random House, 1967), § 8, p. 63.
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense,” in eds. & trans., S. Gilman et al., Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, (New York: Oxford University Press 1989), P. 254. Henceforth cited in the text as TL, followed by page number.
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Simon, J. (1999). Grammar and Truth: On Nietzsche’s Relationship to the Speculative Sentential Grammar of the Metaphysical Tradition. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 203. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2430-2_10
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