Abstract
Usually philosophical problems are overcome not by their resolution but rather by redefinition. Displacements of power in the realm of concepts accompany these new orientations. In this sense, the history of thought can be seen as the sometimes imperceptibly fluid, sometimes bizarre and abrupt, movements of our concepts. It is known that Nietzsche experienced his thought as a scene of logical turbulence which called forth a revaluation of all values. This revaluation completed itself when the leading concepts of the old order reversed or lost their traditional meanings, and all the rest had thereby to appear in a new light. In the following, this revaluation is developed with respect to two central concepts of traditional philosophy that Nietzsche, without defining them anew or otherwise, employed only casually, although their meaning was radically transformed as a consequence of the general revaluation — intuition and imagination. The topic concerns concepts that serve to describe human knowledge, but which simultaneously should also signify real functions of the knowing soul. And it is essential to remember that these concepts, according to traditional understandings, never meant the same things but each of them meant something different, and in some respects even meant something contradictory.
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Notes
Modi, facultates, vires, functiones (cogitandi/cognoscendi, et al.): cf., Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii (abbreviated as Reg.) and Meditationes de prima philosophia (abbreviated as Med.), pass., cited in OEuvres de Descartes, edited by Ch. Adam and P. Tannery, eleven volumes, Paris 1897–1909 (abbreviated as AT). [Cited from the English translation by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch as The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, three volumes, Cambridge University Press, 1985, — Trans.]
Reg. 12, AT X411.
Cf., especially Reg. 3, AT X 368. This turn of phrase has rich and widespread historical roots; and was, therefore, not as “new” as Descartes lets the reader believe (Reg. 3, AT X 369), however controversial. Cf., Th. Kobusch, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, J. Ritter and K. Gründer, eds., Vol. 4 (1976). Cf., for Intuition, ibid., pp. 524–40.
Reg. 3, AT X 370.
[Literally, “a wooden iron (ein hölzernes Eisen),” expresses a philosophical contradiction or oxymoron. — Trans.]
Cf., the definition of necessary conjunction (coniunctio necessaria) in Reg. 12, AT X 421.
“Thirdly...Fourthly...[Dicimus tertio...quarto... ], (Reg. 12, AT X 420 and 421).
Cf., Reg. 12, AT X 421, lines 19–23 in connection with 419, lines 9–17.
“...it is not possible for us ever to understand anything beyond those simple natures and a certain mixture or compounding of one with another [nihil nos unquam intelligere posse praeter istas naturas simplices, et quandam illarum inter se mixturam sive compositionem],” (Reg. 12, AT X 422).
’good sense’ or `reason’ is naturally equal in all men [(le bon sens ou la raison est) naturellement égale en tous les hommes];“ even clearer in the Latin version from 1644: ”(bonam mentem seu rectam rationem) natura aequalem omnibus nobis innatam esse,“ (Discours de la Méthode 1, AT VI 2 and 540).
Cf., Discours 2, AT VI 13; Sextae responsiones, AT VII 441; Principia philosophiae I 1 and I 71, AT VIII, 1, 5 and 35ff. — A complete presentation and exposition of these themes can be found in Henri Gouhier, La pensée métaphysique de Descartes, Paris 1962, in Chapter 2: L’enfance abusive, 41–62. According to Gouhier, for Descartes (as opposed to Plato), not the original connection of the soul with the body, but the first time of this connection is precisely our unavoidable childhood, a scandal of the human condition [un scandale de la condition humaine, in French in the original. — Trans.], (52).
Metaphysica dubitandi ratio (Med. 3, AT VII 36).
Med. 2, AT VII 25.
“Perhaps some God could have given me a nature such that I was deceived even in matters which seemed most evident [i.e., arithmetic or geometry]...it would be easy for him, if he so desired, to bring it about that I go wrong even in those matters which I think I see utterly clearly [quam evidentissime] with my mind’s eye,” (Med. 3, AT VII 36).
The only reason for my later judgment that they were open to doubt (was this preconceived belief in the supreme power of God)...Any reason for doubt which depends simply on this supposition is a very slight and, so to speak, metaphysical one (Med. 3, AT VII 36).
In notes of approximately the same time (Summer 1885), Nietzsche speaks more clearly: “the belief in the immediate certainty of thought is just another belief, and no certainty! We...protect ourselves against his (i.e., Descartes’) dogmatic thoughtlessness of doubt. `It must be doubted better than Descartes!’” (KSA 11, 641). [Jenseits von Gute und Böse, translated by W. Kaufmann as Beyond Good and Evil, (New York: Random House, 1966), abbreviated as BGE].
Descartes also sees the possibility and danger of doubting the simplicity of that which is known intuitively as simple. It shows itself in the suspicion that a simple nature is perhaps known only incompletely through intuition. Yet something cannot be, which may not be: if a simple nature could be known incompletely it would no longer be simple (Reg. 12, AT X 420). That is certainly an acceptable explication of the concept of simple. Yet who says that thought could know something absolutely simple; and more concretely, that the concept `place’ or `motion’ are simple examples for the thought of absolutely simple natures (cf. Reg. 12, AT X 426ff.)? In the context of Borsche’s reading of Nietzsche’s critique of Descartes, I have translated Nietzsche’s Ich as `I,’ rather than translating it with Kaufmann as `ego.’ — Trans.]
Cf., KSA 1, 881ff.; more closely, cf., the fourth section of this article.
Cf., e.g., Reg. 8, AT X 398; Reg. 12, AT X 411.
Cf. also, Les Passions de l’Ame I 17–29, AT XI 342–50. [The Passions of the Soul, in CSM 335–9, — Trans.]
Reg. 12, AT X 418.
Cf., Traité de la Lumière (abbreviated as Lum.) 6, AT XI 36.
Cf., Lum. 6ff., AT XI 31–48; on 31, lines 17ff., and on 48, lines 18; a similar clue in The Discourse on Method 1, AT VI 4. A detailed presentation and explanation of the Cartesian motive for a fictional physics — around 1647, Descartes allowed himself to be portrayed by the painter J.B. Weenix with a book in his hand that shows the viewer the words: Mundus est fabula — is to be found in Ferdinand Alquié, La découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes, Paris, 1950, Section VI: La fable du monde, 110–33. Alquié wishes to understand Descartes’s fiction as `ontology-less science,’ in the sense of a Kantian critique of knowledge and modern physics: the derealization of the world is, therefore, the condition of its explication (115). However, he also unavoidably comes up against the problem of the correspondence of knowledge and the real that, according to Descartes, is to be solved — metaphysically — by recourse to divine truth (116).
Lum. 6, AT XI 36. [Cf., CSM 92 and 97. Borsche’s translation of Descartes use of the term “ feindre” as “erfinden (to invent)” should be taken in the sense of “feign, simulate, dissimulate, s?retend, counterfeit.” — Trans.]
Lum. 6, AT XI 36.
Cf., Lum. 5, AT XI 31, and especially, Treatise on Man (AT XI 200).
Lum. 7, AT XI 47.
Cf., Lum. 7, AT XI 38.43. 46ff.
Lum. 7, AT XI 47.
Lum. 5, AT XI 31.
Lum. 7, AT XI 48.
In the Discourse 4, Descartes defines imagination precisely as “a way of thinking especially suited to material things,” (AT VI 37).
Descartes deals with this division fully in the Treatise on Man,Part 5, AT XI 170–202.
Cf., The Passions of the Soul 117, AT XI 342.
Med. 2, AT VII 24. Cf., Nietzsche, KSA 11, 638: “it is doubtful that the `subject’ can prove itself — for that, it would have to really have a fixed point outside itself, and that is missing!”
Cf., Aristotle, De anima, III 3, 428 a 1–4.
De anima II 8, 420 b 31ff
Cf., BGE 17: “It thinks; but that this `it’ is precisely the famous old `I’ is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an `immediate certainty.”`
E.g., KSA 13, 301–2: “there is neither `Spirit’ nor reason, nor thought, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions of no use.”
E.g., KSA 11, 654: “...’logical truth’ — but which itself is only possible in an imaginary world.”
Cf., KSA 13, 478: “everything that is simple, is plain imaginary, is not `true.”`
Cf., KSA 13, 301–2.
Francis Bacon, The Works, Spedding et al., eds., 1 (1858) 494, and 3 (1859) 329. For Bacon this assignment is quite familiar. Its origin may be sought in the Renaissance poetics of the Cinquecento. Cf. here, the reference in E. Panofsky, Idea, Leipzig 1924, esp. 34ff., from which one can gather that the thought of an artistic imagination did not, from the beginning, take up the Aristotelian concept of fantasy, i.e., imagination; rather, had initially given itself expression, by enlarging the concept (understood as (neo-) Platonic) of the idea. Cf. also, the well known and quite enlightening explication in Robert Klein, “L’imagination comme vêtement de l’âme chez Marsile Ficin et Giordano Bruno,” in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 61 (1956), 18–38.
According to usual ways of speaking, illusion and error are that which come in against will, when truth and being are intended but missed. They define themselves merely from that which they are not, and thus remain indeterminate themselves. If Nietzsche speaks of “willed illusion” or “willed error,” then that happens according to a completely intentional reversal of the valid logic of concepts. According to this logic, the terms “lie” and “fiction” (which he also employs) would be more appropriate. Here, however, a moral valuation is implied that runs no less against his intentions as the logical order there. An adequate, i.e., customary means of expression, is not available to Nietzsche for this new thinking. According to context, he seems to prefer a provocative formulation in either a logical or moral perspective.
Cf., KSA 12, VIII 8 [1], 323–6; KSA 13, 11 [327], 139–40; 14 [120], 299–300; 14 [159], 343–4; 15 [57], 445; 17 [3], 522.
Cf., KSA , 13 193, VIII 11 [415], among many others. The renaming follows consciously and consequently, cf., KSA 12, 239: “`wishability,’ I say, not ideal.”
Ecce Homo, “Why I am a Destiny,” 3.
Ibid., Cf., KSA 12, VIII 1 [145], 144: “this last virtue, our virtue, is called: probity.”
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Borsche, T. (1999). The Epistemological Shift from Descartes to Nietzsche: Intuition and Imagination. 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_4
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