Nietzsche and Phenomenology: Power, Life, Subjectivity

2 The Intentional Encounter with “the World”

28 2 The intentional encounter with “the World” christine daigle in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche begins his investigation by considering the human encounter with objects in the world.1 his approach to the problem is initially conducted via a critique of Kant’s philosophy in the first chapter, “of First and last Things.” The book, written for the free spirit—the one that is freed from all alienating metaphysical illusions—was written in the spirit of the enlightenment and was dedicated to Voltaire, “one of the greatest liberators of the spirit.”2 however, being a liberating book and one for the free spirit (or one for the spirit to be freed) does not make Human, All Too Human a rejection of the quest for truth. Quite the contrary: the task for Nietzsche is to reject everything that, up until now, has passed as truth in order to uncover the true nature of the human, his place in the world, and the relation between the human being and the world. Nietzsche thus puts to work Kant’s call, “sapere aude!”—dare to know—that enlightenment call for the human being to stop relying on authority and to seek knowledge for oneself, using the power of one’s spirit. This appetite for knowledge, paired with the courage that is necessary for it, implies a critique and a questioning of the philosophical tradition.3 This is a problem that Nietzsche begins to tackle rather early. already in the essay “truth and lies in a Nonmoral sense” from 1873, he calls into question the notion of truth and of the reality of the thing in-itself.4 according to him, the latter is “pure truth, apart from any of its consequences,” and it is posited as out of our reach and “the least worth striving for” (tl 116). The task of the philosopher is to aim at a critical knowledge that will demonstrate that what passes for truth is a “movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have The Intentional Encounter with “the World” | 29 been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (tl 117). in this early essay, Nietzsche sows the seeds of his future thinking on metaphysics and on the problem of truth. Human, All Too Human revisits this and opens with the chapter “of First and last Things.” The interlocutor is Kant, and the philosophy that is taking shape is a phenomenology.5 in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche’s reflections are articulated by taking into account and examining the encounter between the human being and objects of the world as well as the world itself. his approach to the problem is grounded in a critique of Kant’s philosophy. The first chapter contains this critique and sets the foundations for a Nietzschean phenomenology. in it, we see Nietzsche’s interest in Kant quickly evolve into a phenomenological approach. While he may initially find the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal appealing, he does not follow Kant’s move toward a more idealist understanding of noumena. his phenomenological views form his response to—and his overcoming of—Kant. indeed the thing in-itself that may lie behind the phenomenal realm is regarded as insignificant, precisely because it is outside of our reach. This is not the case in Kant. Nietzsche’s critique of Kant goes hand in hand with his rejection of earlier rationalistic accounts of the self. This rejection makes room for his own view of an intentional consciousness at work in its encounter with the world.6 The phenomenological concept of intentionality is one that Nietzsche uses, albeit without naming it. a close analysis of his writings reveals that he conceives of the human being as a multifaceted and labyrinthic being that constructs itself via its intentional experience of the world. The human subject is a “subjective multiplicity” (Beyond Good and Evil §12; hereafter Bge). Nietzschean perspectivism, which is tied to this notion of the individual, understands our experience of the world in terms of a multifaceted embodied experience . he posits the human as the colorist of the world. The goal becomes to operate a “phenomenological reduction” (Nietzsche does not use this term, but the method he proposes is the same) to go back to the things we have “colored.” This is especially difficult , however...