Nietzsche and Phenomenology: Power, Life, Subjectivity

8 Of the Vision and the Riddle: From Nietzsche to Phenomenology

141 8 of the Vision and the Riddle From Nietzsche to Phenomenology Élodie Boublil to you, drunk with riddles, glad of the twilight, whose soul flutes lure astray to every whirlpool, because you do not want to grope along a thread with cowardly hand; and where you can guess, you hate to deduce—to you alone i tell the riddle that i saw, the vision of the loneliest. —Thus Spoke Zarathustra, iii, “of the Vision and the Riddle” the chapter titled “of the Vision and the Riddle” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra presents the Nietzschean test of the eternal Return. This invitation conveys the premises of the reevaluation to come, since it reverses the traditional connotations associated with riddles, on the one hand, and those related to vision, on the other hand. From the beginning, seeing does not help solve the riddle—as would have been the case within the context of prophetic revelation1 —but it leads to the riddle’s preservation and concealment so that seeing could turn the riddle into the question par excellence that would test the will of the individual confronted by modern nihilism. only the individual who is “delighted in riddles,” only the one who agrees to dance on the moving floor of appearances2 without seeking grounds and justifications, only this courageous individual can hear and see, in the same synesthetic movement, the enigmatic word and stage that stood before zarathustra’s eyes. my essay does not aim to propose another exegesis of the doctrine of the eternal Return. Rather, i would like to propose that zarathustra’s connection between seeing and saying—between the vision and the riddle—may be interpreted as a mise en abyme of a tension structuring Nietzsche’s entire corpus. i argue that this tension anticipates the phenomenological method as a singular way of seeing and questioning the world and its modes of giveness “without inferring.” indeed the tension not only prepares and calls for a deconstruction (Abbau) of the grounds of Western metaphysics, but it also introduces a manner of looking at things that is properly phenomenological, that is, that tells us something about a given phenomenon. i claim that this vision has to be a “glance into the abyss”3 so that the riddle that epitomizes my relation to the world can recover its visibility and its 142 | Power and Expression meaningfulness beyond the sufficient reasons given by metaphysics and the “thesis of the natural world.” moreover it has to be a particular kind of seeing that needs to go beyond mere presencing in order to differ from the metaphysical reifying gaze.4 i shall argue that Nietzsche anticipates what has to be a “phenomenology of the unapparent,” which is a phenomenology that focuses and reflects on the appearing itself and its constitution rather than on appearances themselves. But as Nietzsche explains from the very first pages of the Birth of Tragedy, this “glance into the abyss” disrupts the apollonian individuation and may cause subjectivity’s deconstruction.5 it therefore questions his project as well as phenomenology’s possibilities in terms of taking up a coherent interpretation of the world and its constitution, as well as some ethical consequences for the individual. i would like to show that the tension between vision and enigmatic speech could rearticulate the theoretical space and practical interests of subjectivity more generally in Nietzsche, husserl, heidegger, and merleauPonty . This relation between the vision and the riddle indicates a new understanding of finitude and of its coming ethical possibilities: either from its paradoxical achievement in a seeing that would give access to some kind of transcendence (Nietzsche/ husserl), or from its preservation and concealing thanks to some telling (Nietzsche/ heidegger) whose enigmatic feature would point to the new infinity and the closure/ disclosure function of the hermeneutic circle. The scope of this essay is more comprehensive than historical, in the sense that i am well aware of the potential anachronisms that such comparisons may involve. But going back to Nietzsche could help rephrase the ambitions of any phenomenological reflection that wants to confront itself to the problematic connections between an ontological story about subjectivity’s intentional relation to the world and a way to liberate its power without damaging its life—that is, annihilating its self-constituting life-world.6 The first part of the essay brings to light this problematic relation between vision and riddle, showing that it is a central theme in Nietzsche’s works and that it defines in some sense Nietzsche...