Nietzsche and Phenomenology: Power, Life, Subjectivity

9 The “Biology” to Come? Encounter between Husserl, Nietzsche, and Some Contemporaries

159 9 The “Biology” to come? Encounter between Husserl, Nietzsche, and Some Contemporaries Bettina Bergo this essay addresses two problems whose outcome indicates the site where a dialogue between phenomenology and Nietzsche might begin. The first problem can be posed as a question: What is the “biology” to which husserl refers in appendix 23 of the Crisis (published in 1936) and which is set forth as the “universal ontology”? The second problem concerns embodied consciousness and its life-world. if phenomenology was to serve as the foundation for all scientific endeavors, how then could biology be equated with ontology, and what relationship other than derivative could biology have to phenomenology? let us recall the spirit of the Crisis of European Sciences in light of husserl’s overarching project. By the time he published the Crisis, transcendental psychology was to lead back to the fundamental science of phenomenology. Not that husserl had made a psychologistic turn; on the contrary, he was simply asserting the primacy of embodied , constituting consciousness as the foundation from which to derive what he called “regional ontologies.” a number of access routes thus opened to transcendental phenomenology , including the critical-historical, that of a fundamental psychology, and perhaps that of the biology to come, grounded in the Lebenswelt. transcendental phenomenology remained the formal foundation of all other inquiries, subjective or objective . Phenomenological consciousness, as meaning-conferral, remained the dynamic correlation of noetic aiming and noematic donation, out of which other domains of positive knowledge implicitly arose. yet by the 1930s husserl’s investigation into intersubjective intropathy (Einfühlung), passive syntheses, and association had clearly shown the conundrums of phenomenological consciousness. Thus consciousness was 160 | Power and Expression invariably embodied and tied to bodily movements (kinestheses). however, the essential ground of consciousness, as spontaneous self-constitution and as the flow of time, proceeded on the basis of now-moments and their retentions, rooted in neurological processes unavailable to phenomenological description. Thus the brief arguments for biology, presented in appendix 23 (left out of the english translation), had to do with husserl’s efforts to situate life, understood as physiological processes in lived bodies, in relation to the consciousness brought to light by transcendental psychology. Nevertheless if biology was to be universal ontology, that meant that the relationship between life and consciousness had come center stage, with life and consciousness, consciousness and the life-world constituting each other dynamically. Biology is certainly also—like all positive science—naïve science and “artwork,” where the word is understood as a higher analogy for craftsmanship. The higher consists in that [biology] carries in itself an obscure meaning, whose true and authentic ontological significance [Seinssinn] it seeks to work out as knowledge [Erkenntnis], although it can never reach this [knowledge] in its present form. But biology, above all, could never become a concrete theory of the life-world . . . [although] its proximity to the sources of evidence makes it so near to the depths of things themselves that the way toward transcendental philosophy ought to be easiest for it and with this too, the way to the true a priori.1 The argument for a higher level of inquiry in biology rested on a certainty about which husserl had long been more dogmatic than heidegger: a living being exists coupled at multiple levels with its world. it is never, as transcendental consciousness might be, separable from world or others. Therefore the biology to come, for husserl, had to have as its object “living,” understood as the correlations of organisms and their life-world: “Biology is, for humans, essentially directed by their actual, originally experienceable humanity, because life alone is original, above all, and given in an authentic way in the self-understanding of the biological [des Biologischen]” (hua Vi, 482). moreover, because living is “subjectivated,” individuated thanks to the interaction of organisms with their life-world, the biology of that world, as experienced by human consciousness “on earth,” ought to be universal. it should provide concepts for understanding life in any Lebenswelt. Rather than overtaking transcendental psychology, the biology to come pointed to a long-standing tension in husserl’s work between lived experience and its physiological conditions of possibility. This tension accompanied his investigations into affects and drives throughout the 1920s and it haunted phenomenology in its formalist quality as the science of consciousness. By 1936 a dual tension was obvious in husserl, between transcendental consciousness and embodiment, on the one hand, and between subjective embodiment and life broadly construed as worldly...