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Angela Zhou Sarah Pourciau (Preceptor Jeffrey Kirkwood) GER 210 19 May 2013 GER 210 Final Exam I. Passage Analysis:

1. Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil: Nietzsche views his philosophical project as a departure from and rejection of the traditional philosophical conception that strives to generate philosophical systems of objective truth. He employs a perspectival approach in his philology, or history of ideas, in a history ultimately intertwined with the individual psyche and its contingencies. He claims his new project is able to place itself beyond good and evil by acknowledging untruth as a condition of life resisting the usual value feelings in a dangerous manner. (passage 4, Beyond Good and Evil) He also acknowledges that these and other philosophical concepts are useful fictions and to renounce them would be a renunciation of life itself. Nietzsche thinks that what it means to be human is related to the fact that life itself is will to power (13); this human agency (for Nietzsche, for the noble at least) is a fundamental aspect of what it should mean to be human. He also acknowledges as part of the individual human condition that we are mediated from the truth and reality of the world by successive layers of sense-systems, from the metaphorical structures of language to the metaphorical visual and cognitive structures, and therefore the notion of objective truth is inherently impossible. Insofar as Nietzsche recognizes the will to power as an essential part of being human, he sees the degeneration of humanity as that which places the community above the individual, in

the process encouraging and demanding mediocrity, subsuming the individual under a herd morality that values the weak at the expense of the strong. He sees this as something that fundamentally thwarts the development of individual excellence. Moreover, he identifies the development and progression of morality as one that has led to the misguided modern values. As an alternative, Nietzsche seems to be advocating, and indeed writing for, a new breed of philosophers and free spirits who feel the compulsion to give impetus to opposed valuations and initiate a revaluation and reversal of eternal values.. To teach humanity its future as its will, as dependent on a human will... to put an end to the gruesome rule of chance and nonsense that has passed for history so far. However, as much as Nietzsche polemicizes against the valuation of truth and value that he identifies as an unnecessary presupposition in conventional philosophy, his claims here are implicitly normative, implying that in some sense his critique is informed by his own value judgments on his standard of what the human ought to be. It appears that he is normatively valuing individual excellence and nobility over mediocrity and the herd morality, therefore is contradicting his own skepticism and destabilization of notions of such things as the Good or objective truth. If he has destabilized the legitimacy of the process of valuation, he has not quite justified himself completely in implicitly employing his own value system in normatively prescribing what human values ought to be or to strive for. In general, this passage reflects Nietzsches abhorrence of the modern value system and indicates his motivation for performing the transvaluation of values that seeks to understand how the valuation of values itself came about. In the process, he performs his genealogical method which inherently analyzes the perspectival and subjective relationship to historical notions in motivating his understanding of the characteristics of the new philosophers. He also

transvalues morality and deplores the subjection of the individual to the groups self-preservation, thus motivating his project in terms of a transvaluation of values, critique of modern values, and critique of morality. 2. Wittgenstein Wittgenstein, in his boundary drawing project, identifies philosophy as not a body of doctrine but an activity (4.112). In doing so, he considers that a philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations: using propositions to say things clearly insofar that it can. The role of philosophy is not to generate special propositions, but the clarification of propositions: to shake away the disguise of language on thought and expose the underlying formulations and relations, to make them [propositions] clear and to give them sharp boundaries (4.112). He identifies philosophy as analyzing the boundaries of thoughts, for the various sciences and their modes of thinking as well. He argues that philosophy finds the limits of what can be thought by moving outwards rather than inwards because in order to draw a boundary of thought itself, one would need to think the other side of the limit of thought, which would be a contradiction since it is outside of thought. Therefore he motivates his project by pursuing a limit drawn to the expression of thought, which would then necessarily circumscribe the realm of what can be thought. Propositions are able to describe reality completely since they contain their possibilities, restrict reality to two possibilities of truth and falsehood, and are themselves pictures of reality understanding a picture of reality implies being able to understand a picture of the state of affairs. However, propositions themselves cannot themselves depict logical form. Logical form is the condition of possibility for propositions to have sense in general; logical form is the relationality of objects that is isomorphic between representations and the rule of transformation. Logical

form uniquely describes the object up to its concrete instantiation as an entity, as he writes in 2.0233, If two objects have the same logical form, the only distinction between them, apart from their external properties, is that they are different. Wittgenstein also argues that pictures are incapable of depicting their own pictorial forms (the relation of the picture elements to the objects in reality) since pictures represent the subject from an internal space and the picture cannot exit or be external to its own representational form. The same argument applies for logical form, which Wittgenstein recognizes is inherent in all pictures as a condition for the relations of pictorial form, though pictures may feature other spatial or visual forms. Propositions cannot express their own logical form because to do so would be to exit the logical space (which is the world and its reality) which would then be a contradiction and illogical statement. Here, Wittgensteins careful consideration of the conditions of sensible statements from propositions is reflected throughout the entire Tractatus as he makes sense of the conditions of sense or nonsense itself. His concern with valid spaces of representation based on this rule of transformation reflects a fundamental understanding in the Tractatus and its concern with the relations between objects rather than the objects as entities themselves.

II.

Short Answers

A. By genealogy, Nietzsche is referring to an analysis of the origin, history, and development of concepts over time. For example, in his genealogy of morals, he considers the premoral, moral, and modern moral conditions in the context of how it is understood by the contemporary time period and its people. He also examines the genealogy of Christianity as it relates to the people and their conceptions of morality.

Nietzsches understanding of history differs from Hegel in that he agrees that history is a succession of negations, but he doesnt see the corresponding negation of negations that ultimately teleologically leads to the Absolute that Hegel considers; rather, he sees history as ultimately influenced by individual narratives and a series of negations and subduing without a final endgoal. B. Nietzsche questions the conventional valuation of value itself; given that the conventional understanding presupposes these as objective/universal concepts when in fact they arise from psychological idiosyncracies that have simply been accepted over time. He writes in the preface, we will realize again and again just what actually served as the cornerstone of those sublime and unconditional philosophical edifices - some piece of folk superstition from time immemorial some word play perhaps, a seduction of grammar or an overeager generalization from facts that are really very local, very personal, very human-all-too-human (3). Nietzsche questions the blind pursuit of truth when truth is mediated by intractable layers of semblance and metaphor, and is inherently beyond linguistic description. He identifies this as the reason behind the democratic implementation of a herd morality, and he seeks to revisit those values which herd morality sought to suppress in suppressing the individual in favor of the groups own self preservation. Beyond Good and Evil paves the way for such a transvaluation by elucidating this skeptical viewpoint on the historical treatment of values and performing a genealogical critique on the historical development of values and morality, and how that has led to the herd morality that he identifies in the modern era. He also calls for the free spirits to arise and perform this transvaluation. C. A picture is a model of reality (2.12), how we picture facts to ourselves. The elements of a picture are related to one another in a determinate way; the conditions of possibility for this

determinate structure of the picture is its pictorial form, which (2.151) is the possibility that things are related to one another in the same way as the elements of the picture. That is, it is the relational correspondence between the elements of a picture and the reality it depicts that is its pictorial form. Since reality itself is dictated by a certain logical form, the pictorial form must itself be of a logical form. Therefore (2.182) Every picture is at the same time a logical one. E. Wittgensteins boundary drawing project, like Kants, seeks to circumscribe an epistemological realm accessible to our thought, but his project specifically sees thought as intertwined with language and considers the limits of what can or cannot be said in a meaningful sense as a limit on thought. In contrast, Kants boundary-drawing project considers what can or cannot be thought in terms of valid use of reason, and draws a distinction between the phenomenal world of appearances and the noumenal world of things-in-themselves. Wittgenstein takes this boundary one step further and analyzes language and its conditions as a condition of possibility for thought itself. Wittgenstein states in the preface of Tractatus, The book deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I believe, that the reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood Kant argues in a parallel fashion about the resolution of seeming antinomies as paradoxes as mere misapplications of reason to a realm (metaphysics) about which it has no validity or access. F. For Heidegger, phenomenology means to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself (58). He distinguishes phenomenology from other philosophies of study by acknowledging that phenomenology doesnt designate the object it researches, only understanding phenomena on their own terms, exhibiting and demonstrating them directly. In the process, he identifies a concept of disclosing such that that which demands

that it become a phenomenon, and which demands this in a distinctive sense is what phenomenology has taken into its grasp thematically as its object (59). Heidegger concludes that ontology is only possible as phenomenology. G. The hermeneutical circle for Heidegger is the process of understanding that relies on iterative interpretation. Interpretation for Heidegger is the process of understanding an object as something within a certain context; it is not necessarily what is empirically the fact but Heidegger sees this process of Interpretation as a rich method of understanding. Interpretation then is founded essentially upon fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception (194). He acknowledges that interpretation which is to contribute understanding must already have understood what is to interpreted (194). He regards this vicious hermeneutic circle as constructive and the expression of the existential fore-structure of Dasein itself (195). He identifies that the most primordial kind of knowing is made possible by this iterative mode of interpretation and that this is essential to the structure of meaning. K. What is the dialectic of enlightenment? Adorno and Horkheimer identify the dialectic of enlightenment in that in the Enlightenments instrumentation of totalizing reason in an attempt to eliminate and move beyond the irrationality and untruth the movement sees in the mythology of old, the Enlightenment ends up becoming mythology in that its taxonomic structure of knowledge is only able to replicate what is out there, rather than reveal true insight or Knowledge as such. In the drive to surpass and negate mythology by explaining the world with the instrumentation of reason, the Enlightenment ultimately negates its own ability to provide meaningful insight and instead is only able to reduce and reproduce what exists.

M. By observation, Luhmann refers to a process of distinction and distinguishing. He describes the problem of observation as following from the problem of distinguishing between the system and environment, and addresses the central question of how the system can be observed or distinguished from within. He identifies that the observer in distinguishing between observer and observed object generates such a difference, and that this operation is dependent on the nature of self-reference. Moreover, he identifies between the observer who observes other external systems and their behaviors, and the observer who observes processes in the system of which he is a part of. III. Long Essay D. Starting with Nietzsche, we see language move into the philosophical foreground. What role does language play in the thought of philosophers from Nietzsche onward, and how does this reassessment of the role of language transform the Kantian/Hegelian heritage? Which philosophical concepts and constructs does the emphasis on language allow later thinkers to replace or reinterpret? The traditional role of language in Kant and mostly present in Hegel was a taxonomical interest in distinguishing and elucidating between concepts and different modalitiesand categories of thought. Language provided a theoretical background structure for philosophers understanding of the world. Beginning with Nietzsche and continuing after, philosophers place much more primary importance on language as both a method of analysis and an object of critique for various ends. Kant employs a great deal of terminology in untangling and identifying nuances of understanding previously taken for granted, but he is less interested in a positive definition of his terms per se than rather the faculty he gains in distinguishing between entities, and thereby developing a formal framework for understanding our understanding of the world. In fact, he strives to develop empty formal and universal statements, as evidenced in the categorical imperative.

Hegel responds to Kants notion of truth in questioning the conditions of possibility of critique itself, generating a theory of knowledge as dynamic development in his Hegelian triad of thought, negation, and surpassing as such. Language in Hegel takes a dynamic turn as his Philosophy of Spirit takes on a performative aspect insofar as he demonstrates his conception of development in developing his key terms and concepts; he refuses to fix them in static linguistic definitions in acknowledging the dynamism of knowledge. Hegel uses the narrative form of Philosophy of Spirit as a written work, sometimes read as a Bildungsroman of Spirit, or a document of the development of Spirit itself, to demonstrate the nature of his argument that places negation as the motor of development. From Nietzsche onward, language plays a much more active role as itself a component used by philosophers to demonstrate their arguments, or as an object of analysis itself for insight into epistemological conditions. Concerning language and form, Nietzsches philosophy abounds with experiments in linguistic form and is written in a looser, more literary style, between his polemical literary-philosophical works and their aphoristic sections. These various forms explore his philosophical positions in their innate reinterpretation of the traditional philosophical role of language to clearly delineate objective truth. His writings are peppered with linguistically deft and artful moves and puns, such as when he rephrases himself, to put the point more virtuously, more hypocritically and , in short, more pleasantly: people are much more artistic than they think (82). Therefore his project cannot be understood without also considering these formal and stylistic considerations as a departure from the convention of philosophy as generative of and seeking an objective truth. As the Introduction identifies on xxvii, through his project, Nietzsche develops his notion of knowledge as intrinsically connected with the idiosyncratic context of a knowing subject.

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He rejects the correspondence theory of language and truth and the idea that the linguistic circumscription of things inherently reflects the reality of the things themselves. Nietzsche argues that language is ultimately a layer of mediation between humans and any notion of truth, since language is different from the universal equipment of the transcendental subject. First of all, there are different languages that all have generated distinct ways of looking at the world; second, any concepts are mediated by layers of representation (visual, spatial, sense-based), the functioning of which we dont understand. He sees as ludicrous the claim that there can be an original or objective truth that has anything to do with the highly mediated concepts communicated in language. He argues that the systematic nature of grammar and language underlies philosophical endeavors and causes them to start out anew, only to end up revolving in the same orbit once again (20), in destabilizing the origins of conventional philosophical thought. Furthermore, he concludes that what is true for all of us is no longer relevant to all of us, and questions the usefulness of the traditional binary distinction between true and false, arguing that values themselves should incorporate the shades of difference and nuance built into the linguistic system. Nietzsche would object to Kants instrumentation of language as a system to identify and distinguish to develop concepts that are somehow more true than what others considered before. He uses the fundamental multiplicity of language to destabilize traditional notions of value and truth, and further, to motivate his own project as an embrace and exploration of the notion of subjective truth or insight. Ultimately, his project seeks to reinterpret and question the very possibility of a philosophical concept, inasmuch it is a concept is used as a cognitive box to subsume and categorize things under in order to understand the object. He argues, we should use cause and effect only as pure concepts, which is to say as conventional fictions for the

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purpose of description and communication, not explanation In the in-itself there is nothing like causal association, necessity, or psychological un-freedom We are the ones who invented causation, succession, for-each-other, relativity, compulsion, numbers, law, freedom, grounds, purpose; and if we project and inscribe this symbol world onto things as an in itself (21). He identifies these philosophical concepts as inventions of human subjectivity, rather than the broad philosophical constructs they were traditionally understood as. He questions, Why shouldnt the world that is relevant to us be a fiction? And if someone asks: But doesnt fiction belong with an author? Couldnt we shoot back: Why? Doesnt this belonging belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Shouldnt philosophers rise above the belief in grammar? (35). Here, he alludes to and criticizes Kants formal system and his conclusion that the only realm of reason is in the world of appearances in advocating for a more descriptive, subjective truth. He sees no problem with accepting the subjectivity of truth and the usefulness and necessity of fiction and his entire project endeavors, performatively, to demonstrate philosophical potential of subjectivity. He criticizes the Kantian heritage, seeing the pursuit of truth as generative only of empty, contentless results that are irrelevant to us as human beings in the world. He does retain an affinity with Hegels performativity of the philosophical work in itself performing its argument, and experiments further with such a philosophical modality in various forms and his attempts to arrive at a subjective, positive conception of the will to power, though it is more challenging to make positive claims. Having laid out a criticism of the conventional acceptance of an ideal of truth and the human ability to circumscribe such truth, Nietzsche employs his genealogy as a methodology of exploring the development of concepts through history in acknowledging the fundamental human psychology and subjectivity that is generative of the history of philosophical

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thought. With his destabilization of the presupposed truth-value of language, Nietzsche now is able to analyze morality with a similar understanding, and reinterprets morality as something necessary for survival but ultimately invalid. More broadly, Nietzsches critique of the presupposition of truth in language generates a more complete and contextual understanding of the history of ideas and reclaims an interest in subjectivity on its own terms. Wittgensteins philosophical system is even more deeply entrenched in language as a formal epistemological system, analyzing the structure of language and propositions themselves to generate an epistemological understanding of the metaphysics of the world. Wittgensteins boundary-drawing project is interested in circumscribing an epistemology of what kinds of meaningful, senseful propositions may be constructed as a boundary to what things we can think, since language is a condition of possibility for thought itself. In other words, Wittgenstein doesnt take for granted the possible correspondence between language and thought. His Tractatus concerns a fundamental question of how language can or cannot communicate meaning. Moreover, the Tractatus also employs language in a completely performative way: he finally states, My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. The Tractatus, by its own logic that it outlines and demonstrates, is nonsensical; it is the ladder to be discarded once its own logic is understood, which exists solely for the purpose of demonstrating itself. Wittgensteins enigmatic final thesis, What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence, parallels Kants delineation between the noumenal and phenomenal realms, wherein we only have access to phenomenal realms and we thus have the capacity to project onto objects

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their existence. He identifies the seeming problems of philosophy as not false but nonsensical (4.003), and that most of these philosophical questions arise from a failure to understand the logic of our language And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all. He recognizes the everyday use of language as an obfuscation and disguise of the pure, logical system of thought that he outlines in the Tractatus. Just as Kant resolves the antinomies by distinguishing the realm of reason and thought, Wittgenstein reinterprets these conventional philosophical questions as misapplications of language to arenas where it has no sense. Though the rigor of the Tractatus seems to move away from Hegels looser, dynamical systems of thought, the absolute performativity of the Tractatus reflects the similar performativity of Hegels Philosophy of Spirit. Wittgenstein is thus able to approach the question of the conditions of possibility of knowledge by analyzing the structures of language, informed by Kants transcendental deduction but even less concerned with entities or objects as objects in themselves. He also reinterprets the roles of objects, which he assumes exists because there is language at all, instead analyzing the relationality between them, identifying logic as inherently contentless, acting only as a boundary. In identifying the pictorial and logical forms, Wittgenstein is able to identify structural similarities underpinning models of reality, linguistic, conceptual, or otherwise, as sharing a common rule of transformation. Thus, Wittgenstein, through analyzing language and how it represents objects the relations, is able to explore the possibilities of metaphysics from his bare presuppositions of the existence of objects and the forms of statements that explain them. Heideggers Being and Time is in some ways further removed than Wittgenstein from a reinterpretation of language itself, but language plays a central role in his project as an object of analysis for insight into the world itself, and a method to generate new and novel insights. He is

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very much so interested in subjectivity in the sense of the phenomenology of the subject itself, in generating his questions of Being and his questioning of the questioning of Being, the notion of the Dasein. In questioning the conventional understanding of Being, Heidegger turns to language as the arena within which the everyday understanding of being as a universal concept is employed. Furthermore, he identifies language as one of the conditions of possibility of ontology itself: how is it that the essence of something can be linguistically described or circumscribed? He rejects the conventional understanding of categories of significance, another allusion to Kant and his categories and modalities. He argues that there emerges the necessity of reestablishing the science of language on foundations which are ontologically more primordial (209). He objects to the notion of empirical correspondence as a philosophical understanding of truth, since truth is greater than an empty relationship between fact and object: the idea of language as picture wouldnt in fact exist, according to Heidegger, without the notion of the thing itself. He continues, Bearing this in mind, we must inquire into the basic forms in which it is possible to articulate anything understandable, and to do so in accordance with significations, and this articulation must not be confined to entities within-the-world which we cognize by considering them theoretically, and which we express in sentences. His inquiry as such employs language methodologically in two senses; in the first sense, he analyzes the etymology and history of terms into which he is enquiring about their ontologies, or how they have been understood ontologically; in the second sense, he derives neologisms for the concepts he seeks to circumscribe, synthesizing and moving beyond traditional conceptions. Heideggers use of etymology in exploring the linguistic history of concepts as exploring the history of understanding concepts as such is seen in his section on The Concept of the Logos, where he traces the Greek conception of logos and failed translations of it, then relating logos to

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phenomenology. He also traces the various conjugations of Sein and Dasein and explores the semantic implications of them in his philosophical project. Heideggers various neologisms form his new terminological framework, most significantly in his conception of Dasein as a construct of being and there, the being that asks the question of being and therefore allows the recognition of Beings. Another instance of his linguistic injection of meaning into his neologisms is how his conception of thrownness (Geworfenheit), in its wordplay, reflects his dynamic conception of Being as Being inherently embedded in a spatial and temporal context of movement. Language relates to Dasein itself insofar as language is the expression of discourse, and Being (as the fallen Dasein, as just being in the plain sense) and its state of mind are made known in discourse and indicated in language by intonation, modulation, the tempo of talk, the way of speaking (205). Therefore Heidegger argues for Being as inherently grounded in the physical modalities of language and discourse. Heidegger thus is able to employ these notions of discourse and language, and the relationship of language to truth and ontology, in reinterpreting Being itself, and questioning the grounds of possibility of ontology. He is also thus able to reinterpret Being and its self-questioning as Dasein, as an entity fundamentally dynamic and fundamentally rooted in time. Heidegger investigates a side of the question that Kant and Hegel overlook, namely that of subjectivity and the role of contingent phenomena on their own terms. Whereas Kant strove to develop a conception of metaphysics and epistemology independent of individual contingencies and subjective notions/values, Heidegger embraces this subjectivity as central to his hermeneutic circle as generative of a rich understanding, for all of its contingencies and inaccuracies.

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The Kantian/Hegelian heritage of questioning and developing systems of thought is transformed by Nietzsches, Wittgensteins, and Heideiggers thought. Nietzsche questions the neat presupposition of a philosophical concept as uninfluenced by subjectivity by analyzing with a perspectival mode and destabilizing the notion of language as having a stable referent or as a stable mapping onto the world or truth. He employs a literary style for his project that is interested in pursuing the possibilities of subjective perspectival truth. Wittgenstein questions the notion of delineating the boundaries of thought as itself dependent upon the modalities of language to make sense at all, and generates a comprehensive understanding of what it means to make or not make sense, and how this relates to logical structures and propositions. His style is notably influenced by mathematical and analytical rigor in plumbing the formal and logical conditions of representation. Heidegger analyzes the grounds of possibility of the notion of ontology itself and analyzes the existence and phenomenology of the subject itself through an archeology of the linguistic context surrounding ontological concepts and a linguistic exploration of the new entities he describes. As these thinkers progress in more complicated and multifarious relationships to language, language takes on a multitude of roles in the same project as object of analysis, performative subject, the instrument of communication (or obfuscation), explication or complication, exploding the terminological framework it was traditionally employed as. These later thinkers have probed deeper into the most basic assumptions in how we relate to the world in questioning the notion of objective truths, philosophical concepts, the conditions of possibility for sensical statements, and what it means for us to exist, through the various implementations of language in their projects.

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