Nietzsche workshop: Peter Poellner

Peter Poellner gave a paper entitled Transcendental Phenomenology and Naturalism in Nietzsche at the Nietzsche workshop. In the paper he argued that the later Nietzsche took up two strands of philosophical thought prevalent in the latter half of the 19th century in Germany: on the one hand, methodological naturalism, and on the other, Kantian transcendental philosophy. With this rapprochement of naturalism and transcendentalism in mind, we can understand Nietzsche's critique of ressentiment and slave morality as critiques of psychological types that are inhibited from engendering free action. This is because the dominance of the affective evaluative attitudes that these psychological types instantiate make it such that an individual is compelled to react to phenomenal properties displayed in the life world in a certain restricted way. And, as free agency consists for Nietzsche in acting in accordance with valuations a subject is not simply compelled unthinkingly to identify with, an individual in the grip of ressentiment will be for him unfree. But Nietzsche's account of free agency as uninhibited affective evaluation might seem to be in tension with his naturalism, if the latter doctrine requires him to give up talk of phenomenal properties due to their not being metaphysically real. According to Poellner, this tension is only apparent as phenomenal properties can supervene on physical ones without this leading to a revision of our everyday evaluative practices, as long as that supervenient relation is one of covariance. In fact, the desire to abolish our evaluative practices because they do not pick out the ultimate furniture of the universe is not necessitated by methodological naturalism, but rather the latter in concert with an over zealous 'will to truth'. So Nietzsche is able to balance the primacy of affective evaluation and thus free agency with his methodological naturalism because he sees the latter psychological drive as itself an optional form of affective evaluation.

I shall mention only two points that came up in discussion. First, it was suggested that identifying Nietzsche's transcendental sympathies with his taking the practical to be primary, was to identify the transcendental with the practical. And this might forestall a fuller account of Nietzsche as a philosopher in the transcendental tradition. Second, it was asked in exactly what sense Nietzsche prioritises the practical: On pragmatic/prudential grounds, or on some deeper (perhaps transcendental) grounds concerning affective evaluation as free activity?