The thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Chouraqui argues, are linked by how they conceive the question of truth. Although both thinkers criticize the traditional concept of truth as objectivity, they both find that rejecting it does not solve the problem. What is it in our natural existence that gave rise to the notion of truth? -/- The answer to that question is threefold. First, Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty both propose a genealogy of "truth" in which to exist means to (...) make implicit truth claims. Second, both seek to recover the preobjective ground from which truth as an erroneous concept arose. Finally, this attempt at recovery leads both thinkers to ontological considerations, regarding how we must conceive of a being whose structure allows for the existence of the belief in truth. In conclusion, Chouraqui suggests that both thinkers' investigations of the question of truth lead them to conceive of being as the process of self-falsification by which indeterminate being presents itself as determinate. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 44 Heft: 1 Seiten: 267-290 In this paper, I examine the possibility of constructing an ontological phenomenology of love by tracing Nietzsche’s questioning about science. I examine how the evolution of Nietzsche’s thinking about science and his increasing suspicion towards it coincide with his interest for the question of love. Although the texts from the early and middle period praise science as an antidote to asceticism, the later texts associate the scientifi c spirit with asceticism. (...) I argue that this shift is motivated by Nietzsche’s realization that asceticism and science share the same fetish of facts. It is now for Nietzsche no longer a matter of proving the so-called facts of the backworlds to be wrong (something science is very capable of doing), but a matter of rejecting the very structure of thought that reduces a shapeless reality into a series of facts, subjects and objects. It is this second attitude that Nietzsche regards as the common core of science and asceticism. From this critique of science and its correlative critique of facts, Nietzsche begins searching for a counter-attitude able to perform the reduction of the factual attitude. This is the attitude he calls love. Although Nietzsche’s concept of love has oft en been elucidated in terms of its object or its subject, I argue that such interpretations precisely defeat Nietzsche’s point, which is to recover a ground that precedes the division of the world into subjects and objects. Love becomes the name of this intra-relationship of being, opening up to new perspectives on Nietzsche’s ontology of the will to power. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty et l’épaisseur temporelle dans les Notes de mai 1959L’insistance de Merleau-Ponty sur le concept de profondeur fait partie de sa stratégie générale pour créer des troubles dans les dualités bidimensionnelles traditionnelles en y introduisant une troisième dimension et, plus généralement, en opposant l’ontologie horizontale à l’ontologie verticale dont l’objet n’est plus le sujet et l’objet, mais la transcendance elle-même. Dans le présent texte, je propose d’examiner la manière dont Merleau-Ponty élabore son concept d’histoire comme sédimentation pour former une image (...) du temps vu comme déploiement, non seulement linéaire mais aussi vertical, et comme voyage à travers l’épaisseur de l’être. Je me concentre pour cela sur certaines formulations énigmatiques relatifs à une troisième dimension du temps, qui apparaissent à la fin des notes du Visible et l’invisible. J’espère établir que l’analyse de ces textes montre que Merleau-Ponty représente l’épaisseur del’histoire comme l’espace d’une rencontre complémentaire entre le pouvoir créateur de l’homme et les déterminations sédimentées héritées du passé, et que cette rencontre n’est autre que la chair « éternelle » que les reflexions de Merleau-Ponty sur l’histoire cherchent à saisir.Merleau-Ponty e la profondità temporale nelle Note del maggio 1959L’insistenza di Merleau-Ponty sul concetto di profondità fa parte della strategia complessiva con cui egli si sforza di scompaginare i tradizionali dualismi filosofici,introducendo tra loro una terza dimensione; strategia che, in senso più generale, mira a opporre a un’ontologia orizzontale un’ontologia verticale incentrata non più sull’opposizione tra soggetto e oggetto, ma sulla trascendenza stessa. In questo testo, propongo di esaminare come Merleau-Ponty si basi sul suo concetto di storia come sedimentazione, per costruire un’immagine del tempo inteso come dispiegamento non solo lineare, ma anche verticale, vera e propria traversata dell’intero spessore dell’essere. Mi concentrerò su alcune formulazioni piuttosto criptiche in cui Merleau-Ponty parla di una terza dimensione nel tempo, alla fine delle note di lavoro per Il visibile e l’invisibile. Mi auguro che un’elaborazione di questi testi possa render chiaro che Merleau-Ponty pensa lo spessore della storia come lo spazio dell’incontro complementare tra il potere creativo umano e le determinazioni sedimentate ereditate dal passato, e che questo incontro, nella sua verità, è quella carne eterna che la riflessione di Merleau-Ponty sulla storia hanno lo scopo di cogliere. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty et l’épaisseur temporelle dans les Notes de mai 1959L’insistance de Merleau-Ponty sur le concept de profondeur fait partie de sa stratégie générale pour créer des troubles dans les dualités bidimensionnelles traditionnelles en y introduisant une troisième dimension et, plus généralement, en opposant l’ontologie horizontale à l’ontologie verticale dont l’objet n’est plus le sujet et l’objet, mais la transcendance elle-même. Dans le présent texte, je propose d’examiner la manière dont Merleau-Ponty élabore son concept d’histoire comme sédimentation pour former une image (...) du temps vu comme déploiement, non seulement linéaire mais aussi vertical, et comme voyage à travers l’épaisseur de l’être. Je me concentre pour cela sur certaines formulations énigmatiques relatifs à une troisième dimension du temps, qui apparaissent à la fin des notes du Visible et l’invisible. J’espère établir que l’analyse de ces textes montre que Merleau-Ponty représente l’épaisseur del’histoire comme l’espace d’une rencontre complémentaire entre le pouvoir créateur de l’homme et les déterminations sédimentées héritées du passé, et que cette rencontre n’est autre que la chair « éternelle » que les reflexions de Merleau-Ponty sur l’histoire cherchent à saisir.Merleau-Ponty e la profondità temporale nelle Note del maggio 1959L’insistenza di Merleau-Ponty sul concetto di profondità fa parte della strategia complessiva con cui egli si sforza di scompaginare i tradizionali dualismi filosofici,introducendo tra loro una terza dimensione; strategia che, in senso più generale, mira a opporre a un’ontologia orizzontale un’ontologia verticale incentrata non più sull’opposizione tra soggetto e oggetto, ma sulla trascendenza stessa. In questo testo, propongo di esaminare come Merleau-Ponty si basi sul suo concetto di storia come sedimentazione, per costruire un’immagine del tempo inteso come dispiegamento non solo lineare, ma anche verticale, vera e propria traversata dell’intero spessore dell’essere. Mi concentrerò su alcune formulazioni piuttosto criptiche in cui Merleau-Ponty parla di una terza dimensione nel tempo, alla fine delle note di lavoro per Il visibile e l’invisibile. Mi auguro che un’elaborazione di questi testi possa render chiaro che Merleau-Ponty pensa lo spessore della storia come lo spazio dell’incontro complementare tra il potere creativo umano e le determinazioni sedimentate ereditate dal passato, e che questo incontro, nella sua verità, è quella carne eterna che la riflessione di Merleau-Ponty sulla storia hanno lo scopo di cogliere. (shrink)

This paper seeks to address two lacunae of the literature about French political theory in the second half of the 20th century. The first concerns the origins of the great Foucaldian thesis of the autonomy of power, and the second concerns the conceptual implications of the events of the 1950s surrounding the politics of communism on both sides of the Iron Curtain. There are many apparent responses to these questions in the existing literature. However, they are rendered insufficient by their (...) refusal to address the need for a specifically intellectual history. With regard to Foucault’s thesis of the autonomy of power, philosophers seem happy to abstract Foucault’s insight from its context, resting on the implication that it may have come out of nowhere. Conversely, when it comes to the implications of historical developments on political philosophy, historians seem to satisfy themselves with wordplay: before so many histories of the intellectuals, who needs intellectual history? It is however rather obvious that both history and philosophy are set to benefit from a specifically intellectual history, that is to say, from an account neither of an idea nor of a context, but of how the historical context of the early fifties made the Foucaldian idea conceivable. (shrink)

This essay attempts to provide a unified analysis of two working notes from The Visible and the Invisible. In these notes Merleau-Ponty questions not only the accuracy of the ontology he is elaborating, but also the incidence and place of this ontology within the Being it describes. He finds that his ontology transforms Being as it describes it, and therefore keeps chasing its tail endlessly. This view is suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s use of Nietzsche’s expression “circulus vitiosus Deus” as a formula (...) that both he and Nietzsche use to describe the ontological place of their ontology. Merleau-Ponty, like Nietzsche, offers an ontology in which Being is highly sensitive to ontological accounts, thereby construing Being as a principle of commensurability between action and description, language and reality, philosophy and world. (shrink)

This article argues in favour of a formal definition of fanaticism as a certain relationship to one’s beliefs that is informed by the assumption that there is a mutual incompatibility between consistency and moderation. It analyses this assumption as an expression of an implicit commitment to naïve realism. It then proposes a critique of such realism and finally it sketches an ontological alternative, able to philosophically and politically respond to and oppose fanaticism by showing the compossibility, on that ontological view, (...) of moderation and consistency. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 1, pp 54 - 69 In this essay, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures on Husserl’s concept of the earth as _Boden_ or ground. Against Husserl, Merleau-Ponty regards the earth seen as pure _Boden_ as an idealization. He emphasizes the ontological necessity for the earth as _Boden_ to always hypostasize itself into the Copernican concept of earth as object. In turn, Merleau-Ponty builds this necessity into an essential feature of being, allowing (...) himself to retrieve ontology itself from its status as external to being, and to make room for it within the structure of being: ontology is one of the ways in which experiences become objectified, thereby allowing being to achieve its essential movement of hypostatization. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the context of the well-established importance of Nietzsche’s engagement with Stoic thought for his work as a whole, this article seeks to make two claims. First, that the Mausoleum refe...

Nietzsche thought of himself as heralding an era of ‘new philosophers’, philosophers who would produce new philosophical insights and practice a new kind of philosophy. This is one of the many sign...

This article presents a critique of the current naturalist readings of Nietzsche by drawing a distinction between a sense of naturalism based on nature taken as "what there is" and one based on the scientific concept of nature. The paper suggests that Nietzsche is a naturalist in the first sense, but not in the latter, and that due to the confusion between the two sense, many arguments in favor of the first have been unwarrantedly transferred into the latter. The article (...) begins with a close critical reading of Brian Leiter's "Nietzsche's Naturalism Revisited" before confronting the naturalist readings with one case of Nietzsche's writings, found in Daybreak's Book V. (shrink)

This paper seeks to provide a basis for a fruitful correspondence between the projects of Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty. It argues that both philosophers are committed to an ontology of relation and they both regards any terms to these relations as being hypostases of a horizontal movement. This commits them to very parallel views of history, politics, and perception.

Rajiv Kaushik’s Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty continues the work begun last year in Art and Institution by exploring the ontological grounds upon whichMerleau-Ponty locates the continuity of philosophy with the visual arts. The mission and the privilege of art are to allow the invisible to appear in its own terms. As such, artpossesses the potential of completing the endeavors of philosophy by bringing the world to expression without abusively bringing it to visibility. Kaushik’s analyses of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of (...) “figural philosophy,” of the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Saussure for his philosophy of art, and of the dynamic and ontological potential contained in the tracing of a line are profound and each makes decisive contributions to the study of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics. In addition to these, Kaushik’s analysis of artworks and artists such as Cy Twombly allow him to make this more than a book about Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy or a book about art; it is a book that enacts their continuity as it describes it, in true hyper-dialectical fashion. (shrink)

Perfect for use at advanced undergraduate and graduate level, this is the first text to offer students a unified narrative regarding the place of the body in Western thinking. The body is simultaneously active and passive, powerful and vulnerable and as such, it fundamentally informs ontological, political, ethical and epistemological issues.