Babette Babich

Scientists defend “impersonal, objective truth” against the postmodern claim that there is no truth, only interpretations. The hoax on cultural studies orchestrated by a physicist, Alan Sokal, has highlighted this perspective. Sokal's disclosure of the hoax and subsequent polemics has ripped through the complacency of academic disciplines, exposing the fragility of academic integrity and raising questions concerning the function of peer review. Sokal submitted a bogus article for the May 1996 issue of Social Text devoted to “Science Wars.” On Sokal's own account, the Social Text essay feigned an earnest reflection on the political and philosophical implications of recent physics research for cultural criticism.

This essay explores the nihilistic coincidence of the ascetic ideal and Nietzsche’s localization of science in the conceptual world of anarchic socialismas Nietzsche indicts the uncritical convictions of modern science by way of a critique of the causa sui, questioning both religion and the enlightenment as well asboth free and unfree will and condemning the “poor philology” enshrined in the language of the “laws” of nature. Reviewing the history of philosophical nihilismin the context of Nietzsche’s “tragic knowledge” along with political readings of nihilism, willing nothing rather than not willing at all, today’s this-worldly and very planetary nihilism includes the virtual loci of technological desire (literally willing nothing) as well as the perpetual and consequently pointless threat of nuclear annihilation and the routine or ordinary annihilation of plant and animal life as of inorganic nature.

Nietzsche's creative and fundamental account of chaos in both its cosmic, universal as well as its humane context, recalls the ancient Greek meaning of chaos rather than its modern, disordered, decadent significance. In this generatively primordial sense, chaos corresponds not to the watery nothingness of Semitic myth or modern, scientific entropy but creative, uncountenancedly abundant potency. And in such an archaic sense, Nietzsche's chaos is a word for both nature and art. Nietzsche's creative conception of chaos equates it with the will to power: as the foundational essence of the world "to all eternity." This same correspondence is also the stylistic prerequisite for creating oneself as a work of art. /// O artigo começa por demonstrar até que ponto a mais fundamental explicação criadora dada por Nietzsche a respeito do caos, em seu contexto tanto cósmico e universal como meramente humano, constitui uma evocação do antigo sentido que Ihe foi dado pelos Gregos, mais do que uma adesão à significação moderna do mesmo, desordenada e decadente. Para Nietzsche, com efeito, o caos em seu sentido generativo mais primordial, não corresponde nem à ambiguidade do nada inerente ao mito semítico nem ao sentido moderno, científico, da entropia, mas sim a uma potência criadora assinalada por uma abundãncia inesgotável Mostra-se, assim, até que ponto, em conformidade com o sentido arcaico do termo, o caos em Nietzsche constitui um nome que se dá tanto à natureza como à arte. Mais, o presente artigo mostra ainda até que ponto a concepqao nietzschiana do caos o transforma em algo equivalente à vontade depoder, ou seja, na essãncia fundadora do mundo " para toda a eternidade". Desta correspondência, aliás, resulta a condição estilistica para que cada um se crie a si mesmo como verdadeira obra de arte.

In a single aphorism in The Gay Science, Nietzsche arrays “The Problem of the Artist” in a reticulated constellation. Addressing every member of the excluded grouping of disenfranchised “others,” Nietzsche turns to the destitution of a god of love keyed to the selfturning absorption of the human heart. His ultimate and irrecusably tragic project to restore the innocence of becoming requires the affirmation of the problem of suffering as the task of learning how to love. Nietzsche sees the eros of art as what can teach us how to make things beautiful, desirable, lovable in the routine truth of reality: “When they are not.” The stumbling block for those of us paralyzed by impotence and frozen in a technological age of anxiety, longing for being not becoming (eternal youth), is that one can never possess but can only win great health, again and again (like erotic desire), because one gives it away again and again as sacrifice or affirmation without reserve: that is to say, with erotic artistry.

Heidegger's 1950 claim to Jaspers (later repeated in his Spiegel interview), that his Nietzsche lectures represented a "resistance" to Nazism is premised on the understanding that he and Jaspers have of the place of science in the Western world. Thus Heidegger can emphasize Nietzsche's epistemology, parsing Nietzsche's will to power, contra Nazi readings, as the metaphysical culmination of the domination of the West by scientism and technologism. It is in this sense that Heidegger argues that German Nazism is "in essence" the same as Soviet Bolshevism and American capitalism. Jaspers himself had likewise emphasized the Will to Power by contrast with the doctrine of eternal recurrence. Heidegger differs from Jaspers (as from their mutual student Hannah Arendt) inasmuch as Jaspers preserves an enthusiasm for the possibility of scientific certainty while yet recognizing (as Heidegger does) a strong sense of the limits of science. None of the three can correctly be labeled anti-scientific. The essay closes by recalling Arendt's reflections on the very possibility of resistance using the example of Jaspers' own resistance to contemporary political events. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------.

This volume contains new and original papers on Martin Heidegger’s complex relation to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. The authors not only critically discuss the many aspects of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, they also interpret Heidegger’s thought from a Nietzschean perspective. Here is presented for the first time an overview of not only Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s philosophy but also an overview of what is alive – and dead – in their thinking. Many authors through a reading of Heidegger and Nietzsche deal with current issues such as technology, ecology, and politics. This volume is of interest for everyone interested in Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s thought. Contributors include: Babette Babich, Charles Bambach, Robert Bernasconi, Virgilio Cesarone, Stuart Elden, Michael Eldred, Markus Enders, Charles Feitosa, Véronique Fóti, Luanne T. Frank, Jeffery Kinlaw, Theodore Kisiel, William D. Melaney, Eric Sean Nelson, Abraham Olivier, Friederike Rese, Karlheinz Ruhstorfer, Harald Seubert, Robert Sinnerbrink, Robert Switzer, Jorge Uscatescu Barrón, Nancy A. Weston, Dale Wilkerson, Angel Xolocotzi, Jens Zimmermann.

Continental philosophies of science tend to exemplify holistic themes connecting order and contingency, questions and answers, writers and readers, speakers and hearers. Such philosophies of science also tend to feature a fundamental emphasis on the historical and cultural situatedness of discourse as significant; relevance of mutual attunement of speaker and hearer; necessity of pre-linguistic cognition based in human engagement with a common socio-cultural historical world; role of narrative and metaphor as explanatory; sustained emphasis on understanding questioning; truth seen as horizonal, aletheic, or perspectival; and a tolerance for paradoxical and complex forms of expression. Continental philosophy of science is thus more comprehensive than philosophy of science in the analytic tradition, including (and as analytic philosophy of science does not tend to include) perspectives on the history of science as well as the social and practical dimensions of scientific discovery. Where analytic philosophy is about reducing or, indeed, eliminating the perennial problems of philosophy, Continental philosophy is all about thinking and that will mean, as both Heidegger and Nietzsche emphasize, making such problems more not less problematic.