Ammar Zeifa

Finally we may ask in future : is there in fine a “dyonisian” horizon to Phenomenology ? Maybe we should examine the history of Phenomenology, and look especially at what is happening to it in our time. In a Nietzschean perspective, there was perhaps, from the beginning, something too “apollinian” in the work and life of Edmund Husserl. When Husserl started his phenomenological work with his "Logical Investigations", there was somebody just before him who had begun also to work on Logic and its “origins”, but this was in an essay about The Birth of Tragedy ! This was Nietzsche. But in reality the great change in modern thought happened when Arthur Schopenhauer – who respected Kant as the most important thinker since Plato – decided to elaborate a new criticism, especially against the transcendental analytic in The Critique of pure Reason, in his unique great work The World as W ill and Representation. And here everything really changed when the “Will” became, with Schopenhauer, the “Origin” of everything, or to say it like him, after Kant, the “Thing-in-it-self ”. It’s raining, so it’s the Will, the cat, it’s also the Will, I am hungry, it’s the Will again, I am thinking, it’s always the Will... Even if Nietzsche examine critically what is too naïve in the schopenhauerian concept of Will, the nietzschean principle of The Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht) was inspired by it ; but we should also say that Nietzsche offered a new great life to his new concept when he gave – to this “will to power”- two new characteristics : intentionality and plurality. In fact, for Nietzsche, there are a lot of wills (to power), not only one kind (plurality), and if everything is will, every will is the will-of- something (intentionality). When we look to anything with this conception of will to power, in all nature and over the world, about everything, before consciousnesses and logic, before the distinctions between what is human, animal, vegetable and mineral, or the dualisms like mind and body, form and matter, subject and object... before all the existing categories, differences and oppositions, we are nevertheless in presence of a primitive form of logic and consciousnesses, those of life, and even before life, just what is organic, and even not organic, just things or objects, so we can maybe talk about the “life of things”, a primitive form of life, consciousnesses and logic. There is no more then “man” facing “the world”, but everything just having a different way to be... a will to power. Everything is force, no space, even no things, just relations among forces, vectors, wills to power, affections : will to power is not “being”, even not “becoming”, it is a process (Whitehead), or a pathos ! When the “essence” of everything is, in the same time, a different and a same “Wille zur Macht”, when the differences between things are just a question of sophistication and complexity, speak of dust, amoeba, dinosaur or man, we have then a chance to make possible an understanding of what is “consciousnesses”, of what is “the world”, to find again the ontological and original relation between them, before the sad, traditional, transcendental “separation”. This was maybe a valuable “gift” from Nietzsche to Phenomenology : it’s what allows phenomenologists to find a solution to the embarrassing problem of naturalization. It makes possible a profound and definitive partnership between Phenomenology and a new kind or a new generation of Sciences of life. Nietzsche’s criticism of the transcendental tradition can help Phenomenology to be much more or fully it self, establishing a dialogue, or a dialectic, between life, the “life” of everything in the world, and the Life-world. “And we burst out laughing, said Nietzsche, when we see man and the world separated by the sublime pretentiousness of the little word “and” ” ! This new radical Phenomenology inherited all the past, and has all the future for its life... and full growth.

Sometimes, in the history of philosophy, there are some great encounters that took place, but not really, not completely. Unfortunately there is no work of Merleau-Ponty about Nietzsche, but maybe, all what wrote the author of Phénoménologie de la Perceptionwas, in some sense, around Nietzsche’s thinking. To say it more precisely, it was a great contribution to what we can call, temporarily, the “Phenomenology of Nietzsche”. Merleau-Ponty can really help us to understand Nietzsche, and his work gives us many developments about what was sometimes, just an idea in Nietzsche’s writings. If we have this understanding, we will have then to really find and define all what is essential about this tradition of phenomenological thinking, and what it is, in relation to the great work of the “last” Husserl. What is sure anyway is that both of them, before and after Husserl, spoke about something like a return and a faithfulness to “earth”, as well as a coming back to “life”. There is of course different ways to tell us all about this, and we have to respect the originality of each thinker. What we would like to suggest in this paper is that we can have a phenomenological approach that makes us able to see all what is the “same” in these works, and all what is precisely around the remarkable concepts of “earth” and “life”. What is clear, in this problematic, and what we have to study and explain, is that in fine, and specially in the end of their lives, they were strangly trying to say some things very close to each other. We think that it is really time to question that, and to look back, to look after what is, above all, the same universal message, in the remarkable tradition of those european thinkers. This message was : the sense of the earth and the earth of sense. It seems to be more important and worthy than talking about “postmodernity”. And maybe we can find here the completion and the real future of our modern humanity.

Towards the end of his life, Edmund Husserl became strangely interested by something like a new type of “Science of Life” or a “Biology”, which could be, he said, a “universal science”. Beside this, there was of course the new great topic of the World of Life, or, to say it like it is well-known, the “Life-World” (Lebenswelt). Even if Husserl was, for good reasons, very careful and prudent about “sciences” in general, and especially about the “Galilean mathematization of nature”, which was making some “schizophrenia”, some separation from life, and was pushing the “European humanity” to a treason of the deep inside of its life, it seems that these ultimate phenomenological ideas are really promising for us today, for our culture and future. But just before the founder of Phenomenology, Friedrich Nietzsche was always thinking and talking about a(n) (eternal) return to life, and, more precisely, about the physiological roots of so many things, and especially in our world, the world of human rationality. More recently, Francisco J. Varela, who was influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, tried to inaugurate, after Hans Jonas and Jan Patocka, a new kind of “philosophical biology”, which can be a radical research about “life in mind” and “mind in life”. If the “embodied mind”, and more generally, the “embodiment” became in our time something like a “mainstream”, it is precisely because, as Nietzsche said, “Mind” and “Life” can never be separated from each other. What is even more important in that theory is that it could be the first step for a radical rethink of all that the philosophical tradition had called “Sensible” and “Intelligible”, with their relations or interactions. It would also mean that “Matter” and “Form” can never be separated from each other. If we try like this to “listen” to the “life” of things, or to “see” them in this new way, this silent way, we will be, in some sense, more “living” and more “thinking”. Some recent research in Biology, in “Biosemiotics”, is talking nowadays about “Signs of Life and Life of Signs”. This new “Biology of signification”, with an evolutionary approach of a “natural history of intentionality”, which could also be a radical theory of meaning, will be perhaps, some day, our greatest science and philosophy.

When Nietzsche-Zarathustra was imagining the future of Earth as a “garden”, it may be was the absolute ecological dream, but this is not an answer, for our time, it is a question, the question mark of our today and tomorrow: in which way? Probably, in its must difficult way and unknown form. Apparently, nobody for the moment can imagine what is exactly this “garden”. Is it just a fantasy or is it—very discretly—a forthcoming issue, a new kind of history, a future historical reality, for wich paradoxically we are not prepared? We are maybe—irony of fate—preparing something today, without knowing what we are doing. We are living time in a so inhuman way, wich is not, at all, the way that leads to the “garden”. We are not living the temporality of the deepest life in us, that of the living body (Leib not Körper), with all its intentionalities and silent possibilities. The deep continuity of life and spirit, body and mind should be first of all our Ariadnes filum. Actually, “Spirit”, in the traditional (socratic and judeo-christian—religious, moral, metaphysical and “scientific”) sense, is it truly an ecological one? It seems rather to have been engendering over the centuries an increasingly poor “life-world”, almost something like a “dead-world”, that of “reason”, “abstraction”, “computation”, “artificial intelligence”, not that of life. It is always, essentially, a matter of science and technique, business, trade and industry. This new modern religion—with its corporate God and globalized entrepreneurial freedom as a morality, in the global free market, with its hidden ascetic meaning and strange type of progress—at least since the Age of Enlightenment –, has actually dominated and achieved its dominance on Earth, on all living beings on this planet. Can this inaccomplished civilization (Zivilisation, but not at all Kultur), this psycho-socio-historical process, can it have seriously a real future? Doesn’t this “spirit”—with its schizophrenic “spirituality”, disconnected from life—exhausting its possibilities, going to nihil, that of nihilism? May be it is possible to understand Nietzsche-Zarathustra as a hidden possible begining for another Umwelt—not only as environment, but also as world-of-meaning according to Jakob von Uexküll—for another Leib and another Lebenswelt, which prepare and welcome a really different world-of-life on our old earth. In nietzschean terms, what could be the first steps of a project wich look like a sincere welcoming to the Übermensch—or to an übermenschliche Menschenheit, in view of an übermenschliche Umwelt—the “meaning of the Earth”?