Christopher R. Myers

The aim of this paper is to examine Nietzsche and Dilthey’s descriptions of the crisis of historical consciousness and visions for the possibility of a living interpretation of the past. While traditional historians interpret the past as something completed and dead—thereby making historical knowledge into a dead knowledge—Nietzsche and Dilthey argue that the past exists only in and through the present, and therefore that the past can be interpreted as something living and open in its meaning. After first clarifying the philosophical motivations that lead Nietzsche and Dilthey to this conception, I consider what Nietzsche and Dilthey’s conceptions of the living past imply for an important case study: our understanding of the history of philosophy itself. I discuss the positive and negative possibilities tied to interpreting philosophy historically, with a specific emphasis on the possibility of interpreting the history of philosophy as something living.

In this article I examine Nietzsche’s commentaries on the discipline of classical philology in relation to twentieth century philosophical hermeneutics. I argue that Nietzsche frequently made use of the concept of “life” to reflect ‘meta-critically’ on philology and nineteenth century hermeneutics, and that this use is much better represented by Heidegger and Gadamer than representatives of the standard Lebensphilosophie reading. Whereas the standard life-philosophical reading suggests that Nietzsche viewed the activity of interpretation as a mere symptom of biological, psychological life, the hermeneutic reading suggests that Nietzsche uses the concept of “life” to refer to the effective reality of interpretation, i.e., the “hermeneutic situation.” By this reading, Nietzsche’s interest in “life” is in fact an interest in deciphering the meaning content behind our own interpretations, and thus implies a commitment to interpretive pluralism—an interpretive pluralism which Nietzsche recognized as being essentially ontological in character.

In this article I provide a reading of the 18th century German discourse of life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie, Philosophie des Lebens) and its importance for classical German philosophy. I draw a line of influence between (A) Lessing, Mendelssohn, Feder, and Moritz’s uses of the concept of “life” (Leben) and criticisms of the “distanced from life” (lebensfern) character of school philosophy (Schulphilosophie), and (B) Fichte, Schelling, Hegel’s uses of the concept of “life” and efforts to reenvision the organization of the modern university at the turn of 19th century. My thesis in this article is that classical German philosophy should be viewed as having both radicalized and overcome the tendencies of 18th century life philosophy. While Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel similarly sought to oppose the tendency of philosophy to become problematically “distanced from life,” they moved beyond the opposition of “life” and “reason” seen with 18th century popular philosophers and came to view “life” as the practical foundation on which all knowledge is founded. With classical German philosophy, then, the concept of “life” was no longer asserted against systematic and scientific forms of reasoning, but instead used to represent the shared ground of all scientific forms of reasoning: the unity of practical life.

For more than a century, phenomenology’s relation to history has remained a problem for phenomenological analysis. This can in part be attributed to the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of phenomenology. As Europe moved increasingly toward world war at the turn of the 20th century, a growing consciousness of the historical relativity of all values and knowledge spread throughout the continent, leading Ernst Troeltsch to speak of the “crisis of historicism” (Rand 1964, 504-5). In this same context, Edmund Husserl framed phenomenological analysis in opposition to history. While Husserl recognized the “tremendous value” that history has to offer philosophical thinking, he believed that a purely historical reduction of consciousness necessarily results in the relativity of historical understanding itself, like a serpent that bites its own tail (Husserl 2002, 280). If phenomenology was to be a genuine science, it had to attempt a phenomenological reduction which would seize upon the essence of our historical being, i.e., our essence as beings that exist within history and are inseparable from it. What was required over and beyond a historical understanding of lived experience was an analysis of the structure of historicity itself (293-4).