The concept of phenomenon in Nietzsche is filled with ambiguity and complexity. Some of this ambiguity and complexity stems from the fact that there is no counter-concept of noumenon or noumena. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche still had a kind of metaphysical hangover from too much Schopenhauer and spoke of a thing-in- itself, the Primal Unity (das Ur-Eine). During this early period he also makes extensive use of the concept of appearance (Erscheinung), a term that pretty much disappears from his later writings. After The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche polemicizes vigorously against anything smacking of a counterconcept to phenomenon, anything in itself. The often-cited passage from Twilight of the idols entitled "How the 'True World' Finally Became a Fable" gives perhaps the most incisive formulation for the death of the form of thing in itself known as the True World or Platonism, a formulation not without humor.
HOW THE "TRUE WORLD" FINALLY BECAME A FABLE: THE HISTORY OF AN ERROR
1. The true world -- attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it. (The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")
2. The true world -- unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents"). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible -- it becomes female, it becomes Christian.)
3. The true world -- unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it -- a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become sublime, pale, Nordic, Konigsbergian.)
4. The true world -- unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming or obligating: how can something unknown obligate us? (Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism).
5. The 'true' world -- an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating -- an idea which has become useless and superfluous -- consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. The true world -- we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) [1]
For Nietzsche there is no such thing as being, the Platonic Form, or the god of traditional philosophy and theology. Becoming and appearance, the two concepts most traditionally opposed to being, are what make up this world, the only world that exists. The fact that there is no such thing as being, but only becoming, precisely elevates appearance to a stature of paramount importance.
Nietzsche seldom uses the term Phanomene (phenomena), a perfectly good German word in the current philosophical terminology of his time. Aside from passages speaking about the Phanomenalismus (phenomenalism) and Phanomenalitat (phenomenality) of the inner world and an occasional statement about the world of phenomena and the reality of phenomena, the term occurs infrequently. Basically, then, we are dealing with two German terms: Erscheinung, which means appearance; and Schein, which means semblance. The whole problematic of the ambiguity of the term appearance is expressed in these two terms. An appearance can be something deceptive, masking the true state of affairs. For example, he appeared to be healthy, but in reality he was quite ill. Then again, appearance can indicate or can be something real, something that actually appeared and took place. For example, he appeared in the doorway.
Even though, or perhaps especially because, there is no noumenon or thing in itself for Nietzsche, the ambiguity inherent in the word appearance permeates all of his philosophy. Within the scope of this chapter, it is obviously not possible to treat this problem exhaustively; I shall confine myself to trying briefly to clarify what Nietzsche meant by appearance by simplifying the plethora of his remarks to two possible levels of meaning; levels, however, that are not completely separable. Linguistically, Nietzsche himself makes no clear-cut distinction between Erscheinung (appearance) and Schein (semblance); he uses them both predominantly in the sense of semblance or illusion, which, however, is all that exists. In the earlier writings Erscheinung predominates, because he still has the "thing in itself" (Ding an sich) in mind. Later on, the term Schein predominates almost exclusively.
Let us examine the first level of meaning: passages like the one cited where Nietzsche says that when the true world is untenable, the phrase apparent world loses its meaning. If there is no true world, there is no apparent world either; the distinction collapses. Many of these passages concentrate on unmasking the so-called inner world of consciousness as the most apparent or illusory of all; Nietzsche's critique of true and stable things in themselves by no means confines itself to the outer realm of empirical objects.
Let us now examine the second level of meaning: passages where art as semblance or illusion becomes the "true" reality. Sometimes art is conceived as overcoming an objective "truth" that is potentially nihilistic.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche speaks of the three metamorphoses of the spirit. Taking these as our guide, we might say that Nietzsche left the camel, the stage of duty, behind very quickly. Therefore what we are dealing with in Nietzsche is the lion, the stage of destroying old values, and the child, the stage of creating something new. Keeping in mind our topic of phenomena, the question becomes to what extent Nietzsche remained a diagnostician of philosophy, religion, and culture, and to what extent he succeeded in offering a way out of the pessimism and nihilism that he diagnosed. The stage of the lion would correspond to Nietzsche's statements that there is no true world, no thing in itself. The stage of the child would correspond to the question of what is now to be done in this world unmasked and liberated from the false preconceptions we have insinuated into it.
Undoubtedly the preponderance of Nietzsche's genius lies in his unswerving, uncompromising diagnosis of Western philosophical, religious, and cultural values. In a rather global way this diagnosis extends to the Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism as well.
Returning to "How the True World Finally Became a Fable," we can say that there is no permanent, readymade reality behind or above the flux of appearances. There is no "reality" already "there" waiting for us.
This is what Nietzsche calls nihilism, the "uncanny guest at the door."
What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; "why?" finds no answer. Radical nihilism is the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values one recognizes; plus the realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or even an in itself of things that might be "divine" or morality incarnate. [2]
Nietzsche traces the roots of nihilism back to the Christian-moral interpretation of the world. Christianity is "Platonism for the people." What is the significance of all this for the question of phenomena, of appearances? According to Nietzsche, the Platonistic-Christian view posited a transcendent "backworld" (Hinterwelt) that was eternal, perfect, and provided a standard by which to judge (or misjudge) "this" world. The transcendent backworld, the true world, which for Nietzsche never existed but was rather, the projection of dissatisfaction with this world of "wishful thinking" (Wunschbarkeiten), imposed all the "false" values upon this world, thus robbing this world of whatever value, autonomy, and power it originally possessed. Now Nietzsche proclaims that the true world no longer exists, that God has died. We are left with this world, devalued and stripped of all value and power. Thus Nietzsche wanted a transvaluation of all values (Umwertung alter Werte).
The world consists of nothing but appearances, but these appearances have been deprived of whatever value and creative power they might have once possessed. If the true world no longer exists, phenomena could regain new creative possibilities. But this cannot happen of itself. As things stand, all we have are devalued, impoverished, flattened-down phenomena. In short, we do not even have the phenomenal world as it "really" is, but rather a phenomenal world upon which we nave imposed the devaluating judgments of Platonism-Christianity. Strictly speaking, there is for Nietzsche no such thing as the phenomenal world as it "really" is, because that would imply more stability and permanence in the world than there actually is. But the phenomenal world, as we now perceive it, is a falsified world. "What is 'appearance' (Schein) for me now? Certainly not the opposite of some essence: what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! ... Appearance is for me that which lives and is effective." [3]
Excursion
If we turn briefly to Nietzsche's own favorite of all his books, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we might consider an intriguing facet to the problematic of phenomenon, not phenomena. In the crucial section entitled "On Vision and Enigma," Zarathustra encounters a phenomenon, ein Gesicht, literally a face or countenance. This phenomena is not just a vision in the ordinary, weak sense of the word, but something actually seen, something countenanced. It shows itself in the most direct way possible in a momentous encounter. It is a kind of singulare tanturn, totally unique.
What is this phenomenon? It is a "poetic" phenomenon, a "poetic" presentation of Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence that transcends ordinary, everyday conceptions of space and time. Briefly stated, past and future meet in the general gateway of the present moment; all time and space come to presence in the eternal present moment. This is an utterly unique kind of phenomenon, one whose meaning is not immediately apparent. It requires thoughtful interpretation and sensitive response. But this countenance, too, is a phenomenon in an important and significant sense and should not be entirely left out in a discussion of phenomena in Nietzsche.
To gain any kind of clarity on the subject of phenomenon, one simply has to cut through some of Nietzsche's inconsistencies in terminology, relying more on the context of what he is saying, rather than on whether he is using the term semblance (Schein) or appearance (Erscheinung). The basic question here does not lie in a distinction between semblance and appearance simply because Nietzsche makes no such consistent distinction, as well he might and perhaps should have. The basic question is, How do we experience these phenomena, what are we to do with them? Do we despair over the fact that there is nothing but appearance and becoming, succumb to nihilism and resign ourselves to a passive acceptance of our fate? Or do we experience the lack of "being," even the lack of stable things, let alone values, in the world as a dimension of freedom, as a challenge to our creativity? In the first case, we are nihilists; in the second case, artists. "'Reason' is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.... But Heraclitus will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction. The 'apparent' world is the only one: the 'real' world has only been lyingly added ... " [4]
Nietzsche spent a great deal of time analyzing and diagnosing nihilism in its various forms, passive and active, European and Eastern. However, he gave us not only a diagnosis, but to some extent a prescription as well. That prescription is art, art so broadly conceived that it not only encompasses art works but, more important, the shaping of "reality" and phenomenon as well. Because with regard to truth Nietzsche oscillates between saying that there is no truth and saying that the truth is something terrible, truth simply ceases to be his major consistent concern. If there is to be such a thing as truth, we must form and shape reality and phenomena. In the terminology of Nietzsche's early work, The Birth of Tragedy, we must give Apollinian form to Dionysian chaos. Either way, what is crucial is art.
We possess art lest we perish of the truth. [5]
The belief that the world as it ought to be is, really exists, is a belief of the unproductive who do not desire to create a world as it ought to be. They posit it as unavailable, they seek ways and means of reaching it.
"Will to truth" -- as the impotence of the will to create. [6]
What happens to phenomena if they are not something that appears of themselves and are true? They become a kind of challenge and potentiality for creativity. They are not already there and accessible, but must first be shaped by us. For the person with the courage to accept this challenge who is not frightened by the fact that phenomena do not come "ready-made, "this offers the possibility of tremendous freedom.
Why not? It is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than semblance (Schein); it is, in fact, the worst proved supposition in the world. So much must be conceded: there could have been no life at all except on the basis of perspective estimates and semblances (Scheinbarkeiten); and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and stupidity of many philosophers, one wished to do away altogether with the "seeming world" (die 'scheinbare Welt) -- well, granted that you could do that, -- at least nothing of your "truth" would thereby remain! [7]
The question of whether we are nihilists or artists becomes a question of power, this much misunderstood and rather dangerous concept so important to Nietzsche. After all, if, as Nietzsche asserts, life is the will to power and nothing else, then power becomes of extreme importance with regard to life and the affirmation of life. Power for Nietzsche has essentially nothing to do with political power or any sort of power over others.
In Nietzsche's radically dynamic view of the world, whatever does not increase in power automatically decreases. There is no possible stasis, no status quo. This is strangely reminiscent of, in many ways, a kindred spirit of Nietzsche's, a thinker whom he admired more than most: Spinoza. In a nonmoralistical way Spinoza calls good whatever increases our power of action. Nietzsche also relates power to the self, speaking not of power over something or someone external, but of power to do something, of being empowered. This highest power is power over oneself, or discipline. Surely discipline is essential to any kind of human enterprise, and absolutely so to the artist. "Overcoming of philosophers through the destruction of the world of being: intermediary period of nihilism: before there is yet present the strength to reverse values and to deify becoming and the apparent (scheinbare) world as the only world, and to call them good." [8]
According to Nietzsche, the philosophers looked at the world passively and objectively. They reified and substantialized the flux of becoming. In contrast, the artist is active; he does not contemplate objects, but creates new forms. In so doing, he transforms the world and himself.
In this condition [9] one enriches everything out of one's own abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, overladen with energy. The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power -- until they are reflections of this perfection. This compulsion to transform into the perfect is -- art. Even all that which he is not becomes for him nonetheless part of his joy in himself; in art man takes delight in himself as perfection. [10]
Among other things, this passage emphasizes the inseparability and wholeness of man and all things, of man and world. When he is in an "artistic" condition, a condition of intoxication, man experiences the oneness of himself and the world; not passively in some sort of mystic absorption, but actively in transforming everything into reflections of his power and perfection.
What alone can our teaching be? That no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself. ... No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be .... One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole -- there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole .... But nothing exists apart from the whole! [11]
According to Nietzsche, we can place the responsibility or blame for ourselves neither on heredity, nor on environment, nor on ourselves as isolatable individuals. Each person is a necessary ingredient of the whole, which cannot be judged or even compared with anything because there is no vantage point outside the whole from which to do so.
Although Nietzsche participated to some extent in the nineteenth-century cult of the artist, and particularly the genius, his keen perception was nevertheless not blinded by mindless admiration. His later vehement rejection of Wagner is ample evidence of this. Fundamentally, Nietzsche's concern is not with art alone, although the artist is the type of higher man who comes closest to approximating the overman, the kind of human being Nietzsche hoped would he able to take the place of the old god. Nietzsche's crucial concern lies in the question of affirmation, of affirmation of life. His whole philosophical life was spent doing battle with his early mentor, Schopenhauer and, in a different way, Wagner. Nietzsche finally came up with a kind of "answer" to Schopenhauer's pessimism and doctrine of the denial of the will to live. What is ultimately at stake is our "attitude" toward life. Attitude is not intended here in a merely psychological sense, but more in the sense of a stance toward life, the posture with which we encounter it. Therefore the question here is neither merely psychological nor physical, but involves the whole being of the human being,
What is romanticism? -- In regard to all aesthetic values, I now employ this fundamental distinction: I ask in each individual case "has hunger or superabundance become creative here?" At first sight, another distinction might seem more plausible -- it is far more obvious -- namely the distinction whether the desire for rigidity, eternity, "'being" has been the cause of creation, or rather the desire for destruction, for change, for becoming. But both kinds of desire prove, when examined more closely, to be ambiguous and interpretable according to the scheme mentioned above, which, I think, is to be preferred.
The desire for destruction, change, becoming can be the expression of an overfull power pregnant with the future (my term for this, as is known, is the word "'Dionysian"); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, underprivileged, which destroys, has to destroy, because what exists, indeed existence itself, all being itself enrages and provokes it.
"Eternalization," on the other hand, can proceed from gratitude and love -- an art of this origin will always be an art of apotheosis, dithyrambic perhaps with Rubens, blissful with Hafiz, bright and gracious with Goethe, and shedding a Homeric aureole over all things -- but it can also be that tyrannic will of a great sufferer who would like to forge what is most personal, individual, and narrow -- most idiosyncratic -- in his suffering, into a binding law and compulsion, taking revenge on all things, as it were, by impressing, forcing and branding into them his image, the image of his torture. The latter is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, whether as Schopenhauerian philosophy of will or as Wagnerian music. [12]
The distinction hunger-superabundance undercuts even what has been taken as the most basic philosophical distinction: being-becoming. Nietzsche is not talking about the world apart from the human being nor, for that matter, about the human being apart from the world, but about the whole.
What matters is the motive in the root sense of what moves us. The desire for destruction and change can be Dionysian; destruction is essential to the creation of anything new. Dionysus must die in order to be reborn. Then again, the desire for destruction can stem from a smouldering rage and resentment against life itself. A man miserable and unhappy with his life would like to destroy all life. If he cannot be happy, then no one else should be able to be happy either. This is perilously close to Schopenhauer's much yearned-for denial of the will to live. Life is at bottom something despicable, full of suffering and frustration. The term frustration stems from the Latin frustra, which means "in vain." Phrases such as "all is in vain, nothing is worthwhile, all is the same" recur in slightly different formulations throughout Nietzsche's writings. They embody the threatening danger of nihilism that he was confronting. If this is the way things are, nothing we can possibly do has any meaning or makes any difference. Under these circumstances this would indeed be "the worst of all possible worlds." [13]
Similarly, the desire to eternalize, perpetuate, or preserve something can stem from the love of beauty, this term, once so absolutely central, that is fast disappearing from our meaningful vocabulary. In the Phaedo Plato stated that "through the Beautiful the beautiful is beautiful." Today's logicians might well dismiss this statement as an example of tautology. And Keats still was able to say, "beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." But beauty has become increasingly difficult to find or to speak about. Certainly contemporary art seldom has anything to do with beauty. Guernica is not beautiful; Beckett's plays are not beautiful.
However, the desire to eternalize can also stem from an individual's profound suffering from himself, from the need to immortalize his very suffering by forcing the image of his torture on everything. As was the case in the negative instance of the desire for destruction, the motive here is again revenge, this most terrible of all emotions that Nietzsche uncovered and laid bare. Revenge does not simply entail one person attempting to get back at another; rather, the most profound dimension of revenge is that described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the revenge against time and time's "it was," revenge against finitude itself.
In some sense, the whole distinction of passivity-activity needs to be rethought. Nietzsche utterly rejects passivity as a kind of nihilistic resignation and exhaustion of the will. The opposite of this is certainly some kind of "activity." There is a profound ambivalence in Nietzsche as to what kind of activity is at stake here. With his insistent emphasis on the will, a strong element of "voluntarism" in his thought is undeniable. And yet Nietzsche's emphasis on art and creativity offers another dimension to the question of activity. Artistic creativity does involve discipline, but it is by no means a matter of will alone. Rather it is a kind of activity that springs from a response to the real. Thus it transcends the passive-active dichotomy conceived as resignation-voluntarism and enters another dimension. A response is nothing passive or reactive; on the contrary, it is a spontaneous activity that we do not and absolutely cannot force. Sponte means "of itself. " Not artificially produced, willed or forced by us, something simply happens. If one were unable to respond to another person or to a piece of music or a poem or to a beautiful landscape, life would be impoverished indeed. Only from the dimension of spontaneous response is much of Thus Spoke Zarathustra accessible. It is not a matter of chance that Keiji Nishitani, undeniably one of Japan's greatest thinkers, considered it "scripture."
What is the significance of this for phenomena? What is the relation of affirmation or negation for phenomena? Ultimately, for Nietzsche phenomena are not what appears, but what is formed and created. What is formed and created depends upon our active or passive relation to the world. The quality of this relation is the crux of the whole question of the meaning or meaninglessness of life.
Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life....
One will see that in this book [14] pessimism, or to speak more clearly, nihilism, counts as "truth." But truth does not count as the supreme value, even less as the supreme power. The will to appearance (Schein), to illusion, to deception, to becoming, and change (to objectified deception) here counts as more profound, primeval, "metaphysical" than the will to truth, to reality, to mere appearance (Schein) .... In this way, this book is even antipessimistic: that is, in the sense that it teaches something that is stronger than pessimism, "more divine" than truth: art.
. . . Perhaps he has experience of nothing else! -- that art is worth more than truth ....
"Art as the real task of life, art as life's metaphysical activity --" [15]