Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 2, August 2006
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Emden, Christian J., Nietzsche on
Language, Consciousness, and the Body, University of Illinois Press, Urbana
and Chicago, 2005, 223 p., 0-252-02970-4, $35
Reviewed by
Princeton University
Although the title of the book leads us to expect a study that would
distinguish itself seemingly little from the wave of scholarly inquiries
subjecting each topic, age and philosopher to “the body”, Christian
Emden’s book cannot be put into the same category.
In
fact, it is a highly readable and interesting book that attempts to propose a
corrective to the Nietzsche-interpretations that have dominated scholarly
understanding of his philosophy ever since the advent of deconstruction, i.e.
ever since Paul de Man’s focus on Nietzsche’s rhetoric and tropes. As such,
this book is refreshing in its emphasis on the historical background and
character of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Emden’s Nietzsche is a child of the
nineteenth-century, and while he might have addressed problems that we still
face, he is not a post-modern philosopher in any way in which this term could be
chronologically or ideologically useful. This study, then, takes part in a
broader development toward re-evaluating the importance of historical contexts (historical
and material turn), but it also focuses on aspects in Nietzsche’s
work that are interesting to a contemporary audience. It is a fashionable, but
more than that, it is a thorough and subtle excavation of Nietzsche’s Zeitalter.
The
book attempts to advance our understanding of Nietzsche’s historical and
intellectual context, while at the same time proposing a subtle interpretation
of his work. Indeed, what connects Nietzsche’s “project” to our epistemic
problems is his focus on what Emden calls the “anthropology of knowledge”,
i.e. the correlation of physical and linguistic moments in the constitution of
consciousness, or “the rethinking of language, consciousness, and the body
along anthropological lines” (162).
While
Emden draws on less “previously unpublished and undiscussed Nietzsche
material” than the book cover would make us believe, he manages to present a
balanced view and a responsible interpretation of Nietzsche’s writings.
Arguing that Nietzsche’s early interest in rhetoric was quite untimely but
helped him to conceive of a conceptual scheme into which to incorporate
contemporary scientific, linguistic and physiological debates, his understanding
of metaphor (Übertragung) as a process on different levels of the constitution
of consciousness and linguistic capacity is discussed in detail.
Here,
the insight into the debate about Übertragung
in electro-physical and psycho-physiological contexts is very insightful indeed.
One of the major strengths of this book is to provide the background, even if
often only in short and cursory paragraphs, of contemporary debates which were
followed by Nietzsche and are said to have influenced his thinking. Thus, e.g.
some central sentences in “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen
Sinn” acquire a new meaning and accessibility, when understood against the
background of the physiological studies of Funke, Büchner and Lotze. These are
moments in which the historical method is truly brilliantly used and certainly
yields fruitful insights.
On the other hand, as interesting as the contextualizations of
Nietzsche’s thinking, reading, and writing are, the study often seems to be
more an agglomeration of presentations of contemporary debates and books rather
than a stringent argument for their influence on Nietzsche. While names and
titles are at times repeated to a degree that seems almost redundant, it
frequently remains unclear how they would have born on Nietzsche’s views. It
does not seem sufficient that he might have known of them in order to construct
an argument about Nietzsche’s philosophical standpoint with regard to these
debates.
This is not to say that Emden does not attempt to present us with what is
known about Nietzsche’s life, his habits, and his readings. He even analyzes
the “typewriter” episode and Nietzsche’s nervous illness in the context of
his own writing and concurrent scientific debates. The problem raised above is a
general problem that concerns the methodology of studies of influence and
intention. There is a certain limit to what can be known, and if Emden resorts
to the rhetoric of ventriloquism (“whereas Nietzsche would argue/say”), we
have to state that this might be likely with regard to his Nietzsche, but that
it is all but certain.
There is a curious imbalance, then, between the scholar’s rhetoric of
subtlety and caution at the beginning of the book, (….) and his increasing
identification with Nietzsche’s point of view. We applaud Emden’s attempt to
balance Nietzsche’s views: He did not deny metaphysics and the idea of a
“self”; rather, he considered them necessary fictions. He was neither Anti-Logiker
nor Anti-Metaphysiker; rather, he doubted the ability of these terms and methods
to encompass reality, while admitting to their usefulness in making sense of the
world.
While
we read the book with delight and benefited from it, the Nietzsche here
presented is also only one of the many Nietzsches that we have come to know:
surely a tamer, but also a more interesting one. We end by asking ourselves:
does inserting him to such a degree into a Zeitalter
that he was also highly sceptical of, as Emden points out, not also mean to work
against his spirit? Perhaps. But maybe one has to.