Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Noumenon, Will to Power, Evolution

In #16 of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche seems to repudiate use of the Noumenon-Phenomenon contrast.  However, what he is more precisely rejecting is the Metaphysical status of the former, as part of the more general project of the book to re-conceive the contrast as Sub-Conscious vs. Conscious, thereby pioneering what becomes the Freudian tradition in Psychology.  The dichotomy is also a factor at the outset of The Gay Science, where he proposes that Morality is itself only a doctrine of Phenomena, designed to reinforce the illusion of Individual Selfhood.  But, there, he introduces a significant variation on the connotation of Universality in the Noumenal realm--it is now that of the Species specifically.  Likewise, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Man' and 'Overman' are general, not individual concepts.  Thus, when he defines Will to Power--his replacement of Schopenhauer's Noumenal Will to Live--as Self-Overcoming, he is implicitly conceiving the Noumenal realm as the Evolutionary drive of the Species, even if he expresses disdain for Darwinism elsewhere.

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