An originary analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche in light of generative anthropology

So much has been written about Friedrich Nietzsche’s life and work that entire books have now been written about how extensively Nietzsche’s life and oeuvre have been written about. There is not simply a wide range of interpretations of Nietzsche, but an industry of interpretations. What is apparent in this industry is an interpretative maximalism that is part and parcel of the postmodern, post–nineteenth century approach to Nietzsche and his radical break from modernist thinking. Yet, despite the evident value of these herculean hermeneutic and biographical efforts of the past, perhaps the best impulse might lie in a counter-intuition: to re-construct Nietzsche’s work in the most minimal terms possible. Stemming from the French literary and cultural critic, René Girard, whose work on “mimetic desire” and the “scapegoat mechanism” were formative to his thinking, Eric Gans, Distinguished Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, has pursued a line of non-metaphysical philosophical thought he calls “generative anthropology.” Contrary to much postmodern philosophical thinking—at least in the humanities—Gans has proposed a “minimal hypothesis” that attempts to answer fundamental questions about human consciousness and language by placing the ostensive sign at the very centre of human origins—of the origin of the human as human. Generative anthropology essentially attempts to figure Homo sapiens in the most elementary terms possible. Crucially, Gans claims that the work of Nietzsche represents a particular model of his originary analysis—although his analysis of how this is the case deserves to be elaborated on more. In this thesis, I situate Nietzsche’s work by articulating it in the most minimal terms possible—that is, to discern how Nietzsche’s work re-presents the scene of human origin; and equally, how this theoretical orientation offers a plausible, coherent, and novel way of approaching his work. And so, essentially, the goal of this dissertation will be to expand and clarify how and why it is the case that one should utilise generative anthropology as a hermeneutic tool to study Nietzsche’s work. Despite the overwhelmingly postmodern philosophical reception of Nietzsche’s works (by Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault) in the twentieth century, this thesis aims to situate Nietzsche, not only as a precursor to postmodern suspicion, but as a theorist of the human, of human origins, and of the ethical. Of course, Nietzsche is particularly preoccupied with the origin of language, resentment, religion, morality, tragedy, culture, and music—all minimal categories of the human, according to generative anthropology. Yet, how is it possible to fly against a century of typically Nietzschean postmodern philosophical thinking characterised by the denial of the objectivity of linguistic reference, where determinate meaning is impossible? The answer to this question may lie in generative anthropology, which theorises that the emergence of language was a singular event and that all human culture is a development stemming from this event. Generative anthropology allows for a hermeneutic of Nietzsche’s oeuvre that at once positions him as an anthropologist, a theorist of human origins and of the ethical, and allows one to bypass the postmodern de-/re-constructions of his work by claiming that he offers a particular scene of human origins, that he explicitly discusses the origin of the human and language, and that he provides a particular insight to one of the most important philosophical questions: What is the human? This thesis positions Nietzsche as a theorist of the origins of the ethical. It does this by utilising generative anthropology, a field which deals specifically with the ethical in relation to the event of human language origins. By utilising generative anthropology as the hermeneutic lens to examine Nietzsche’s own insights about the human, we gain insights into both ways of thinking. Indeed, Nietzsche’s later thinking about the ethical is intimately connected to his earlier thinking about the emergence of language as an aesthetic phenomenon. Through an “originary analysis” of Nietzsche’s fundamental ideas about the human—the will to power, eternal recurrence, resentment, and language as “error”—Nietzsche’s particular vision of what the human is will be mapped out within a generative anthropological framework, which considers the advent of language itself to be coeval with the ethical and the “vertical” separation of the human from the horizontal worldly appetite of the non-human animal. An originary analysis is essentially that which claims all human thought and activity stem from a single “scene” of human origin, where all aspects of the human can be traced back to this moment. In order to understand how and why one should read Nietzsche from a generative anthropological standpoint, it is essential to give a brief overview of generative anthropology and its understanding of the origin of the human, language, and the ethical. However, it is precisely because generative anthropology provides a fixed reference point that accounts for the fundamental elements of the human as human, we are able to assess Nietzsche’s own thinking about the human in a new way, without retreating into the postmodern suspicion of the truth value of language