Abstract
This paper attempts to argue that we can salvage the element of transcendence even within the immanent thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche by registering the inexhaustible nature of the present immanent/material existence itself. Thus, without invoking the binary of platonic “other-world” (which Nietzsche critiques to be guilty of nihilism), this paper focuses on Nietzsche’s meditations on the “sensual” itself which is endless or inexhaustible. This inexhaustibility, here, is being read in terms of breaching the immanent limits. Therefore, Nietzsche’s spirituality entails an affirmative transcendence where material itself is spiritualised precisely by problematising the “material” itself through the registration of its infinite depth. Hence, in Nietzsche’s universe of meaning, passion/desire is not banished in platonic sense, but rather it is spiritualised by deifying it; this paper performs an intervention here by arguing that this deification cannot lead to its confinement within the immanent precisely because it is inexhaustible or undefinable in its essence. Against a more popular (hard) problem of consciousness, this paper invites attention towards the “hard problem of matter” itself, since matter itself is an enigma, not fully known/defined. The paper also invokes, a much less known twentieth century American existentialist philosopher, Henry Bugbee, who puts a similar thesis in terms of “density” or “finality” of finite, material things. This study also borders on Hegel’s and later Jean Luc Nancy’s formulations of the “infinitude of the finite”.
Presenters
Mugees Ul KaisarStudent, PhD Student, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, Jammu and Kashmir, India
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Immanence, Transcendence, Infinitude of the finite, Inexhaustible, Nietzsche, Spirituality
