Value in Modernity: The Philosophy of Existential Modernism in Nietzsche, Scheler, Sartre, Musil

383 Pages·2022·2.954 MB·English

by  Peter Poellner

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/01/22, SPi
Value in Modernity
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/01/22, SPi
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/01/22, SPi
Value in Modernity
The Philosophy of Existential Modernism in
Nietzsche, Scheler, Sartre, Musil
PETER POELLNER
1
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/01/22, SPi
1
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849731.001.0001
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For C. S.
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1. How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche on Overcoming the
‘Tyranny of the Real’ 19
1.1 Nietzsche’s Early Works as Founding Texts of Existential
Modernism in Philosophy 19
1.2 Metaphysical Agnosticism: The Critique of Schopenhauer 23
1.3 Redeeming Nature Aesthetically: The Birth of Tragedy and
Myth- Making 24
1.4 Affectivity and the Ideal in Untimely Meditations 34
2. Later Nietzsche: Value, Affect, and Objectivity 46
2.1 Introduction 46
2.2 Values, Attitudes, Objectivity: Some Preliminaries 48
2.3 Emotions as Perceptions of Values 55
2.4 Affectivity as Constitutive of Value: Nietzsche’s Rejection
of Metaphysical Value- Objectivism 73
2.5 Value and Nietzsche’s Metaphysical Indifferentism 85
3. Nietzsche’s Evaluative Practice: Ethics and Aesthetics 97
3.1 The Heterogeneity of Nietzsche’s Thinking on Value 97
3.2 Nietzsche’s First- Order Valuations: Two Examples 102
3.3 Quasi- Aesthetic Grounds of Valuation 108
3.4 Phenomenally Intrinsic Value 114
3.5 Applying the Theory: The Value of Subjectivity 126
3.6 Higher Values and Conceptualization 130
4. The Scheler–Sartre View of Emotion and Value: Defending
Qualified Affective Perceptualism 136
4.1 A Qualified Perceptualist Model of Emotional Experience 136
4.2 Does the Qualified Perceptual Model Misdescribe Emotional
Experience? 144
4.3 Do Phenomenological Differences between Emotions and
Standard Perceptions Undermine the Scheler–Sartre View? 147
4.4 Different Rationalizing Properties? 152
4.5 Experiencing Values in Objects: The Very Idea 155
5. Indistinctness in Value Experience 161
5.1 The Problem 161
5.2 Non- Conceptual Contents of Perceptual Experience 167
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viii Contents
5.3 An Analogy with Indistinct Affective- Evaluative Experiences? 174
5.4 Indistinctness in Anticipative Experiences of Futural Value 181
6. Distorted Value Experience and Intentional Self- Deception 191
6.1 The Example of Ressentiment 191
6.2 Ressentiment as an Intentional Project of Object- Mastery 197
6.3 Can One Intentionally Deceive Oneself? 204
6.4 Can Ressentiment ‘Create’ Values? 215
6.5 Conclusion: What Is Wrong with Ressentiment? 220
7. Freedom, Ethics, and Absolute Value: Early Sartre’s Two Philosophies 222
7.1 Intentional Consciousness 224
7.2 Freedom, Action, and Worldly Reasons 228
7.3 The Self- Determination of Consciousness 242
7.4 Ethics and Absolute Value 253
Appendix: Beyond Moral Principles 266
8. Modernity, Cultural Discontent, and the Experience of Wholeness:
Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities 269
8.1 What The Man without Qualities Is about: Musil’s Philosophical
Questions 269
8.2 Irony, Modernity, and the Ideal 274
8.3 Intentional Feeling, Value, and Concepts 282
8.4 The Reality of the Other Condition 295
8.5 Authentic Eros and the Reciprocity Thesis 302
8.6 The Outer Horizon of the Other Condition: Musil’s Holism 311
8.7 Action and the Other Condition 326
8.8 The Other Condition and Ethics 334
Conclusion 348
Bibliography 359
Index 369
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Acknowledgements
Chapter 4 is a slightly modified version of a journal article published previously
as ‘Phenomenology and the Perceptual Model of Emotion’, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 116:3 (2016), pp. 261–88. I gratefully acknowledge permission
by the Aristotelian Society to use this material.