Rainer J. Hanshe

Nietzsche’s Synaesthetic Epistemology: The Restitution of the Holistic Human

“Do I counsel you to deaden your senses? I counsel you to innocence of the senses.”

——Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

In Nietzsche’s epistemic order, every sense is not only positively valued but also often “crossed” with other senses. Despite assertions by some scholars that his use of synaesthesia is strictly metaphoric, his texts reveal that the phenomenon is conveyed as a distinct reality. As recent neuroscience research has proven, such perceptions are not metaphoric but actual. Aside from its largely aesthetic orientation, synaesthesia also has a philosophical precedent. For Empedocles, common sense, Koinê aesthêsis, had a completely different meaning——the coordination of all the senses as an integrated sensory organ. As a purified mode of perception, it projects one beyond automatic modes of observation into heightened states of awareness.

In counseling us to develop a synaesthetic relation to the world, Nietzsche not only recuperates an ancient praxis but also advances a sense-oriented epistemology as part of his restitution of the body. Apart from sight and hearing, most senses were excluded from the field of knowledge, repressed like the sex organs. Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values includes dismantling and reconfiguring the traditional philosophic and religious hierarchy of the senses. Through positively endowing the senses and considering them valid means for acquiring knowledge, Nietzsche develops a new attunement to the world. In offering humanity this expansive vision of itself, he believes it has the capacity to achieve that vision for he sets boundaries to his thought through limiting “truth” to what is humanly thinkable, visible, and sensible. If as some neuroscientists believe synaesthesia can be developed, Nietzsche presents humanity with a spectacular challenge that demands consideration. Since Zarathustra achieves the challenging aspiration, Nietzsche reveals the task as attainable.

Rainer J. Hanshe is a novelist whose other works include aphorisms, poetry, and essays. He is seeking a publisher for his first novel, The Acolytes, and is currently at work on his second, “The Abdication.” Hanshe is a graduate of the New School and is pursuing his PhD in English at CUNY Graduate Center. He is interested in philosophy and all forms of aesthetics and how they may intersect, as well as consciousness and the body, space, time, and morality.

Research interests include German and English Romanticism, philosophy (ancient Greek, Nietzsche), aesthetics (history of aesthetics, with a particular emphasis on the beautiful and the sublime), poetic (poetry and poetic theory from the 19^th to the 20^thcentury), the sacred in the aftermath of the death of God, and modernist literature. He is a co-founder of the Nietzsche Circle (NC) and serves as one of the editors of its journal, The Agonist. Along with Mark Daniel Cohen, he also edits the journalHyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, published online through the NC:http://nietzschecircle.com/hyperion.html