Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism: Essays on Interpretation, Language and Politics 9780773573567

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
NOTE ON ANNOTATION
INTRODUCTION
Tracking Nihilism: Heidegger to Nietzsche to Derrida
Nihilism: Reactive and Active
Nihilism and Autobiography
Nietzsche and Biblical Nihilism
Language to the Limit
The Deconstruction of the Tradition: Nietzsche and the Greeks
The Nietzschean Interpretation . . . of Freud as Thought on the Fragmentary, as Fragmented Thought
Minoritarian Deconstruction of the Rhetoric of Nihilism
Passing-a-Way-of-the-Child
Eurotaoism
With the "Nightwatchman of Greek Philosophy": Nietzsche's Way to Cynicism
Nihilism: "Thus Speaks Physiology"
Remarks on Nietzsche's Platonism
Nihilism and Technology
Zarathustra, Nihilism and the Drama of Wisdom
AFTERWORD
On the Coincidence of Our Preoccupation with Nietzsche
LIST OF WORKS CITED
CONTRIBUTORS

Citation preview

Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism: Essays on Interpretation, Language and Politics

TOM DARBY BÉLA EGYED BEN JONES, Editors

Carleton University Press

VIIIWIIII AND THE

RHETORIC OF

NIHILISM ESSAYS ON INTERPRETATION, LANGUAGE AND POLITICS

THE CARLETON LIBRARY SERIES A series of original works, new collections, and reprints of source material relating to Canada, issued under the supervision of the Editorial Board, Carleton Library Series, Carleton University Press Inc., Ottawa, Canada. GENERAL EDITOR Michael Gnarowski ASSOCIATE GENERAL EDITOR Peter Emberley EDITORIAL BOARD Duncan Anderson (Geography) Bruce Cox (Anthropology) Peter Emberley (Political Science) Irwin Gillespie (Economics) Naomi Griffiths (History) Michael MacNeil (Law) Daiva Stasiulis (Sociology)

MTZSCHE AND THE

RHETORIC OF

NIHILISM ESSAYS ON INTERPRETATION, LANGUAGE AND POLITICS EDITED BY TDM DARBY, BEWEGYED, BEN JONES

Carleton University Press Ottawa, Canada 1989

©Carleton University Press Inc. 1989 ISBN 0-88629-093-7 paperback 0-88629-099-6 casebound Printed and bound in Canada Carleton General List Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Nietzsche and the rhetoric of nihilism ISBN 0-88629-099-6 (bound) — ISBN 0-88629-093-7 (pbk.) 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. 2. Nihilism (Philosophy). I. Darby, Tom, 1942II. Egyed, Bela, 1941. III. Jones, Ben, 1930B3317.N43 1989

193

C89-090200-3

Distributed by: Oxford University Press Canada, 70 Wynford Drive, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3C 1J9 (416)441-2941 Cover design: Aerographics Ottawa Acknowledgements Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing programme by the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

Contents Page FOREWORD Ben Jones

vii

NOTE ON ANNOTATION

ix

INTRODUCTION. Tracking Nihilism: Heidegger to Nietzsche to Derrida Bela Egyed

1

Nihilism: Reactive and Active Gianni Vattimo

15

Nihilism and Autobiography Jean-Michel Rey

23

Nietzsche and Biblical Nihilism Thomas J.J. Altizer

37

Language to the Limit Claude Levesque

45

The Deconstruction of the Tradition: Nietzsche and the Greeks Tracy B. Strong

55

The Nietzschean Interpretation . . . of Freud as Thought on the Fragmentary, as Fragmented Thought Lise Monette

71

Minoritarian Deconstruction of the Rhetoric of Nihilism Constantin Boundas

81

Passing-a-Way-of-the-Child Francois Peraldi

93

Eurotaoism Peter Sloterdijk

99

With the "Nightwatchman of Greek Philosophy": Nietzsche's Way to Cynicism HorstHutter

117

Nihilism: "Thus Speaks Physiology" Richard Brown

133

Remarks on Nietzsche's Platonism Stanley Rosen

145

v

Nihilism and Technology Barry Cooper

165

Zarathustra, Nihilism and the Drama of Wisdom David Goicoechea

183

AFTERWORD. On the Coincidence of Our Preoccupation with Nietzsche Tom Darby

193

LIST OF WORKS CITED

201

CONTRIBUTORS

205

vi

Foreword Ben Jones "Nietzsche's books give the appearance of having been assembled rather than composed." Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher

These essays, gathered as they are from a group of conference papers, show diversities of approach, concern, rhetoric and strategy. But they have been assembled with a sense of composition. They were not presumed to bring into focus a singular Nietzsche, this Nietzsche whose mark is plural. The conference, "Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism" (held at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, 25-28 September 1986), set out to initiate discussion of Nietzsche's work, recognizing conventional interpretation of it, and to pose questions about whether or not (and if so, how?) it is rhetorical and nihilistic. Are there relations between rhetoric and nihilism? If there are, what are they? From the first, we were certain of the dualities: rhetoric has a reputation as both a positive and a negative force; nihilism is constructive as well as destructive. But even the terms positive and negative, constructive, destructive, are subject to interpretation and re-interpretation. We were committed to assembling diverse perceptions of Nietzsche, of what it was he was talking about, of how he spoke, of what had been made of him. The essays gathered here will show these diversities. Yet, there was a great deal of composition, and some composure, in the intent and the realization of the conference: there was a continuing interpretation of Nietzsche who offers us—perhaps as much as any modern writer—the opportunity for continuing such interpretation. To interpret Nietzsche is an act of re-interpretation not only of the Nietzschean text, but of texts prior to Nietzsche, texts after Nietzsche, texts written about or out of Nietzsche. The conference provided, as this collection also will provide, a demonstration of concentrated attention to problems of interpretation. Our intention to approach these problems from three different points of view—the philosophical, the literary, and the political—was realized in the way that we had anticipated, indeed hoped for: there were recognizable approaches to problems, but these approaches were mixed, interwoven, extra-territorial, extending beyond the strictly philosophical, literary or political. We may say that this was consistent with Nietzsche's approach, his way of interpretation. The essays are organized in this collection in an order different from the order of delivery at the conference. In retrospect, we have been able to see the possibilities for continuity that the exigencies of conferences obscure. Not all participants hear all the papers, and even conveners are drawn away to solve the latest crisis. We have established perspectives for the reading of the collection. Bela Egyed has provided an introductory essay which includes a guide for a sequential reading of the essays. Tom Darby has provided an afterword. If these positioning statements frame the essays which compose the text, they should not vn

be considered in themselves to be static markers identifying closure. Each in itself is an interpretation: Egyed's from the position of the "tradition," accounting for what these particular philosophical discourses deliver (tradere: to give over, surrender, deliver); Darby's from the position of how these discourses speak towards action in the world. Their own controlling metaphors provide some guidance to the reader: Egyed's "tracking," and Darby's "descent from the mountain." There is, then, movement within the frame, within the framing discourses. Between these positions, the one philosophical and the other political, the connections and the fractures within the text can be discerned. We hope that such connections and such fractures will enable and initiate new readings of Nietzsche's work. If the essays would not have been possible without the conference, we believe that the conference itself could not have been finally composed, or indeed complete, without this assembling of the essays. Especially we acknowledge the generosity of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Embassy of France, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany (with the Goethe Institute, Montreal), and the Embassy of Italy. Their support made the international and bilingual dimensions of the conference possible. Carleton University's support for the conference was re-assuring, necessary, and efficiently accessible, so we thank the Dean of Arts, the Dean of Social Sciences, the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, the Office of the President, the Office of the VicePresident (Planning), and the Departments of English, Philosophy and Political Science. For assistance in organizing the conference and being there, we thank Ian Lee. Earl Nitschke, of Central Michigan University, made available for exhibition at the conference his beautifully printed book Zarathustra's Roundelay (Enigma Press, 1984): as another interpretation of Nietzsche it was an important contribution. We also wish to express special thanks to the many participants at the conference who entered into discussions with eagerness, intelligence and pertinency. For assistance and support in the preparation of the book we thank the Deans, particularly the Dean of Social Sciences who provided the facility for word processing. For many hours of putting difficult texts onto disks we thank Else Brock. Julie Maybee prepared the annotations and assisted in the editing of papers and the preparation of English texts.

vni

H We have rationalized the methods of annotation within the limits placed upon us by diversities of approach, discipline and language. We have used "parenthetical documentation" within the text wherever possible. Author and/ or text citations refer to the List of Texts Cited (pp. 201-04). To avoid lengthy or cumbersome parenthetical entries for Nietzsche's texts we have used abbreviations or "short titles," as follows: CM 1967, for Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari). Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1967-. CM 1976, for Oeuvres Philosophiques Completes (eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari). Paris: Gallimard, 1976-. Kaufmann 1954, for The Portable Nietzsche (trans. Walter Kaufmann). New York: Viking 1954. Kaufmann 1966, for Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Walter Kaufmann). New York: Vintage, 1966. Kaufmann 1969, for Ecce Homo (trans. Walter Kaufmann). New York: Vintage, 1969. Kaufmann 1971, for Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Walter Kaufmann). New York: Viking, 1971. Kaufmann 1974, for The Gay Science (trans. Walter Kaufmann). New York: Vintage, 1974. KH 1968, for Will to />ower(trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale). New York: Vintage, 1968. Nietzsche 1920, for Gesammelte Werke, MUnchen: Musarion Verlag, 1920. Schlechta 1954, for Friedrich Nietzsche. Werke in drei Bdnden (ed. Karl Schlechta). MUnchen: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1954-65.

IX

This page intentionally left blank

Tracing Nihilism: Heidegger to Nietzsche to Derrida Bela Egyed I. Rhetoric and Nihilism This collection of essays is not intended as an introduction to Nietzsche. Rather, it is, as its title suggests, an exploration of two themes and a reflection on the possible connections between them. Nietzsche had much to say about nihilism. It might even be argued that it is the single most important theme running through his works. He says comparatively little about rhetoric. But one could assert that rhetoric is strongly implicated as one of Nietzsche's permanent concerns. Indeed, it could be argued that such Nietzschean themes as perspectivism, nihilism, will to power, eternal recurrence, or the overman lose altogether their force and novelty if they are not seen as just so many elements in Nietzsche's rhetorical arsenal. And it could be argued further that Nietzsche has created a new place for rhetoric in the history of Western thinking, that he has restored to it a legitimacy it once enjoyed. Not all the essays here are written from the same point of view. Nietzsche, because of the way he wrote and because of his attitude toward reading and writing, never had a devout circle of followers. Hence, those who follow him do so as individuals not so much in search of some one truth, but more in search of words and ideas around which they can weave their own words and ideas, giving the latter a unique texture. Among these varied and personalized perspectives on Nietzsche's words some have left marks on his corpus which none of us today can ignore. And, without doubt, the reader who had the widest impact on our generation was Heidegger. One could almost say, with only slight exaggeration, that everything that is said or thought about Nietzsche today is said or thought, directly or indirectly, for or against Heidegger. Indeed, this holds true for the essays that compose this book. I would say further that the majority of the authors of these essays take their specific position with respect to Nietzsche not only with Heidegger in the background but also with what has come to be known as the "French" interpretation of Nietzsche. This French interpretation has evolved as a result of a confrontation with Heidegger's thoughts on such fundamental topics as "metaphysics," "nihilism," and "difference." The names of Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida come up time and time again in this book and even where there is no explicit mention of them their influence is easily discerned. In order to enable our readers to see this more clearly, I shall set out as briefly as possible, first, Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche, then Deleuze's implicit critique of Heidegger's critique, and finally I shall try to indicate how Derrida's deconstruction is a development of Nietzsche's conception of philosophy and rhetoric and that it is in an important sense a critique of both Heidegger and Deleuze. 1

2

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

In spite of my great respect and admiration for Heidegger's philosophy, I cannot accept his critique of Nietzsche. In fact, I believe that Nietzsche's position is much closer to his own than he realizes. It seems to me that Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche, understood properly as a critique of subjectivism, is not only a more faithful understanding of Nietzsche but even of Heidegger himself who, it must not be forgotten, was the first thinker of difference and the first critic of subjectivism after Nietzsche. By introducing Derrida's position I want to focus attention on the affinities between the deconstructionist and the Nietzschean conceptions of language, and to show the importance of the notion of nihilism for both. The concept of nihilism is the obvious link between Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, and this book. But we must not forget rhetoric. Most of the papers in this book speak explicitly about rhetoric, offering one position or other with respect to rhetoric. However, I want to argue against some of them, and with some of them, that only by listening to deconstructionists like Derrida can we hear the great intensity of "the rhetoric of nihilism," and hear it not simply as the discourse of the rival, or of the frivolous, or of the dilettante, but hear it as it marks all discourse. But this is something that needs to be argued and something which I shall do with the hope that even if I don't succeed in convincing my readers, I will succeed in giving them a better sense of the overall argument of this book. II. Heidegger on Nietzsche on Nihilism Between 1935 and 1945, a period spanning the most troubled years of our century, in a series of lectures and articles on Nietzsche, Heidegger presented some of his most profound reflections on nihilism and on modernity. He took his point of departure from Nietzsche's distinction between incomplete and completed nihilism. He notes that there are a number of different senses of "nihilism" in Nietzsche, some of which are relatively easy to see. For example, it is relatively easy to see what Nietzsche means when he says that the history of Western thought up to his own time is a history of nihilism: he means the negation of life in the interest of peace and security. In other words, in one sense "nihilism" refers to a historical period in which the instinct to survive leads individuals and peoples to form communities, to institute rules of exchange which would enable them, if not to master, at least to create the illusion of mastering, all that is wild, unpredictable, and ambivalent: all that is alive. Another sense that Nietzsche gives to nihilism is that in the end the negation of life negates itself, that those values by which men have devalued life cause themselves to be devalued. This kind of nihilism is typified for Nietzsche by the world-weariness of a Schopenhauer. The point here is that since values are seen for what they are, simple instruments in the service of life, they can no longer be valued for themselves, but only tragically. It is not so easy to see that what Nietzsche thinks follows from the devaluation of all values hitherto recognized, or in other words, what he understands by "completed nihilism." It is

Tracing Nihilism: Heidegger to Nietzsche to Derrida

3

Heidegger's great merit that, against a mass of misinterpretations reigning at the time, he undertook the task of rethinking this question as it relates to the future destiny of man. He observes that Nietzsche's discussion of nihilism is an essential part of his "countermovement to metaphysics" (Heidegger 1977, 61), which is announced as early as in The Gay Science by the words "God is dead." But Heidegger also notes a radical ambiguity in this discussion: Nietzsche talks about an incomplete nihilism, a simple "no-saying," as well as a "completed" or "classical" nihilism. As a form of "yes-saying," completed nihilism is not simply a devaluing of the highest values hitherto recognized but is, at the same time, a revaluation, a counter-movement to devaluing (Heidegger 1977, 67-68). This revaluing is not merely a replacement of old values by new ones, it is also a complete restructuring of the nature and manner of valuation itself (Heidegger 1977, 70). Heidegger construes the revaluation carried out by complete nihilism as the replacement of a (lifeless) supersensory world with a (life-full) sensory world. In the end Heidegger does not think that Nietzsche has succeeded in overcoming nihilism, or even metaphysics: he has completed it but he has not overcome it. Despite all his overturnings and revaluing of metaphysics, Nietzsche remains in the unbroken line of the metaphysical tradition when he calls that which established and made fast in the will to power for its preservation purely and simply being, or what is in being, or truth. (Heidegger 1977, 84). Before looking at Heidegger's argument for this central point of criticism, let me say a few words about Heidegger's conception of metaphysics which motivates and guides his interpretation of Nietzsche. III. Heidegger on Metaphysics According to Heidegger, the history of Western metaphysics is a history of the forgetting of Being, or more precisely, the forgetting of the difference between Being and beings. This forgetting is accompanied, in Heidegger's view, by an ever growing obsession of the subject with itself. This subjectivity, in its increasing effort to master and dominate all that is not itself, making it into beings for its own use, erects an increasingly impenetrable veil between itself and Being. Language, science, metaphysics, technology, all have for Heidegger the same essence, they all play their role in this veiling. This conception of metaphysics leads Heidegger to say that Nietzsche completes, but does not overcome, metaphysics because, with his doctrines of will to power, eternal recurrence, and the overman, metaphysics reaches its highest possible point, a point so high, in fact, that humanity will no longer be able to hide from itself its own truth: its essential subjectivity. But, according to Heidegger, Nietzsche who is the first to give expression to this profound insight is able only to affirm it, and for this reason he escapes neither from metaphysics nor from nihilism. It remains to be seen whether Heidegger himself is able to do what he thinks Nietzsche could not do, but his interpretation of Nietzsche has some plausibility. If we were to think, as Heidegger seems to, that Nietzsche conceives of life, and

4

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

of the affirmation of life, uncritically, and if we construe will to power as a form of valuation, as a life enhancing/preserving point of view, and, furthermore, if we acknowledge Nietzsche's tendency to "ontologize" the will to power, Heidegger's conclusions are hard to avoid. Nietzsche arrives at this transformation of metaphysics into psychology, according to Heidegger, by connecting will to power to both valuation and to being. (This, he tells us, is the meaning of Aphorism 617 of Will to Power: "To impose upon becoming the character of being—that is the supreme will to power.") Heidegger, who places much emphasis on this passage, sees it this way: for Nietzsche, values are points of view whereby the conditions and preservation/enhancement of life are posited, but it is the will to power which posits values and it is the will to power which determines the essence of Being. In this way Being comes to be subjugated to the will to power. There are, however, a number of difficulties with the way in which Heidegger sees the connection between valuation, will to power, and being. First of all, Nietzsche never says that will to power is, or determines, the essence of being. He always means "beings" when he speaks of being, not "Being," if we are to use the Heideggerian terminology. What Heidegger means by "Being" is meant by "becoming" in Nietzsche. Secondly, and here we are getting at a more serious difficulty, Heidegger makes too much of the notion of preservation/ enhancement for Nietzsche's philosophy. He argues on the basis of a plausible, but not Nietzschean, view that enhancement is possible only if a stable reserve, preserved and secured, is already at hand (Heidegger 1977, 73). This seems to me to miss completely Nietzsche's ambivalence about the preservation of life. Nietzsche gives expression to this ambivalence when he says that the strong should be protected from the weak. Why should the strong be protected? The best answer to this question based on our understanding of Nietzsche is that the strong need to be protected from the weak because their interest in survival or self-preservation is lower. Metaphysics in all its forms is, according to Nietzsche, on the side of the weak: it is their strength. It is their defense against the incertitude and violence of living. As we have already seen, metaphysics as the protracted struggle to preserve life against life is one meaning Nietzsche attaches to "nihilism." Thus, we can see how the preservation of life can be for him in direct opposition to its enhancement. For this reason we cannot allow Heidegger to construe Nietzsche's conception of will to power as the necessary condition and positing of "the constant stability of a constant reserve" (Heidegger 1977, 103). But without this, Heidegger could not convincingly argue that Nietzsche's will to power amounts to an "obliteration of Being" by and in the name of a self-asserting subject. In fact, it can be argued, and it has been argued by a number of more recent interpreters of Nietzsche, that his notion of will to power is precisely his way of "decoding" or "deconstructing" subjectivity. As I have suggested, Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche can be criticized on a number of specific points and I could add to the ones already mentioned the following: first, it is extremely doubtful that Nietzsche would explain the

Tracing Nihilism: Heidegger to Nietzsche to Derrida

5

difference between incomplete and completed nihilism in terms of selfconsciousness; secondly, in view of Heidegger's statement that "Nietzsche never recognized the essence of nihilism," it is not clear whether he would grant him even that; thirdly, Heidegger says nothing about why and how Nietzsche thinks that completed nihilism involves a joyful affirmation, and he thereby leaves a number of important questions unexplored. At the same time, self-overcoming and self-affirmation are central themes in Nietzsche's philosophy. So the onus is on us to show that an interpretation of the will to power which is different from Heidegger's is possible. It is for this reason that Deleuze's Nietzsche et la philosophic is such a valuable contribution to Nietzsche studies. It was the first, and is to this day the most fully developed alternative to Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche. IV. Deleuze on Heidegger Deleuze's and Heidegger's interpretations of Nietzsche differ on almost every point. Yet, their agreement on the fundamental unity of the doctrine of will to power, eternal recurrence, and the overman makes it easier to compare their points of view. In fact, their differences can be brought into sharp focus by an examination of their respective treatment of "becoming." I have already expressed some reservation about the way Heidegger explains Nietzsche's concept of "being" and "becoming. "The following passage, despite its seeming innocence, reveals in my opinion another main source of Heidegger's misconstruing of Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power: Here and in the conceptual language of Nietzsche's metaphysics generally, the stark and indefinite word "becoming" does not mean some flowing together of all things or a mere change of circumstances; nor does it mean just any development or unspecified unfolding. "Becoming" means the passing over from something to something, that moving and being moved which Leibniz calls in the Monadology (Chap. 11) the changements naturels, which rule completely the ens qua ens. . . . Nietzsche considers that which thus rules (i.e., will to power) to be the fundamental characteristic (the essential) of everything real, i.e., of everything that is, in the widest sense. (Heidegger 1977, 73-74).

Apart from the gratuitous assimilation of Nietzsche's view to that of Leibniz, Heidegger's claim that for Nietzsche "becoming" means the passing over from one thing to another is absolutely without foundation. Even though Deleuze does not mention Heidegger by name, this is precisely the view that he attacks. In direct opposition to Heidegger, he maintains that "becoming" makes no sense unless it is conceived as "pure becoming" (Deleuze 1962, 53-54). For, if becoming is a becoming of something which already is, then it is a complete mystery why and how could it ever have begun to become. Furthermore, if becoming is a coming to something, it is a complete mystery how this could "take place." If it could, why then has it not already taken place? I will argue that we will go far in understanding Nietzsche if we accept that for him, as for Heraclitus, there must be a choice between pure (unchanging) being and pure

6

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

(changing) becoming as fundamental concepts, and that what he asks of a fundamental concept is that it be able to explain and not that it be explainable itself. According to Nietzsche, we can give a much better explanation of being in terms of becoming than the other way around. This is the true meaning of Aphorism 617 of the Will to Power. "That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being." For these reasons we have to agree with Deleuze when he says that it is nonsense to construe eternal recurrence as a return of the same. As he puts it: "It is not being that returns, but the return itself constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming . . . " (Deleuze 1962, 55). Thus, while he agrees with Heidegger that eternal recurrence is an expression of a more fundamental principle, the will to power, he does not understand this principle in the same way at all as Heidegger does. While it is ironic, it should be said: Deleuze is more open to Nietzsche's ontology, his discussion on being and becoming, than is Heidegger. Deleuze is more open because he is less obsessed with a certain manner of posing the "question of Being." He follows Nietzsche boldly in seeing what it is like to take Heraclitus' side in the debate with Parmenides. He takes seriously not only Nietzsche's attack on Parmenidianism, or on Platonism, but he takes just as seriously the latter's attacks on atomism, mechanism, and certain popular conceptions of time. This is what allows him to have a more "ontological" and a less voluntarist—that is, a less subjectivist— approach to the will to power. Once again, he is less concerned with the concept than with showing what role it might play in an overall explanatory schema. What is important for Deleuze is not the phenomenon of willing, of overreaching oneself, and of securing for oneself a stable reserve, but Nietzsche's attack on mechanism. Deleuze begins his account of the will to power by noting that force is essentially a relative concept: there is no force outside the relation offerees. On this point everyone agrees. But, Nietzsche invented the concept of "will to power" in an attempt to give a non-mechanistic explanation of force. Will to power, in other words, is nothing other than the genealogical aspect of force: that which differentiates quantitatively one force from another and that by virtue of which each force has its intrinsic quality. It is not to be mistaken for some secret inner will pre-existing in each force. For the same reason that there can be no force as such there can be no will to power as such. So why talk about will to power at all? Once again Deleuze considers Nietzsche's reasons to be ontological: forces in pure becoming cannot be in complete equilibrium (such a complete equilibrium would be pure being under another name). Therefore, at best, we can only speak of a synthesis, of a "vector" of forces. There is an affinity with Kant's conception of "synthesis," and this is intended. Here we have a constituting/constituted difference of forces which cannot, ex hypothesi, be imposed from "outside," i.e., "outside" is itself constituted by the differences of forces, therefore, there can never be an "outside" to their differences. And Nietzsche calls the originary self-constituting difference of forces "will to power."

Tracing Nihilism: Heidegger to Nietzsche to Derrida

7

At this point one might ask how "will to power", understood this way, could have anything to do with willing and subjectivity as we ordinarily understand them. Deleuze answers this question with an elaborate theory of active and reactive forces and affirmative and negative wills to power. It is an ontologically based theory of ethics in the grand style, suggesting that we might, after all, extract from Nietzsche's writings a non-Hegelian political philosophy, a different kind of answer to the question: "how ought one to live?" Fascinating as it is for the way it pulls together the different strands of Nietzsche's philosophy, it is not without its critics, especially among political theorists. Where Deleuze wants to end up is clear: he wants to arrive at a coherent vision of the overman, not as the essence of humanity, but as a figure of pure affirmation. He takes his distance from the Heideggerian conception by stating at the outset that man is essentially reactive and therefore cannot overcome nihilism without first overcoming himself. The overman is not, for Deleuze, the being who will succeed where man, even the highest, has failed (Deleuze 1962, 194). His problem at this point is to explain what he means by "man overcoming himself." The problem is especially urgent since this is one of those rare occasions on which Deleuze addresses his criticisms specifically to Heidegger, and, as we have seen, for Heidegger the overman is man overreaching himself. To put the problem slightly differently: if nihilism as negation is a quality of will to power and if conversely will to power appears in man as a will to nothing, how can man ever overcome himself and nihilism? Deleuze's solution to the problem is as simple as it is brutal: man must turn against himself, must destroy himself in order to make room for the overman. This solution clearly echoes many of Nietzsche's own sayings and it calls to mind the figure of Dionysus, so prominent in Nietzsche's writings. Let me offer a few suggestions which might illuminate this point. First, it should be recalled that for Nietzsche, and for Deleuze, the eternal recurrence is a principle of selection in addition to being the thought of an ontological synthesis. As a principle of selection it separates those who can bear life without "truth" and "eternal values" from those who cannot. But to affirm life conceived in such a way is completed nihilism. It is a wager, and a wager that all those who love both life and wisdom must make. And like all wagers, this one involves risks. In other words, only those who can live life fully, living it without the sour taste of resentment, loving it together with its ugliness and cruelty, will be able to affirm all its negations as well as all its affirmations. My second suggestion is based on an example Deleuze uses to illustrate what he means by the concept of "becoming-reactive" (Deleuze 1962,75). Sickness, he points out, is a reactive force insofar as it renders one inactive, restricts one's possibilities. But, at the same time it reveals new powers that one never thought one possessed. So there is no absolute distinction between forces which render me reactive, separate me from my potential, and those which bring out in me a new power. This indicates that even though man is essentially reactive and that his will to power is essentially a will to nothing, depending on the configuration

8

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

of forces which constitute him, they might tend to a further becoming-reactive or they might tend in the opposite direction. In the case of sickness one might unleash further reactive forces, fighting sickness as it were, or one might "affirm" it, gathering new strength. Of course, it is possible that one might die in the process, but one can die just as easily fighting sickness as affirming it, and by affirming it, and "oneself" "once again" in it, one can at least live more fully until one dies. And finally, we come back to Heidegger. He himself outlines how such an overcoming might some day be possible. And this outline, barely intelligible as it is, is not without relevance to the question of "pure affirmation." Having stated that "Nietzsche never recognized the essence of nihilism" he goes on to note first, that the essence of nihilism lies in history itself (Heidegger 1977, 109). But, since Being is whatever is in its entirety it cannot not be. Consequently, nihilism to us can only mean that Being does not show itself, that Being has withdrawn itself. And, according to Heidegger, we are accustomed to hearing a false note in "nihilism," hearing it because, in our self-centredness we can think, only of how Being appears to us and not how it is in itself. And he suggests that perhaps with another "note" in our ears, we might one day be able to ponder differently what really is "befalling Being" in this "age of that consummation of nihilism which is now taking place"(Heidegger 1977, 111). This different thinking would not be about some deeply hidden meaning behind our discourses on, for example, politics, technology or religion. It would be "de-ranged," "dislodged" (can we say also, "joyful"), a thinking of what "lies nearest." This, for Heidegger, would be a new way of thinking nihilism. I do not know to what extent these suggestions help to clarify the overman, or the completion of nihilism, but by listening to Nietzsche and his "interpreters," and by trying to talk about them ourselves, we get an uncanny feeling that we are coming up against the very limits of language. Could it be that nihilism is our language, or better yet, that it is that which is unsayable in our language revealing itself at the limit only as a limit? Ever since Spinoza one of philosophy's most important dicta has been: "determination is negation." It played a crucial role in Hegel's philosophy and it has once again come to the forefront with Heidegger's discussion of nihilism: by thinking Being under certain forms of determination as beings we think Being nihilistically. And, although he suggests that we could think Being in a different way, it is clear that we could not speak it differently. The question here asked of Heidegger is the following: what kind of thinking is it which cannot be spoken? Heidegger seems to reject the possibility that it is some kind of deep prelinguistic or extra-linguistic thinking. He says simply that it is a thinking of "that which lies nearest." What can this mean? One way of making this meaning clear is Derrida's. If we interpret "lying nearest" in the light of the original hermeneutic project of Being and Time, as that which is "present," Derrida's criticisms of it would apply. But if, on the other hand, we focus not on Being and Time but on Heidegger's later "philosophy of difference" Derrida's criticisms may not apply as easily. In a way, Derrida's "debate" with Heidegger is not

Tracing Nihilism: Heidegger to Nietzsche to Derrida

9

unlike the one between Nietzsche and Heidegger. What Derrida says in opposition to Heidegger is discovered later as having been said by Heidegger himself. In order to complete our discussion of the Heideggerian critique of Nietzsche we must confront Heidegger with Derrida on the question of difference. V. Difference: Between Heidegger and Derrida

Nothing would be gained by arguing at length whether Derrida's criticisms are appropriate for Heidegger or not. Instead, what I propose to do is to defend Derrida's views, leaving aside the question whether Heidegger would agree. A case can be made, however, that there is prima facie ground for suspicion about Heidegger's preoccupation with the question of Being. It seems to me that we have to choose between Being, on the one hand, and the difference between Being and beings on the other. Derrida clearly chooses the second. Heidegger seems at times to choose the first, but at other times says that there is no choice because Being is the difference between Being and beings. With Derrida, in contrast to Deleuze, we find specific attacks on Heidegger and on his reading of Nietzsche. But in Derrida we do not find the comprehensive reconstruction of Nietzsche's works that we find in Deleuze. There is a passage in Grammatology that puts his position on the Heideggerian interpretation very pointedly: To save Nietzsche from a reading of the Heideggerian type, it seems that we must above all not attempt to restore or make explicit a less naive "ontology," composed of profound ontological intuitions acceding to some originary truth, an entire fundamentality hidden under the appearance of an empiricist or metaphysical text. The virulence of Nietzschean thought could not be more completely misunderstood. On the contrary, one must accentuate the "naivete" of a breakthrough which cannot attempt a step outside of metaphysics, which cannot criticize metaphysics radically without still utilizing in a certain way, in a certain type or a certain style of text, propositions that, read within the philosophic corpus, that is to say according to Nietzsche ill-read or unread, have always been and will always be "naivetes," incoherent signs of an absolute appurtenance. Therefore, rather than protect Nietzsche from the Heideggerian reading, we should perhaps offer him up to it completely, underwriting that interpretation without reserve; in a certain way and up to the point where, the content of the Nietzschean discourse being almost lost for the question of being, its form regains its absolute strangeness, where his text finally invokes a different type of reading, more faithful to his type of writing: Nietzsche has written what he has written. He has written that writing—and first of all his own—is not originarily subordinate to the logos and to truth. (Derrida 1974, 19)

Derrida is here warning us against attempting to restore to Nietzsche, or to make explicit in Nietzsche, a more sophisticated ontology than that of Heidegger. This constitutes indirectly a reproach to Deleuze who, as we have seen, attempts to do just that. Also, it is a reproach to all those writers who take seriously the project of overcoming the nihilism of metaphysics. All readings which claim that Nietzsche was or was not a "naive" metaphysician mis-read him, and do so because they read him metaphysically. It is Derrida who says that

10

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Nietzsche is read well only if he is read "superficially,"—read on the surface— because writing, as Nietzsche himself says, is only surface. Writing has no depth. We are reminded here of Heidegger's invocation: "think what lies nearest." And we can hear in this reminder an explosion of the difference between Derrida's and Heidegger's points of view. This is precisely Derrida's point: there is neither depth to his own writing nor to Heidegger's, and those differences between texts or interpretations are really like the folds between two surfaces. This is also why Derrida asks us to read Nietzsche in a completely Heideggerian way in order that Nietzsche may regain his absolute strangeness. Absolute strangeness comes with absolute closeness. Something is strangely close to us (unheimlich) because it talks to us in our own language, but talks strangely about familiar, all too familiar, things. Heidegger's and Deleuze's readings of Nietzsche function insofar as they push certain elements of his text to a breaking point. They fail the moment they invite us to a secure position where, in our complacency, we could say "yes, this is it, now I've got it." Derrida captures the meaning of "rhetoric of nihilism" more firmly than does either Heidegger or Deleuze by his insistence that we can never take our distance from nihilism because all such distancing is already caught up in nihilism. But, is there negation without affirmation, surface without depth, rhetoric without logic, or difference without identity? Surely, it would be too naive to think we can affirm difference and at the same time negate one of the terms in difference. I have hinted earlier that Heidegger in thinking Being and difference might be guilty of such a naivete. But surely Heidegger is not naive, or at least not a naive philosopher. And here is where something uncanny appears: Heidegger, or Nietzsche, or anybody else, could not have been a profound philosopher if he had not already been naive. What about Derrida and Deleuze? Is Deleuze not naive when he talks of "pure becoming" or when he talks of "pure affirmation"? And is Derrida not naive when he talks of the "arch-trace," or of "differance"? To those who read him as proposing a new "structuralist" ontology he will appear naive. But, there is no Derrida in himself, so whether he is naive, and to what extent he is, will depend on the nature and strength of the interpretive forces which resist him. Thus the naivete, the profundity, the frivolity, or the seriousness of any discourse, can only reveal itself as a resistance, as a difference which is deferred, if not altogether negated, by and in the nihilism of rhetoric which is at the same time a rhetoric of nihilism. VI. The Rhetoric of Nihilism If what I say in the last section is anywhere near the truth, if, that is to say, it can put up a resistance for at least a short time, then the essays in this volume are not simply about the rhetoric of nihilism but are instances of such a rhetoric. The question of the relation between rhetoric and nihilism is first taken up by Gianni Vattimo. In his most recent publications, writing under the joint influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger, he invited us to consider the possibility that there is only a "weak" truth, a "weak" ontology, or a "weak" thought.

Tracing Nihilism: Heidegger to Nietzsche to Derrida

11

Vattimo here brings the notion of "weak thought" to bear on the issue of overcoming nihilism. Arguing, first, that attempts by hermeneutics, pragmatism and vitalism to give sufficiently precise sense to Nietzsche's distinction between "active" and "reactive" nihilism have failed, he goes on to suggest that we should not look for a "strong" alternative between the two. He recommends, instead, that we look upon active nihilism not simply as the overcoming of metaphysics but also as the overcoming of the hope that there is a strong alternative to metaphysics. This suggestion invites us, at the same time, to read not only the distinction between "active" and "reactive" but all of Nietzsche's binary oppositions in a new way. Jean-Michel Rey's essay, like Vattimo's, is informed by years of study into Nietzsche's works. Here he shows how all discourse, and especially that of autobiography, is filled with paradoxes and ambivalences. If his essay can be said to have one single thesis, it is this: "Nihilism is perhaps discourse which, after multiple detours, after times of wandering, is on the way to finding its object, that is to say, the very absence of an Object." Some might wish to see in it also a masterly deconstruction of Nietzsche's announcement: "Nihilism is at the door: whence comes this most uncanny of all guests?" Thomas Altizer is widely known in the English speaking world of letters not as a philosopher but as a voice of radical theology. Still, readers of his essay in this volume will note affinities with what I am calling the philosophy of difference. Altizer considers Nietzsche "the apocalyptic thinker par excellence . . . simultaneously apprehending God as absolute Yes and absolute No, as absolute perfection and nihilistic abyss." And he concurs with Nietzsche that "the Christian God is a pure embodiment of guilt and revenge," linking guilt and revenge to "an apprehension of the Kingdom of God as being other than all and everything, as being a realm wholly beyond or wholly to come." Thus for Altizer Yes-saying is, as it was for Nietzsche, inseparable from No-saying. Consequently, all discourse about the coming of God is inevitably discourse announcing the death of God. And this comes close, I think, to saying that all discourse, insofar as it announces a coming or a passing, is a discourse of nihilism. Claude Levesque's essay in this volume, "Language to the Limit," warns us against a simplistic way of construing Nietzsche's distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. He argues that Nietzsche considered musicality and language to be inseparable, music being not something above or below language but its very limit. He describes how at this limit, in the scream (le cri), language shows itself for what it is. A corollary of Levesque's thesis is that what marks language as language is not its seriousness, its conceptuality, but precisely that which, by mobilizing the dissonance of desires and impulses, allows it to escape all representation. He also makes it clear that for Nietzsche the Dionysian and the Apollonian, drunken ecstasy and melodic revelry, are not absolute opposites. He merely insists that the Apollonian risks denying itself in denying the Dionysian. Levesque's sober analysis of Dionysian frenzy points in a direction away from what are, at best, romantic, and at worst reactionary, conceptions of politics too often ascribed to Nietzsche.

12

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Tracy Strong's pioneering work, in English, on the French Nietzsche— a Nietzsche which emerged from the writings of Blanchot, Derrida, Deleuze, and Klossowski—came out more than ten years ago. He was among the first to bring "deconstruction" to North American Nietzsche studies. In the present volume he asks: What did the Greeks mean for Nietzsche? What is the sense in which Nietzsche made the Greeks his own? And what can we learn from Nietzsche's "imitation" (mimesis) of the Greeks? Strong's main interest is in understanding the structure of authority, in understanding the process whereby what has authority is recognized and accepted as authoritative. Strong is not asking a simple question about history and tradition. His question goes to the very heart of political life in that it poses the radical question of all political subjects: what authorizes adhesion to a community? Freud and Nietzsche are the two central figures for all that has been vibrant and inspiring in the last few decades of French intellectual life. And, as Lise Monette reminds us, in spite of Freud deliberately taking his distance from Nietzsche's writing, and doing so mostly to safeguard his own "originality," and in spite of Lacan's contemptuous attitude towards his own Nietzschean contemporaries, the affinities between Nietzsche and psychoanalysis are unavoidable. This contention is already implied by Key's, Levesque's and Strong's papers. But Monette arranges for us a "blind date" between Freud and Nietzsche on the question of interpretation. She shows us first of all how a Nietzschean "interpretation" of Freud could have fertile consequences both for the theoretical and clinical development of psychoanalysis. She also points to very important similarities between the Nietzschean and the psychoanalytic notion of "interpretation." In the end she offers philosophers new insight into Nietzsche's conception of "time," "truth," "will to power," and also into Nietzsche's use of aphorism: his way of keeping his writing open to interpretive forces without letting it run wild. The title of Constantin Boundas' paper, "Minoritarian Deconstruction," should be read in two ways. First, it should be read as a form of deconstruction which Deleuze and Guatari find in Kafka's writing. Kafka, according to them, is able to subvert a "major language" by setting up a "minor" practice within it. Secondly, "minoritarian" should be read as a form of deconstruction which differs from the "majoritarian" (Derridian) practice of it. In fact, Boundas' paper is minoritarian in both senses. He details the distinctive contributions made by such readers of Nietzsche as Deleuze, Laruelle, and Klossowski who read him "ontologically." At the same time he attempts to deconstruct the majority deconstructionist position from within. I leave it up to the reader to decide to what extent the minoritarian's key concept, "intensity" (which Boundas also calls "originary difference"), is in fact sufficiently distinct from Derrida's concepts of "arch-trace" and "differance" to enable their subversion. Whether or not it succeeds in confounding the codes of majoritarian deconstruction, Boundas' essay makes an important contribution to our understanding of the French Nietzsche. At the beginning of Zarathustra we are told about the three metamorphoses of the spirit, first into camel, then into lion, and finally into child. Nietzsche's figure of the child allows Frangois Peraldi to convoke for us, this time, Nietzsche,

Tracing Nihilism: Heidegger to Nietzsche to Derrida

13

Heidegger and Freud. The description of a "primal scene" at Heidegger's house leads Peraldi to reflect upon the conditions of thinking which, according to him, are also the pre-conditions of psychoanalysis: the ability of the thinker as well as of the analyst to become-child. This becoming-child is not for psychoanalysis, any more than it was for Nietzsche, a becoming of a something from a something else. It is rather a constant repetition of a passing away, a form of dying. This passing away, which corresponds in the primal scene to the absence of the mother in her "little death," is also a rite of passage. Peraldi locates the birth of thinking at this "point of radical cleavage." Consequently, he suggests, that the thinker, if he is to make himself available to "that which lies nearest," must go back to this point of cleavage and go over it again as did the child. Peter Sloterdijk's poetic essay is also a result of years of reflection upon Nietzsche, Heidegger and psychoanalysis. Against common opinion he suggests that our death poses less of a problem for us than does our birth. He sees all efforts to achieve full subjectivity as pathetically inadequate attempts to heal an originary wound. Sloterdijk's ultimate intention is to trace the way from the ancient Cynics through Nietzsche to what might be called Eurotaoism. I do not think that he is alone in this project. While his term "Eurotaoism" will seem puzzling to some we should be reminded that the Tao, the Way, is not what can be named, it is not what it is forever, it is rather what makes all naming possible, makes all difference possible, it is, we might say, "originary difference" or "arch-trace." Horst Hutter's thoughts on the Cynic tradition are, as he tells us, a continuation of Sloterdijk's major work, The Critique of Cynical Reason. Cynics like Diogenes Laertius practiced a form of rhetoric of the body which was meant to resist attempts at recodification. For this reason they could be considered as the first joyful practitioners of the rhetoric of nihilism. Their vulgar parodies and pantomimes can teach us much about strategies of subverting dominant discourses. Hutter argues that Nietzsche's rhetoric owes an important debt to the ancient Cynics. But he notes that for historical reasons Nietzsche's appropriation of the cynic wisdom of the body was not complete. He points out that Nietzsche gave in at times to morbid, and "cynical" (in its modern colloquial sense) ideas about pain and suffering. It is interesting to speculate as to how much Nietzsche knew about the characters and the events associated with the historical phenomenon that has come to be called "Russian nihilism." No doubt the subject came up in his conversations with Lou Salome. He was, no doubt, also familiar with the attempt of these "nihilists" to reduce questions of morality to questions of physiology. Richard Brown's essay documents the many references to physiology that appear throughout Nietzsche's writings. We can assume that Nietzsche was aware of the conceptual traps opened up by a narrowly reductivist use of the term. Brown shows us how Nietzsche, by making physiology a fundamental concept of moral valuation, completely restructures the nature and manner of valuation itself. Brown stops short, however, of spelling out how this valuation from "below," this rhetoric of the body, could lead to an active, or completed nihilism.

14

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Stanley Rosen sets himself the task, first, of arguing that Heidegger's view about Nietzsche's "Platonism" misses the rhetoric in both Nietzsche's and Plato's philosophy. Neither, according to Rosen, were "Platonists" in Heidegger's sense. Secondly, he argues that Nietzsche's commitment to chaos, a world of pure becoming, cannot fairly be described as commitment to ontology. Finally, Rosen undertakes to spell out the difference between Nietzsche's and Plato's rhetoric. In Rosen's view both invoke a "noble lie." But, whereas Plato's sober political rhetoric is meant to constitute a political solution, Nietzsche's "mad or Dionysiac" rhetoric provides none. Still, Rosen finds a sense in which we might speak of "Nietzsche's Platonism." Nietzsche's teaching, he claims, "stands or falls upon the possibility of distinguishing the high from the low, the noble from the base. . . . " Surely, high and low, noble and base cannot simply be the rigid, absolute binary distinctions of traditional metaphysics. The question then is whether, in the end, Nietzsche was a dupe of metaphysics (and the political hierarchies that it has nourished) or was using categories of metaphysics and politics in an effort to deconstruct them. The possibility of discovering a natural order, which could serve as basis for sober political thinking, is important for both Barry Cooper and Stanley Rosen. However different their answers to this question might be, they agree on the importance of it. Cooper shows in a humorous way how Nietzsche's description of ass-worship at the end of Zarathustra is also an apt description of the current worship of technology. Like Rosen, he also seems to fault Nietzsche. Nietzsche, Cooper says, side-steps the Socratic question, "how ought one to live?", by giving it a merely Dionysian answer. Here, one might juxtapose some of the earlier essays, especially Levesque's and Strong's and the questions they raise about the validity of attributing to Nietzsche an absolute distinction between "sober" and "Dionysian" rhetoric. David Goicoechea approaches the rhetoric of nihilism from yet another point of view. Through an analysis of the rhetoric of life and wisdom in Zarathustra he leads us step by step to the conclusion that Zarathustra's affirmation of life is "beyond Platonic negation and the tragic protest." Thus, for Goicoechea, too, the question "How ought one to live?" is an all important one. But he finds the answer to it to be beyond rhetoric. In short, he understands the overcoming of nihilism as an overcoming of rhetoric. And, as he says, this overcoming cannot be derived from Platonic negation or tragic protest; it must come from an affirmation of all that is. But, what does it mean to affirm all that is? Does it mean to re-affirm all that has been affirmed or negated up to now? Or, does it mean to affirm and to negate differently—in a way which would result neither in a simple "what is" or "what is not"? These questions bring us back to the one posed by Vattimo in the first essay of this book: should we not think of Nietzsche's overcoming of nihilism as advocating a form of "weak" thought? I invite the reader to judge.

Nihilism: Reactive and Active* Gianni Vattimo

The chance of Nietzsche's philosophy amounting to an Überwindung der Metaphysik, an overcoming of Platonism, or an overcoming of the bisherige Mensch and the subjection to morals, religion, and ideology, depends on the distinction between reactive (or passive) and active nihilism—a distinction that is neither clear-cut nor univocal in the notes of the late Nietzsche. As you know, Nietzsche calls himself the first accomplished nihilist ("der erste vollkommene Nihilist Europas"), precisely because he has pushed nihilism to its extreme consequences and therefore "ihn hinter sich, unter sich, au/ter sich hat", has left it behind, below, and outside (Schlechta 1954, 3:634). The whole of Nietzsche's interpretation of the problems of his age and ours—remember that he records that his writing is the story of the next two centuries (Schlechta 1954, 3:634)— lies in the very possibility of the transformation of passive nihilism into active nihilism through its radicalization or accomplishment. Therefore, the distinction between reactive and active nihilism is not just a matter of Nietzschean philology, of reconstructing his thought for the sake of historical knowledge—it is a way of re-examining the possible meaning of the concept of nihilism as a theoretical proposal for today's philosophy. Modern commentaries show just how difficult it is to discern in Nietzsche's texts a clear distinction between reactive and active nihilism. Commentators tend predominantly to understand his notion of nihilism in a symptomatic sense: that is, as a symptom of the decadence, illness or dissolution of late bourgeois culture (compare, for example, Lukacs' Destruction of Reason), or as the accomplishment and the end of metaphysics, as in Heidegger (although Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche is much more complicated and cannot be reduced to this simplified scheme). Other dominant interpretations of Nietzsche's thought from this century show similar tendencies. Both Jaspers and Lowith, for example, although in somewhat different ways, consider nihilism the expression of a problematic condition which Nietzsche, ultimately, never overcame. In this paper I will try to show that the difficulty of clearly distinguishing reactive from active nihilism is a real one; but far from reducing Nietzsche's notion of nihilism to a symptom, this difficulty is the very basis of the "positive" meaning of his theoretical proposal. The most general characterization of the distinction between reactive—or passive—and active nihilism seems to be in terms of strength of spirit. Nihilism, according to Nietzsche, is zweideutig, i.e. ambiguous. Nihilism can be a sign (Zeichen) of the strengthened power of the spirit or a sign of the spirit's fall. The

*Julie Maybee assisted in the preparation of Professor Vattimo's English text (eds.).

15

16

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

first is active nihilism, the second passive (Schlechta 1954, 3:557). (Note that Nietzsche here uses the "metaphysical" and moral notion "spirit" probably in the same sense in which he uses the expression "Freiheit des Geistes" in a note on the same manuscript (CM 1967, VIII, 2:17 [9, 39]). The power of the spirit is increased, above all, by the dissolution of everything that requires our acceptance of an objective structure, of a meaning or of a value. Generally, a belief "expresses the constraint of existence-conditions, the subjection to the authority of relations within which a being expands (gedeiht), grows (wachst), obtains power. . ." (Schlechta 1954, 3:557). Therefore, the denial of these conditions is itself a sign of activity and so cannot be mistaken for reactive nihilism.1 Negation, however, is not the main and specific characterization of passive and reactive nihilism. On the contrary, in its different historical forms, this nihilism has always taken an affirmative appearance since its very purpose is to conceal the nothingness which lies at the base of all that which is believed to be true, to have value and to subsist as an objective structure. Passive nihilism is reactive exactly in the sense that when the supreme values fall, it refuses to accept the annihilation, and in an attempt to numb, heal and tranquilize, opposes to it all sorts of "disguises: political, religious, moral, aesthetic, etc. "(Schlechta 1954, 3:558). Thus, the connection between passivity and reactivity becomes clear: the reaction—the use of all sorts of disguises, i.e. the creation of ideological masks— is part of the attitude that refuses to recognize that there are no objective meanings and values, no given structures of being which would exist independently, and that, therefore, these meanings and values must be actively created. The passive nihilist does not accept this creative task, and reacts by using disguises and masks so "that things have an autonomous structure (eine Beschaffenheit an sich) totally independent of interpretation and subjectivity— [and] this is a completely lazy hypothesis: it assumes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential . . ." (Schlechta 1954, 3:555). Reactivity, then, is connected to passivity and laziness. If, on the other hand, nihilism has the courage to accept that God is dead, i.e., that no objective structure an sich is given, nihilism becomes active in at least two senses. First, it does not simply unmask the nothingness which lies at the basis of meanings and values—it also produces and creates new interpretations and values. It is only passive nihilism which says that there is no need for ends and meanings. On the contrary, "exactly now [now that God is dead], when Will would be required in its highest strength, it is in its weakest and most cowardly condition. . . . There is an absolute mistrust in the organizing power of the will . . ."(Schlechta 1954, 3:555). Second, nihilism is active insofar as it is not simply the "belief that all deserves to be dissolved (zugrunde zu gehen)", that all is in vain, but actively operates to dissolve and destroy (Schlechta 1954,3:670). Perhaps this is an illogical attitude because one could simply wait for the inevitable annihilation of all values and structures; but nihilism does not claim to be logical. Active nihilism is the

Nihilism: Reactive and Active

17

attitude of strong spirits—and these, by their very nature, cannot be satisfied with the "not" of the judgment. This judgment must be followed by the "not" of the action. "Annihilation by means of the judgment seconds annihilation by means of the hand" (Schlechta 1954, 3:670) (with all the Marxist echoes so intensely present in the Nietzsche commentaries of the sixties and seventies). Yet, why do the bisherige values deserve to be dissolved? While they pretend to be the "eternal" truth, they simply express the conditions under which "specific forms of life (eine bestimmte Art von lebendigen Wesen)" (Schlechta 1954, 3:844) can survive and develop. "We have projected our survival-conditions (unsere Erhaltungs-Bedingungen) as the predicates of Being in general" (Schlechta 1954, 3:556). What is believed to be the truth, the structure and value of Being in itself, is simply, we could say, ideology—the historical projection of a form of life, of an individual or of a society. Now, the reason why these values need to be dissolved is the same reason why they are necessary: every form of life needs a truth, a system of survival and development conditions projected into an interpretation of the world. As we saw above, the mistrust in the "organization power" of the Will is a symptom of weakness and of passive nihilism. Consequently, active nihilism cannot destroy the bisherige ideologies without creating new ones, i.e., new interpretations which represent the conditions of survival and development of another form of life. What is it that really differentiates these "active" values from the old, tranquilizing disguises of reactive nihilism? Apparently, while the latter represented themselves as eternal truths and objective structures, the "active" interpretations are explicitly aware of their hermeneutic essence, and so they correspond to a more adventurous form of life which is free, rich and open. In the form of life of the herd, of reactive and passive nihilism, no interpretation is strong and courageous enough to present itself as the interpretation of someone. It always has to appear as the "objective" truth. In the weak and decadent romanticism of the nineteenth century, for example, the idea of genius was replaced by that of "popular poetry"—without individuality or individual creativity (Schlechta 1954, 3:553-4). It is not clear whether the reference to different forms of life—the weak and decadent vs. the strong and adventurous—has really brought us to a satisfactory characterization of passive and active nihilism. As a matter of fact, the "strong" form of life may still be defined in terms of either "hermeneutic awareness" or pure extra-hermeneutic strength. In the first case, strength would be precisely the capacity to live without the guarantee of a firm horizon, to live with the awareness that the systems of values—all of them—are nothing but "human, all too human" interpretations, or, as The Gay Science puts it, the simple awareness that "I am dreaming and have to go on dreaming" if I want to live (Schlechta 1954, 2:73). In the second case, active nihilism would be defined as a form of life which, through its strength and vitality, creates again and again new "interpretations" of the world which struggle against and oppose each other and establish provisional and temporary balances of power without ever being able to refer to any "objective" criteria of validity. While this latter conception looks a little like the image of the Renaissance made popular by Burckhardt (and

18

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

which was largely shared by Nietzsche), the former has more the traits of a Goethean or Diltheyan historical consciousness. I am going to argue that the "vitalistic," "historistic" or "transcendental" images of active nihilism do not describe active nihilism adequately. The historistic image, which reminds us of Dilthey in a substantial sense (Schlechta 1954, 2:219),2 seems inadequate because it reminds us of what could be called "Socratism." Given the dissolution of the notion of self-consciousness in Nietzche's works—self-consciousness being "the voice of the herd" and a mere tool of communications, especially for the needs of the social hierarchy (Schlechta 1954, 2:219-22)—it is hard to believe that the essential characteristic of active nihilism could be that sort of docta ignorantia which takes all the value systems as mere "errors", dreams, ideologies, or as historical Weltanschauungen which become materials for a typology or a transcendental psychology. The second, vitalistic image, which defines active nihilism in terms of energy, power, and vital force, also involves difficulties, even though it is rather popular among Nietzsche commentators, from Baumler to Deleuze or Foucault, nonetheless with very different conclusions. While Baumler and the fascist interpretation assume that Nietzsche has unmasked the "violent" essence of history and culture, and that, on this basis, a culture should intensify its strength, even the biological strength of a race, Foucault takes Nietzsche's unmasking thought as a sort of more radical "critique of ideology," showing that the historical epistemai are but "effects of forces" and must be so described (which also goes back to a sort of Diltheyan view). Deleuze seems to distinguish between the "authentic" vital fluxus and the "canalizations" imposed upon them. Only the latter are responsible for the "violent" (fascist) aspects of history while, taken as a step toward the liberation of the vital fluxus, Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power is one of emancipation. It is hard to see how life could be defined under all these vitalistic interpretations of active nihilism in any terms other than those of hermeneutic strength. Just as Nietzsche criticized the idea of a central and ultimate character of consciousness, he criticized the notion of life as something substantial and unique—which probably explains why he says in Ecce Homo that he should not be mistaken for a "Darwinian donkey." Like the ego and the will to power itself,3 life is nothing but an interpretation, a notion that is totally internal to a particular perspective and incapable of describing, in a general and ultimate way, the essence of being. Therefore, if we were to claim that the ultimate nature of active nihilism is defined in terms of the vital strength it expresses, we would bring in a "metaphysical" notion of vital strength, and of life, that is not consistent with Nietzsche's other doctrines. Consequently, the superiority of active over reactive nihilism seems to be intelligible only in terms of a comparison between different interpretations of perspectives. Yet this comparison, if we are to exclude the reference to a metaphysics of life, brings us back to the question of deciding why, in pure hermeneutic terms, one perspective reveals itself to be "superior" to another; and we are confronted once more with the "transcendental thesis."

Nihilism: Reactive and Active

19

The inadequacy of what may be called "metaphysical vitalism" as a description of Nietzsche's philosophy also argues against a pragmatic interpretation of active nihilism. Of course, such an interpretation does seem very plausible. From a generally "cultural" point of view, the pragmatic interpretation could represent an "urbanization" (Urbanisierung) of Nietzsche paralleling Heidegger's interpretation which, as Habermas has pointed out, has taken place within Gadamer's hermeneutic (and, we could add, within Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature). The passage I quoted above about the "laziness" of passive nihilism recalls almost literally a page of Rorty's book in which he, referring not to Nietzsche but to Sartre, "recommends" a pragmatic attitude which is morally active and responsible—the attitude in accordance with which man accepts the task of creating meanings instead of looking for them "out there" (Rorty 1979, 375-6). Rorty's pragmatism could also help us to resolve the political problems posed by many pages of the late Nietzsche. Nietzsche's idea that the Ubermensch needs slaves, that the superiority of the creative type of man can exist only in relation to a non-creative mass, could easily be "transformed" into the complementarity which, as you know, Rorty establishes between what he calls (in Kuhnian terms) normal and revolutionary science, or epistemology and hermeneutics. In such a transformation, the first member of each pair is the generally accepted paradigm of a science or of a culture of society, and the second comprises the innovative interpretations that cannot be "proved" within the paradigm but have to be "understood" through a hermeneutic act, as in poetic experience or the experience of becoming acquainted with a person. As I said, this "pragmatic" interpretation could be supported by many arguments for its consistency, especially within the radical anti-Platonism professed by Nietzsche. Under this point of view, active nihilism would be defined as radical pragmatism. Nevertheless, I believe that even this view remains within a vitalistic perspective. Why should we recommend an active nihilism or pragmatic attitude, as Rorty does, if not on the implicit basis of a belief in the "value" of innovation, creation, Wachstum, or, ultimately, life? I know that Rorty avoids this "metaphysical" implication by simply assuming that everybody will spontaneously prefer to live in an open horizon (with a conversation going on, as he says) instead of a situation in which a mind is just the "mirror" of an objective order out there, which excludes the possibility of novelty and a continuation of the conversation. Nietzsche could probably object that the very preference for an "open" horizon, as far as it is shared, is again a "herd" belief, or at least one interpretation among others. As a matter of fact, it could be very easily argued that precisely the idea that novelty, creation, and invention of paradigms are "better" than repetition and conservation is the characteristic dogma of modernity—a sort of generally shared vitalistic ideology whose collapse is announced by Nietzsche's idea of the eternal recurrence. I am not going to elaborate this theme here. I simply want to point out that, apart from the difficulties which would arise if we were to attribute to Nietzsche the position of a "metaphysical" vitalist, there are signs—I would not say

20

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

evidence—in his late works that he tried to solve the problem of "active nihilism" in another way, a way in which nihilism, however active, remains defined in terms of "nothingness," a kind of nothingness that any pragmatist could not tolerate. The long fragment on European nihilism written at Lenzer Heide in the summer of 1887 describes nihilism as the "discovery" that existence has no meaning and no end, or, in other words, that God is dead and all is Wille zur Macht, and it goes on to say that this discovery (which, by the way, is not a theoretical event but an objective process of modern civilization) will result in the perishing of the weak and of the slaves who will no longer be able to protect themselves with metaphysical, religious and moral disguises. The struggle among naked forces, wills to power, will become explicit. However, in this situation, Nietzsche says in the last paragraph, the winners will not be the most violent individuals, but rather the most "moderate, those who do not need extreme beliefs, those who not only admit, but love a good deal of hazardousness and absurdity . . . ." Many other notes of the last years show more clearly what Nietzsche meant by "moderation." In those notes, he uses as the model of the Ubermensch not the "blonde Bestie" or the violent man (which would correspond to the vitalistic, fascist ideal of Ubermensch}, or, it is important to note, the philosopher or "transcendental psychologist" (which would correspond to the Diltheyan interpretation of active nihilism). The most constant model is that of the artist, who, in a sort of return to the terminology of the earlier works, is called tragic or Dionysiac. The artist, then, is defined in On the Genealogy of Morals above all in terms of a capacity for grasping, accepting, increasing the problematic and terrible aspects of life by a sort of hubris which is similar to that of technicians and "engineers" (Schlechta 1954, 2:854). From this point of view, the "moderation" of the fragment on European nihilism is not an "Olympic" or transcendental attitude, but a disposition to take risks which can be called moderate because it overcomes the violence that belongs to the struggle for existence. The Gay Science had already advanced the uncanny hypothesis that "the exclusive will to health may be a prejudice, a cowardliness, perhaps a remnant of the oldest barbarity and primitivity" (Schlechta 1954,2:124), and the late Nietzsche, in Genealogy of Morals (Schlechta 1954,2:825-26), characterizes man as "an animal soul turned against itself" whose appearance brought something radically new and "pregnant with a future" into existence. The novelty and importance of the capacity to transcend the self-preservation impulse, which on another page of the Genealogy of Morals seems also to be an essential trait of future humankind,4 is probably the least inconsistent point in Nietzsche's description of the Ubermensch and also of active nihilism. I have argued that active nihilism cannot be satisfactorily defined either in terms of "self-consciousness" (or transcendental historicism, a la Dilthey) or in terms of the promotion, preservation and development of life, since such an interpretation would involve an unNietzschean metaphysics of vitalism. The main difficulties we are faced with when we try to give a satisfactory definition of active nihilism or the Ubermensch are related to the inadequacies of these two

Nihilism: Reactive and Active

21

interpretations. Rather paradoxically, if we follow the descriptions Nietzsche gives of art and the artist in his late notes, where the tragic and Dionysiac artist seems to play the role of model for the Ubermensch, we find in Nietzsche a sort of return to the philosophy of Schopenhauer and to Schopenhauer's interpretation of Kant's aesthetic disinterest. The very possibility of an active nihilism is the capacity of transcending the self-preservation impulse, thus reaching an attitude of moderation, which is also the condition of the hubris (the experimental courage) that is essential for the Ubermensch. Described in these terms, active nihilism is not very far from passive nihilism; and so, as we have seen, the attempt to pick a clear distinction between the two forms of nihilism out of Nietzsche's work does not seem to have succeeded. The fact that the only possible definitions of Ubermensch and of active nihilism refer, ultimately, to the capacity of transcending interest in self-preservation indicates that active nihilism is always also passive in the sense that it is based on what, in a different context, I would suggest calling an "ontology of weakness." To avoid turning active nihilism into simply a new metaphysics, which would set life, strength, and will to power in the place of the old Platonic essences and the "Being" of tradition, Nietzsche's nihilism must be interpreted as a theory of the "disappearance" of Being—the disappearance of Being as the essential feature. Passive nihilism is the process through which Being as such vanishes. Active nihilism is the human response to this "objective" fact, a response which ultimately reveals itself to be adequate only insofar as it accepts, accompanies, goes along with, the dissolution of Being by transcending the interest in selfpreservation and, with it, the violence of the struggle for life. In his meditations on metaphysics, Theodor Adorno sees the last chance of metaphysics to be the developing not of oppressive, universal categories, which were its past content (and which Adorno partly blamed for Auschwitz and for the totalitarian tendencies of modern, rationalized society), but of a meditation on thepresque rien—the only form in which something can still be given to us as an essence outside the logic of violence. Thepresque rien is not very far from the "gering"— the small, marginal, unnoticeable—of which Heidegger speaks at the end of the lecture on Das Ding. Both are, in the end, possible names for Being after the demise of metaphysics. The final insolvable "complicity" between passive and active nihilism in Nietzsche, together with Nietzsche's "definition" of the Ubermensch in terms of the capacity to transcend self-preservation, point in the same direction. Endnotes 1. Cf. "die Lust am Nein-sagen . . . aus einer ungeheuren Kraft und Spannung des Ja-sagens . . .", Schlechta 1954, 3:622). 2. It has been observed, with good reason, that much of the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften of 1883, though without any direct influence, develops, in a "scientific" and academic way, Nietzschean themes. 3. Cf. the last line of Beyond Good and Evil, Schlechta, 1954, 2:586. 4. Cf. On the Genealogy of Morals: "Hubris is our attitude towards ourselves . . . we perform with ourselves experiments that we would never attempt with any animal," Schlechta 1954, 2:854. 5. In the concluding chapter of his Negative Dialektik.

This page intentionally left blank

Nihilism and Autobiography Jean-Michel Rey Translated by Sinclair Robinson No doubt—having read all of Nietzsche's works, as well as the comments on these works (I am thinking particularly of Heidegger's book)—we know the essential things about nihilism, we know the main points of the problematic, the fundamental axes of the set of themes which this term is supposed to cover. No doubt, if we get together to talk about this theme, at least from the orientation provided by the title of our colloquium, we have, each of us, a certain idea, a representation, perhaps an interpretation of this theme. In all probability, we no doubt also have, in relation to this aspect of Nietzsche's thought—which can be called his last thought—a certain perplexity, numerous questions, reticence perhaps; in any case, a sort of position which is far from univocal, simple or elementary. And this because of something very well known: that we try to be readers, that is, in my opinion, beings who are, in turn, intimidated, melancholic, fascinated, reserved, enthusiastic, reticent, etc.—each of us can multiply at will the adjectives that he thinks delimit or define his situation: the essential thing is in the process itself, in the very act of reading which we have every reason to believe today no longer goes without saying. Because, then, of the fact that we are—that we become—subjects who are divided by what we read, that each of us—and this is my hypothesis—is as if situated on either side of a line whose direction he does not know, but whose existence he suspects, whose importance he senses. I am not going to talk in what follows about the general problem of nihilism, supposing moreover that there is one and that its generality as such is tenable, that there would be a sense to giving a general talk on the subject, supposing also that I am capable of doing such a thing. I want to make a few remarks, to emphasize a few details in certain statements by Nietzsche relating to nihilism; that is, I want to try to indicate rapidly a few fragments of the line to which I am linked and in relation to which I try to situate myself; I want to note certain concordances. At best, I will be beginning a development of which I obviously do not know the ending, and for which I cannot provide a conclusion. By saying this from the very beginning, I know I am taking a certain position in relation to the whole of the Nietzschean text, that I am adopting a bias in my reading: in a word, the necessary fragmentation of the theme, its bursting or splitting, its dispersion. I ought to spell out this dimension more clearly, define what is involved, indicate the logic, if only to justify, as much as possible, the approach I am sketching here. I can thus only talk of nihilism in a lateral way, using a means which, I believe, requires us to refer to a particular meaning of what is designated by autobiography, changed in relation to the current meaning, and displaced in its usage. That at least is what would be on the horizon of this text: the obligation to

23

24

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

reformulate, as far as the thought of the "later" Nietzsche is concerned, the notion of autobiography, to begin to ask questions about its relevance, the need to decompose the term into the three Greek words of which it is formed. "Nihilism is at the door: whence comes this most uncanny of all guests (dieser unheimlichste aller Gaste)" (CM 1976, XII: 129 [2, 127]). As if behind or at a distance from the great theses on nihilism, Nietzsche uses the image of the one who is "at the door," who stands in this position. At the same time, he also writes this: "Nihilism is at the door, according to all the symptoms (in alien Anzeichen)" (CM 1976, XIL125 [2,118]). So there is something—or someone—who is placed at the door and who is making a sign. What sign can it be? The question imposes itself by the very fact that all of Nietzsche's work can be looked at from the point of view of semiology (the term, as we know, is frequently used by Nietzsche), from the point of view of a multiplicity of signs, of symptoms, of indications—the term "Anzeichen" covers these various meanings—that must be read, interpreted, collected, held together. Philosophy, because of a profound "historical" necessity, must be transformed into philology: the theme is present as early as The Birth of Tragedy, and develops continually from then on. Nihilism makes a sign, it is a sign, symptom, indication: it is taken up in a kind of great allegorical framework: as a presence which seeks, as a being whose entirety is striving for manifestation. In other words, then, at the door there is a guest (French: hote) which makes a sign to us. Let us say as well, taking advantage of the double meaning of the word "hote" in French (as host and guest), that at the door there is someone to whom we can make a sign. Now the "we," as is known, is in Nietzsche always modified by an indetermination (we who have no country, we who are yet to come, we the latecomers, etc.), always oriented towards the future, like a sort of improbable being to be constituted. Something has come towards us, uncertain, as if to seek our hospitality. Now, with all the urgency that there can be in this term, it is at the door: the sign can be an incitation to cross the threshold as well as a presence to whom one signifies the possibility of this crossing. Being at the door does not exclude the possibility of going through it, of entering a place that the door helps to delimit. On either side of the door there are two different spaces, which are opposed but complementary. "To be at the door": a kind of elementary scene which could be mythological or biblical and which is, in any case, fictitious; that is, it announces a situation, it designates a state resulting from a previous movement, from a process, from a progression. (Is there a need to emphasize the importance of progression in Nietzsche, this compulsory metaphor of thought, and, even more, of writing?) To be at the door: a movement of stasis, of stopping, which may be followed by another, or not: a step which can be followed by another or remain in abeyance. Let us also say about this scene that there is an indecision on both sides: in the guest and in "us," the personal pronoun which raises so many questions for Nietzsche, the sign pointing towards an unknown future. We are the hote of nihilism. More exactly—in accordance with a movement made by Ecce Homo (behold the man) we could say "Behold the hote'"—we must

Nihilism and Autobiography

25

become this hole. In the two possible meanings: we can become nihilism, we can accept the hospitality of nihilism, while still emphasizing that this "we" has no place, that it does not exist as such, that it is a projection into an undecided future. It might almost be said that the "we" is perhaps for Nietzsche only the dream of an impossible community, the other side of an essential solitude, a sort of fiction which imposes itself because of grammar. Something we still believe in, something, in the final analysis, that we cannot stop believing in. There is, no doubt, an ambiguity in the "we" of Nietzsche of which the quotation which was my starting point might be one of the effects. Sometimes the "we" represents the metaphysical man (to take up a theme from Heidegger), sometimes it designates a future community "beyond" nihilism. The Nietzschean "we" oscillates between two opposed fictions, between two unequal poles. The question of nihilism is connected with this oscillation. For in this oscillation between two different uses of the same term—the "we"—can be seen one of the essential aspects of the Umwertung of all values. Contrary to the "we"—that is, to the beliefs of which it is the location—there is an essential solitude of the guest who is outside the door, of the one who, at the moment he makes a sign, does not know yet if his invitation—or his request— will find any echo at all, who cannot know if his sign will be perceived as such. In the first moment of the formulation of the logic of nihilism, Nietzsche writes this: Do not believe that 1 will incite you to take the same risks! Or even to bear the same solitude. For the one who goes his own way does not meet anyone on it: this is the nature of a "way of one's own". Here no one comes to his assistance, and he must overcome himself all the dangers, hazards, all the malice and bad weather, which occur. He has in fact a way of his own, and he has occasion to be frustrated by this harsh and inexorable his own which is translated, for example, by the fact that even his good friends do not always see or know where he is really going, or where he wants to go, and wonder sometimes: what? Is he advancing at all? Has he a way? Since I am trying here to give to those who until now have—despite everything—been benevolent towards me some idea of the road I have travelled, it is better to say first of all on what roads people have sometimes looked for me and even thought they found me. People usually confuse me: I admit it, and it would have done me a great favor if someone else had defended and defined me against these confusions. But, I said, I must help myself: with what goal does one go one's "own way": "antimetaphysical, antiromantic, artistic, pessimistic, sceptical, historical"? (CM 1976, XII: 159 [2, 186]) The great solitude of the one who arrives at the door. But where does he come from? How long has he been making his way? The equivalent solitude of the one who places himself at the door, on the inside, who has gone through the house to welcome the one who arrives. But such an evocation of "solitude"—the solitude which the "later" Nietzsche constantly writes about and whose extent and necessity he tries to show, the

26

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

solitude that he, in a certain way, demands—immediately raises some elementary questions. In this scene, where are we exactly? Where can we stand? Is it at all possible to find a "we," this fold in grammar which authorizes speech, this improbable category, this personal pronoun which is supposedly the equivalent of an actor? Or, in the same vein: who is in fact able to see the whole scene? what is the look involved in the perspective? From what places does this vision proceed? How does it operate? The point of view of nihilism seems to involve, in the same movement, the dimension of the look and the position of the one who speaks or who describes. Perhaps we should go so far as to say—and this would support the metaphor of the hole who makes a sign—that nihilism poses the general question of the address, or, at least, that it generalizes the presuppositions of this question, putting it in an original way. It is first of all in this direction that the "we" of the quotation at the beginning takes on a striking relief, that it imposes itself as profoundly problematic. (Nihilism and the address: an extension of a specifically Nietzschean problem). At the most elementary: how can we seel What has become now of the dimension of vision? The DESCRIPTIVE, the PICTURESQUE as symptoms of nihilism (in the arts and in psychology). Do not peddle psychology! Never observe simply for the sake of observing! this gives a false perspective, a crooked look, something forced, excessive. To have an experience as one wants the experience: this is scarcely successful as soon as one considers oneself as one does it; the born psychologist, like the born painter, is careful not to see for the sake of seeing—he depends on the "nature" of his instinct for the sorting and expression of the real experience, of the "case"—generality comes to his consciousness as such, not the arbitrary abstraction of determined cases. (CM 1976, XIII:65 [9, 110]).

How can we introduce nihilism? How can we show what is obvious or manifest? How can we have the signs recognized for what they are? In other words: how can we address the "we"? What modalities of discourse must be made use of in order to cause to appear that which imposes itself, already speaks, which already makes a sign towards the future? Questions of this order are answered by the Nietzschean affirmation, by this discourse in the first person which is placed right from the beginning under the aegis of description or even of narrative. As if such an affirmation was above all intended to counterbalance the "we," as if it ventured forth while getting rid of the constraints represented by the plural in "we." Nietzsche writes about what he sees, at the same time as he states the conditions of seeing. He describes what makes a sign: at the same time he attempts to indicate the position he occupies to describe this. He writes that "nihilism is at the door," while stressing the disturbing character of this guest. (Are there not analogies between this discourse of nihilism and the text of the Apocalypse, the end of the Scriptures, the end of the Book, the end of a story which opens on another?)

Nihilism and Autobiography

27

The following, of which several versions are found, is a reminder: I am describing what is coming: the advent of nihilism. I have here much to describe, because here there is happening something necessary—the signs of it are manifest everywhere, only our eyes fail us for such signs. I am praising, 1 am not condemning here the fact that it is coming: I believe that there will be one of the greatest crises, an instant of the most profound coming-tooneself of man; whether man will recover from this, whether he will overcome it, is a question which depends on his strength: it is possible. . . . Modern man believes experimentally now in one value, now in another, even if it means dropping them: the realm of outmoded and deposed values is constantly expanding; the void and the poverty of values are felt more and more: this is an irresistible movement, despite the large-scale attempt to slow down its effect— Modern man risks a general criticism of values; he recognizes their origins; he recognizes enough of them to believe in no value any longer: this is the pathos, the new fear. . . . What I am telling here is the history of the next two centuries. . . .(CM 1976, XIII:250-51 [11, 119]) This was written under the title "For the Preface." As readers we can say that it was a preface for a future book which we know never appeared, and concerning which we can even wonder if it was thinkable that it might appear. But apart from that question, which is no doubt insoluble, something else imposes itself on us in this text whose aim is to summarize the principal stages of nihilism (a summary which we know undergoes changes in the Fragments posthumes): what meaning can we give to the "here" which, in a way, punctuates the text? What place can this be, exactly? Is it the place where the person who speaks is found? Is it the place where the speaker—Nietzsche—is able to be found? Is it a place that he designates in his writing? What can be the meaning of the repeated use—as in this quotation—of "here" in a text whose function it is to introduce something new? Do we have reason to believe that it is only an artifice, a convenience of language or a way of speaking? How can we read the preface of a non-existent book? Into what places is Nietzsche dragging us by thus dispersing the meaning of this little word: "here"? What is the function of "here" in a text which is constituted uniquely of fragments? What can it mean for an author to write a preface to a book which as such does not yet exist? To interrupt these questions, I quote Nietzsche: For the third book The will to power How the men who undertake upon themselves this reversal of values should conform. (CM 1976, XII:135 [2, 131]) With these questions I return to the metaphor of the beginning, to connect, pursue, support our argument. The distinction between "active" and "passive" nihilism, which is, as we know, one of the insistent themes of these fragments, is put in multiple ways, in particular through the logic of "hospitality." At the door, here, we must welcome nihilism: it is the future of the sign which is at stake. Will we be able to be ourselves? Will we be able to become what we are?

28

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

At the door, someone invites someone else to move, to take an extra step, perhaps even to come into the house. But who is the hotel Of whom is one the hotel Is not hospitality the way to give, par excellence, a meaning to the "here," while designating it? Is it not a way to manage, par excellence, the space of the "here" or to diminish the strangeness of the "here"? With regard to this process of the hote—in German "Cast" (guest) or "Gastgeber" (host)—it can be recalled that the lifelong friend, and especially the friend in these last years, the one to whom are addressed the letters from the time of "madness," is called Peter Cast. Perhaps Cast was the only man whom Nietzsche really addressed? Perhaps he was the only one with whom a certain community became thinkable? For Nietzsche, Cast occupied, at a certain time, in a certain "here," the position of "author": he actually received a text from Nietzsche, he was its writer, its editor, he was the hote of a book, the one called Human, AH Too Human. Nietzsche recounts this hospitality in Ecce Homo: Human, All Too Human . . . received its conclusion, its final form, during a Basel winter under far less favourable conditions than those in Sorrento. It is really Herr Peter Gast [the italics are Nietzsche's], then studying in Basel and very attached to me, who has the book on his conscience. I dictated, my head bandaged and painful, he wrote, he also corrected—he was really the actual writer (der eigentliche Schriftsteller), while I was merely the author (Autor). ("Human, All Too Human," sec. 5)

On January 4,1889, the day it is said Nietzsche went mad, he writes this letter: "To my maestro Pietro. Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured and all the heavens exult.—The Crucified." A reply, perhaps, to the hote who had agreed to write for him, to order words in the very place of the author, to the one who had lent himself to such an arrangement. It will have been noted that in this letter the name of the person to whom it is written is "translated" into Italian. Is this because of the "here"—Turin—where Nietzsche is staying when he writes this letter? Be that as it may, the question of the address comes up again in this last text. At the door, here, now: we can understand by "door" the threshold, the crossing point between two spaces, the outside and the inside, or between two times, more exactly between two centuries. Nietzsche died in 1900. Whether we put the emphasis on the "here" or the "now", we necessarily find the same thing, the same logic, that is, in brief, a sort of perfusion of opposites, a compulsory complementarity: a kind of movement which causes to coexist, among other things, the "last" and the "first." The statements by Nietzsche which are built on these two terms are well known (the "last man," "I may be the first tragic philosopher," etc.). I do not want to take up the logic of these statements. That would take us too far. I only want to show that, in this perspective, we find again—is it surprising?—the door, in a slightly different mode from the one in which I introduced my argument. On December 20, 1887, Nietzsche writes to Carl von Gersdorff as follows: In a significant way, my life is now precisely at high noon: one door is open, another is closing. What 1 have done in recent years was only a stock-taking,

Nihilism and Autobiography

29

an adding- up, a settling of the past; I am finally through with men and things and I have crossed them out. Who will be left for me, what will remain for me now that I have to go (now that I am condemned to go . . .) to the real essential thing in my life? That is the capital question.

The "door" is thus the place where all paradoxes are condensed, can coexist, in a disconcerting fashion, the most opposite terms, the sharpest and most contorted contradictions. The door is as it were the site of pure contradiction, without possible or thinkable relief, the site where contradiction is exposed with the greatest clarity; the space where dialectics is confronted head-on. (Nietzsche's virulent criticism of dialectics, particularly in Ecce Homo, is well known). The door is like a "here" and a "now" in abeyance, a halt in progression, the indication of an undecided movement which, in this case, depends on the other. The only thing which can give meaning to the door, in the scene constructed by Nietzsche, is what is happening on each side of it, in the reciprocal action between another and a hole, and the decision which can come either from the one who welcomes or from the one who is welcomed. The door is the site—the topos—where meaning is prepared, in a moment when nothing is yet, strictly speaking, fixed or determined: the very space of indetermination which is capable of becoming (on a mere sign) determination; perhaps also the site of what is insane. (Why not mention on this subject the short text by Franz Kafka which is called Before the Law? In it we find exactly a door, someone who is standing at the door, and someone else who is waiting at this same door. What is also involved is the appropriate entrance for the one who is waiting and, finally, a door which closes as a refusal. The look is not absent from this scene, nor is the sign. If I mention Kafka, and this text in particular, my purpose is not to say that in his way he introduces us to nihilism—this I believe would have no meaning. It is beyond the analogy between the two scenes to show that as far as the lack of meaning is concerned, the withdrawal of meaning or its suspension, there is in Kafka's writing something which points in this direction. Perhaps we should consider in the same perspective everything in Kafka which has a relation to autobiography, once more in its displaced meaning.) Among the paradoxes I mentioned just now, there is one which is explicitly expressed in the sentence by Nietzsche at the beginning, and even in an emphatic way, that is by a superlative: nihilism is the most unheimlich—the most uncanny, the most disquieting, the most frightening—of all holes. It is known that Freud stressed the importance of the term "unheimlich" by showing what, in its everyday use and in its use in fiction, gives this term a kind of indefinite extension: a word, in short, which is the space of a pure contradiction. (It is Freud who says somewhere, about the beginning of his work and of his "discovery," that the concept of the unconscious had been knocking for a long time at the door.) What we can retain from the thought of Freud is, first, that right from the beginning the Unheimlich is described as escaping all strictly conceptual logic, second, that one of the major characteristics of anything unheimlich is that it was to remain a secret, in obscurity, but comes out from it,

30

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

and, finally, the fact that the Unheimlich is connected with the development of language: a kind of deposit which philosophy can take hold of. Nihilism is thus, at once, the most familiar hole. At the door there is someone whom we know and yet who is disquieting. Someone who is of the home—the root of the term "Unheimlich" (Heim) evokes the home, perhaps even economy—and yet who disturbs, intrigues. At the door there is someone with whom, despite the signs, we have a contradictory relation. This is in a scene which is capable of generating anguish, fright or fear—that is, feelings which must be, as far as possible, overcome, overcome in the same space. A passage from Ecce Homo seems to me to go in that direction, a coming-tooneself, a way by which one becomes what one is (an expression which itself deserves to be analyzed in detail): For the task of a revaluation of values more capacities were required than have dwelt together in the one individual, above all antithetical capacities which are allowed neither to disturb nor destroy one another. Order of rank among capacities; distance; the art of dividing without making inimical; mixing up nothing, "reconciling" nothing; a tremendous multiplicity which is nonetheless the opposite of chaos—this has been the precondition, the protracted secret labor and artistic working of my instinct. The magnitude of its higher protection was shown in the fact that I have at no time had the remotest idea what was growing within me—that all my abilities one day leapt forth suddenly ripe in their final protection. I cannot remember ever having taken any trouble—no trace of struggle can be discovered in my life, I am the opposite of a heroic nature. To "want" something, to "strive" after something, to have a "goal", a "wish" in view—I know none of this from experience. Even at this moment I look out upon my future—a distant future!—as upon a smooth sea: ruffled by no desire. I do not want in the slightest that anything should become other than it is; I do not want myself to become other that I am. ("Why I am so Clever," sec. 9)

Nihilism consists in dealing with a kind of necessity which is all the stronger because we cannot grasp it: at best, we describe this necessity, we invent metaphors for it; a necessity which oscillates from the most familiar to the most unknown. So we can describe it equally as what becomes familiar from being unknown, as what becomes strange from being familiar or known, as what becomes disquieting from being known and so on. Something which, in any case, is under the sign of becoming, of a becoming left in abeyance. There is no being, strictly speaking, of nihilism: there is a process, a delay, a waiting, there is a fundamental lack of actuality in what manifests itself, in what is a symptom or a sign. The sign and the symptom in Nietzsche—but, in another way, also in Freud—always express a delay, an adjournment, a postponed movement. In other words, sign and symptom appeal to interpretation, to deciphering, to reading (in the generalized sense of the term). Philology participates totally in the economy of this delay, and so does autobiography. The fundamental question posed by this hole is that of his origin, and this all the more so because his history (for the most part underground) is already very long, because in a certain way, it is confused with the history of philosophy. It is this confusion which explains, in part at least, the delay in the manifestation of nihilism, not to

Nihilism and Autobiography

31

mention our blindness to it. What is unheimlich, fundamentally, is that which has appeared recently in an explicit form, a recognizable form, that which has found its name, while at the same time having another form, other names or other figures, having a completely different story. Nihilism is discourse succeeding in telling what animates it, what constitutes it, what it is confronted with, the different elementary scenes with which it necessarily deals. To speak of nihilism, as Nietzsche repeats constantly in the Fragments posthumes, is to undertake a narrative, a description, with a view to measuring up to this long, hidden story. Nihilism is perhaps discourse which, after multiple detours, after times of wandering, is on the way to finding its object, that is to say, the very absence of Object. Ultimately it is discourse telling its "own" story, the story of which, since the Platonic beginning of philosophy, it has been dispossessed. In a certain way, in fact, the Unheimlich is in league with the "own," with economy (in the Greek sense of this term). Freud tells us that it is finally psychoanalysis which has itself become unheimlich'. what was known without being known, what we had under our eyes without seeing it, what was said by discourse without being recognized as such, what was stated without the possibility of extracting a meaning, what was said in allegory. In a word: what is happening, what is already speaking through numerous signs or symptoms, in a disconcerting presentation—we could say perturbing to evoke the Italian translation of unheimlich—of what was (was supposed to be) well known. In sum, an event which obliges us to take another look at all previous history. (A perspective in which "even the blunders of life have their meaning and their value, and the detours and the transient errors . . . . " ) A new look, but also a new fright: something like a great return of the tragic on another stage, an announcement at once joyful and serious, another negotiation with fear. The "door" is thus one of those sites—a term of multiple understanding, without forgetting the Greek topos—where the relation between the familiar and the unknown is constantly negotiated. One of the forms of this negotiation is the step, that is the crossing. I do not say the going beyond. A crossing which brings into communication two contiguous and opposed spaces, which establishes as a result a kind of complicity between them. What Nietzsche tells about himself, what he describes as being his own position in those years in which the discourse of nihilism is being developed, all this is intimately connected to such a structure. Among other things, I recall only the image of the cave, that place which can be defined by the absence of a door. An animal burrows into its hole when it is sick; the philosophical animal does likewise. It is so rarely now that I hear a friendly voice. I am alone now, absurdly alone; in the pitiless and underground combat which 1 am waging (my formula for all this is "revaluation of all values") against everything which has been revered and loved until now by mankind, I have myself become without realizing it a kind of cave—something hidden which can no longer be found, even when looked for. But one does not go there. . . . Let it be said between us—it is not impossible that I am the first philosopher of the times, and perhaps even more, a decisive and fatal element placed between two millennia. So singular a position must constantly be expiated—by an

32

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism ever greater, ever colder, ever sharper isolation. (Letter to the Baron of Seydlitz dated February 12, 1888)

(This obligation to expiate the crossing of a threshold should be discussed at greater length. Questions should be raised, threads pursued. We should ask ourselves if "madness" is part of this need for expiation. We should develop the notion of "experience," which seems to accompany and, in part, support this principle of expiation. Perhaps that will lead us in the direction of the debate between Bataille and Blanchot. In any case, it would take us away from a strictly Heideggerian interpretation of nihilism. I cannot dwell on this here.) Nihilism: a being-at-the-door which has been making a sign for a long time and whom no one, until now, has seen or understood, or at least, whom no one has recognized: what he is, what he represents or signifies. A bemg-hote about whom we must ask ourselves questions, and who questions us by his very presence, by the simple fact of being there because of a necessity, a necessity which eludes us, by the act of eluding us. It eludes us all the more because it is found in an "unthinkable" place, because it is contradictory. Nihilism, as we know, is zweideutig, it is equivocal, it has two meanings: it participates at once in the active, as a sign offeree, of violent force even in the form of destruction, and in the passive, as a sign of weakness, of exhaustion, devoid of the belief which allows all "disguises" (Verkleidungen), be they religious, moral, political, aesthetic, or otherwise. Nihilism advances wearing a mask. Nihilism is like the height of the Unheimlich: a state of stupor, of disorientation, which produces something which is situated beyond questioning, thus inducing, in Nietzsche's eyes, a certain "pathology," going as far as the lack of meaning, confirming a kind of end of great words and ideals and values: a movement with an extended end, an end which, without intervention, may become interminable. The resources of nihilism are, as it were, inexhaustible. Now what imposes itself on Nietzsche, in these years, is more than ever before, we can say, the necessity of writing, more precisely of telling his story, inasmuch as the latter belongs to him, as he must appropriate it, as he must thus become what he is. What is brought into play, in this perspective, is a kind of paradoxical experience which is produced at several levels, which is really achieved by narrative. Ecce Home is in particular constituted by such narrative. A few brief examples: Within my writings my Zarathustra stands by itself. I have with this book given mankind the greatest gift that has ever been given it. With a voice that speaks across millennia, it is not only the most exalted book that exists, the actual book of the air of the heights—the entire fact of man lies at a tremendous distance beneath it—it is also the profoundest, born out of the innermost abundance of truth, an inexhaustible well into which no bucket descends without coming up filled with gold and goodness. (Ecce Homo, Preface, sec. 4) The ladder upon which he climbs up and down is tremendous; he has seen further, willed further, been able further than any other human being. He contradicts with every word, this most affirmative of all spirits; all opposites are in him bound together in a new unity. (Ecce Homo, chapter entitled "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," sec. 6)

Nihilism and Autobiography

33

But there is also another sense in which I have chosen for myself to possess this word which sets me off against the whole of humanity. No one has yet felt Christian morality as beneath him; that requires a height, a farsightedness, a hitherto altogether unheard-of psychological profundity and abysmalness. (Ecce Homo, "Why I am a Destiny," sec. 6)

What is striking in these texts—and there are many others in the same vein—is the double movement of ascent and descent, the co-existence of height and depth, another version of that contradictory place in which the history of nihilism is played out; another dispersion of the "here." But in such a movement can be read also what is condensed very well in the Latin term "altus": something which represents a certain indistinction of the high and the deep, a continual transition—a gesture of crossing—from one to the other, a perfusion of these two opposites. In the same way—this is, in brief, the lesson of the Unheimlich— there is an exchange of the "familiar" and the "unknown," of what is hidden and of what manifests itself: psychoanalysis itself depending, after all, on this contorted logic. The time of nihilism is for Nietzsche the moment of an intensified philology, of a greater than ever attention to what language conceals, to what it expresses by hiding it, to what it veils by uttering it. This is the moment of a writing which, so to speak, comes to itself, which finds its most elementary movement once more, which is produced in memory of its predecessors (in this case Latin and Greek), which incorporates foreign terms into its own movement; we know the use Nietzsche makes, in these latter years, of French terms—"decadent" among others, even "nihilisme." A writing which is produced in the perspective of fragmentation, which uses the possibility of keeping together incompatible positions, which takes advantage of all the resources of the language. The end of great words, which characterizes nihilism, is the beginning, or the rebeginning, of the ruses of writing: a way of beginning to put an end to conceptual logic; perhaps also a way to start questioning the conceptual logic; perhaps also a way to start questioning the constraints which, in spite of whatever we may do, bring us back to a belief in a monotheistic God. Everything I have just recalled is the compulsory accompaniment of a metaphor—nihilism is the most unheimlich of all holes. An accompaniment or even a support: everything which can be extracted from minimal linguistic effects to define, circumscribe the unthinkable place that is constituted by nihilism, to announce or express its fundamental ambiguity. I add as a hypothesis the following: if nihilism is the (anticipated) end of "great words, "its formulation—its presentation, exposition—is itself subject to this criticism. In this perspective the discourse of nihilism—the discourse which expresses it, which signals its advent, the discourse that is produced by it—is, by the same necessity, not only a fragmentary discourse but also an infraconceptual discourse, and this not out of deficiency but rather through an excess of determination. Nietzsche writes in the fragments of counter-concepts (Gegenbegriffe). Nihilism as such is unthinkable; it is, at best, what speaks, signifies, comes to light, imposes itself: it is of the order of the greatest exteriority

34

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

and at the same time the most extreme intimacy. (It inhabits us, in a certain way as tragedy does.) Nihilism takes place in the form of the impossible. It demands to be told in several ways. No single way could suffice—that is, for example, in a subjective way, through a certain figure of autobiography. At least for Nietzsche—without any doubt following a necessity which goes beyond him—it is a matter of keeping together an objective narrative, in part conceptual (describing the advent and the manifestation), and a subjective narrative whose most elaborate, most "systematic," form is the book called Ecce Homo. This is the great leitmotif of the mass of fragments from 1885-1888: I tell—I describe—what cannot help but happen, what, in a certain mode, is already here, what permeates, as it has for a long time permeated, all discourse. On the basis of this main statement, as its henceforth compulsory complement, Nietzsche writes as follows: He who speaks here has, on the one hand, done nothing until now but come to himself: as a philosopher and instinctual hermit, who found his advantage in being aloof, in the outside, in patience, in adjournment, in delay: as an augural spirit, who looks back when he tells what will come; as the first perfect philosopher in Europe but who has already lived in himself nihilism until its end—who has it behind, under, outside of himself. . . . (CM 1976, XIII:362[11,411])

In fragments such as these we would find, in other words, the altus, the dispersion of the "here", the ending and the beginning, the originality and the rebeginning. To live nihilism—we could say, taking a frequent term in Nietzsche, to assimilate it—to exhaust all its figures by one's own efforts, oneself, that implies a movement of the order of becoming: a multiple becoming which is, at once, a coming-to-oneself, a vague kind of crossing, a relation to time. For what is in particular in play with the eruption of nihilism is a tension toward the future, a movement which must reckon with the past. And this in the perspective of a paradoxical form whose most elementary expression is "Why I am a Destiny." Revaluation of all values: this is my formula for an act of supreme comingto-oneself on the part of mankind which in me has become flesh and genius. It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being, to know myself in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia. . . . I was the first to discover the truth, in that I was the first to sense—smell—the lie as a lie. . . . My genius is in my nostrils. . . . (Ecce Homo, "Why I am a Destiny," sec. 1)

To have the chance to welcome nihilism, one must have in oneself the equivalent of what is represented by the Unheimlich—or the altus—that zone where the familiar and the unknown interpenetrate each other, the site of unceasing exchange between the disquieting and the already-known. For nihilism to welcome us, in order for it to make a sign to us, there must be a common element between it and us—what is called here "destiny," something which goes beyond "will" and the present. Everything happens as if Nietzsche knew that such a coincidence is necessary and that it must, in the one who is its site, be expiated, be written down, and, in

Nihilism and Autobiography

35

the same moment be expiated. For this coming-to-oneself—this "becoming what one is" which punctuates and gives rhythm to Ecce Homo—takes quite a disconcerting form which is very intimately linked with the whole work. It takes the form of an unprecedented affirmation which makes the past work of the author appear in a certain light: something which must be perfected, accomplished, which, whatever may be the price, must be recorded. A new look which is not without a certain cruelty. We will not take up here the whole of the trajectory of Ecce Homo. I would like to mention several themes, however, which seem to me to have some analogy with what I have just developed: the double origin, the father and the mother, death and life, the high and the low, the decadent and the beginning—to list only the best known. What I can say, without discussing all those themes, is that Ecce Homo is not a synthesis of the past work and is not even, strictly speaking, a moment of recomposition. This book, in its very process, beyond the propositions that it states and displays, does not obey a dialectical movement. It is a nameless necessity that presides over Nietzsche's writing of this book: what he produces is much more of the order of a decomposition, of a kind of fragmentation or analysis which carries the subject away. There can be no doubt that such a position has to do with the particular "misgiving" that is represented by the Unheimlich, with the radicalization of what is contained in the Latin altus—this mixture, this hybrid of height and depth—with the being-at-thedoor. All the more so because one of the effects of this movement—on which Nietzsche insists in his last years—is the following expressed in a letter of December 1888 addressed to Peter Cast: "For a few days now I have been leafing through my works, that now, for the first time, I feel up to. Do you understand that? I really did write all that, but without realizing it, on the contrary! . . . ." We should draw a parallel between this statement and the following from Ecce Homo: I am always up to dealing with any chance event; I have to be unprepared if I am to be master of myself. Let the instrument be what it will, let it be as out of tune as only the instrument "man" can become out of tune—I should have to be ill not to succeed in getting out of it something listenable. ("Why I am so Wise," sec, 4) To be up to what one has written: to record all the depth of what one has written. To be up on chance events: to perceive oneself as the discordant instrument of a "destiny" or "fate." In both cases it is a movement which, essentially, consists in coming to oneself after numerous long detours—and books can be understood in this perspective as detours. It is to understand that one has completed a trajectory—one door closes, another may well open: a time of abeyance and indecision when everything seems possible, when the future is open without being predetermined in any way, when nothing counts except what is about to be accomplished, when nothing has a meaning except what will happen. One then discovers the obligation to take stock of oneself. But it implies also that there is a different time as far as the subject, and the work, are concerned, that there is a disparity, a non-coincidence between these two

36

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

dimensions. And it is no doubt in this interplay that all the autobiographical fragments can be placed. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes: I am one thing, my writings are another. Here, before I speak of these writings themselves, I shall touch on the question of their being understood or not understood. I shall do so as perfunctorily as is fitting: for the time for this question has certainly not yet come. My time has not yet come, some are born posthumously. (Ecce Homo, "Why I Write Such Excellent Books," sec. 1)

Among these autobiographical fragments there are two that I would like to mention briefly, inasmuch as they are contemporary with the writing of Ecce Homo: a movement is stated in them quite clearly, it plays a crucial role, indicates a direction, marks a certain end. First, this: Ecce Homo Notes by a multiple and changing man 1. The psychologist speaks 2. The philosopher speaks 3. The poet speaks 4. The musician speaks 5. The writer speaks 6. The educator speaks (CM 1976, XIV:372 [24,3])

A diversity of roles, of masks, of positions inside discourse: the multiplicity of the subject is stated directly. Should we not see in such a diversity a possible consequence (and of primary importance) of nihilism? Might nihilism not be this shattering of discourse, the position of the subject who is absent, the dispersion of the places from which one speaks ordinarily? Secondly: "Fridericus Nietzsche de vita sua translated from the German," and then, " The mirror. An attempt at self-evaluation by Friederich Nietzsche" (CM 1976, XIV:372 [24,4 and 5]). Nietzsche translates himself into another language, and thus at once keeps German at a distance—this is an insistent theme in the later years—and returns to a language, Latin, that he has already spoken in a certain way, or in any case he has made use of the strength of certain of its words. But we could also say: Nietzsche intervenes in language, through this autobiographical surge. Nietzsche is a writer devoted to changing the general regime of discourse, to transforming what is given (to take up a distinction that Nietzsche establishes precisely concerning nihilism and which seems to me to be decisive in this context). Nietzsche going from the "saying no" to the "doing no," on the verge of taking this step, without, for all that, as he often stresses at this time, being a denying spirit, attempting thus to settle in the register of affirmation, reconsidering consequently in the light—or the shadow—of nihilism the relation of negation to affirmation, Nietzsche between the one and the other, in this unthinkable site which is the intermediary between the one and the other. Nietzsche, finally, on the threshold of autobiography. What is the last thought of Nietzsche?

Nietzsche and Biblical Nihilism Thomas J.J. Altizer Nietzsche knew nihilism as an historical consequence of Christianity, and, more specifically, as a consequence of the death of the Christian God. That God is identified in The Antichrist as the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy (section 18). No thinker in history has been so obsessed with God as was Nietzsche, nor has any other thinker, with the possible exception of his deepest predecessors, Spinoza and Hegel, so fully known and envisioned the totality of God, a totality which is finally inseparable from consciousness itself. But it was Nietzsche who discovered the nihilistic identity of the Christian and biblical God, and, although unheralded as such, this was one of the revolutionary events of the nineteenth century, and one which made Nietzsche, along with Kierkegaard, one of the creators of a truly modern or postmodern theology. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche brought to maturity an historical insight that played a decisive role in his later writings: "The Jews are the strangest people in world history because confronted with the question whether to be or not to be, they chose, with a perfectly uncanny deliberateness, to be, at any price; this price was the radical falsification of all nature, all reality, of the whole inner world as well as the outer" (Section 24, Kaufmann 1954, 592). Yet Nietzsche honored the Old Testament, it was only the New Testament which he despised, for he found in the Old Testament epics, just as he found in the Homeric epics, a truly heroic landscape, for Israel, even as Greece, originally stood in the "right" or the "natural" relationship to all things. Its Yahweh was the expression of a consciousness of power, of joy in oneself, of hope for oneself: Yahweh is the god for Israel and therefore the god of justice, the logic of every people that is in power and has a good conscience. But this power was shattered by the Exile, and Israel became the only people to survive such a catastrophic defeat by creating a "slave morality," a morality of the weak as opposed to the strong, and a morality which later became the foundation of Christianity. So it is that the Jews are the most catastrophic of all peoples because they transformed a noble morality into a morality of ressentiment, the latter born of the "No" to the former. This was an historical insight that was not discovered by biblical scholarship until the twentieth century, for it was not until the end of nineteenth century that historians discovered the apocalyptic or eschatological origin of the New Testament, and not until the twentieth century that Old Testament scholars unravelled the historical origins of the prophetic revolution, and thereby discovered its implicit but essential eschatological ground. Needless to say, biblical scholars of all kinds have ignored Nietzsche, but it was Nietzsche who first understood that lying at the center of the Bible, at least as the Christian knows it, is a profound and ultimate movement from life to death, from life and world affirmation to pure negation. Nothing so straightforwardly expresses this 37

38

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

pure negativity as does the Christian symbol of the eschaton or the "end of the world." That symbol lies at the very center of primitive Christianity, and its Old Testament counterpart and historical source lies at the center of the prophetic revolution of the eighth century B.C.E. And, as Max Weber was the first to demonstrate, it was the prophetic expectation of an immediate and total judgment that made possible the new and radical ethical call of the reform prophets: For the circles of true believers in Yahweh . . . precisely this timeliness of the final expectations was decisive. We know from the Middle Ages, the time of the Reformation, as well as the early Christian community, the powerful impact of such expectations. In Israel, too, they have indeed been decisive for the way of life of such pious circles. In the last analysis they alone explain the Utopian world-indifference of the prophets. When they counselled against all treaties, when they ever again turned against the vain arrogant doings of this world, when Jeremiah remained single, it was for the same reason that led Jesus to counsel, "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's. . . ."All these affairs of the present after all are completely irrelevant, for the end is directly at hand. (Weber 1952, 326) All of the pre-exilic reform prophets proclaimed the immediate coming of the end of Israel, an end that would be the consequence of the judgment of Yahweh, even if this was a reversal of the understanding of Yahweh that preceded them. No canonical prophet gives hope that this judgment could be averted, and vivid expectations of catastrophic destruction deeply conditioned the pre-exilic prophetic oracles, thereby making possible what Weber called the Utopian world-indifference of the prophets. If the reform prophets were the first to unveil the absolute sovereignty of God, this sovereignty is so complete, so overwhelming that, as Rudolf Bultmann noted, the world sinks away and seems to be at its end (Bultmann 1951, 1:22). Not triumph in the world but obedience to Yahweh in defiance of the world becomes the goal of the new faith. The prophets were violently hostile towards the monarchy, the ruling circles of Israel, and to the religious cultus itself. All attention was directed to Yahweh's immediately coming acts, and to the radical obedience which these acts demanded, an obedience transcending all worldly authority and actuality. So it is that the future replaces both the present and the past as the primal reality, as Hermann Cohen saw with such clarity: Time becomes future and only future. Past and present submerge in this time of the future. This return to time is the purest idealization. All existence shrinks into insignificance in the presence of the point of view of this idea, and man's existence is preserved and elevated into this being of the future. (Cohen 1972, 249) The very reality of the present moment is profoundly threatened by this total absorption in the future, and here lies the historical origin of an absolute negation of the given. In prophetic and apocalyptic faith, that negation is a violent reversal of the totality of worldly conditions, and such a reversal may even be looked upon as a full historical and phenomenological parallel to

Nietzsche and Biblical Nihilism

39

Oriental mystical conceptions of the void (cf. Altizer 1961). Certainly that apocalyptic Judaism which was the womb of Christianity was violently turned against the world, and this is precisely what makes possible an absolute negation of the given in all its totality, a negation which full apocalyptic faith knows as the immediate coming of the end of the world. While Nietzsche, despite his friendship with Overbeck, never became aware of the apocalyptic ground of Christianity, he nevertheless himself became an apocalyptic thinker, and a purely apocalyptic thinker, and at no other point is his own Christian ground more fully manifest. Like Overbeck, and following the Hegelian tradition which preceded them, Nietzsche grounded his understanding of Christianity in an apprehension of an absolute reversal lying at the very origin of Christianity. As he declared in The Antichrist: If one were to look for signs that an ironical divinity has its fingers in the great play of the world, one would find no small support in the tremendous question mark called Christianity. Mankind lies on its knees before the opposite of that which was the origin, the meaning, the right of the evangel; in the concept of "church" it has pronounced holy precisely what the "bringer of the glad tidings" felt to be beneath and behind himself—one would look in vain for a greater example of world-historical irony. (Section 36, Kaufmann 1954, 609) The very word 'Christianity' is a misunderstanding: there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. And his gospel died on the cross: "what has been called 'evangel' from that moment was actually the opposite of that which he had lived:'/// tidings', a dysangeF (Section 39) (Kaufmann 1954, 612). Certainly Nietzsche is not alone in knowing a Jesus who is the opposite of the Christian Christ; this was a primal motif of the radical Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just as it was reborn in romanticism and continues into our own day. One might even suspect that it was a realization of this truth which both originally motivated and finally brought to an end the nineteenth-century quest for the historical Jesus. But that quest did fully unveil the original eschatological or apocalyptic identity of Jesus, and that is precisely the original Christian ground which was negated and reversed by the historical evolution of Christianity, and so much so that the historical discovery of the eschatological Jesus came as a cataclysmic shock to the Christian world. This is the shock that generated Protestant dialectical or existential theology, a theology in which Jesus becomes a disembodied Word and an unknown 'x', so that in the work which was the original manifesto of that theology, Karl Barth can declare: The revelation which is in Jesus, because it is the revelation of the righteousness of God, must be the complete veiling of his incomprehensibility. In Jesus, God becomes veritably a secret: he is made known as the unknown, speaking in eternal silence; he protects himself from every intimate companionship and from all the impertinence of religion. (Barth 1933, 98) The latter clause is without question an assault upon the Christian church, for here is where the original Jesus most clearly became the very opposite of himself,

40

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

so that in Nietzsche's words Christianity is the stone upon the grave of Jesus. Indeed, no thinker has done more than Nietzsche to open up a way to that original but forgotten Jesus. Not only is this a fundamental motif and movement of The Antichrist, but it surely lies behind his choice of the genre of the gospel in creating Thus Spoke Zarathustra (and this is a unique event in the history of literature until the advent of Finnegans Wake), just as it is undeniable that in some sense the historical figure of Jesus lies behind the modern apocalyptic figure of Zarathustra. While in Ecce Homo Nietzsche confessed that he chose the name of Zarathustra for his prophet of eternal recurrence because he believed that the Persian Zarathustra created morality as metaphysics and thus gave birth to our historical era, intending thereby to reverse our history by a new Zarathustra who is the opposite of the historical Zarathustra, it cannot be denied that the primary opposition in Nietzsche's later work is between Dionysus and Christ. And this is not the Greek Dionysus of The Birth of Tragedy, or not solely so, for this is a Dionysus who appears only at the end of history, only after and as a consequence of the death of the Christian God. That is the God who must die before Dionysus can come, but that is also the God who must die before Jesus can be resurrected from the dead, a death occurring in the very advent of Christianity. Now this is such a radical theological insight that few imagine that it can be genuinely theological, but the fact is that it has a full and comprehensive parallel in Blake's apocalyptic vision, just as it has its counterpart in Kierkegaard's dialectical and historical understanding that only the end of Christendom makes possible a genuine contemporaneity with Christ. Again and again in The Antichrist, Nietzsche portrays Jesus as a kind of naive forerunner of his own Zarathustra, for Nietzsche's Jesus is free ofressentiment, is likewise free of history, and is himself the exact opposite of Christianity. If I understand anything about this great symbolist, it is that he accepted only inner realities as realities, as "truths"—that he understood the rest, everything natural, temporal, spatial, historical, only as signs, as occasions for parables. The concept of "the son of man" is not a concrete person who belongs in history, something individual and unique, but an "eternal" {actuality, a psychological symbol redeemed from the concept of time. The same applies once again, and in the highest sense, to the God of this typical symbolist, to the "kingdom of God," to the "kingdom of heaven," to the "filiation of God." Nothing is more unchristian than the ecclesiastical crudities of god as a person, of a "kingdom of God" which is to come, of a "kingdom of heaven" beyond, of a "son of God" as the second person in the trinity. All this is—forgive the expression—like a fist in the eye—oh, in what an eye!—of the evangel—a world-historical cynicism in the derision of symbols. But what the signs "father" and "son" refer to is obvious—not to everyone, I admit: the word "son" expresses the entry into the over-all feeling of the transfiguration of all things (blessedness); the word "father" expresses thisfeeling itself, the feeling of eternity, the feeling of perfection. (Section 34) (Kaufmann 1954, 607f.)

Not even in Thus Spoke Zarathustra did Nietzsche speak so clearly of the transfiguration of all things, and nowhere else does he speak so straight-

Nietzsche and Biblical Nihilism

41

forwardly of the symbol of God as the expression of the feeling or realization of perfection. Now it is just because this original symbol of God was so profoundly reversed in the birth and historical evolution of Christianity that the Christian God must die to make possible the resurrection of joy. That resurrection is a resurrection of Jesus for it is a resurrection of that life which was negated and reversed in the very advent of the Christian God. It was Nietzsche alone who conceived this God as the essential and intrinsic otherness of the life and love which Jesus lived. And that love of Jesus which Nietzsche so profoundly sought is not only a praxis which leads to the true God of transfigured perfection: "it is 'God' (Section 33) (Kaufmann 1954, 607). This is the God who is the transfiguration and eternal Yes of life, and thereby is the intrinsic otherness of that God who is the deification of nothingness, and the will to nothingness pronounced holy. If Nietzsche is the apocalyptic thinker, par excellence, he is also our purest dialectical thinker, and nowhere more so than in his theological thinking, a thinking wholly and simultaneously apprehending God as absolute Yes and absolute No, as absolute perfection and nihilistic abyss. True, it is the latter image and conception which dominates Nietzsche's thinking, but thereby Nietzsche is in full continuity with his prophetic forbearers, and above all with the prophets of Israel who are the original historical ground of Nietzsche and Jesus alike. We now know that Amos, the first revolutionary prophet of Israel, gave us oracles only of total judgment and destruction, and it is clear that these were directed to shattering everything that was given to his hearer, everything that sanctioned and sustained his or her life and existence. Here, a mythical and primordial darkness and chaos passes into an interior and historical abyss, an abyss that quite simply and literally is the total judgment of God. If the prophet is one who names an immediate and actual darkness, that darkness is here the darkness of God, and this is a total darkness in which there is no light. And the truth is that in the prophetic revolution as a whole, God can only be apprehended as total darkness when known and named on this side of judgment, when known before the advent or realization of cataclysmic judgment. Prophetic oracles of life and joy are only given us as a consequence of that judgment, as in Deutero-Isaiah, and they are meaningless and unreal when heard apart from a realization of total judgment or total ending. Only the actualization of that ending or judgment makes possible a new life, and that new life is wholly other than all life prior to or apart from total judgment and total ending. The Exile itself was a full ending of pre-exilic Israel: therein and thereby Israel lost everything that was the source of meaning and identity to an ancient people and this alone made possible the revolutionary advent of Judaism or a new Israel. Jesus is the prophet of Israel who enacted and proclaimed the final realization of total judgment and total ending. And that ending is so total that it passes immediately and spontaneously into the gospel or "good news" of the actual advent of the Kingdom of God. No prophet before him knew and proclaimed

42

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

such a final and total advent, just as no other prophet enacted a love or agape which is total and all comprehending, a love bringing an end to everything which is apart from itself. If we are to accept the overwhelming judgment of modern New Testament scholarship, that enactment wholly transcended all mythical and religious language. Or, in the words of Nietzsche, Jesus understood everything natural, temporal, spatial, and historical only as signs, only as occasions for parables. Only thereby can the gospel or evangelical practice be enacted, and that enactment is the Kingdom of God. But it is the Kingdom of God only by being all in all, only by enacting the ending of everything else, an ending which is the transfiguration and perfection of all and everything. So it is that it is precisely an apprehension of Kingdom of God as being other than all and everything, as being a realm wholly to come, that is the deepest negation and reversal of the original identity of the Kingdom. But this is the origin of the Christian God, an origin which Nietzsche knew more deeply than anyone, and an origin unveiling both the total transcendence and the total mystery of the Christian God. Nietzsche knew both this mystery and this transcendence as a full reversal of that love which Jesus himself enacted, therefore the Christian God is a pure embodiment of guilt and revenge, and may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types (The Antichrist, Section 18, Kaufmann 1954, 585). Nevertheless, it is a full reversal of Jesus'"God," and thus Nietzsche allows us to see, as Blake did before him, how the unique and absolute No-saying of the Christian God is dialectically and historically inseparable from the absolute Yes-saying of the praxis of Jesus. And it is precisely such a conjunction of absolute No-saying and absolute Yessaying which is reborn in a new Zarathustra, whose proclamation, if not his praxis, can in this perspective be seen to be a rebirth of the prophetic enactment of Jesus. Certainly the new vision of eternal recurrence is only possible as a consequence of the death of the Christian God. Again and again, Nietzsche proclaims that the death of God is the most important event in history, as once again Crucifixion becomes the absolute centre of history. But it is the absolute centre of history only inasmuch and insofar as consciousness itself is the embodiment of ressentiment, a ressentiment which is itself the origin of consciousness (Genealogy of Morals), and whose purest embodiment is not in the Jewish creation of slave morality but rather in the Christian God. Only the death of that God makes possible the end and reversal of ressentiment, a reversal and end which is the dance and the joy of eternal recurrence. Such a joy is first historically present in the praxis of Jesus, and even as that praxis is inseparable from its ground in a prophetic ending of the givenness and finality of the world, so the joy of eternal recurrence is inseparable from an absolute negation and reversal of the totality of consciousness itself. There is a full continuity between Nietzsche and the Bible, that is, between the prophetic and eschatological traditions embedded in the Bible, and nowhere is this more fully manifest than it is in an apocalyptic nihilism which lies so deeply at the center of both Nietzsche and the New Testament.

Nietzsche and Biblical Nihilism

43

Indeed, it was Nietzsche who first historically unveiled the New Testament as a nihilistic scripture. While Nietzsche knew this nihilism as a full and pure embodiment of ressentiment, this very embodiment enacted an absolute negation of the world, a negation which is itself the advent of the Christian God. But the death of the Christian God, as Nietzsche enacted and proclaimed it, itself realizes an absolute negation of the world, or a full and final negation of the deepest ground of all consciousness whatsoever which is open to or grounded in transcendence in any form. Therefore the death of God is quite simply the end of history, or the end of Western history, and therein the end or ending of every form and mode of consciousness which has been actual and real within the horizon of history itself. The death of God is inevitably a nihilistic event, and, for Nietzsche, the deepest of all nihilistic events, but precisely thereby it is a rebirth of the advent of Christianity, a rebirth of the advent of the Christian God. So it is that the death of God is inseparable from the birth of the Christian God, from the advent of absolute No-saying. Both the advent of Christianity and the end of history are nihilistic events and therein and thereby are apocalyptic events, events wherein and whereby total ending is total beginning. Apocalyptic language and imagery was itself historically born by way of a vision of a new creation, a new creation which will be a repetition of primordial beginning, but a repetition which once and for all will bring an end to time and history. So it is that eschatology or apocalypticism, in the words of A.J. Wensinck, is a "cosmogony of the future" (Wensinck, 189). This is clearly expressed in the apocalyptic Epistle of Barnabas: "Lo, I make the last things like the first" (6:13). An apocalyptic ending of the world is a final and ultimate beginning of the world, a beginning which is ending, and it is precisely thereby that it is absolute beginning. Beginning and ending here purely and wholly coincide, even as they do in Nietzsche's vision of eternal recurrence: "Being begins in every Now" (Zarathustra III, "The Convalescent"). For Nietzsche's vision of eternal recurrence is itself a rebirth of an original Christian apocalypticism: both revolve about a proclamation and enactment of the end of history, and in each that ending is an absolute and final beginning. So, too, an absolute No-saying and an absolute Yes-saying here coalesce and become one, and not only is each inseparable from the other, but an actual and real enactment of one is necessarily an enactment of the other. If Nietzsche is our most nihilistic thinker, he is also our most apocalyptic thinker, and it could even be said that he is an apocalyptic thinker just because he is so deeply and so profoundly a nihilistic thinker. While Nietzsche may well stand alone as a nihilistic and apocalyptic thinker, he does not so stand alone as a visionary, for nihilism and apocalypticism in one form or another are fully conjoined in many if not all of the greatest expressions of the modern imagination. Nietzsche can teach us that apocalyptic nihilism has its origin not only in Christianity and the New Testament, but also in the Jewish slave revolt in morality, a revolution which passed into the very centre or centres of the Bible itself, as can be seen in the synoptic words of Jesus that promise that "the last will be first, and the first last" (Mathew 20:16). These words are not only a rebirth

44

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

and re-enactment of ancient prophetic oracles, they are also anticipations of an actual historical future, and a future that fully became real only with the end of Christendom. That end is the death of the Christian God, but it is also and thereby the rebirth of "God" or the Kingdom of God, a "God" whom Nietzsche knew as the absolute perfection and transfiguration of life and existence.

Language to the Limit Claude Levesque Translated by Bela Egyed From the beginning of his reflections, Nietzsche is in search of "a new philosophy of language" (CM 1976, 1:340 [8, 52]), a philosophy which would wisely consent to lose its head and which could give, in a positive manner, an account of the bacchanalian revel, the festive inordinateness of the dithyramb, "this beautiful and savage folly of poetry" (CM 1976, V: 100-1). One is to understand the "nature" of language beginning with its derailment and its loss. This new philosophy seeks to give back to language all its striking force, all its power to cast a spell, its mysterious and indomitable density, its uncanny and irreducible strangeness. Nietzsche does not believe that language is first and foremost an instrument of communication, nor does he believe that it is constituted essentially by the concept. He admits that "we cease to think if we refuse to do it within the constraints of language, we arrive barely at doubt, perceiving there a border as border" (CM 1976, XII: 195 [5, 22]), and he adds: ". . . rational thought is an interpretation according to a schema which we cannot reject." Thus, Nietzsche does not seek to get around this self-evidence: language signifies by concept, this is its force, its life, the dimension where it holds out, but it is also its limit. It happens that, in doubt, in anguish, or in frenzy, one perceives this limit as limit. The concept is always there, it is unavoidable. There must be the concept, for only as a result of it do I come to perceive the limit (of language) as limit. But now—and it is here that fear begins to get a hold of us—I cannot perceive a limit as limit without being, in some manner, over the limit, which does not quite mean that I really cross the limit and that I find myself purely and simply on the outside. I can never fall to be in between the two, at the same time both inside and outside, below and beyond the limit, a limit always already passed and impassable. It is always in the concept that a beyond of the concept is foreshadowed and is announced. Thus, one can say, paradoxically, that the essential escapes language and the concept, that the immediate, in its singularity, allows itself to be approached only indirectly, as a distance and by the distance, excluding all immediate relationship and all empirical contact. The word itself never does more than suggest, pointing blindly towards an unfathomable beyond of language: "it is the surface of the wild sea where the storm reigns in the depths" writes Nietzsche at the moment of The Birth of Tragedy (CM 1976, 1,1:189 [2, 10]). Thus, he is attempting to rethink language, not in the direction of the demands of discursive thinking, but, as Klossovski puts it, "in terms of the forces of non-speech," of "corporating" forces which express themselves everywhere in culture. These forces are more perceptible in poetry and music, but only on condition that one thinks of music with Nietzsche as "an art not yet dissolved in the concept" (CM 1976, 1,1:389 [9, 90]). 45

46

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Now, these forces of non-speech, which express themselves through the excess and the disordered violence of impulses, are precisely what the tradition has always attempted to exclude from the field of its reflection. Such forces can only fascinate and lead astray, to dislodge from the straight and virtuous road suitable to men, and how much more, as says Socrates in The Republic, to future guardians of the state. It is possible, according to Nietzsche, to find the veritable "nature" of language from its intensive use in emotion, in poetry and in singing, that is to say, where thinking responds to the musical essence of language. Language would do nothing but put into effect—in poetry, for example—that which is and has been forever, a power of seduction, a magical and oracular act, a convincing and contagious force, a tragic tonality going as far as provoking— in the dithyramb—"the shivers of the approaching beyond" (CM 1976, 1,1:209 [3, 45]). This is why the goal of language, as language of intensity and of impulse, would be to provoke a kind of commotion, a passionate flutter and an unrestrained outburst which make one clear with one leap, outside all coordination and all project, the limits of representation. "We want to transpose the world for you," writes Nietzsche, "in images the likes of which would make you shudder" (Marietti 1969, 73). What this is in some way is language wanting to become theatrical where the representation is always of the order of a performance, a tragical and rhetorical conception of language in which it loses its transparence and its ideal and abstract purity, an illusion in any case, to show itself for what it is: an act, an event, the site of a vital experience, that is to say a risky and deadly experience, a limiting experience, which is always only the experience which escapes experience and which claims to go, as if on an irresistible slope, right up to the limit, where language destroys itself as conceptual language. He writes in the posthumous fragments of The Birth of Tragedy that "speech which does not act by its extent acts by its intensity" (CM 1976, 1,1:385 [9, 72]). "Thoughts are signs of a play and of a combat of the emotions: they stay tied always to their hidden roots," he writes elsewhere (CM 1976, XII:38 [1, 75]). From the moment that affectivity intervenes, language strains, takes on a tone, gives itself a tonality, a particular sonority, an evident sensuality: (it) becomes music. Obviously, what interests Nietzsche in language is not so much the intention it conveys, or the message it transmits, as the tension, the tone and the rhythm that effects and disarticulates it. He is more fascinated by the intensity, the excess in intensity, the heightening of the effect which make of language a pure pathos, than by the ideality, the transparence and luminosity of meaning. Language is then, for him, essentially pathetic, for it is first and foremost symbolic of desires. It is the language of desire and of sentiments. It is a site for the play of passions, where passions are played with, where passion discharges itself in pure loss. In short, language appears here in its lyrical and tragical dimension and, according to Nietzsche's own expression, "it remains incontestably the supreme musical marvel of nature" (CM 1976, 1,1:333 [8, 29]). Under the influence and the surprise of emotion language bares itself, disarticulates itself, negates itself to

Language to the Limit

47

reach finally, in this strange disintegration that can touch the sublime, up to the terrifying simplicity of screaming. "Remarkable: the simplicity of language attested in the most lively emotion" (CM 1976,1,1:339 [8,46]), writes Nietzsche. The paradox of man as a being of language lies there: it is at the moment of saying what is most important to it, that which is closest to its heart and solicits it to the extreme that language suddenly derails, loses itself, freezes, recoils, stutters, admits (without admitting it) its impotence and yields place to the terrifying gaping of a mouth that screams. The scream, then, is but one way of giving a voice to silence and to give back to language its illimiting margins of non-sense. The excess overflows not only meaning but all project and all intention: it strains to exceed all language. But while the excessive crosses the limits of language it does not really amount to a breaking away from language and passing purely and simply to the outside. The excessive is always only an excess of language: it belongs to language as its effect, it is its strongest affirmation, affirming inside language, at the limit of language, an unknown beyond, inaccessible, undecipherable. Being neither sense nor non-sense, the excess does not allow itself to be defined except as that which is outside-sense and by the same token outside language. It must be said then, without saying it, that the excess as in the scream, for example, is a language outside language. By reaching the nocturnal heights of tone and intensity, language ceases to appear as an instrument of communication, a tool that one manipulates at will according to precise goals, and becomes instead a labyrinthine space where its limits burst and open up to the night sans phrase. Words function like things, rather as magical things, carrying effective cargoes, occult powers, decomposing and recomposing ceaselessly according to the dizzying play of a strange syntax. Language, obviously, is not made for telling the truth, it is not made for putting in direct contact with the intimate essence of things. The force that works and animates it is an artist force, a power of dream and illusion, a force of figuration and dissimulation. Its most profound tendency is more to veil than to unveil. This movement which goes always ahead and takes it towards the world in its singularity and multiplicity, is certainly inhabited by the passion of truth; but this passion is illusory and without object. Truth: a phantasm which fulfills and deceives desire, like all phantasms. Besides, the soul of language is not knowledge, science (episteme), but verisimilitude, opinion (doxa), and it aims, before all else, if not exclusively, to persuade, to seduce, to legislate, to command, and to transform, in short, to create and to produce effects. "The force (Kraft) that Aristotle calls rhetoric," writes Nietzsche as early as 1869, . . . which is the force of disentangling and of emphasizing for each thing that which is effective and makes an impression, this force is at the same time the essence of language, the latter bears no more relation to the truth, to the essence of things, than does rhetoric, it wants not to instruct but to transmit to others an emotion and a subjective apprehension. (Nancy and LacoueLabarthe 1971:111) Rhetoric does not graft itself on to language in the manner of a strange body: it only perfects that which is already present in language, in such a manner that

48

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

there is no pure language, there is no naked and intact state of language where there would be neither transition, nor metaphor, nor figure of any sort, nor consequences. There is no language proper which would finally give access to an intrinsic and immediate relation to the world. The distance which separates us from things has always been and will forever be impassable. We are no less strangers to ourselves than we are to things and to others. "Our representation," writes Nietzsche at the time of composing The Birth of Tragedy, "stays always hooked to representation. Our life is a represented life. We don't advance a step" (CM 1976,1,1:309 [7, 157]). Language is not subject to truth; and speech, just as writing, has since forever freed itself from it, presenting itself as a sovereign speech, speaking from nowhere, that is to say from itself, in view of nothing, saying nothing, but finding in this nothing the infinite resource of an incessant speech. The consequences of such a philosophy of language are innumerable and breathtaking. Metaphysics has founded its empire on a series of partitions which the foregoing generalization of metaphoricity and the non-transcriptive sovereignty of language put into question. What loses all pertinence is the strict and exclusive opposition of concept and metaphor, of sensible and intelligible, of speech and language, of denotation and connotation. Linguistics lives on these partitions and believes itself capable of justifying them scientifically. It is difficult to admit that the intensity and the expressivity of discourse are no more than secondary traits, that lament and scream, desire and appeal, love and hate, that is to say all that animates, upsets and renews language is marginal to real language and does not belong in the order of the human. As Wittgenstein very appropriately says: "removing the contingent and accidental elements of a word or of a phrase, is like searching for the real artichoke by removing all its leaves." According to The Birth of Tragedy, it is in music, more than in any other art, that this seduction exerted by all extreme things, this "magic of the extreme," is produced with most force. The Birth of Tragedy unites in the same problematic, according to a strange necessity, the motif of music, so all-pervasive at the time, and the more marginal, also more enigmatic motif of the scream. The scream is for Nietzsche—this paradox has passed unnoticed—that which is musical, properly musical in language, that by which language escapes momentarily (but this is a possibility always already inscribed in it) from the space of representation and gives itself, beyond the concept, as "the language of the Dionysian." "Music," on the other hand, is constituted essentially by the bringing into play of pure tonality, by the dissolving effect of its erupting violence, and by the comparable force of harmony. "Harmony," according to the unusual sense given to it by Nietzsche, is that by virtue of which music is felt as a multiplicity and, singularly, as dissonant multiplicity or, if one wants, according to a heavily underlined expression of the posthumous fragments dating back to the time of The Birth of Tragedy: "scream and counter-scream." At its highest level of intensity, music, at any rate Dionysian music—let us note it well—is of the order of the voice and of singing: it is inordinateness in the voice, excessive voice, "resounding," writes Nietzsche, "in magical and bewitching

Language to the Limit

49

accents, and letting burst out with a great crash, till the very shrillness of the scream, all the excess of nature exulting in joy, in suffering, or in recognition" (CM 1976, 1,1:55). Harmony, scream, these two motifs each refer back to dissonance, that is, to the limits of music, to the limits of language where music and language lose their identifiable contours, the security of their frontiers and pass from one to the other. It is then that they appear as "the true symbols of multiplicity." For Nietzsche, the scream is at the same time in language and out of language. It is the eruption of a beyond of language in language. One says easily today, too easily, that the scream pertains to a fascination with origins, to a reference to nature as an unencroached plentitude, one says that in screaming I seek immediate communication, absolute proximity below the articulated structures of language. But for Nietzsche, the scream does not refer back to the same, instead it gives itself from the start as scream of the other and an appeal to the other. It is the infinite distance, the pathos of the distance that cries out in the scream, irreducible remoteness, the impassable separation of the other from me and of itself from itself. The scream does not arise from what is full and without fault (if such a thing could exist) but from that which is non-coinciding and nonidentical, from that which belongs at once to the limit and to the beyond limit. Not only does the scream bring along the difference (which brings it along) but the scream is always deferred: it is the last word, the last recourse, the last retrenchment, the last way out, the impossible way out, when all possible has been exhausted: the leap in the void. It is the same with scream as with naivete: it is not just there before all language and all civilization, like a golden age, but it is rather at the limit of language and of civilization as their supreme effect and their excess. It presupposes the struggle of Titans, the conflict of antagonistic forces and can come into being only as a product of this mortal struggle: war cry, death cry, and cry of death. For those who take measure to be the truth and fundamental law, the measure of reason, all that goes beyond this measure detonates and acts as a detonator. And that which detonates and risks blowing everything up is precisely the tone, the fluctuating intensity of tone that moves across the pure sky of representation like a menacing cloud, it is its dissonance, its untimeliness, its intractability with respect to the light of the concept. This aversion of tone for the concept is positive and affirmative because it affirms a beyond-the-concept, whilst the aversion of the theoretical eye (of Socrates) for all that is unfigurable, uncertain, strange, is but reactive and defensive. The Socratic contempt for the impulsive and the instinctive is at the basis of Euripides, whose heroes, according to Nietzsche, have constantly to justify their deeds "by reason and counter-reasons" (CM 1976,1,1:102), whilst, on the contrary, a real tragedy allows itself to sink profoundly into injustice and produces in the end nothing but "scream and counter-scream." Euripides tends to reduce in favour of Apollo alone the Dionysian and Apollonian duality which is responsible for the appearance of the miracle of tragedy. Nietzsche takes pleasure in underlining the difference between the two approaches: the one sure of itself, virile, adequate to its object, luminous and

50

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

transparent, saying only what it means and saying it totally. Euripides' heroes "are truly as they speak." But they express themselves entirely while Aeschylus' and Sophocles' characters are more profound and fuller than their speeches: on the subject of themselves they can only stutter. Euripides creates figures only by decomposing them: his anatomic science leaves nothing hidden in them" (CM 1976, 1,2:38). The other speech is more hesitating, faltering, inadequate, feminine, blind in relation to itself, not saying what it means, saying it by its very incompletion, by its interruption and its fragmentation. The difference between these two speeches is the difference between a pessimistic vision and an optimistic vision, that is to say, a serene vision without residue and without surprise. The tragic artist "sees in their reality terrible things and does not dissimulate them" (CM 1976,1,1:212 [3, 62]). He is equipped with the force and audacity necessary for facing up to the terrible, the absence of a way out or of truth; the unlimited and abyssal character of the world, the finitude of existence and of desire. The spirit of music has the effect of pushing music and language up to the shrillness of scream, the scream which represents the most sensible, the most outspoken, way of symbolizing the original contradiction. The classical conception of harmony is founded on the resolution of contraries, on the primacy of unity over multiplicity, of consonance over dissonance. For Nietzsche, harmony, when it wants to define itself, makes an appeal to the scream and to a multitude of heterogeneous screams. He puts the accent on dissonance, multiplicity, heterogeneity and simultaneity. Harmony is on the side of the affirming excess, of the overflowing richness, and of the explosion of Dionysian forces. It carries within itself the spirit of music. The spirit of music (the forces of non-speech) conveys in articulate language the inarticulate of Dionysian impulses, the infinity of passion, the silence of the impossible. Its effect is to render essentially equivocal and indeterminate that which claimed to be unequivocal in a clear and pure sense. The spirit of music conveys in the text the equivocacy of music which may at the same time say all or nothing, its very style "in which," writes Nietzsche, "the precise form is continually broken, warped, reinterpreted in imprecisions, in such a way that it signifies one thing and at the same time another. . . . It provokes also in a reader worthy of that name a sentiment of incertitude regarding whether he is walking, standing or lying down, a sentiment which is akin as much as possible to soaring" (CM 1976, 111,2:113 [57]). Now, it is this wavering, this equivocation, this incertitude and this strangeness that Euripides violently refuses. He wants neither to soar nor to swim, nor does he want the choice between a too highly raised sky and an infinite sea where, writes Nietzsche "one ends up by giving oneself over to the mercy of the undulating element" (CM 1975, 111,2:134 [64]). What Euripides refuses, in sum, is "this too feminine nature of music" (CM 1976, 111,2:134 [65]). For Euripides the thinker, the language of Aeschylus has "something disproportionate—a certain imprecision which could create illusion, but only on the basis of an enigmatic and infinite depth" (CM 1976,1,1:91). The language of

Language to the Limit

51

Aeschylean tragedy is too emotional and too excessive, too enigmatic and infinite, making a sign to the uncertain and the indeterminate, an equivocal language which risks drowning all in the formless, and in the end carrying us away, getting us lost. Euripides refuses to allow that language outstrip its limits and that it pass beyond; he refuses that language articulate, by disarticulating itself, the inarticulate, the unnamed, the terrible unknown; he refuses that it summon, in the disfigured figure, the unfigurable, and that it convey in the excessive and multi-colored sonority of words the deafening/inaudible silence of Dionysus. For Aeschylus, by contrast, language can say the inordinate only by breaking itself up, only by scattering metaphors all over, pell-mell, thereby displacing the limits of abstraction. This writing of the scream, these unsettling words, of a terrible pathos that Nietzsche speaks of in connection with Aeschylus, these are the very words of mythical narrative: words uttered very much in a mysterious, oracular way, but, all the same, articulated words and words which come to make counter-weight by this very articulation to musical rapture, to the totally devastating influence of music. These colossal lyrics draw us close to music by the tone, rhythm, and intensity that runs through them, and at the same time they protect us from it, tempering the violence of its effects by the absence, the distance and the iterations that constitute them. The voice of tragic myth, the voice of Apollo, only translates and noisily manifests the suffering and ecstasy of Dionysus. Apollo is never more than a mouth-piece, a ventriloquist for Dionysus. The seductive power of the Dionysian causes the appearance to lose its force of conviction and seduction: the appearance is no longer savored in itself and for itself, but appears for what it is, appearance, nothing but appearance, whose whole function is to indicate, in a veiled and indirect manner, a beyond of appearance. Appearance constitutes itself as a symbol of truth, of this truth that refuses itself to the light of day and the light of evidence, to common sense and to language. "Taken in its totality, tragedy produces an effect," writes Nietzsche, "that exceeds all the artistic effects of which the Apollonian is capable" (CM 1976, 1,1:141). Apollo is not really the unconditional adversary of Dionysus, but rather his accomplice and brother: he participates in his cunning, he plays his game, he obeys his injunctions. The Dionysian always ends up by imposing itself indirectly, for he is the taskmaster; it is he who holds all the strings, and who wags the Apollonian marionette. It is in this way that a tragedy can be at the same time tragic terror and joy of appearance, because the knowledge of terror, even if it flirts with the frightful, remains only a knowledge, a representation from a distance of its object, and as such tragedy implies a certain pleasure, the pleasure of knowing what otherwise would make one perish. The effect of Dionysian power is to force symbols to be apprehended as such, as no more than symbols. Like all systems of reference, symbols efface themselves by themselves, suppress themselves ceaselessly, lose all autonomy and sovereignty, to be no more than traces which, like fingers severed from a hand, point pathetically, blindly, to a terrible reality. Tragedy does not take place unless Apollo is willing to speak a foreign language, going into exile in the language of the other, allowing itself to be

52

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

ventriloquized by the other. All of Apollo's art consists, then, in speaking his own language and in this language to make the impossible language of the other heard, the language of the impossible and of the inarticulate. Through the measure, make the un-measured heard; through the reasonable tone of reason, make something altogether different heard: the inaudible scream of the Dionysian passion. Dionysus speaks two languages but can only speak them because he is always already divided in himself. Apollo's tongue is no longer Apollo's tongue when the Dionysian tone gets hold of it and alters it and does it so radically that in the end it is Apollo who speaks in his language, the language of Dionysus. This language of translation/summoning, this strange and disproportionate style of all language which speaks starting from another language gives Aeschylean tragedy its oracular and sacred power, its infinite openness. The spirit of music—of Dionysian music—enriches the phenomenon, writes Nietzsche, "and widens its singularity to the dimensions of the world" (CM 1976, 1,1:118). At any rate, this superior knowledge engendered by tragedy is more the order of presentiment than that of acquaintance, it belongs more to the order of unlimited non-knowledge than to the limits of a so-called "certain" but, in fact, short-sighted knowledge. Music which raises myth to the height of its intensity, in which it negates itself as Apollonian language, is precisely what acts with the same power on the spectator of tragedy, transmitting to him, writes Nietzsche, "the sure presentiment" that there is a superior pleasure to which one has access only by one's downfall and annihilation, so much so that for him everything in music happens as if what he was hearing, speaking to him distinctly, were the voice itself which surges from the most hidden abyss of things. (CM 1976,1,1:137) It is one of the most powerful effects of tragic art to produce, first this illusion of superior knowledge, a sort of omniscience criss-crossing the mirror of phenomena, and then to tear open the veil of Maya, destroying all illusions, and finally to plunge into the most subtle secrets of the universe. Nietzsche proliferates the "all happens as if's," the "so to say's," and takes all sorts of rhetorical precautions to mark the fictional and show-like (in the theatrical as well as in all other senses) character of this transgression. Nietzsche marks pointedly the pure pleasure taken in the appearance and the negation of this limited pleasure, too limited, to be sure, to go beyond itself. Let us note, however, that he never draws the curtain, neither does he tear the veil, as if an essential interdiction had been cast on this fascination of the beyond, and on this passion of the outside. This is the logic of the double step, of a stepping beyond (underlined by Blanchot and Derrida): a step of crossing over and a step of negation that annuls (without annulling). Tragedy is situated always in between beauty and truth, in this intermediary world of the verisimilar—this world which is also that of rhetoric—the indeterminate world where affirmation and negation, the visible and the invisible, the audible and the unheard-of silence are being played out at the same time. The dissonant pleasure which comes from this aesthetic play with the ugly and the disharmonious is what it is only because it

Language to the Limit

53

articulates itself on the joy of the formative force of the world, a force which constructs the world only to destroy it (and reconstructs it in order to destroy it once again, eternally), in the manner of Freud's grandson who casts the spool, reels it back only to cast it again, in a kind of strange pleasure of the absence, of the far away, and of annihilation. The Dionysian allows itself to be thought of as arch-dissonance and as common matrix of this pleasure engendered by musical dissonance and tragic duplicity. This arch-dissonance would be at the non-original origin of that which is most musical in music, the most language-like in language: harmony and the scream. Dissonance takes root in this nether-region where there is neither music nor language, but where resounds endlessly the mute scream let out by Dionysus. The heterogeneous space of the forces of non-speech opens up music (and) language to the infinite, making them pass into one another, beyond all fusion and all separation. The spirit of music: arch-dissonance. Why be astonished that man, at the point of not being able to know and to bear it anymore, in appealing to the other, takes on the colossal and intolerable voice of the scream?

This page intentionally left blank

The Deconstruction of the Tradition: Nietzsche and the Greeks Tracy B. Strong No longer can the individual, as in former times, turn to the great when he grows confused. Soren Kierkegaard The Present Age

In a letter written on November 13, 1925, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote as follows: Even for our grandparents, a "home," a "well," a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat, were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now . . . empty indifferent things are pouring across . . . sham things, dummy life . . .; a house [now], . . . an apple or a grapevine, . . . has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers. . . . Live things, things live and conscious of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. (Rilke 1948, 374-5)

It is fair, I think, to see this passage as one possible description of nihilism. It presents the reader with a world in which she/he exists but in which no human thing (no "thing . . . conscious of us") can be found. We cannot find our feet in such a world. Some Nietzsche criticism suggests that Nietzsche sought to counter the apparent emptiness of such a modern world by looking back to the world of antiquity, specifically to the Greeks, and that he found there a rich and full realm. It is a short move from this to suggest that Nietzsche wanted to "return" to the Greeks, or recover a Greek-type world in 19th-century Germany. Typical of this view are the comments of Jiirgen Habermas. 1 For Habermas, Nietzsche "takes leave of the dialectic of the Enlightenment," he makes use of "the thread of historical reason, in order to throw it away in the end and to set his feet into the other of reason, into myth" (Habermas 1985, 106-7). In this view, Nietzsche simply wants to go back, to take his leave of modernity: the preSocratic or pre-Platonic Greeks are his model for this enterprise. 2 There are two things at stake in this debate. First, the question of Nietzsche's relation to modernity, and second, the question of how this relationship to modernity can help us come to terms with our own epoch. In the following pages, then, I would like to return to the question of Nietzsche's understanding of the Greeks. The Greeks were a problem to Nietzsche throughout his life and thought. I also think, and will try to show, that in his understanding(s) of the Greeks are to be found the dynamics of the rest of his thought. Thus I have two interests in raising the question of what Nietzsche 55

56

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

thought about the Greeks: first, the significance, the authority of the Greeks for Nietzsche's analysis of the modern (Western) condition; secondly, the process by which Nietzsche arrives at his understanding of the modern situation. In the 1886 "Effort towards a self-critique" with which he prefaced the new edition of the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche himself indicates that these two are linked. He had gotten a hold of, he writes, a "new problem" (CM 1967,111,1:7), that of Wissenschaft itself. In other words, The Birth of Tragedy was a book that sought to make sense of the activity of making sense of a culture. It is in that book, and in Nietzsche's comments on it, that we can best see what Nietzsche's overall enterprise is. I shall focus on Nietzsche's discussion of the Greeks in his first writings: the Birth of Tragedy, the various texts which surrounded the publication of that book, the notes and letters from the time. In addition, and contained within these writings, are Nietzsche's discussions of his own discussions of the Greeks. Central here are the already mentioned 1886 preface and the notes made in preparation for it: they provide an entry into Nietzsche's own appreciation of what was misspoken in the Birth. Nietzsche is far more self-conscious and reflective about his writing than he is often given credit for. The issue of the Birth has been given prominence in the recent Nietzsche commentary; most texts re-open traditional issues and replay the controversy along the lines traced by Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's original critique.3 Was Nietzsche right? Was there evidence? Should we take Nietzsche seriously as a Greek scholar? These are not uninteresting issues, but they must be formulated, I would argue, in relation to the question: what was Nietzsche trying to do in writing the Birth! For instance, both the sympathetic and the hostile commentators on Nietzsche allow that the Birth of Tragedy was a book that had its influence more by inspiring other research than by contributing anything scientifically new. P.M. Cornford, the great English classicist, can suggest that Nietzsche "left a whole generation of scholars toiling in arrears." The contemporary scholar, William Arrowsmith, notes that "time and recent scholarship have . . . vindicated . . . Nietzsche, the man who 'arrogantly' dared defy the scholarly consensus of the time for the simple reason that it did not make literary or cultural sense to him" (Arrowsmith 1963,10). On the other side, those apparently more concerned with philological science have raised doubts especially about Nietzsche's account of the ancestry of the chorus.4 Recent and importantly new attention has been given to Nietzsche in the writings of Jacques Derrida and those associated with the contemporary French school of "deconstruction."5 Though most of this material is apparently not explicitly about Nietzsche and the Greeks, I hope to show that it casts a biased light on the problem of Nietzsche's enterprise. I. Authority The standing that Greek tragedy has for Nietzsche is central to his understanding of history and of the availability of the past to the present, the question, if you will, of the "tradition." It is standard to describe this

The Deconstruction of the Tradition: Nietzsche and the Greeks

57

understanding in this way: in Greek tragedy we see how human beings can act in the face of the pain and suffering of existence; the tragic heroes do not seek redemption from the pain of existence, but take the suffering upon themselves; its very meaninglessness makes it all the more gloriously human. 6 Nietzsche provides a number of passages which encourage this approach.7 Thus, Greek tragedy would provide a touchstone of how human beings should act. In this understanding, one might consider tragedy and its heroes to have replaced "nature," or more precisely to be an historically relativized version of "nature." Bruno Snell writes in this vein: "If we hope to be Europeans, . . . the question which looms before us is, 'what were the Greeks?'" (Snell 1960, 261).8 Snell's question is typical of an important way of approaching Nietzsche and the question of the Greeks. We examine the Greeks the better to discover ourselves: they institute central portions of the Western experience. Whatever the worth of this approach—and it is, I think, not inconsiderable—in the end this approach remains a child of the enlightenment, for its motivations are fundamentally anti-Christian. The search is for the "natural" Western, European person, before Christianity so mixed the brew that the original ingredients were hopelessly lost. The Greeks are somehow more purely "European"; Christianity becomes a late import, important, but less original, less basic.9 I cannot in this paper deal with Nietzsche's complex understanding of Christianity. 10 But it does seem to me clear that whatever his attitude towards the Greeks may be, he does know that Christianity has sufficiently changed us so that we cannot actually want to "recover" them. Such a desire cannot be for the actual Greeks because our desires are the result of two millenia of Christianity. Nietzsche does not himself express such a desire. Here, for instance, is what he requires of himself and his readers: "To get past Hellenism by means of deeds: that would be our task. But to do that we first have to know what it was!"11 If Nietzsche does not seek to "recover" the Greeks, in the manner proposed by Habermas, his Auseinandersetzung with them still raises the question for us of the authority that the Greeks have for his thought, and for those of us who are the inheritors, willy-nilly, of the Greek world. Bluntly: why worry about the Greeks? In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche says, famously, that "existence and the world appear as justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon." I take it to be a characteristic of an aesthetic phenomenon that it can provoke us into an acknowledgment of its being, of its presence to and its otherness from us. I would also take this provocation to imply that something which is an aesthetic phenomenon has for us an authority, derived from the fact that it requires of us an understanding. 12 We can, then, take this notion of an aesthetic phenomenon and apply it to The Birth of Tragedy, and see what kind of sense it makes in the Wilamowitz-Cornford-Arrowsmith debate. I am not, then, primarily concerned with the sense that Nietzsche makes of Greek tragedy. Rather, I am concerned with the fact that Greek tragedy, as Nietzsche conceives of it, has the quality of requiring us to make sense of it. For Nietzsche, it is neither a question of imposing a sense on the Greeks nor of "getting them right."

58

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

It is immediately apparent that the fundamental rhetorical mode of the Birth is that of compulsion. Throughout the book, the author appears almost passive in the face of his text. Again and again, Nietzsche tells us of what he had to conclude. From the beginning of Chapter 24: "We had to emphasize an Apollonian illusion . . ."; "We thought we had observed . . ."; "We were forced to recognize the apex of Apollonian and Dionysian artistic designs . . ."; "The revelation seemed to summon us. . . ." And in Chapter 19, during his discussion of the historical origins of opera: "I can explain to myself [the origins of the Stilo representative] only by a cooperating extra-artistic tendency . . ."; "One has to infer an origin . . ."; "It is now a matter of indifference that the humanists of the time [were in opposition to the Church]"; "For us, it is enough to have perceived. . . . " To say that the sense he makes of tragedy compels Nietzsche to write as he does is to say that the authority of tragedy for Nietzsche is not grounded in anything other than itself. In the end, authority—of the Greeks, of tragedy, of Nietzsche—can have its source only in the terms of its own assertion, and in our ability to be provoked by, to find ourselves in, those assertions and those assertions in us. The reference to aesthetic justification is an indication that conviction is not to be won on these matters from evidence, logical proof, nor even deduction. (I am supposing that this is what it means to live after the death of God.) The problem posed by Nietzsche's stance before the Greeks is thus the problem of being able to be provoked, to find ourselves in an assertion and to find that assertion is us. If the nature of authority in these matters—political and cultural matters—is such that it cannot be abstractly arrived at, but that it depends on qualities of human beings, then it is not apparent that authority will always be available. Let us look at another case. Nietzsche is not the first to have wrestled with this problem, though he is perhaps the first to have generalized the problem of authority beyond the religious sphere. Kierkegaard, for instance, understood precisely the same question as did Nietzsche, but he could still frame it as a religious problem (which, for Kierkegaard, might be thought of as how to speak seriously about religion when one risks saying everything wrong). Kierkegaard's problem, however, despite or because of the fact that it is a religious problem, is especially a modern problem: it is not that one has to be religious to speak about religion, but that even the religious person does not know what to say about religion. Kierkegaard put it like this some twenty-five years before Nietzsche: "Doubt and superstition have, among other things, made men embarrassed about obeying, about bowing to authority. . . ."At this point, he goes on to describe Clergyman presenting the gospel: "This word was spoken by him to whom, according to his own statement, all power hath been given in heaven and earth. Now, thou, hearer, must consider by thyself whether thou wilt bow to this authority or no, receive it and believe it or no. But if thou wilt not do so, then for heaven's sake do not go off and accept the word because it is clever and profound or wondrously beautiful, for this . . . is wanting to treat God like an aesthetic critic. . . . "

The Deconstruction of the Tradition: Nietzsche and the Greeks

59

Returning to his own voice, Kierkegaard asks: "But how can an apostle prove that he has authority?" The reply: "He has no other proof but his own assertion'" (Kierkegaard 1966, 116-7; emphasis added).13 Nietzsche is, however, no longer concerned with the problem of speaking religiously: like Max Weber some forty years later he is "religiously unmusical." Aesthetics is the route that provides him a way to talk about authority. Just as a work of art qua work of art provides the terms of its own discussion, so also authority is best considered as a kind of problem in aesthetics since the only proof of authority is its own assertion. The problem of authority—here the problem of the Greeks—may thus initially be thought of as how the fact of their existence, in and of itself, could provide an authority for us, and, by extension, how authority is possible at all. I take it that Nietzsche is sharing Kierkegaard's concern, now extended to the cultural sphere, when he opens the Birth with this phrase: We will have conquered much for the aesthetic understanding (Wissenschaft) when we do not come to the logical insight, but to the unmediated certainty of vision (Anschauung), that the ongoing development of art is bound to the duplexity (Duplizitat) of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. (CM 1967, 111,1:21) Due to translation problems (not always from German to English), the focus of this phrase has generally been misread. Nietzsche's concern is with "aesthetische Wissenschaff" Apollo and Dionysus are not an oppositional, almost dialectical "duality" (which would be a Zweiheit), but a "twoness"; furthermore, Nietzsche indicates that one can understand the "ongoing development of art" in two manners, the one "logical"—which is apparently not very much of a problem— and the other with what I might call "transparency," in which the certainty of the understanding comes in the acknowledgment of the authority which the understanding has for one's life and action. The distinction between these two modes of understanding is therefore not a simple opposition between "intuition" or "feeling" or between "instinct" and "reason." There is a "logical understanding" of the relations between Apollo and Dionysus. It will, however, be simply an argument and will not advance "die aesthetische Wissenschaft." But the task Nietzsche sets himself is to "advance our aesthetic science" (which is different from getting the Greeks right, though not unrelated to it) and to see that this is achieved by grasping the centrality of the experience, "the direct certainty of vision." It is important to remember, though, that Nietzsche is clear at this time in his life that philological arguments are possible for his position in relation to the Greeks. He selects this approach in his response to Wilamowitz when on July 16, 1872, for example, he writes to Rohde encouraging him with various scholarly citations supporting his theory of capripedic satyrs. But this approach is clearly not the method which he thinks to be the important achievement of the Birth. The point is that the "logical" approach will not now allow Greek tragedy the authority it has.

60

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

So: whatever authority Greek tragedy has is (a) bound up in an understanding which is transparent to its "substance," and (b) tied up with the double gods, Apollo and Dionysus. I wish to explore these criteria in sequence. How does it happen that an understanding might be "transparent?" It seems to be the case that the ability to erect spheres which are authoritative lies—at least for Nietzsche during this period of his life—in human beings themselves. In the essay "On Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral Sense," written about the time of the Birth, we read: All that distinguishes man from animal depends on the faculty of volatilizing (verfliichtigen) transparent (anschaulichen) metaphors into a framework (Schema). . .; in the realm of these frameworks something is possible which never was in the realm of the first transparent (anschaulichen) impressions: the building of a pyramidal structure on the basis of castes and degree, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, delimitations....(CM 1967,III,2:375) And later in this text, he refers to the "formation of metaphors" as the fundamental drive" of mankind (CM 1967,111,2:381). Human beings apparently have two stages in their understanding of the world: the first, the elaboration of metaphor; the second, the elaboration of metaphor into a Schema. The two capacities appear to follow one from the other; both of them are traced to the artistic capacity of human beings. In the notes written around the time of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche sees art as an activity which is purely human. "In nature," he writes, there are no sounds, she is dumb; no colors. . . . no f o r m s . . . in itself (nature has) no up and down, no in and out. . . . If we took ourselves as subject away from nature, nature would be something very indifferent, uninteresting, not a mysterious original source (geheimnissvoller Urgrund), not the unveiled riddle of the world. . . . The more we take humans out of the world, the more the world becomes empty and meaningless for us. ... Art does not seize the nature of things, . . . for in the final analysis there are no "things," nothing endures. (CM 1967, IV,2:554-5) This is an important passage and clear in its implications. Whatever art makes available to us and whatever is "justified" by art is not going to be "nature," or "reality, "or the ground of existence, or, indeed, any-thing. Nietzsche claims that all sense is metaphorical, and that "truth" is a temporal development of sense; in his well-known definition, truth is "a mobile mass of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations,. . . illusions of which one has forgotten that that is what they are." Truths are like coins which have lost their face and now serve only as metal. Much as Marx had earlier found fetishes, and Freud was later to find totems, Nietzsche discovers "idols." This is not for Nietzsche (nor was it for Marx or Freud) a claim that the metaphor links an unknowable realm with a realm of sense. What the metaphor bridges is not two worlds, but the making of sense and the sense that appears as made. What we have forgotten in the realm of "truth" is not what was there "originally," as it were before metaphors were made, but the fact that it is we who have made the

The Deconstruction of the Tradition: Nietzsche and the Greeks

61

truths and not they themselves. For Nietzsche, human beings are architects of meaning who elaborate hierarchical symbolic systems. In other words, human beings have no space in the world except that which they make themselves: the human world is built on itself, and on itself only. It is important to realize that making sense of the world, finding oneself in another, the very epistemology of authority itself rests on this aesthetic conception of the world. Nietzsche writes: Just as the Romans and the Etruscans divided up the heavens with rigid mathematical lines and in space thus defined—as it were in a temple—called out (bannten) a god, so does each people have above it a mathematically divided heaven of concepts and now, under the demands of truth, understands that each concept-god (Begriffsgott) can only be sought in its own sphere. (CM 1967, IV,2:375-6)

There are, in other words, no terms by which to judge a concept, except those terms which it provides. One might be tempted here to insist on a kind of Kantian objection: even if thought is metaphorical, it is metaphorical of something, and this something is what thought is about. In a recent article, Alexander Nehamas has cogently advanced this critique of one reading of Nietzsche (Nehamas 1983, 473-90).14 It is fair to say that Nietzsche is not always completely clear about these questions, especially in his early writings. To the degree that Nietzsche cannot get around this objection, his claim to novelty would fail and the entire Kantian enterprise would remain intact. The deduction of a "nature" which transcended the hereand-now human would remain possible. Even the concept of chaos would mean that chaos was the nature of the world: Nietzsche would have simply humanized God's role in the first chapter of Genesis or modernized the Theogony. The problem with this point of view ultimately comes in the fact that Nietzsche is not asserting that before there were concepts there was (and is?) chaos. Rather, he seems to me to claim that any concept which is not a concept of the world is itself a chaotic notion. There is no breaking out of the circularity of making sense of sense.15 We make sense, all the time, whether we will to or not, and especially when we will not to. The danger is to avoid taking the sense we make as immaculate. What Nietzsche is after is a conception of knowledge that is knowledge (not "subjectivity") but which does not posit a transcendental realm for itself even though it remains subject to whatever strictures it places on the world. When Nietzsche wrote the Birth, he had not completely resolved the question of the status of what came "before" the Greeks. At times, he seems partially to have assumed that if one could only recreate the experience of dissolution into chaos, the Germans would be capable (with his own and Wagner's artifice) of remetaphorizing German culture. The implication of this assumption was that the historical space—the presence of the past in the present—did not make it impossible to recover a period before the birth of the Greeks. However, as he came to understand, he had been insufficiently historical in his understanding of the modern predicament. Here is a notebook entry from 1886, written as he was trying to get his ideas clear for the Selbstkritik:

62

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism Faulty application to the present: I understood (deutete) pessimism as a consequence of higher power and fullness of life, in which the luxury of tragedy permitted indulgence. At the same time I understood German music as the expres- sion of a Dionysian superabundance and originality, i.e. 1) I overvalued the German species (Wesen) 2) I did not understand the source of the modern desolation (Verdusterung) 3) I lacked the cultural-historical understanding for the source (Ursprung) of contemporary music and its essential romanticism. (CM 1967, VIII,1:115)

Two points emerge: that the authority of the Greeks cannot be derived from its representation of, or origins in, "nature," even if one thinks of that "natural" world as chaos or a void. Secondly, whatever the Greeks did (or were) does not derive from some general human Urgrund which would be in principle recoverable at any given time. The mistake in some of the language of the Birth, as Nietzsche indicates, is that he seems to assume that it would be possible to recover for Germany the same experience that was available to the Greeks. Instead, the case is that Greeks have made it impossible for us to have a "Greek" experience. Why then be interested in the Greeks? The above seems to indicate that at best the Birth is antiquarian history. An exploration of this question takes us to the relation of Apollo and Dionysus. Nietzsche is quite clear that tragedy is the means by which a "metaphor" (Gleichnis) is awakened in the audience (CM 1967, VIII, 1:86). (Here it is worth noting that Walter Kaufmann translates "Gleichnis" as "parable." This is appropriate only in a religious context and seems to me to lose the reference to Nietzsche's other writings on metaphor from this period. In addition, despite a note to the contrary, 16 he gives "feeling" for "Schein" and "erweckt . . . den Scheiri" becomes "deceives into feeling" instead of "awakes the illusion." I apologize for such textual possessiveness, but the matter is vital because my understanding requires that nothing is "put over" on the spectator). The tragedy is thus important as a means, and not precisely in terms of its "content." The metaphor which tragedy awakens is "the myth," the account of the Dionysiac hero (Orestes, Prometheus, Oedipus): this metaphor serves as a "mediator" for the "strongest and in themselves most portentous qualities of a people. "Tragedy thus serves for the Greeks the role of pharmakon, just as the tragic hero was himself the pharmakos for the city of the play.17 It is important to note here that we have two contending possibilities of authority: the "metaphor," and the "truth." "Truth" is not precisely antagonistic to metaphor: it seems rather to have a temporal relationship to it, an inevitability which is generated by the passing of time. Truth develops from the human faculty of forgetting, and of forgetting the particular fact that sense is a human creation. 18 Most importantly, truth is the result of the refusal of human beings to remember that is it they who are responsible for their own lives. (It is on this matter that the most fruitful links between Nietzsche, Freud and Marx are to be found). Hence, "truth" reflects for Nietzsche most often the conditions of subordination and domination, the theodicy, of its genesis.19

The Deconstruction of the Tradition: Nietzsche and the Greeks

63

Nietzsche does not think that this is necessary—that is, logically necessary— only that it has been historically the case, the product of human activity: this is what he forgot about the German Wesen. He writes, in Dawn of Day, for example, that, we ... have finally reached the conclusion that there is nothing good, nothing beautiful, nothing sublime, nothing evil in itself, but only qualities of soul which lead us to instance things outside and inside ourselves with such words. We have taken back the predicates of things, or at least have remembered that we lent them at first:—let us watch that with this insight we do not lose the possibility of lending and that we do not become at the same time richer and more impoverished.20 (CM 1967, V,1:191-2)

The warning from Dawn is appropriate to the consideration of tragedy. What makes tragedy noteworthy as a particular stage of Greek history and culture— different, say, from what Nietzsche calls the "titanic-barbaric" period, as it is also from the period of the "Doric style" and the period of mystery cults which precede it—is the conjunction of Apollo and Dionysus. The relationship of Apollo and Dionysus is a fraternal union of equals; it is not a relationship in which Dionysus is a negation of the Apollonian assertion. The relationship is something which human beings make and which does not exist in nature. The achievement of this metaphor is made possible by the human action of tragedy. 2 ' In the twenty-first chapter of the Birth, for instance, Nietzsche indicates that both India and Rome achieved solutions quite different from those of Greece, not involving the generative union of Apollo and Dionysus. There was no model for what the Greeks did, and indeed Nietzsche speaks of tragedy as "miraculous." The unity achieved by Aeschylus has no necessary or natural existence: Nietzsche refers to it as a "victory." Just as in his later analysis of the will to power—the answer to the unasked question of "what is Apollonian?"— there is in the world of tragedy no natural drive prior to or anterior to sense, and there is no sense prior to the drive to make sense.22 II. The Modern Situation I have tried to establish that the particular authority that Greece has in Nietzsche's view comes from its metaphoricality and the particular relationship of the forces he calls "Apollonian" and "Dionysian." This has, in turn, raised the question of what a metaphor is "of" and the status of the force which "makes" metaphors. There follow four interrelated questions. 1) What was there when there was not Greece and what is the status of "notGreece"? 2) What was tragedy's function in the achievement of Greece? 3) What does the Birth allow one to do with the Greeks? 4) What is the purpose of the Birth in relation to its readers as they move in the contemporary world? 1) The question of what was there when there was not Greece is the question of the presence of transcendence in Nietzsche's thought. This has recently been the

64

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

subject of a number of important discussions of Nietzsche's work. J.P. Stern argues that Nietzsche must or should posit that there is "a primal ground o f . . . [the] unworded" about which one can be truthful only by remaining silent, and he develops an argument that Nietzsche should have adopted a position somewhat like that which Wittgenstein took at the end of the Tractatus (Stern 1979, 193). On a different, and more fruitful line, Alexander Nehamas argues in his discussion of perspectivism that to say the world has no meaning, but "countless" meanings, does not solve the problem. Nehamas says that "to claim that an object does not have a unique character but a multiplicity of characters is not an alternative to, but a specific way of having, a determinate character" (Nehamas 1983, 489). If Greece was an embodiment of something, even Hesiodic chaos, then, Nehamas argues, the world has a character. Against this approach—which posits the inevitability of a transcendental realm, even a negative one of chaos—the most extended argument is that advanced by Jacques Derrida in Eperons, which has been heroically presented in English by Barbara Harlow as Spurs. It appears to claim for Nietzsche that propositions and indeed words have no decidable reference, indeed that all references are good, one as good as the other, and that there is no procedure by which one can be taken as more correct than another. For Derrida, in fact, the importance of Nietzsche's texts is that they have no one meaning, nor do they even have the meanings which have been made of them (even though, of course, they do not have those meanings). Perhaps, the texts in fact have no meanings at all, perhaps more meanings than readers. The issue cannot be decided. He writes: There is no truth in itself, but only a surfeit of truth; even for me, about me (pour moi, de moi) truth is plural. . . . [If Nietzsche's text is] cryptic and parodic (and I tell you that it is, through and through, and I can say this because it won't get you anywhere, and I can lie in admitting it because one can only dissemble in speaking the truth, in saying that one speaks the truth), it can stay indefinitely open, cryptic and parodic, that is closed and open, at once and each in its turn. (Derrida 1978, 102, 136)23 If this means(?!) anything, it means that in reading Nietzsche we do wrong to search for what Nietzsche means, as if his words have something to tell us about the world. It also follows that we cannot write about what Nietzsche means—we cannot say it—because such claims would constitute a formalization of Nietzsche's text, the turning of what should be a metaphor into a "truth." It would be to deny to the text what it does. Derrida has, of course tried to apply the strictures of Nietzsche's text to his own text on Nietzsche's text. Thus there is no "text" before us. This argument is ultimately premised on the claim that the central function of language is meaning and not reference. It is not that language is not referential but, as Derrida cites from Montaigne, "we need to interpret interpretations more than interpret things." Derrida seems to call attention to the fact that the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible is already a "syntax and a system" (Derrida 1978, 278, 281).

The Deconstruction of the Tradition: Nietzsche and the Greeks

65

A consequence of this basic point of deconstruction is that we do not need to try to figure out if Nietzsche was "right" in what he said about the Greeks. This is not the way in which a text should be taken. Instead, like Hamlet's players, a "text" is a selection of catches; the reader can hold them in dissociation from the story which pretends to link them. Part of the justification which Derrida gives for this approach depends on the availability of documents which have meaning, but for which it is in principle impossible to recover a (single) meaning. Here, I submit, at least on the surface, Derrida runs into problems. He cites the following kinds of examples: first, in the notes from the time of Diefrohliche Wissenschaft Nietzsche writes: "'Ich habe meinen Regenschirm vergessen'—"I have forgotten my umbrella'." Derrida comments: However far one might push a conscientious interpretation, one cannot deny the hypothesis that the totality of Nietzsche's text is perhaps, in some monstrous way, of the type: 'I have forgotten my umbrella'. Which is to say that there is no longer a totality to Nietzsche's text, not even a fragmentary and aphoristic one.

Second, Derrida refers us to a snippet of a letter to Malwida von Meyensburg in which Nietzsche mentions a "little packet" that he has sent her. Derrida writes: "Will one even know what it was that was thus named for each of them?" (Derrida 1978, 122ff., 34).2* It should be remarked that Derrida is not claiming that we can make propositions refer to whatever we "want" them to. Such immaculately conceived sense would posit a transcendent speaker, whose will was not sub ject to the world. This is assuredly not what Nietzsche (or Derrida) means. It is probably true that the sense of a proposition is in fact anything one can make of it, but the problem is to make some sense of it. And sense made does not exist until and unless it is made. Here Alexander Nehamas' critique seems to me right on the mark: "It will not do to claim that an interpretation is 'only' an interpretation because a different claim could in principle be produced. This is a serious challenge only if a genuine alternative is in fact produced—and that is not usually an easy task" (Nehamas 1983, 488). Seen in one way, Derrida's examples are misguided: answers (referents) are available for each of these points. We know, for instance, from Theodor Adorno's account of his and Herbert Marcuse's visit to Sils Maria, that Nietzsche had a red umbrella which he needed for protection against the sun on his daily walks and indeed that village children used to delight in filling it with pebbles so that they rained down on his head when he opened it (Adorno 1977, 328). So we have something, even if it is not clear why Nietzsche puts the passage in quotation marks in his notebook. The little packet which he sends to Malwida on 7 November 1872 is identified at the end of the accompanying letter as containing a photograph (of the bridge over the Rhine in Basel), Rohde's book in response to Wilamowitz-Moellendorf s attack on the Birth, and Nietzsche's own five lectures on the future of educational institutions. Yet, this kind of response to Derrida's claims does little more than complicate his picture further. Let us grant that randomness in reference is not a tenable claim: it does not follow from this that there is one correct reference.

66

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

One of the sources for Derrida's claim about Nietzsche comes in the role which Nietzsche appears to attribute to music in the Birth: it appears to be a voice without words, a "language" without "parole." If music actually functions in this (Schopenhauerian) manner, then insofar as Nietzsche's writings (and his life!) duplicate music, they are without definite semantic referent.25 It would follow then from this reading that tragedy as articulated in the Birth becomes the mediator between music and speech: Nietzsche's interest is in tragedy as a medium, and most especially as the medium whereby the Greeks became "the Greeks" and abandoned their alternation of separate Dionysian and Apollonian states. Tragedy is not "about" nature, human or otherwise. Nature is not intelligible: it does not even translate. Music is the means whereby "all of nature's excess in pleasure, grief and knowledge becomes audible," but it is not a "solution." The spirit of music gives birth to tragedy only after—or rather, as a result of—the union of the two deities. He speaks of the "art-product" of the "Dionysian/Apollonian" genius . . . (CM 1967, 111,1:37-38). 2) What, then, as my second question, does tragedy do? I have elsewhere (Strong 1975, 163-85) described at length the dynamics of the audience situation for Nietzsche. To summarize: before such an audience, tragedy takes a metaphor—that is, a human establishment of sense—and places it before the audience in such a manner that it can be "deconstructed," so that it can be understood both as a human creation and as an inevitability. In this reading, the audience for the Antigone would both understand nomos as a human creation and accept nomos as given. There is a kind of gennaion pseudos, a "noble deception," implicit in Nietzsche, except that he is paradoxically much more egalitarian than Plato: tragedy requires that no one be in the position of selfcontrolled irony which characterized Socrates in the Republic. Another way of looking at this problem would be to pick up the parallel with Marx's notion of fetishism. Fetishism for Marx is something like Nietzsche's conception of truth—a human activity given a natural or transcendent value, in which the humanness is forgotten. Marx thinks that fetishism inheres in at least the capitalist mode of production; he implies that in societies not so bound by domination, no such syndrome would be present. One might assume that Nietzsche is attempting a general discussion of how it is that the apparent inevitability of the change from metaphor to "truth"—fetishism—could be prevented.26 Later, Nietzsche will complicate this question by the introduction of the notion of genealogy. The Birth, as I have indicated above, tends to suffer from the assumption that the audience situation is easily achievable. The later writings have as one of their burdens the recognition of the weight of the historical and of the impossibility of simply shrugging off the consequences of Socratism. In the Birth, however, the change requires only a breaking of the hold that one thinks nature might have. In Nietzsche's discussion of the tragic hero he refers to the insight expressed in the horrid triad of Oedipus's destiny: the same man who solves the riddle of nature—the Sphinx of two natures—must also as murderer of his father and

The Deconstruction of the Tradition: Nietzsche and the Greeks

67

husband of his mother break the most sacred natural orders. Indeed the myth seems to whisper to us, that wisdom and particularly Dionysian wisdom is an unnatural abomination, such that he who by means of his knowledge plunges nature into the abyss of annihilation, must also experience in himself the dissolution of nature.27 (CM 1967, 111,1:63) 3) Thus, in answer to my third question (what the Birth allows us to do with the Greeks), the intention of the Birth is what Nietzsche suggests explicitly in Chapter 24: "at the same time having to watch and longing to be beyond seeing (zugleich schauen zu miissen und zugleich iiber das Schauen hinaus zu sehen). . . (CM 1967, III, 1:146).28 The metaphor is retained as a metaphor, but as a metaphor which places the audience member under the compulsion to make sense of it. Hence to be a member of an audience—in the above deconstructed sense—is to achieve authority for oneself, that is, to recognize with others one's experience as authoritative. Authority is not guaranteed, as Nietzsche makes clear several times in the Birth. Socrates, by his effort to ground authority in a manner transcendental to human activity, destroys authority. (The same push to the transcendent is at the source of Nietzsche's comments critical of the Jews). Socrates, however, is the temporally inevitable culmination of tragedy in the same sense that metaphor must over time change into "truth"; tragedy develops into Socratism. We live now in the shadow of that development. 29 (The only way to avoid this development, Nietzsche indicates in Zarathustra, "On Redemption," would be to live not subject to time: in the world but not of it). Nietzsche hopes that the understanding of how the metaphor was preserved in tragedy might provide an example of what it would mean to find authority in some sense. Hence—to speak to the fourth question—the role of the book in the contemporary world, our world, is to provide a test by which the reader may determine whether or not she/he is able to receive authority, whether or not she/ he has avoided the fatality of time. Nietzsche writes: Whoever wishes to test himself completely accurately (recht genau) as to how closely related he is to the true aesthetic member of an audience or rather belongs to the community of Socratic-critical persons, has only to examine honestly the feeling with which he receives the wondrous spectacle present to him on stage: does he feel offended in his historical sense relying as it does on strict psychological causality, does he benevolently concede that it is intelligible to the childish, but alien to him, or does he feel something else. (CM 1967, 111,1:141) There is an intentional weakness, I think, in the "something else" which closes this citation. If authority is a relation of "I" to the "other", if authority rests on the possibility of acknowledging an other—finding my feet with him or her— then any universal statement of it must, should, remain vacuous ("something else"). To claim anything substantive here would be to privilege my relations with you, to take this moment out of time and history and give it rights over other moments and times.30

68

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

There is, then, at least at this point in his life, no rejection by Nietzsche of what one might call scholarship, or, wanting a better word, what I would call "hard work. "Nietzsche quietly justifies the mixture of modes with which he has shaped the Birth. He suggests that we are all so imbued with the spirit of a criticalhistorical culture that we will only be able to make available the former existence of myth—of a metaphor dramatically laid before us—through the medium of scholarship. He thinks in the Birth to have found a way around the nihilism whose onslaught he deplores by using history against itself, as it were. If we have become critical-historical beings, then Nietzsche will show us that precisely this quality will permit us to move to a deeper level of aesthetic science. It was thus essential to Nietzsche's project in relation to the culture of his time that the Birth be well received. This is one of the reasons why Nietzsche was so disappointed with the reception of the book by his teachers Friedrich Ritschl and Hermann Usener. He hoped, in fact, for a role for traditional scholarship in his project. Thus, from Nietzsche's understanding at least, it would be wrong to say that his scholarship was mistaken or irrelevant, and wrong to treat the book, as sometimes it has been treated, as inspiration and prophetic exhortation. The consequence of the failure of the Birth was not simply wounded pride and a tarnished academic reputation. It meant that the whole approach to his project had to be changed. Nietzsche is perhaps at fault in thinking that scholarship can serve to help us gain access to the world of our life, but he is neither the first nor the last to have thought it. The problem may be in our form of life, and only then in our scholarship. Endnotes 1. Habermas' thesis has been subjected to a devastating critique by David Wellbury in a soon to be published paper "Nietzsche-Art-Postmodernism: A Reply to Jtlrgen Habermas." 2. See my critique of the "return thesis" in Strong 1975, 135-41. 3. The texts of controversy are gathered in Karlfried Grunder ed., Der Streit um Nietzsches Geburt der Tragodie: Die Schriften von E. Rohde, R. Wagner, U. von Wilamowittz-Moellendorf (Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 1969). Most of the relevant citations since then are gathered either in M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and/ or in William Musgrave Calder III, "The Wilamowitz-Nietzsche Struggle: New Documents and a Reappraisal," Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983), 214-54. 4. See William Ridgeway, The Dramas and Dramatic Dances of the Non-European Races with Special Reference to the Origins of Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915) and Arthur Wallace-Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb. Tragedy and Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). 5. See Jacques Derrida, Eperons, in the Barbara Harlow translation as Spurs. Nietzsche's Styles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) and Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy," Disseminations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) as well as Bernard Pautrat, Versions du soleil: Figures et systemes de Nietzsche (Paris: Seuil, 1971), and Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la metaphore (Paris: Payot, 1972) and Nietzsche et la scenephilosophique (Paris: Galilee, 1986), especially chapter 1. 6. See for instance Thomas Gould, "The Innocence of Oedipus: The Philosophers on Oedipus the King," Arion (Autumn/ Winter 1965). 7. See Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, the preface in K. Schlechta (1966), 3:351. He calls for "the recovery and recreation of those lives so as to allow the polyphony of Greek culture to at last resound again." See my discussion in (1975), 137-38. 8. See also Snell's discussion of Nietzsche on pages 119 ff. A similar view is in Werner Dannhauser's article on Nietzsche in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds., History of Political Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972), 788: "If Greece is the peak of recorded history, Greek tragedy is the peak of that peak."

The Deconstruction of the Tradition: Nietzsche and the Greeks

69

9. The most gifted exponent of this approach in our time is J.G.A. Pocock in the The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976) and his recent work on Gibbon. 10. See Strong 1975, chapters 4 and 5 for a preliminary discussion. 11. Nietzsche, Werke, X (Leipzig: Naumann Verlag, 1898), 410. 12. I have explored this matter more thoroughly in relation to Nietzsche and Emerson in my "Nietzsche's Political Aesthetics,"forthcoming in Michael Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong, eds., Towards New Seas: Nietzsche on Politics, Philosophy and Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 13. Compare to Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Soy? (New York: Scribners, 1969), 70-2. 14. See also my "comment" following (pages 491-494). See the discussion of Nietzsche and Kant in Allan Megill, "Nietzsche as Aestheticist," Philosophy and Literature 5, 2 (Fall 1981), especially 213-217. 15. See the discussion by Stanley Rosen, The Limits of Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 205. See also Robert Pippin, "Nietzsche and the Image of Modernism. "My thanks to Pippin for discussing these is 16. ith me. 16. On page 34 of his edition of The Birth of Tragedy. 17. See here Jacques Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy," and J.P. Vernant, d'Oedipe "Ambiguite et renversement. Sur la structure enigmatique d'Oedipe Roi," in Mythe et tragedie en grece ancienne (Paris: Maspero, 1972), 99-132. 18. See Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la metaphore. 19. This is the source of Foucault's inspiration from Nietzsche. See the discussion by Thomas Keenan, "The Paradox of Knowledge and Power: Reading Foucault on Bias," in Political Theory (February, 1987). 20. See Strong 1975, 72-4. 21. This is Nietzsche's quarrel with Aristotle. See my "Nietzsche's Political Aesthetics," in (1988) and the discussion in Silk and Stern Nietzsche on Tragedy. 22. See here Laruelle 1977, 45ff. and Strong 1975, Chapter 8. 23. I add one more text to the world with my translation. 24. For the original "umbrella" see CM 1967, 111:485. 25. See the comments by Derrida's student, Bernard Pautrat, in a brilliant book, Versions du soleil. Figures et systeme de Nietzsche (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 46. 26. See James Miller, "Some Implications of Nietzsche's Thought for Marxism," Telos 37 (Fall 1978), especially page 35 as well as various comments scattered in Pautrat's Versions du soleil. Figures et systemes de Nietzsche, and Nancy Love, Nietzsche and Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 27. See CM 1967, 111:109. Nietzsche applied the same terms to himself and in his autobiography equates himself—his work—with a tragic hero text. See my "Oedipus as Hero: Family and Family Metaphors in Nietzsche," boundary 2: a journal of postmodern literature (Spring/ Fall 1981), 311-355, especially 330-1. 28. See my discussion of "overlooking" (1975), 163-5. 29. See my discussion (1975), 221-34, and in "Nietzsche's Political Aesthetics." See the interesting comments in Carl E. Pletsch, "History and Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy of Time," History and Theory (Fall, 1981), especially 39. 30. See my The Idea of Political Theory (forthcoming).

This page intentionally left blank

The Nietzschean Interpretation . . . of Freud as Thought on the Fragmentary, as Fragmented Thought Lise Monette

Speech on the fragmentary ignores its conceitedness, it does not suffice, it is not to be said for its own sake. . . . Speech which is other, separated from discourse, not denying and in this sense not affirming and yet letting the limitlessness of the difference play between the fragments, in the interruption and the cutting. Blanchot Systematic elaboration of a subject is impossible for me, the fragmentary nature of my experiences and the sporadic character of my inspiration do not permit me to do so. Freud Unlike Freud (see his confession in On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement], I have allowed myself the great pleasure that comes from reading Nietzsche. It is as a text of jouissance, thought-provoking for the reader that I am, that these reflections have sprung to life; no doubt also because of the "voluptuous concision" of Nietzsche's style, as he puts it himself. Nietzsche is in a way the underwriter, the guarantor of a resistance, a struggle against the double philosophical ideal of clarity (Descartes) and system (Hegel). Yet, the existence of a deep-seated reservation over his remarks on women and certain passages on the will to power—seen not as an interpretive force of an intrasubjective rapport deforces, but as an inter-subjective power relationship—forces me, fascination aside, to keep a certain distance. It provokes uncanniness through a combination of familiarity and estrangement, as Freud describes it. What follows is a further reflection on the theme "Deconstruction, Construction and Reconstruction,"1 a re-reading of Freud's text "Constructions in Analysis" (Freud, 1953, 23:255ff.) in which interpretation itself analyzes a fragment and differentiates itself from the construction of a hypothetical speculative whole, that is, from any supposition that aims to create a dynamic structure among a multiplicity of disparate elements within the subject's history in order to extract a meaning, a coherence, a unity, a kind of crutch or Ersatz for a missing memory in the analytic process. Freud uses the term Erraten (Sarah Kofman [1983] presents it as a lapsus calami), for which he immediately substitutes Konstruiren. From the divining to the constructing emerges the conjectural aspect of this selection, which is necessary because of the fragmentary nature of the material, Bruchstucke. From interpretation as a relay of meaning and construction as an organization of meaning is born the metapsychological "witch" who enchants and entices by systematicity, and by what is denied, that is, an address: the

71

72

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

undisclosed transferential dimension. I am referring here to the subjective elements from which any theory stems and to its imaginary interlocutor chosen as conscious or unconscious reference. Both are eradicated by the style and unwritten laws that preside over this form of thinking, yet they remain as dynamic and economic aspects, the drive, energy, and rapport deforces which are precisely at the heart of Nietzschean elaboration: meaning always brought on by force, often subverted by force. Under what sign does Nietzsche dwell on this question of the relation of force and meaning? This is one of the threads running through what follows. As for the relation between force and meaning in Freud, Ricoeur has addressed this question. He has unearthed an energetics without hermeneutics in the 1895 Project., and discovered the coexistence of both in the Interpretation of Dreams. Then Ricoeur finally underlined the appearance of the topical point of view in the meta-psychological works, which crowns the two preceding views. He writes: "Psychoanalysis never presents naked forces, but always forces in quest of meaning" (Ricoeur 1965). Paul-Laurent Assoun (1980) has already made thematic comparisons between Nietzsche's and Freud's views on such matters as instincts and impulses, the unconscious and the conscious, eros and the libido, etc. For our part, we will at this point be concerned with interpretation, paying particular attention to the rhetorical function of aphorism in Nietzsche, to Nietzschean and Freudian interpretation, and to the performative aspect (Austin's sense) of their conception of interpretation. This essay will try to go beyond the simple thematic conjunction between Freud and Nietzsche, and move into the fruitful precariousness of the in-between. I. The force of interpretation

"Interpretation capable of transforming the world" (CM 1976, XI:277 [35, 84]), chapter heading in the Posthumous Fragments of the Gay Science but also a proposed sub-title to the Will to Power. "Essay on a new interpretation of any event, or what comes about?" (CM 1976, XL359 [39, 14] and 390 [40, 50]). Interpretation is presented programmatically as endowed with a power to bring about change. Its efficiency and its efficacy are for Nietzsche inseparably connected to its instinctual roots in the subject. Numerous passages in Nietzsche concerning thought and consciousness describe them as epiphenomena of the instincts. In Daybreak the whole of conscious life is seen as an interpretation of the instinctive by means of the memory of the experienced (CM 1976, IV:495 [6, 81]). On the subject of the recollection of affect, he specifically states that we must invert our conceptions of it: "What has been lived survives in the memory, whether it returns, I can do nothing about it; the will does not intervene, any more than in the coming of any thought" (CM 1976, XI:380 [40, 29]). What has been experienced leaves traces, mnemonic traces which, like the return of the repressed, insist. The repetition compulsion is analogous in some ways to this passive memory which eludes conscious control; passive memory which submits to the force of what is inscribed, but also passive intellect "which, precisely where it knows nothing,

The Nietzschean Interpretation . . .

73

pretends to know all" (CM 1976, V:356 [11, 128]). Intellect works in an unconscious manner, Nietzsche writes. What can this mean? As for active memory, it would be that of the eternal return, pure becoming which eludes the inertia of thanatos as a vain attempt at the reproduction of the identical. Michel de M'Uzan (1977) distinguishes the identical from the same that includes the minimal difference of temporality. Transference in this sense is a repetition of the same and not of the identical. Similarly, the subject of the eternal return is not the Identical, but the Different, change. Deleuze developed this same theme in Difference et Repetition but stresses, in addition, that "Disguises and their variants, masks or travesties, are not simple adjuncts, but on the contrary form the internal genetic elements of repetition itself, its integral parts and constituents" (Deleuze 1968, 27). Nietzsche underlines in another passage of Daybreak how consciousness believes it constitutes the whole of intellect; and further imagines that it knows the causes of all things agreeable and disagreeable (CM 1976, IV:566 [6, 361]). He treats as naive those people who believe that they know why we will. The motives elude us, doubtless because they are forever inaccessible to us, but also because "what puts us in movement" is not for him a matter of meaning but dependent on the economics of meaning, on an energetic kathexis or investment in content. We find this point of view in Freud as early as the Project for a Scientific Psychology under the guise of the quantity of energy circulating in neurons. We find it later under the form of the quantum of affect accompanying representation in his description of repression: the unfolding of the economic aspect side by side with the dynamic aspect (rapport de forces) as withdrawal or dis-investment of energy (secondary repression) and antikathexis or counter-investment (primary repression). This same point of view is still clearly present in his last text, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," in his reflections on the impasses and limits of the analytic process based on the stasis of the libido seen once again in purely energetic terms. The interpretation by the intellect of pleasure and displeasure turns out to be completely arbitrary, since the same excitation can alternatively be interpreted as one or the other (CM 1976, V:152 [27]). Our actions are themselves interpreted "according to the canon of our postulates on human motives" (CM 1976, V:566 [6,361]) based on an "analytic grid," ^.grille d'analyse, as the French say, which can be valid or invalid. But interpretation itself has no power: it cannot and never will be able to initiate an action, he writes: "It does not dispose of any lever for triggering movements in itself" (CM 1976, V:566 [6, 361]). The picture of internal psychic dynamics sketched out by Nietzsche is that of an interpreting machine, the intellect, which believes itself to be at once the master and the motor on board a ship that in fact is pushed and tossed by the tumultuous waters of instincts. "The main part of our being remains unknown to us. Nevertheless... we speak of ourselves as a familiar object. In our heads, we have a phantom 'me' that determines us in a great many ways" (CM 1976,111:376 [32, 8]). The powerlessness and illusoriness of our speculations on ourselves strike a heavy blow to the virtues of introspection and send us back to the texts of Freud and Lacan in which the Ego is described as a psychic agency containing

74

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

nothing but borrowed forces, those of the Id. Nietzsche and Lacan speak of the speak of the Ego in terms of a "regulatory fiction": the Ego is not the subject, it is the territory of masks, of persona (the identifications with images). Lacan writes: "The Ego is that which stands the most clearly in the way of the truth of being." It is an agency of illusion also to the precise extent to which the ideology of the coherence of reason is transformed into criteria of scientificity: the logic of the illogical, an after-effect of meaning set into a network of which the principal actors remain forever active and non-manifest. A conception of a delirious thinking machine arises, cut off from its roots or rather denying them, since any internal indicator of reality in the intellect is seriously lacking. The same topic reappears in two passages from Beyond Good and Evil and the Posthumous Fragments of 1884 concerning the relation between will and thought, intention and act. Nietzsche writes that the origin of a thought escapes us and that it is a symptom of a more general state of the subject, just like feeling, he adds. He shows not the slightest hesitation in tracing the status of thought back to that of affect, not with the intention of reducing one to the other but in order to trace both of them back to the physiological level that controls them. Thought emerges, often composite and in the shadow of all those that press around it. That all thought is at first sight ambiguous and hesitant and only gives rise in itself to an interpretation which is first multiple, then arbitrary and limited (CM 1976, X:197 [26, 92])

The Nietzschean will to power shows itself, contrary to intellect, as a power to be affected.2 Nietzsche himself introduces affectivity, pathos (Will to Power, sees. 635, 688). Interpreting becomes a matter of weighing the forces present. This throws a different light on the "violence of interpretation" in analysis, a subject addressed by Piera Aulagnier in a recent book with that title (1975), a violence which is necessary and unavoidable in psychic working-out and workingthrough. Nietzsche underlines the arbitrariness of the valid interpretation, of the one that remains, that insists, that sticks out of the pack, so to speak. This may be compared with free association to the extent that the choice between a multiplicity of thoughts seems arbitrary. Nietzsche and Freud question the internal necessity, the determinism, of thoughts. They are arbitrary each with respect to the other. Their necessity is of another order: for Nietzsche, the physiological; for Freud, the affective. The intentions which control our actions are also considered by Nietzsche as symptoms. [We] immoralists have the suspicion that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in what is unintentional in it, while everything about it that can be seen, known, "conscious," still belongs to its surface and skin—which, like every skin, betrays something but conceals even more. (CM 1976, VII:52 [32]

II. Incisive interpretation: aphorism Intentions and thought call for interpretation because of what they dissimulate but also through the multiplicity of their meanings. The ambiguity

The Nietzschean Interpretation . . .

75

of meaning, which is both synchronic and diachronic, leads, Nietzsche tells us, to a limit (CM 1976, XI:329 [38, 1]). Any aphorism is constructed over a cut that juts out. Lacan, in specifying that the aim of interpretation in analysis is to punctuate the discourse of the Other (a caesura which is necessary for the subject to erupt into its own authenticity), gives it an analogous strategic function in the unveiling of truth. Thought in itself would be ambiguous and vague. The task of the will is to reduce it to the point where its signification becomes unequivocal (CM 1976, XI:329 [38, 1]). Interpretation produces the unique meaning by a "forcing," by force. On a first reading, then, we could consider the aphorism as the result of a compromise between the unifying and reductive action of interpretation and the multiplicity of meanings that it tries to control and synthesize. But a look back at its dynamic aspect in relation to the traditional philosophical text points up the fact that philosophical logorrhea indicates an incapacity to choose among the thoughts that rush together in the mind. They could remain on the condition that they be ordered and subsumed under imaginary rhetorical forms such as the presentation and analysis of anticipated objections or the refutation of the Other, a group of other thoughts, of other thinkers that occupies consciousness. Aphorism, however, abandons all these thoughts. It is incision, it is incisive in that it cuts meaning, and, paradoxically, by imposing a limit it condenses a multiplicity of meanings which are left to the reader-interpreter. "An aphorism formally conceived appears as a fragment, it is the form of pluralist thought" (Deleuze 1977, 35). Once again, in the 1884-85 Posthumous Fragments, Nietzsche recalls that the history of language teaches us how each concept is in a state of "becoming," how it is the product of an evolutionary process and how finally its degree of universality is an index of its antiquity and its falsity. Aphorism cuts meaning, and at the same time gives it new impetus. In this way, it constitutes a surpassing of dead meaning, of dead knowledge. Through its concision, it reunites the demonstration and the conclusion by catapulting each into the other. Synthesis but not system. Strangely, in the analytic process, too, Freud has proposed two ordering strategies: interpretation of a fragment for reactivating speech and construction as a "complex of structured ideas." At the beginning, I underlined the extent to which, for Freud, this substitute for remembering was only that, a substitute. In comparison with metaphysics and meta-psychology as theoretical systems, its status of "supposition" or Vermutung can only be surpassed by its effects, its force, by the production of new associations. Concerning valid interpretation, Lacan evokes jokes based on word-play, the structure and dynamics of which are analogous to those of aphorism: production of meaning, often beginning with the elimination of the conscious text of one or several other meanings that in turn determine the latter. Its force is once again to be located in the Other; in the case of psychoanalysis: desire. Freud's oscillations on the construction/reconstruction of the primitive scene in the Wolf Man are common knowledge. In his 1937 essay, construction is not

76

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

compared with the so-called objective history of the subject, given that it is the lack of remembering itself that brings this construction about. On this subject Nietzsche has written that objectivity is in itself a false concept: "That things have a constitution in themselves, leaving aside all interpretation and subjectivity, is a perfectly pointless hypothesis" (CM 1976, XIII:30 [9, 40]). Interpretation becomes the immediate datum. Not only does it not have a basis in things in themselves, but the world itself is made up of nothing but an infinity of interpretations (CM 1976, V:2898 [381]). From an epistemological standpoint, whereas Freud oscillates between an Aristotelian realism and a Kantian position on the inaccessibility of the thing in itself, Nietzsche goes even further in radicalizing the status of interpretation as pure speculation without any objective support from the external world; nothing remains but the reality of the instincts, of the physiological which shows up in the conscious mind through fantasies, as he puts it (CM 1976,1:228 [5,25]). Philosophy becomes a theory of the interpretation of fantasies staged by the forces which give it life. For Nietzsche, we are always already in interpretation. Psychoanalysis only appears, then, as one of its modes of existence. Aphorism causes a reversal of the relation between text and its reading. In traditional philosophy, the text puts a multiplicity of meanings on stage under the control of a thought master, the task-master of meaning. Reading has no choice but to restrict its exegesis to the dominant meaning. Philology becomes the principal means for avoiding a delirious hermeneutics. But in the case of aphorism, the reader-interpreter is no longer restricted by one unique perspective. Condensation suggests overdetermination, i.e., a multiplicity of meanings: "An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been 'deciphered' because it has been simply read, far from it: rather, interpretation has only begun and to interpretation there is an art" (CM 1976, VII:222). The Interpretation of Dreams presents a technique of analysis by fragments of the products of the unconscious rhetorical processes (displacement and condensation), which Lacan has compared to metonymy and metaphor. The abbreviated and composite twist of dreams, and of aphorism as well, condenses a multiplicity of forces, affects, and significations that call for interpretation. But how is meaning chosen? Nietzsche the reader shows us a way which eludes or transgresses the logic of meaning by reintroducing the subjective dimension, heart and passion. Just as the Italians have taken over a kind of music by incorporating it into their passions—since such music calls for this kind of personal interpretation and benefits from it more than all the other harmonic arts—so I read the thinkers and I sing their melodies after them. I know that behind all the cold words stirs a soul of desire and I hear it, singing, since my own soul sings when it is moved. (CM 1976, IV:597 [7, 18])

How must this passage be grasped? Are certain styles more favorable than others to personal interpretation? For sure. But Nietzsche then generalizes in order to indicate to us an interpretative way of reading the melodic line of an author rather than his cold concepts. Style, metaphor, are they not the occurrences, the

The Nietzschean Interpretation . . .

77

lieux, or rather the non-occurrences, the non-lieux, of the manifest text, the forbidden through which desire can show itself? The reference to singing, to incantation, evokes the rhythm and inscription of affect in the text. Thus Spoke Zarathurstra represents an attempt to subordinate meaning to the r h y t h m . . . of desire. And the analyst pricks up his ears, those to which Deleuze refers in the following words of Dionysus to Ariadne: "You have little ears, you have my ears, put in them a discriminating word" (Deleuze 1977, 216). III. The becoming-true of interpretation Nietzsche declines the right to speak of absolute truth. Not only is this truth veiled but its becoming is infinite. He presents truth "as aprocessus in infinitum, as active determination and not as a becoming conscious of something that would be in itself firm and determined" (CM 1976, XIII:54 [9, 91]). Freud elaborated on the dangers of interminable analysis as a non-ending process of interpreting. No decisive or final interpretation will ever grasp the whole truth or put an end to the becoming of truth. Nietzsche relativizes truth to the point of defining it: "the position occupied by different errors with respect to one another" (CM 1976, XI:332 MS 38 (sec. 4):332). In the Gay Science Nietzsche cautions against trying to be one's own interpreter: "I comment on myself and I lie to myself, an impotent exegete of my own self" (CM 1976, V:35 [23]). Lacan rightly points out how, as soon as we step outside of Hegelian absolute knowledge, it becomes apparent that the truth shows up by and through errors and lies. He notes that the truth comes out in analysis through mistakes, in particular, those involving lapsus, parapraxis. He writes: The main characteristic of the psychoanalytic field is the supposition in effect that the subject's discourse normally develops—this from Freud—in the sphere of error, of meconnaissance, even of denegation. It is not exactly lying, it is between error and lie. During analysis, something happens through which the truth erupts, and it is not contradiction. (Lacan 1975,291)

In other words, false interpretation and lying, in the extra-moral sense, are an integral part of the subject's relation to itself. How can we escape from the impasse of the intertwining of truth and falsehood? "The ear of the Other" becomes a transferential basis of valid interpretation, on the condition that it not be wild, i.e., that it avoid that precipitation to judgment typical of thought in its masculine form. As Granoff would say: interpretation cannot do without the time of force and force of time. Lacan once again throws light on this matter by distinguishing the time involved in understanding from the time needed to conclude. The timing of the interpretation is just as important as the content. "Never want to see, in order to see! As a psychologist, it is necessary to live and wait—until the result, sifted by several life experiences, has of itself drawn its conclusion. According to Nietzsche one must never know/row where one knows something, otherwise one gets a "bad perspective, speciousness" (CM 1976, XIII:42 [9, 64]): a

78

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

description that could just as well appear in technical psychoanalytic writings concerning the analyst's floating attention! Nietzsche rebels against the identifying activity of logic and against the triple authority of conscience, reason and science. He describes scientificity as a subtle defense against "becoming-true" to the extent that it organizes, classifies, simplifies and freezes: . . . the fear of uncertainty and of the ambiguity of anxiety with regard to the capacity for self-transformation has praised to the sky what is simple, what remains identical to itself, what is predictable and what is certain. (CM 1976, XIII:365 [9, 64])

He denounces the will to truth as a will to die, as incapacity to create, whereas interpretation's force resides in its ability to create fictions: Nietzschean nihilism appears as the "negation of a veracious world"(CM 1976, XIII:386 [9,64], 39 [9, 60], 40 [9, 60], 38 [9, 60]). Interpretation itself is a form of the will to power, Nietzsche stresses, that could be read as an excess of decision or an excessive decision by virtue of the forces that propel it, since "every drive is a kind of lust to rule." The intensity, the forcefulness of the will to power are more important than any semantic content, and truth therefore has nothing to do with identity. IV. The inadequate interpretation of Nietzsche and Freud . . . At once theirs and mine! This question opens onto the technical problem of "terminable and interminable analysis" and in Nietzsche's case onto the use of aphorism as a means of blocking eventual interpretative delirium. One notes in this text an absence of references to passages where Nietzsche discusses moral interpretation or rather moral misinterpretation as false interpretation whose source is moral prejudice (CM 1976,IV:590, [6,444]). The source and motivation of the problem of interpretation in Nietzsche is doubtless to be found in his critique of traditional morals, but its economy goes well beyond this polemic. In this sense, Nietzsche and Freud try to remain outside the sphere of morals; the contribution of psychoanalysis beyond good and evil, and the Nietzschean reading of Freud beyond the classical hermeneutics, are symptomatic of this double decentering of the subject. In the early 1870s, Nietzsche sends the following reflection to Deussen: "A philosophy that we do not accept as a result of our desire to know will never really belong to us since it has never been ours. The correct philosophy for each individual is anamnesis" (CM 1976,1:486). As early as the Three Essays on Sexuality, this desire to know was picked out by Freud as being at the heart of the psyche; he calls it the epistemophilic drive. With regard to Nietzsche's anamnesis, a distinction must be made from the psychoanalytic view, which only reveals itself in and through deferred action, I'apres-coup. Should it not be understood in the sense of a genealogy that is not a linear genesis but a projection into a becoming, into the Lacanian "future anterior"? The screen-memory bears witness to this virtual, composite past. Platonic reminiscence is, for Nietzsche, of no assistance in grasping in what way a thinker's philosophy is anamnesis.

The Nietzschean Interpretation . . .

79

As an apres-coup, we might suggest that Nietzsche and Freud were invited to a blind date. As every one knows, some blind dates are fruitful, others are not. But does the blindness of one party to the other not have a determining influence, whether the meeting be arranged or not? Lou-Andreas Salome has revealed Freud's resistance to reading Nietzsche because of his avowed fear of being confronted by his double. Paul-Laurent Assoun (1980) has thoroughly documented Freud's manifest and non-manifest references to Nietzsche. We do not have an adequate interpretation that relates Nietzsche to Freud. There are, however, remains that elude the interpretative enterprise, that still fall outside its grasp, and which thus assure its renewal and its becoming: remains, as fragments of the repressed past, Erinnerungsbrocken, memory shreds, in Freud's formulation. But Nietzsche seeks to reassemble what in man is fragmentary even if what remains is an enigmatic and frightening destiny. We have elaborated a diagonal reading, a conjunction of the psychoanalytic and the philosophic, an in-between, something not to be clogged up but rather dug out, the remains to be sifted, creating possibilities for new effects of reading and fragmented interpretation. Endnotes 1. Lecture delivered at Carleton University, winter 1986. 2. See Deleuze 1962, 70.

This page intentionally left blank

Minoritarian Deconstruction of the Rhetoric of Nihilism Constantin V. Boundas Nietzsche's influence upon deconstruction has been well-documented.1 Yet, what has been left relatively unexamined, is the fact that his impact has often been responsible for the internal differentiation of the deconstructive paradigm into discordant theories and practices. We know of course that between the dominant, Derrida-inspired deconstruction and the "minoritarian deconstruction,"2 led by G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, F. Laruelle, T. Negri and N. Bolz, there exist antagonistic and mutually displacing tendencies. But not much attention has been paid to the fact that these tendencies, at least in part, are motivated by different inscriptions of the "Nietzsche-effect" upon deconstructive palimpsests. Based on a long meditation on Nietzsche's linguistic theory and practice, dominant deconstruction releases the signifier, weaves and unravels textual webs, and tracks down the trace of a difference without closure. On the other hand, minoritarian deconstruction, based upon the chiastic reading of the Nietzschean will to power and the eternal return, proclaims the critical necessity of an ontology without metaphysics. As it attempts to inscribe Otherness in the space of the ethical, it refuses to surrender the emancipatory interest of difference to the fashionable "anti-foundationalist" merry-go-rounds of arch-writing. Far less equivocally than the dominant paradigm, minoritarian deconstruction strives to articulate a critical theory capable of outlasting the breakdown of the old certainties of "good" and "common" sense. Such a critical theory could then resolutely face the post-modern mutation of the concept of history, 3 without falling back onto the well-entrenched, liberal habitualities of our Western ethnicity. 4 Perhaps it is a calculated gamble to postulate that Otherness, liberated from the constraints of Identity, would not lead to the extermination or assimilation of the other. 5 Perhaps also, to entrust unassimilated Otherness to the operation of the "Nietzsche-machine" may even be an irresponsible gambol. Can a minoritarian reading, with its avowed ontological interest, succeed in restoring a critical-theoretical interest in Nietzsche, in the face of so many antifoundationalist, totalitarian, voluntaristic, activist, or cynical expropriations of his writings? Can there be a minoritarian, critical-theoretical deconstruction of nihilism which would not be a contradiction in subjected I begin with the minoritarian characterization of nihilism and its rhetoric as a cultural and political assimilation of difference marked by distinct linguistic practices. I then go on to claim that the Nietzschean text supports this characterization, provided that the nihilist becoming-reactive of all forces and the strategy for the advent of a supramoral man be underwritten by the in tandem ontological enracinement and deracinement of the chiastic reading of 81

82

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

the will to power and the eternal return. The forces which constitute the flux of becoming have the Being of intensity, and the selective test of the eternal return, which overturns the nihilist becoming-reactive and restores sovereignty to unassimilated difference, is grounded on intensive time and "memory of the future." I conclude finally with some reflections on the incomplete project of a critical theory which still wants to be Nietzschean and minoritarian deconstructive. II

From the minoritarian deconstructive perspective, nihilism is the assimilation of difference, that is, the appropriation of the other, instead of the becomingother.7 When identified, recognized and represented in the name of common and good sense, difference causes the becoming-reactive of all forces and seals the destiny of metaphysics. For the deconstruction of the latter, therefore, to be the overcoming of nihilism and the displacement of the Platonic specularity of the Same, it must actively affirm "difference as resistance to Being within which it is included" (Laruelle 1977, 103). Nihilism as assimilated difference is an overdetermined system of domination characterized by the becoming-paranoiac of the will to power and by the ensuing blockage of the transformative lines of becoming-other. This specification of nihilism as an overdetermined system of domination solicits a rethinking of the ontic and ontological processes of difference in the nexus of power relations. However, this dislocation/relocation of thought should not be allowed to relapse into earlier naive positions shown to be indefensible by the expended deconstructive labour. To argue, as minoritarians do, that language and textuality are not the only (or even the best) indices of the sovereignty of Otherness (or of the pathology of difference) is not meant to authorize a new complacency about rhetoric. We must not lose sight of Nietzsche's discovery that rhetoric is neither the art of persuasion alone nor the art of illusion and deception (in which case it would be expendable for the sake of the unadorned enunciation of truth).8 If the empire of language and the realm of rhetoric are co-extensive, it is because the fault on which they both sit is neither linguistic nor rhetorical. Nothing, in all of this, prevents us from talking about the rhetoric of nihilism, provided that we do not confuse the latter with the language of the rival. Nihilism or its rhetoric is a mode of becoming and, therefore, a far too serious concern for it to be sacrificed to the parochial bickering with the Sophists. There may always be signs on the road pointing at the rumblings of the rhetoric of nihilism; for the latter, being the language of the assimilation and domination of Otherness, has in fact a frequency of certain tropes. Being assimilative, it tends to operate by means of analogy, resemblance, identity, metaphor, negation, hypotaxis, sublation in the concept and equivalential logic. On the other hand, it could be argued that parataxis, antiphrasis, chiasmus, catachresis, differential rhythms and speeds abound in the language which resists assimilation.9 Yet, in the last analysis, the issue between the rhetoric of nihilism and the active or

Minoritarian Deconstruction of the Rhetoric of Nihilism

83

affirmative resistance to it cannot be decided soley on the basis of the distribution or frequency of rhetorical figures; it also requires the eyesight of the genealogist, as well as the critical analysis of the forces which take hold of these figures, and the quality of the will which is expressed in them. At this point, one may object that the determination of nihilism as assimilated Otherness is nowhere attested in the writings of Nietzsche, and that what can be found in them instead is the genealogical disclosure of the mechanism of the devaluation of all values or of the becoming-reactive of all forces, a disclosure which, in turn, is rooted in Nietzsche's reading of culture as training and selection. And, indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that the interpretation and evaluation of culture is one of Nietzsche's main concerns. Consequently, minoritarian deconstruction starts with the Nietzschean critique of culture, but it also attempts to show why it is that at a certain stage values are devalued and why a different arrangement of forces should then be hailed as an overcoming and a transvaluation. The fact that Nietzsche interprets and evaluates culture, along with its values and the advent of the posthistorical, from the vantage point of the eternal return of the will to power 10 provides the minoritarian argument with its clue. Ill

The minoritarian argument for the determination of nihilism as assimilation of Otherness depends on the success of two moves: the reading of the will to power as intensity, and the reading of the eternal return as the return to Otherness. If these moves are successful, the will to power/intensity which animates beings would surge forth as the differentiated and differentiating ontological "ground" of becoming, and the eternal return would manifest itself as the principle of selection which raises becoming to the power of Being. It is on the plausibility of these two moves, then, that I would like to focus my attention. As Eugen Fink noted, Nietzsche's will to power is the essence of beings, provided that "essence" is not understood as essentia, but rather taken in the active, verbal sense of "essencing" which testifies to the mobility of beings (Fink 1965, 105). But to "energize" this Wesen brings us no closer to the Nietzschean will to power, at least not before we begin to rethink the Being of beings in relation to the will to power, that is, the relation between the will to power and the eternal return. That the will to power and the eternal return are linked together to the point of being Nietzsche's one and only "fundamental" thought has been established conclusively in the writings of Heidegger (Heidegger 1971, 358-66)." But to rethink the will to power and its chiastic relation to the eternal return in a way that takes us beyond Heidegger requires that we begin with the fact that Nietzsche has made no room in his writings for beings, entities or things as the common and good sense conceives them. His active resistance to beings is not due to his repudiation of the principle of individuation. 12 Rather it is due to the fact that Nietzsche's principle of individuation is derived from, and depends upon, a prior genetic and synthetic principle, perfectly capable of determining

84

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

the "this" and the "now" inside mobile fields of dynamic relations. What the common and good sense recognizes or represents as a thing or an entity is, for Nietzsche, a field of active and reactive forces whose quantity and quality are perfectly well determined in their interrelation. "Interrelation" here refers to the will to power which is "both the genetic element of force and the principle of synthesis of forces" (Deleuze 1983, 51). The will to power would in fact be a bad metaphysical abstraction if it were to be separated from the forces which incarnate it. However, far from being separable from them, the will to power is expressed in forces which have entered into relations among themselves. Will to power and force are inseparable, yet not identical. The will to power is the supplement of force, the genetic and synthetic principle of its production and reproduction. Nietzsche, in fact, through the will to power thwarts all efforts to determine the nature of beings according to a model of a world with spatio-temporally extended beings conceived as panes extra partes. But in order to accomplish this, and also to maintain the will to power as genetic and synthetic principle, he must think that "active"-"reactive", "affirmative"-"negative" are not merely different qualifications of interrelated forces and of the will to power, but are instead their veritable differentials. For only the differential may be indeterminate by itself and yet perfectly determined in its relation to another differential. As differentials of the will to power, "active"-"reactive", "affirmative"-"negative" are qualities of becoming itself—the sensibilia of becoming (Deleuze 1983, 63). The will to power which "essences" beings is itself inwardly cleaved and therefore transmits its own cleavage to the fields of forces in becoming. We could say that the will to power "essences" beings as it annexes becoming. Now, if this reading is correct and if the sensibilia of becoming are differentials, Nietzsche must have thought of forces and the will to power in accordance with the model of intensive magnitudes. Extended things or extended surfaces and forces are not subject to the alteration of their nature as they become divided or subdivided; only intensive forces or magnitudes have their Wesen altered through division and subdivision. Intensive magnitudes, therefore, are incommensurable and unequal and as a result are differential and indivisible, in the precise sense that any division causes their nature to change.13 This reading of Nietzsche permits minoritarian deconstruction to designate the will to power as the intensity which "essences" beings, and to claim that this inwardly differentiated intensity is the Otherness that nihilism, in its reactive fixation in extension and extended beings, strives to assimilate. And with intensity placed in the spotlight, Nietzsche's thought turns out to be rooted in Being beyond any dispute.14 Now, those who monitor the minoritarian appropriation of Nietzsche often tend to overlook the critical sovereignty of intensity in its ontic-ontological determination of becoming, and to cast out their interpretive nets for the prize catch named "desire": the will to power as desire.15 But this interpretive shortcut tends, in its turn, to conceal the fact that Nietzsche displaces man (and his desire)

Minoritarian Deconstruction of the Rhetoric of Nihilism

85

from the center for the sake of the eternal return of difference. In the last analysis, of course, the minoritarian appropriation/expropriation of Nietzsche wants the liberation of unassimilated Otherness in terms of intensity, desire and libido. Once the ontic and ontological primacy of intensity is properly recognized, there is no harm in introducing desire as the specification of the will to exist. This subordination of desire to intensity makes clear that desire is a force (or rather a field offerees) and that, as such, it is differentiated, originally as active and reactive, affirmative and negative. Moreover, the primacy of intensity and the corresponding displacement of intentionality expose the misinterpretation which often plagues the expression "will to power" and the ensuing theory of desire (as well as the objections of anthropocentrism which surround them). The will to power, as Nietzsche understands it, is not an intentional pursuit of power by forces which are deprived of it, but rather the expression of the kind of power that the force itself is. "Will to power," in the sense that power itself wills, is the meaning of the will to power.16 An intentional reading would make power the object of a representation, a wanting to acquire that which a force lacks, and therefore something totally incompatible with Nietzsche's theory offerees. If power were to be the object of representation and recognition, his theory would be obliged to revolve around the power struggle of already existing and entrenched values, since only these values can become objects of representation and recognition. But it would be a falsification of Nietzsche's views on the subject to expect values to come to light as a result of the struggle for recognition and the powergrabbing which such a represenationalist reading of the will to power would necessitate. Nietzsche, who resolutely denounces the will as the philosophers' own construct, could not possibly have experienced the temptation to identify Being and Will. If the will to power is intensity, and intensity is the determining instance of beings, this intensity is, for Nietzsche, the ontic and ontological determining instance of itself and of the world of extended things. It may be the case that intensity tends to cancel itself out in the extended entities that it constitutes, but it never surrenders its ontic and ontological primacy over extension; and it is this primacy which guarantees the ontic-ontological Sovereignty of Difference or Otherness. IV

The will to power proclaims that becoming involves essentially differential forces and that, as long as things become, these forces enter intricate patterns of conflict and form fragile hierarchies. The deployment of nihilism, on the other hand, reveals, in the devaluation of all values and their becoming-reactive, reversal of a certain hierarchy wherein the sovereignty of active and affirmative forces used to prevail for nihilism is "the indecency of looking at things from underneath—the point of view of the weak."17 No longer are we allowed to doubt, after the specification of the will to power as intensity, that this "underneath" is marked by the egalitarianism, equivalence and substitutability

86

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

of the world of extension where intensities are annulled. But it is still legitimate to ask why the active affirmation of intensive Otherness is assigned sovereignty over its own assimilation by the long shadows of extended things. In what sense precisely does the world of extension negate its cleaved "origin" and trap Otherness by cancelling differences and distances? To this question, only the selective thought of the eternal return can provide an answer, because it supplements the ontology of the will to power, which is both ground and abyss. If the will to power is the genetic and synthetic principle offerees and of fields of forces, the eternal return is the elective principle of differences. As such, through the sovereignty of the future over the present and the past, it guarantees that the Being of Becoming is the repetition of active and affirmative intensities.18 Thus, the negative and reactive assimilation of Otherness is not repeated, only the affirmative release of Otherness repeats itself. Speaking on behalf of the minoritarian appropriation/expropriation of Nietzsche, Deleuze says: "Being is the affirmation as the object of an affirmation. As first affirmation, it is becoming, but as an object of a second affirmation it is Being. Becoming is raised to the power of Being" (Deleuze 1983, 186-9). To be, then, is to affirm and to be affirmed, and Being is affirmation of an affirmation. But in what sense does the eternal return entail all of this? Eugen Fink provides a clue for answering the question. Repetition, says Fink, is not born within time; rather it is time. The idea of an eternal repetition displaces the boundaries between pastness and futurity (Fink 1965, 124). To follow this clue is perhaps to be in a position to catch a glimpse of the content of this thought of time which turns out to be both an enracinement and a deracinemenf. it reveals the chiasmus between Difference and Repetition which has replaced the chiasmus between Being and Time. But if this is the case, this thought would hardly make sense if Difference were intensive and Repetition extensive. The fact is that the eternal return stands for time in its intensive nature and that repetition proclaims time's intensive efficacy. Time is intensive because it is a continuous emergence of novelty, and novelty which presupposes qualitative difference renders the segments of time heterogeneous. Intensive time presents multiplicity and unity in a supplementary relation to each other, and just like any other intensive magnitude, time cannot be subjected to division or subdivision without undergoing a change in its nature. It follows that the eternal return cannot possibly be taken in the sense of the eternal return of the same, but that it is meant to be the return of difference.19 The transvaluation of values, the overcoming of the reactive forces and the advent of the new sensibility of the overman are not intelligible at all, if Nietzsche's message of the eternal return is that the same returns eternally. These forces, then, which affirm themselves and their identity while in the process of assimilating Otherness do not come back. Only the annexation of the future is repeated, being, at the same time, a release of the future for the sake of the becoming-other of present and past. The reactive, nihilist forces which dominate Otherness either perish or transvaluate themselves into active and affirmative forces. Hence, the deconstruction of nihilism and of its rhetoric is the

Minoritarian Deconstruction of the Rhetoric of Nihilism

87

product of the thought of the eternal return, only because it is the product of the labour of time itself both as eternal return and as principle of selection. Transvaluation would thus be "openness to unassimilated Otherness" or, even more to the point, becoming-other. Openness to unassimilated Otherness may still be characterized by the placid acquiescence of the beautiful soul to pluralism and to the "yea-saying" to all competing or entrenched values. Becoming-other, though, is not the shouldering of weights (the way of the ass), but is rather the affirmation of intensities and the active destruction of the identical center which made us think that intensities must first be ours in order to be affirmed by us. To affirm is to liberate Otherness for the sake of all possible worlds, but to affirm the affirmation in the selective ontology of the eternal return is to attend to the compossibility of some worlds and to the active destruction of those which are not compossible. Displacing the Platonic anamnesis which was mobilized in order to dispel the illusion of the multiple and to strengthen the identity of the soul, the Nietzschean eternal return dispels the illusion of the One and severs the relation between the will to power and its self-identical preservation. But since it was the positing of difference as self-identity which held the forces captive to a reactive state, the becoming-active offerees will depend upon the re-affirmation of difference as difference. V

My reading of the deconstruction of nihilism has been based on the argument that the eternal return is the elective synthesis whose principle is the will to power. The objection, therefore, could be made that I have not disposed of foundationalism, and that the minoritarian reading of Nietzsche is deconstructive in name only. And, of course, beyond this parochial dispute about the legitimacy of titles and the proper distribution of the territory, an even more serious objection waits in the wings. How is it possible to combine a deconstruction of nihilism rooted in Being with Nietzsche's own refusal to make any concessions to the philosophical constructs "Being" and "truth"? That the will to power is the ontic and ontological principle around which Nietzsche's thought revolves seems to me to be irrefutable. This revolution, though, is at the same time a dispersal, because the principle itself, in each and every revolution of becoming, is differentiated and specified together with that which it differentiates and specifies. Every rooting is also an uprooting, and every revolution a catastrophe; differentiation prevents the will to power from ever presenting itself as a self-sufficient "nature," or from being prior to the becoming which it animates. The foundation is an abyss, but an abyss is neither Being nor Nothingness. In it, unassimilated Otherness rumbles, bringing to the surface new worlds and dissolving old continents. Between the contraction of creation and the contraction of catastrophe, the moment of dilation of Otherness in extension gives rise to the nihilist transcendental illusion which identifies assimilated Otherness with Being. Against this background, Nietzsche's perspectivism and his manifold of interpretations do not seem to me to present a challenge to my reading; for

88

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Nietzsche has also thought that it is the will to power which interprets and is interpreted. In Andre Glucksmann's insightful words, [t]he affirmation of the perspectivist finitude is not the observation of a fact; being itself an interpretation, it can only be the self-interpretation of the interpretation. The possibility of such a self-interpretation requires that the perspective be capable of being reflected within itself. Moreover, its validity presupposes that the conditions for every interpretation would be unveiled within this reflection: these conditions are the perspectivist form of all perspectives. (Glucksmann 1965, 131)

My claim is that the perspectivist form of all perspectives is the selective principle of the eternal return. Perhaps, though, the objection that my reading of Nietzsche lapses into foundationalism demands a more direct reply. Such a reply is already contained in the writings of F. Laruelle (1977). Laruelle argued for a reading of Nietzsche that would disentangle three strategies in his texts which had previously been woven together by the chiasmus of the will to power and the eternal return. These three strategies of the Nietzschean text cannot exist apart from one another. Were they forced to exist apart, they would exist as veritable traps for the interpreter. First synthesis: priority of the Other and subordination of Being. This synthesis functions against the falsifications of Otherness; Second synthesis: affirmation of Being-for-the-Other and a return of Being but, this time, for the Other; Third synthesis:... a superior synthesis of Being and Other or rather of the relations they enter. Being of the Other and at the same time Being as Other: repetition as difference . . . Being-without-being (one) as difference—and no longer in the mere dependence of difference—the training of affectivity. (Laruelle 1977, 179-80)

If Laruelle's reading is correct, the first synthesis would permit the "programmatic" use of the will to power and of the eternal return. The violent Nietzschean intervention against the values of the decaying culture belongs here. The second synthesis, however, is where the "problem-setting" use of the will to power and the eternal return waits to ensnare and to ambush the reader. Writes Laruelle: [This is] the use of permanent strategy and parody by means of which the Idea of the eternal return/will to power, because of its transcendental generality or ubiquity, permits the confounding of the local adversary, his ensnarement, and, by destroying his reactive functions of encoding . . . the affirmation of him as an "element" of the libinal "chance." (Laruelle 1977, 134-5)

Finally, the third synthesis, and the permanent training of affectivity (intensity, desire) which it entails, would proclaim the possibility of unassimilated Otherness to transcend itself as conspiracy, snare, theory or thesis and to return instead as "radical production, resistance or subversion" (Laruelle 1977, 135).

Minoritarian Deconstruction of the Rhetoric of Nihilism

89

VI I confessed in the beginning of this essay that my minoritarian deconstructive interest in Nietzsche is motivated by the promises of a critical theory which would be capable of placing the emancipation of Otherness on its agenda. I would now like to bring the essay to a close by making two points. I intend them merely as an invitation to further discussion, and I begin with the expression of generalized suspicion. How plausible is it to expect that a critical theory—instead of being a marginal strategy of local disturbances—would find sufficiently strong bulwarks to articulate and enact its emancipatory interest, if it were to lean on an ontology of intensity and desire? The release of Otherness may be a necessary (and perhaps a sufficient) condition for the overcoming of nihilism, but is it a sufficient condition for solving the conundrums that "Being-with-other" generates daily? One could argue, in a sense, that these questions prove only that we have not been listening. It is as if we were to ask whether the will to power/intensity, without the selective principle of the eternal return, could by itself bring about the transcendence of nihilism. The answer, as we have seen, is that surely it cannot. Without the intensive time, the will to power cannot select compossible forces and establish a discordant harmony between them. Difference and repetition work together for the reversal of Platonism. But although this deflection of the objection constitutes a valuable reminder, it is not effective against all that the objection may encompass. The full brunt of the objection could be felt in the following way: let us grant the sovereignty of intensity and co-ordinate extension and intensity together so that the former is the dilation of the latter. In this case, the topoi "high" and "low," which enter our determination of nihilism, seem to have taken a tolerably stable meaning. Nihilism and its overcoming would both be modes of becoming, because the forces which propel becoming are themselves cleaved in terms of "high" and "low." It is tempting then to conclude that although the triumph of nihilism, as well as its overcoming, are inextricably tied to the "destiny" of man, this "destiny" is itself decided by the folding and unfolding of becoming. This conclusion, however, would go beyond all evidence presented so far. Definitely, something more is needed. One must account for the fact that the "high" and the "low," which are mere topological properties of becoming as long as they are considered in abstraction from the chronicles of man, turn suddenly into standpoints and sources of evaluation when they are occupied by men. Between flatland and high mountain there is of course a difference. But even when we grant that the flatland is the result of the erosion of high mountains, it would be very fanciful indeed to think of the mountain as being active and affirmative and the lowland as reactive and negative. Only flatlanders and highlanders could enter into such relations. My point is that the minoritarian deconstruction of nihilism is strong in topology and typology and unduly reserved when it comes to genealogy, despite its boastful appropriation of this critical tool. More fine-tuned mediations are necessary if the ontological difference is not to establish itself as an unbridgable chasm.

90

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

And this brings me to my second and last critical point. The metaphysical project of the West has lived long enough with the embarrassment of "passing muster" in the tests of identification, re-presentation and recognition, while always failing the test offered by the principle of difference. Unassimilated Otherness is our new test, and minoritarian deconstruction has done well to place it on our agenda. But when everything is said and done, the sovereignty of repetition (time as repetition) is still only post-dictive: the acid test of the compossibility of a world of intensities is in repetition, and I think that there is something unsatisfactory in this. It is not so much that the compossible worlds would be seen only in a glass darkly and only for the instant before the folding and the unfolding of becoming destroys them for the sake of new and changed worlds. What is arguably more disconcerting is this: a critical theory tends to emerge from this "innocence of becoming" incorporating the "s is never yet p" which disciplines us to want time. But this theory is then combined with the "s is p" of a praxis constantly tempted by an activism which is often blind without the benefit of mediations between the Idea and the concept. 20 1 do not take this to be a fatal omission; its disclosure would not bring down the edifice of the minoritarian deconstruction of nihilism. Nonetheless, it points at a weakness which may very well be related to the remnants of an older and harsher dismissal of the question of the subject. It may never be enough to discuss the subject in relation to the changing forces to which it relates. The reasons for the peregrination of the subject must also be investigated, because the theoretical mediations and the praxiological imperatives that we are looking for may well be located in them. Endnotes 1. See, for example, J. Derrida, Spurs, Nietzsche's Styles (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979); S. Kofman, Nietzsche et la Scene Philosophique (Paris: U.G.E., 1979), Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe, Le sujet de la philosophic. Typographies I (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1979); G. Deleuze (1983), and F. Laruelle (1977). 2. The expression "minoritarian deconstruction" has been introduced by Frangois Laruelle. See, for example, his Au-dela duprincipe depouvoir (Paris: Payot, 1978) or his Le principe de minorite (Paris: Aubier, 1981). This expression captures the essence of Deleuze's and Guattari's discussions of the intricate relations between majorities and minorities. See G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature (trans. D. Polan) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 3. On the "post-modern" mutation of the concept of history and the sterility of discussions which overlook it, see G. Raulet, "La fin de la 'raison dans 1'histoire'," Dialogue 22 (1983), 631-46. 4. Habermas and Rorty are typical cases of this liberal expropriation of Nietzsche. Habermas' views on Nietzsche can be found in Knowledge and Human Interests (trans. J. Shapiro) (London: Heinemann, 1971), chapter 12; see also his "Modernity versus Postmodernity/'/Yew German Critique*) (1981), 3-14, and "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-reading Dialectic of Enlightenment," New German Critique 9 (1982), 13-30. Rorty's views can be glimpsed in his review of Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy in Times Literary Supplemental June 1983,613-20), and in his unpublished lecture "Ironists and Metaphysicians." 5. T. Todorov has pointedly reminded us of this gamble in La Conquete de I'Amerique. La question de I'autre (Paris: Seuil, 1982).

Minoritarian Deconstruction of the Rhetoric of Nihilism

91

6. For a certain reading of Derrida, minoritarian deconstruction stands for a regression to the metaphysical. See, for example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value," Diacritics 15 (1985), 73-93, in which the minoritarian notion of the "body without organs" is subjected to the critical suspicion of "a last-ditch metaphysical longing." It is interesting to compare this reservation with Chakravorty Spivak's demand for a limit to deconstruction in front of "the body of the woman as mother." See her "Displacement and the Discourse of Woman," Displacement, Derrida and After, M. Krupnick ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983) 169-95 (especially 184). The difference between the two bodies eludes me. Compare also the qualified reservations to minoritarian deconstruction expressed by Derrida and S. Kofman, J.L. Nancy and Ph. LacoueLabarthe in F. Laruelle, Le declin de I'ecriture (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1977), 245-77. 7. Although motives and reasons differ substantially, nihilism (and its violence) are discussed in terms of assimilation of Otherness not only by Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, but also by M. Foucault, E. Levinas, J. Baudrillard and R. Girard. 8. For Nietzsche's views on rhetoric, see his "Rhetorique et langage," translated and annotated by Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.L. Nancy, Poetique 5 (1971). See also Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe, Le sujet de la philosophie. Typographies I, 31-74, and Paul deMan, Allegories of Reading. Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 79-131. 9. See G. Deleuze (1968), especially chapter 3. 10. In this sense, the minoritarian reading of Nietzsche prolongs the penetrating analyses of Heidegger. See M. Heidegger (1971:201-366). 11. For the critical development of Heidegger's misunderstanding of Nietzsche, see F. Laruelle (1977), passim, Eugen Fink (1965), 229-41. For a gentler critique of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche see G. Vattimo, Les aventures de la difference (trans. P. Gaberllone et al) (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 77-98. See also G. Vattimo, "Nietzsche et la philosophie comme exercice ontologique," Nietzsche, Cahiers de Royaumont (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 203-18. 12. I think, therefore, that Fink is mistaken as he concludes that Dionysian becoming precludes individuation. Decentering the subject leaves intact our ability to specify haecceities. See E. Fink (1965), 210 and G. Deleuze (1968), 314-35. 13. For a detailed discussion of intensive magnitudes and differentials see G. Deleuze (1968), 286-335 and 221-36. 14. I disagree, therefore, with Stephen Houlgate's thesis according to which "Nietzsche's critique . . . fails to challange the basic dichotomy between being and becoming . . . " in his Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 91. Intensity is the Being of becoming, and it is curious that Houlgate remains unconvinced by his own argument which allows him to argue that "Nietzsche's homogeneous plurality thus always remains fundamentally diversified and in conflict with itself, and is not only opposed to the metaphysical idea of a selfidentical, timeless substance underlying existence, but also to the Hegelian idea that the explicit unity of consciousness can emerge within the diversity of temporal existence . . . " (67). 15. Vincent Pecora in his "Deleuze's Nietzsche and Post-Structuralist Thought," Substance 14 (1986), 34-50, correctly points out that Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy makes no mention of desire at all. The usual interpretive shortcut to desire overlooks that Deleuze's theory of difference as intensity was published in 1968 (Difference et repetition), six years after the first edition of Nietzsche et la philosophie, and four years before the publication of Anti-Oedipus. There is continuity and transformation between the work of 1962 and that of 1972, and without the work of 1968, the readers of Anti-Oedipus often miss the pivotal role of intensity and its painstaking earlier elaboration by Deleuze.

92

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

16. This point is developed in Deleuze (1977), 31. See also Nietzsche's Will to Power (KH 1968), sees. 619,668. Section 668 states clearly that "'willing' is not 'desiring', striving, demanding: it is distinguished from these by the affect of commanding. . . .That state of tension by virtue of which a force seeks to discharge itself—is not an example of 'willing'." 17. This is S. Kofman's reference to Nietzsche's metaphor of truth as woman. Kofman goes on to draw the reader's attention to a similar point of view which, in Freud's texts, is linked to the origins of fetish. See her Camera obscura et I'ideologie (Paris: Galilee, 1973), 59 ff. 18. On the eternal return as selective and synthetic principle, see P. Klossowski's Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969) and "Circulus Vitiosus," Nietzsche Aujourd'hui? 1 (Intensites), 91-103; and G. Deleuze (1968) 36589 and (1977) 68-72. 19. Nietzsche, in the context of his discussion of the eternal return, talks about "the ability (of the world) for eternal novelty." The power of infinite transformation and eternal novelty are not compatible with a cyclical return of the same. 20. My own assessment, therefore, of minoritarian deconstruction is different from John Fekete's global characterization of the "structural allegory." In his "Descent into the New Maelstrom: Introduction," Fekete expressed his dissatisfaction with the variants of the eschatological "s is not p" which have surfaced as "s is already p", in structural causality, and "p is not p" in "difference, trace, structure." He invites us, therefore, to a more authentic exploration of "s is never yet p", overlooking the fact that the minoritarian distinction between differentiation and differentiation (virtualactual) has already extended this invitation. See The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xviii.

Passing-A-Way-Of-The-Child Francois Peraldi Translated by Bela Egyed It is a bit late already and, I imagine, you have done a lot of work for the last two days, and will, no doubt, continue to do so. You have listened, in English and in French, to discourses of a high degree of intellectual, moral, and philosophical import. I would not wish to add, be it even a grain of coriander, to the mass of knowledge with which you now find yourselves loaded, like Nietzschean camels— no harm intended1—who are ready to brave the crossing of the desert in hopes of carrying on their backs the richest products of one culture to another. I am absolutely not a philosopher. I am an exile. My time is divided between listening and travelling. An analyst can hardly repeat what his patients come to tell him. The unrepeatability of what might have been essential in their speech under analysis is not only the first condition of analysis but is, I would add, a singularity unique to thinking, to the kind of thinking which so intimidates the hunters of universal methods and laws stalking the little game preserves of the field of knowledge. But, one can speak of one's travels so I will tell you a travel story. A travel story which is not in any event without relevance to those of other travellers like Nietzsche, Freud, and why not—even though he travelled very little— Heidegger. One of those chance events of life, a new friendship, has, as it happened, brought me close to the family of one of these rare men whose work fascinates me completely, to the point of being able to tear me away from the daily rounds of my ratiocination: the family of that rare man, Martin Heidegger. At Freiburg im Breisgau a great yellow house surrounded by a garden is inhabited by the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of the last great thinker. Young children run in all directions among debonair parents. There are toys everywhere, even on the stairs, cries and laughter greet one everywhere. An intense life surrounds and protects, like a vibrant light, a room closed off, locked by key: the sombre and austere study of Martin Heidegger. In a corner between two windows overlooking the trees of the garden and the mountain behind them is a large oak desk. A painting, hanging on one of the walls, depicts a landscape of snow-covered Black Forest. There is a divan covered in dark velvet, a round table surrounded by a few chairs and two shelves lined with hardly a couple of hundred volumes. "This is my father's library," Hermann Heidegger told me with a sort of a smile. I approached and recognized titles, names scattered through Heidegger's works: Aristotle, Trakl, his dear Hb'lderlin cracked by many readings, a few philosophers, among them Nietzsche, naturally . . . "And this is all?" I asked. "This is all," he said, "and the few volumes you have seen at the small hut." "There aren't many," I murmured a little foolishly, suddenly uneasy at the thought of the thousands of books uselessly covering my walls. 93

94

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

"My father had no need for many books" . . . Hermann remarked, faintly amused and, after a long silence during which I observed my embarrassment grow, he added, still with a kind of mocking politeness, finger raised . . . "he was thinking]" The uneasiness that overcame me all of a sudden was so intense that I had to leave the room and return to the garden among the trees and flowers, next to the children who were playing and laughing. I had the impression of having approached too closely a secret that did not belong to me, an intimacy which did not concern me but which had a formidable force—to this day present in the abandoned, austere desk of oak panelling—in front of which I felt myself becoming a child again. A child among the children playing in the garden, a child one smiles on as he plays with his toys, be it a small spool attached to a string, or just toys, or his books which clutter up every room in the house; a child that has just committed a blunder by disturbing, inadvertently, the sacred and silent solitude of the man who thinks, a child who has just been reprimanded, in a manner so much more terrible for being gentle, ending with the words: "Go out my child, you are disturbing the thinking; it is there, one must not interrupt it or distract it from its course." When thinking had taken hold of Heidegger, no one, not his children, not even his wife, was permitted to trouble him, to penetrate the reserved space of the austere oak study in the Freiburg home, or of the small nook with a miniscule table the size of a notebook in the little Todtnauberg hut where, for more than half a century, Heidegger let thinking silently take hold of him so that he could later tell us in a "singing voice" what it said. A visit with the Heideggers, a few minutes in the austere oak study, a day at the small hut "on the steep side of a vast mountain valley in the south of the Black Forest at 1150 meters of altitude," taken up completely with sensing the change from hour to hour brought on by the impact of what was his universe of work. . . one of these seemingly minuscule events linked to the development of a new friendship, will have sufficed to destroy, in a short instance, what years of analysis had already shaken: the formidable monument of my narcissism, of my intellectual narcissism, I should add, of my mirror alienation (alienation au miroir). Without a doubt, as in Jean Cocteau's film Orpheus, the broken mirror reconstitutes itself very fast, and narcissism too soon revives itself from its ruins. And of course, once I had returned to my library—housed in Montreal—I did not rid myself, in a great movement of hysterical identification, of all my books. I am still too attached to them even if I do not read them, but just look at them as Heidegger looked at the landscape through the window of his work-nook in the small hut where he could have seen, "scattered at the bottom of the valley and on the opposite side . . . farms with large overhanging roofs. Higher on the slope, fields and pasture reaching all the way up to the sombre pine forest, ancient and majestic." While working, I feel the warmth of my books, as of a second skin, the murmur of their silent voices, the purring of knowledge that they distill like the clamour of an extremely distant crowd, like the scarcely audible humming of

Passing-A-Way-Of-The-Child

95

strings in a romantic symphony. They are the noises of depth, the basic noises (bruit de fond)—my artificial memory, my "system M*" (to use Freud's term)— from which emerges sometimes, bursting and singing, the rare voice of a thinker that tears us away violently from the purring of knowledge and delivers us over to thinking. An astute analyst would not have failed to recognize in the little scene at Heidegger's house in Freiburg the replica of what we in our jargon call a primal scene. Freud thought of this scene (while listening to the Wolf Man) in terms of a confrontation of a young child with the bed manners of his parents and, in particular, with that which he would have construed as a castration. A castration that he would have foreclosed, that is to say, would not have symbolized, and which for just this reason would have had the strange property of surging back into the Real under such forms as the hallucination of the severed finger or the tree that bled. Analysts after Freud have made a knowledge of this thought. (A knowledge that can become explosive only on condition that it leads to a new place). A knowledge which on exploding can yield place once again to the thoughts of this scene only if the analyst lets himself be confronted with it once again in his own analysis or in the analysis of those whom he holds with his listening (soutient de son ecoute). In this case it will appear to him that this thought does not necessarily let itself be reduced, that it is in fact radically reducible to the knowledge he previously had of it, even though it can occasionally be expressed in terms of this knowledge. There, where knowledge recurs, purrs, the act of thinking skips, expels, opens a passage. My own experience of the primal scene has led me back to a passage in Freud's Project, a passage sufficiently porous so that I could combine Freud's signifiers with my own and constitute a sort of floating field of signifiers, allowing me to think the primal scene without yielding to the power of reappropriation, territorialization of the reactive forms of so-called psychoanalytic knowledge. (The "floating field" is a concept introduced by Michele Montrelay, and it seems to me to be particularly rich). The passage in question is from a text that Freud wrote in one stroke, literally possessed by the act of thinking while travelling by train from Berlin to Vienna after an intimate meeting with his great friend Fliess: Project for a Scientific Psychology. In this passage Freud examines what happens when the infant (who does not yet speak) confronts for the first time something he is not acquainted with, or more exactly, confronts a completely unknown aspect of someone whom he knows very well, of someone who resembles him, the Nebenmensch to use Freud's term, his "fellow-creature" as we translate it. At that moment, "the perceptual complex of the Nebenmensch will be in part entirely new and incomparable . . . but certain visual perceptions coincide in the subject with his own memory of similar impressions of his own body." And then, Freud says something that got me thinking: "If the Nebenmensch cries, his cries will awaken the memory that the subject has of his own cries as well as the suffering that provoked them. The one will stay placed there, in front, like a constant structure, a thing (Ding) gathered up on itself, whereas the other will be comprehended because of the activity of memory."

96

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

But why would the Nebenmensch cry? Above all, if, as it appears in the rest of the chapter, the Nebenmensch is the maternal figure? Could one think of a situation at once normal and extraordinary where the mother would cry in such a way that she would be, that she would become by so doing, completely strange to the child, that is to say, since we are there at the very beginning of what one labels "The Mirror Stage," a moment in which the child would be totally, albeit temporarily, expelled, excluded from the mother's thought. As I reflected upon this I could not avoid the thought that the moment in question is the one in which the mother has reached a climax of pleasure, is enjoying a sexual climax. Pleasure takes hold of her, and she cries as it takes hold of her. At the climax of her pleasure she thinks neither of the child at her side nor of the object that takes her to her pleasure, she annihilates herself, for the space of an instant, in the "black continent of herjouissance," the little death.2 At this moment of turning away, the child is expelled by ihisjouissance that he senses, which rises up before him like an incomprehensible unsymbolizable thing, which tears him from the pleasant continuum of the maternal symbiosis. It is at this point of radical cleavage, inaugurating the structure of the subject, that I locate the birth of thinking, brought about by confrontation with the thing, and also the birth of knowledge and of the Ego, these false, corporeal and imaginary comprehensions of the secondary effects of the eruption of the thing: the cries and the suffering of which they call up the memory. A memory which drapes the thing immediately in the mnesic veil of misconception. What I am getting at here is that knowledge of suffering substitutes itself for the emptiness, for the incomprehensible, for the unrepresentability of this thing possessed by jouissance that expels, nay kills, the originary symbiotic unity. First death. The imaginary death of the child is also a rite of passage, a first metamorphosis from the undifferentiated One to the Two of dual relation, of the specular relation. This is a passage to the proliferating construction of the Imaginary separated from the Real, from which the child has just emerged, been expelled from, to which he has just become dead by the stroke (la barre) of a cry that he believes, having felt it in his body, to be a cry of suffering. The thinker—in whatever field thinking has taken hold of him—is he who by his crying and his songs provokes a leap out of knowledge, out of the Ego and engages the one who can hear him "along the path of the thinking that seeks its verb. "The words of the thinker act like the ecstatic plea of the thing. Heidegger himself noted this strange and constant mixture of suffering and the impulse to burst out with joy in Nietzsche's Zarathustra. A woman who attended Heidegger's seminar could say after the first time: "listening to this modulated and somewhat hollow voice I felt as if a veil had ripped, something of which I had never thought before appeared to me with an extraordinary clarity. I saw opening up before me a new perspective towards which I was irresistibly pushed, drawn. But, when I found myself outside, everything closed up again and I noticed that I had completely forgotten everything I had just heard." The thinker—from Socrates, standing on one foot for hours in the entrance of an unknown house in his cherished Athens, to Heidegger overtaken each morning

Passing-A-Way-Of-The-Child

97

by thinking in his cherished valley of Todtnauberg, by way of Nietzsche walking briskly in the icy solitude of the peaks of Engadine near his cherished Sils Mariais he whom thinking, the thing that makes thinking, has seized, and who offers himself to the saying of a word whose worth is greater for its tone and for the way it opens than for the knowledge it seems to carry. The thinker is sustained, one could say, by his love for his native soil. Thinking is an expelling force, a force of tearing away and of passing on. Zarathustra, for example, teaches the passing from man to the Overman: "M an is a tight rope between beast and Overman, a rope over the abyss.""Dangerous to pass on, dangerous to be on the way, dangerous to turn back, dangerous to tremble and to stay in one place! Man's greatness is to be a bridge, not a goal; what one can love in a man is that he passes on and goes under." To read a thinker is first of all to give oneself over to this force, it is to accept (to affirm, Nietzsche would say) one's will to let oneself be carried off to the most remote "origins that reach out to meet us," as Holderlin used to say; "it is to become-child," Nietzsche would say; "to go to the encounter of the thing," Freud would say; "to return towards the primordial sense of this question, forgotten since the origin of thinking, the question of the sense of Being and of beings," Heidegger would say; the sense which is also farthest in the past, the farthest ahead of us on this sort of Mobius strip that makes up our journey in its eternal return. It is in this sense that, however dazzling in erudition these works or remarks on Nietzsche, on Heidegger, on the relations, differences, resemblances between Nietzsche and Freud and so on might be, they appear to me to be dead letter the moment they merely expose the supposed meaning of the thoughts of these thinkers. Rather, it seems to me that the value of these thoughts rests in the actions which they provoke, the passages they open up; in sum, they rest in their force, or, to take a Nietzschean term, in their power. This is how I conceive of Zarathustra, the one who shows the way to the Overman, Overman who is neither Superman—the all-American turnip^—nor the furious blond beast, but he who most tightly holds on to the child who is the child to come. This is how I conceive of Nietzsche—he who has thought the teaching of the way to thinking by tearing man away from the spirit of revenge, from the knowledge of the self grounded on suffering, and from the misconception of power. This knowledge born of ressentiment, this self, a wholly reactive instance, is defined by Freud in terms of defense mechanism and misconception. It is in this same sense that I understand his glorious "failure"—at least in his role as the master of the way, as the teacher who thinks and teaches the Overman and the eternal return of the same—a failure of not being able to do anything other than showing the way, the way of the three metamorphoses that are metaphorized in the "Prologue" to Thus Spoke Zarathustra as the passing from the camel (man of reactive knowledge, negation, and repetition) to the child (man of creative thinking and of desireful affirmation) by way of the lion (man of active will "who creates not new values but a free space for creation again"). It is here that I would invoke psychoanalytic thinking, not as a more or less analogical parallel to Nietzsche's thinking, not as a possible representation of the question of being and of the passing to the questioning of the Being of beings to

98

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

which Heidegger refers and which echoes,pace Deleuze, in its most profound sense the thought of Nietzsche, but rather invoke a psychoanalytic thinking as a practice of the passing over. Freud has left to Nietzsche the thinking of this passing (it is in this sense that I understand Freud's often repeated and only partially false claim of having always denied himself the pleasure of reading him), and he, for his part, proposed a device for passing: psychoanalysis. Under this heading, the psychoanalyst is not, strictly speaking, a Master, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra. He does not teach. Properly speaking there is no question here of a thinker, for he does not deploy in his speech the power of thinking, he does not rely on this power for effecting the passing, he is certainly not the man of power either. In sum, he is no more Overman than the child declared by Nietzsche to be the last moment of the passing. I would say—without being able to take the time here to develop it—that the psychoanalyst is he who got stuck in the passage of an interminable analysis, neither failed nor succeeded. He is, or should be, the ferryman who maintains by his listening the passing of the one who passes over to the child: this passing that Freud called psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis as such takes place in the space of transference, the space of friendship, of re-actualized native soil, putting into effect a thought that is carried in the stream of words (from metaphors to metonymies Lacan would say), in the stream of words cleansed of meanings, words cleansed of the knowledge that they carry by the interpretive scanning of the analyst, but words retaining their power, their power to drag along. This is a thinking which would rise above the prohibition of the Super Ego (the dragon "you mustl" of a thousand scales), beyond the torn veil of the Ego and its sparkling lures, beyond its imaginary knowledge anchored in the deceptive and narcissistic recollections of the body. This thought would bring, I would say, the passer-by to the threshold of the Real, to where the thing holds out, where thinking and desiring find their roots, a place always already lost, the place of his greatest nostalgia, to a grief caused in us by the proximity of what is so far away. "There, to where he who is passing is headed," remarks Heidegger apropos Zarathustra (but one could also say this of someone in analysis)—"there is the place of his nostalgia."The passer-on, like the one who guides him, the master (like the analyst who, by his listening, passes along with him), is on his way back to his most authentic being. He is the "convalescent." But this place of the greatest nostalgia is also the place of the little-death, of jouissance. Freud referred to this place as Nirvana, this ancient state of affairs to which the death instinct tends to bring us back, the first death, the imaginary death, that is to say the imaginary death of the child: the end of the passage, the threshold where the true voyage begins. Endnotes 1. Originally in English (trans.). 2. I have decided not to give an English translation of "jouissance": besides "enjoyment," and "joy,"the word in French can mean intense sexual pleasure and orgasm (trans.). 3. Originally in English (trans.).

Eurotaoism Peter Sloterdijk Translated by Michael Eldred In the first section of this paper I will explain the necessity of posing the problem of nihilism differently from the way Nietzsche posed it. In the second section I elaborate on the idea that the philosophy of subjectivity—which is closely woven with the phenomenon of nihilism—is an attempt by Western thinking to compensate for the unhomeliness (Unheimlichkeit) of the world by means of a forced quest within oneself. In doing this I extend the old idea of philosophy as a spiritual midwife towards a general understanding of the subject as the centre of a will of exertions, exertions of self-birthing. In the third section I will comment on the concept of Eurotaoism. I. Historicism and Nihilism: the Natural History of Existential Weariness Merely looking at the human now makes us tired—what is modern day nihilism if it is not thatl. . . . We are tired of the human. . . . (Genealogy of Morals)

Since Nietzsche, European thinking has discovered the connection between evolution and melancholy. In this discovery lies the quintessential legacy of the nineteenth century. It left behind a paradox that sets loose more insanityproducing energies than the most stringent double bind: by condemning later generations to historical thinking, this discovery has educated us in existential weariness. Historicism destroyed naive immune system that protects normal life from seeing itself historically, and exposed it to the view of its own abandonment in the great currents of time. Just as Pascal felt a horror at the eternal silence of the infinite spaces of the universe, historicized humans must feel downcast at the eternal noise of the historical time-spaces. From history we learn the reasons for despairing. Historicity is thus the philosophical concept for despair—we have known this ever since the young Nietzsche gave the first lucid hints of the drawbacks which historiography presents for life. We can conjecture that the romantic generation, consisting of survivors of the French Revolution, had already drained this problematic to the dregs. For them, the evil of the century lay in the feeling that the historical world is only a graveyard of enthusiasms—in it, every project, no matter how energetically begun, decays. To think historically, since that time, means to accommodate oneself to a world situation in which life is no longer a match for its own reflexivity. European philosophy of alienation since the generation of the Hegelians has dealt with this. Its critique of civilization revolves around a structure in which life discovers that it possesses more morals than vitality, more inhibition than spontaneity, more recollection than adventurousness. Historicism makes the nightmare of past generations felt for the first time. It burdens the consciousness of the contemporaries. Within 99

100

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

this structure there is hardly any thinking that is not enraged about the result of history—insofar as this result is nothing but an inhibiting contrivance called civilization, recollection, conscience, reflection, objective spirit, culture, capital, compulsory education. With historicism, every real life must have the feeling of coming too late. It finds itself in the position of an heir who notices in retrospect that his inheritance disinherits, overtaxes, overruns and ruins him. Such ruination by a depressing inheritance is not without irony when one recalls that at first European historicism was the very optimistic project of making the past and the future of this strongly mobilized world as a whole into our property. The heroism of a total historical appropriation is connected in the first place with the works of Hegel and Marx. The former undertook the attempt to reclaim the entire past of thinking humanity as the property of an absolute spirit arrived at itself, while the latter raised the claim to organize the entire future as the characteristic manifestation of a humanity working on and for itself. For a long time, however, the impression has been growing that both of these historically recent programs of exertion also, in their turn, end in fatigue. Today, nothing is more alienating than the titanic claim to appropriate completely the alien. We are glad when nothing happens to us on the way to and from work. We cannot imagine hoping to transform the world through work into the subject's own apartment. For the ideologues following Marx, the earth is the future family home of the working class; while for Hegel world history is a family tomb in which every skull represents a relative. Both overexertions lapse back into the history of weariness, and by looking at the last two Titanisms it becomes clearer than ever that historicity stands under the star of depression. As far as depressive historicism is concerned, the present is peculiar in that it feels hopelessness not only retrospectively but also prospectively. World history is revealed as a patchwork of desperations not only to the eyes of the historians, but even more to those of the futurologists. However, today wants to be sad, thinks not so much about what was as about that which is to come, and after historicism has poisoned the future, the circle of historicity is closed. World history as the high-spirited report on the stages on the path of ourselves is no longer possible without qualifications, and in the future it will always be sabotaged by counternarratives that will talk of the losses. Historicism has made sure that the world now lies under the evil eye of history—unilluminable. As a result, all historiography has become dysangelic: history is bad news. Now we can turn to an exposition of the question of nihilism. It is obvious that with the emergence of nihilism, the worthiness of life to be affirmed is put totally into question. It is, however, historicism which first creates a cultural situation in which life can reflect its own history as a process of progressive inhibitions. At the moment when the victory of depressions over initiatives, inhibitions over impulses, seems to be almost complete, the theme of nihilism must become the burning focused point of cultural self-clarification. For this reason Nietzsche places his thinking at the turning point of a universal-historical decadence. He understands that nihilism and historicism are allied insofar as historicism can deal only with the relentless nihilistic inhibiting of life that has come to prevail in

Eurotaoism

101

the name of culture and history in Europe and the rest of the world. For Nietzsche, the history of Christian Europe is exposed as the history of a slow and artful suicide. In it the negation of life pervades all forms of thinking, all arts and institutions with horrifying thoroughness. The psychological concept for this process is the hegemony of resentment: the biological concept is decadence; the political concept is dictatorship of the mob or democracy; the religious concept is Christianity; and the philosophical concept is nihilism. The world history of Christian resentment means for Nietzsche the history of a boundless devaluing of the world and of life. This devaluation is the expression of a negation that in turn can be traced back to the feelings, the retaliations, of an inhibited and mutilated life. Accordingly, European nihilism would be the world-historical staging of a fundamental negating of 'values'. To the extent that a covert, suicidal will to nothingness is at work in nihilism, it signifies the rejection of affirmative values and the empowerment of negating values. The nothingness brought into its own by this nihilism is a nothingness of life-values, a nothingness of motivation to exist—in short, a depressive nothingness based on the refusal to allow the facts of life their validity. A struggle with this motivational nihilism, with this moral monopoly of an inhibited/inhibiting process of negating, runs through Nietzsche's entire thinking. This negating expresses itself, according to its nature, in a twofold way: at first as impotence and a self-inhibiting of the will; and then as a reactive, poisoning will to nothingness. With this twofold effect, European motivational nihilism gains the power to move and weigh down the world simultaneously. We must speak of nihilism only because in it an impotence has established itself as world power: the incapacity to affirm life has come to prevail world-wide in institutions of disguised negation of life. Nihilism is the world empire of resentment understood as the will to break and annihilate life. With this diagnosis, Nietzsche has issued Europe, together with its heirs, the moral certification of death. With indignation he points out that the "world" is a Christian swear word. And insofar as he saw in his epoch a world hegemony of the Christian No to the world emerging, he felt justified in damning his time as the era of completed nihilism. His answer to this nihilism was supposed to consist in a change of values, of motivations themselves. Against motivational nihilism, he wanted to counterpose a seamless affirmative stance, an heroic positivism that, for its own part, would only grant validity to motivations and values arising from the spirit of affirmation. All this is well-known and is only mentioned in order to sketch the background for further considerations. Nobody can doubt the sharpness of Nietzsche's cultural diagnoses, nor the penetration of his historical vision. An uneasiness, however, is unavoidable when we try to link up with Nietzsche's proposals. The reason for this lies not in the exaggerated cuttingness and the conscious onesidedness of his judgments, but in their philosophical harmlessness. It is no longer possible to treat nihilism as if it were only a matter of motivations and the positing of values. Whoever is content to talk only of an inversion of values in nihilism, of the revaluation of all values, and of a re-

102

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

establishing of a will that wants itself, does not account for the full extent of the problem of nihilism. In the hundred years since Nietzsche's demise, the problem of nihilism has been transformed from a motivational into a fundamental/ ontological form. Every positing, whether it appears as affirmation or negation, is by its very gesture to be suspected of nihilism, because in such positing it being is conceived as something that would be nothing without the intervention of the positing. "We are tired of the human . . . ."This sentence, which articulates Nietzsche's disgust at the sight of a wayward humanity, fits (better than its writer knew) into a widespread cultural process of existential fatigue. This process encompasses Nietzsche's weariness with weariness, and strides with a yawn past every Dionysian revival and all affirmative therapies. A real confrontation with what nihilism means after all this is possible only when thinking pulls itself together to observe and comprehend its own heaviness, its weariness, its depression. Therefore, I maintain, a philosophical discourse on nihilism is possible only as a meditation on heaviness. Such a mediation is only a match for its content when it proceeds neither metaphysically nor historicistically. As soon as we admit that a philosophical concept of life must necessarily include an understanding of weariness and inhibition of life, then we allow that depression is an authentic modus of life and thus something that life inflicts on life. It would, therefore, be philosophically false and dietetically senseless to revolt with false exertions against the weight of the world which depression makes us feel. Those who attempt a philosophy of Yes can only maintain their perspective when they summon the strength to support their affirmation with a primeval history of negation and an archaeology of existential weariness. Otherwise nothing remains but an impotent affirmation, at best a euphoria lacking a sense for negativity. A euphorist, however, who is silly enough to philosophize must be able to think a logic of depression. This is connected with the thesis that depression is not a psychiatric but a philosophical theme. If this theme is developed in an appropriate way, it becomes clear that weariness with life is the typical signature of a life that has been seduced by false alleviations into experiencing even the bearable as unbearable. Parallel to the false alleviations, overexertions develop that provide additional motifs of existential weariness for a life marked by its own heaviness. As soon as the question of nihilism is no longer posed in terms of values and motivations, the philosophical discussion shifts from a problematic of will to an ecology of exertions. With this shift we are already beyond Nietzsche's horizon of motivational nihilism. It is probably no accident that in a well-known formulation, Nietzsche describes nihilism as an eerie guest, the most eerie of all guests. With this formulation, Nietzsche oversteps his own horizon for a moment. The image of the eerie guest indicates that nothingness is not only the content of negation of life by those who live badly, but that conscious life as such must prepare itself for dreadful visitors. Something eerie is inherent in life, something that does not arise from our saying No, but which, more powerful than any spoken Yes or No, immerses us from the start in a dangerous,

Eurotaoism

103

frightening medium. The unhomely guest who comes to visit us is only a delegate of the unhomeliness (Unheimlichkeit) in which we are guests by the fact of existence. Nothingness is thus not so much a guest, as Nietzsche seemed to believe, as it is a host. The uncertainty about whether we come to unhomeliness, or it comes to us, is an expression of the fact that Nietzsche's discourse on nihilism still raises claims to self-assuredness that come into conflict with his vision of dangerous living. This ambitious stance makes him believe that dangerous living is an achievement of a subject, not a situation that precedes every achievement. As soon as we speak of eerie unhomeliness, we leave the terrain of motivational nihilism, in which we deny life in order to press on into the domain of ontological nihilism, in which life denies us—or at least presses the fingerprints of the negative into our existence. The history of philosophy in this century is essentially bound up with this transition, as anyone easily recognizes who follows the path from Nietzsche to Heidegger. On this path nothingness has transformed itself into something that in its massiveness and realness is a match for the most tangible realities. It is to be reckoned as a theoretical gain that with this transformation the problem of the negative has become more than a matter of will and denial. In the meantime there are already children's books that treat nothingness as something eminently real, as for example, Michael Ende's fairy tale The Endless Story, one of the most successful books of the century in Germany. We can see in this book how the question about nothingness has proceeded beyond Nietzsche's answers, right up to popular ontological ideas which in turn require correction. One can quarrel about the literary quality of the Endless Story, and accuse the author of a tawdry trivialization of metaphysics and mythology, but it cannot be denied that the possibility of trivializing nothingness is itself a fact in the history of ideas that deserves notice. In Ende's book nothingness as an existing nothingness acquires a massiveness that would cause even a sworn Heideggerian to turn pale. For those whose memory of the book is not fresh, I recall a passage where the young hero Artreju, shortly after his calling and his exodus, meets three forest spirits, weird dark trolls, who warn him not to continue on his way, for ahead he will run straight into nothingness. Looking at the three trolls, a cold shudder ran down [the hero's] back. The first troll's legs and lower torso were missing, so that he had to walk on his hands. The second had an enormous hole in his chest that you could look through. The third hopped on his single right leg, for his entire left side was missing as if he had been cut in two. (German edition, p. 52) The three figures, gnawed at by nothingness, play a role that in myth research is called the adjuvant, the providential helper, at first in a warning function, then in a direction-giving function. When Artreju enquires what has happened to them, the first troll answers: "Annihilation is spreading . . . it grows and grows and becomes more from day to day—provided that we can say that nothing can become more. Everyone else escaped in time from the Howling Forest, but we did not want

104

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism to leave our home. And then it befell us while we were sleeping and made us into what you now see before you." "Does it hurt a lot?" asked Artreju. "No" the second bark troll replied. . . ."You don't feel anything. You are just lacking something. And every day you are lacking more once it has befallen you. Soon we won't be there at all."

Artreju is now courageous enough to ask from which spot in the forest it began and after receiving directions from the trolls he climbs a tall tree to look at nothingness: When he had finally reached the highest peak he looked into the sunrise and saw it: The tops of the other trees near him were green but the foliage of those behind seemed to have lost all its colour. They were gray. And a bit further away they seemed to become translucent and foggy in a strange way, or, to put it better, they seemed to become more and more unreal. And behind that was nothing more, simply nothing. There was no barren place, no darkness, there was not even any brightness. It was something unbearable for the eyes and gave you the feeling of having become blind. For no eye can bear it, to look into complete nothingness. Artreju held his hand in front of his face. . . . Only now did he fully understand the horror that had become widespread in fantasies.

What philosophical reflection on nothingness has gathered together as concept and conception over one hundred years has here become literary material. Rarely has such an all-encompassing warrant of arrest been issued for existing nothingness. At first we learn that it befalls beings in the night like an ontological leprosy, leaving them as deficient beings: full of holes, truncated, amputated. We learn further that it makes its victims into refugees and forces them into a life on the run with the prospect of soon disappearing entirely from the earth. We read that it de-colours the trees and makes them gray, like a metaphysical forest dieback. It dips them in a ghostly translucence that derealizes the trees as trees, as if light were a secret agent of nothingness that lights up things and drives them to the edge of annihilation. Finally, we learn that nothingness, as in negative theology, can only be described negatively, in such a way that its central feature consists in being unbearable for the human eye. It is impossible here not to think of La Rochefoucauld's statement about the sun and death, upon which one cannot fix the naked eye. It also fits that this nothingness intrudes into the forest from the sunrise, as if here there were a glimmer of a notion that nihilism is of the same essence as the explication of a certain European heliology. Confronted with such a story, those who think about nothingness only with philosophical means will probably develop two counterposed feelings: first, a bit of envy at the liberties taken by a storyteller who resorts to pictures where concepts are lacking; then, a discontent aroused by pyrrhic victories of the picture over the concept. Here the concept oilack means more than the lack of a concept. Metaphors about unhomeliness carry us beyond actual unhomeliness no better than metaphors of the abyss carry us over the actual abyss. The

Eurotaoism

105

conceptual lack hinted at by the word "unhomeliness" is of such a kind that nothing would be less effective than to fill it in with a quick heuristic picture. To understand what nothingness is about, thinking has to withstand its invisibility longer than an image-hungry literature. There is, in fact, a philosophical third way which is neither a sceptical abstention from remarks about nothingness, nor a pictorial filling-in of the problem's hollow space. This middle path follows the tracks leading from the homely into the unhomely, from the worldly into the unworldly, from the settled-posited (aus dem Gesetzten) into the horrifyingdisplaced (in das Entsetzliche). By way of such a search for tracks we reach a philosophical biography of the subject. The question about nothingness thus merges into a natural history of the eerie unhomely. Where both meet, there the understanding of depression encounters the inner comprehension of overexertion. On this path, thinking that is the explicit achievement of a subject finds its way back to what is heavier and more difficult than thinking. II. The Mis-carried Animal and the Selfbirth of the Subject The human is the great hyphen in the book of nature. (Jean Paul, "From the Devil's Papers")

Whoever traces back the tracks of the unhomely to their starting point ends up at the human drama of birth. The way in which humans come into the world already contains, I conjecture, the entire key to the problem of nothingness. The concept of nothingness, if it is supposed to be more than an excuse to practice charlatanism, is a hint that it does not suffice for humans to be born in order to come into the world. The physical birth of the human is precisely the opposite of a coming-into-the-world: a falling-out of everything familiar, a plunging into the unhomely, a losing of oneself in an eerie vastness. This holds in a threefold way: coming into the world means for the human child, first, departure from an intrauterine pre-life that is probably the only stage of its reception by the world that really possesses a homely character, insofar as the shoots of an unfriendly life do not already reach it; the exodus into the world certainly implies an adventurefilled expedition through the eerie forest in which annihilation threatens. Coming into the world means, secondly, arrival in the uncertain, because for the human the world is something that is not secured and given from the start but which has to be ascertained and secured; the place of arrival itself is made insecure and is set into motion by the human's arrival. Coming into the world means, thirdly, always to have come too early and to have arrived in a state which is inappropriate for a solid advent in the world, a state of complete helplessness, lack of orientation, exposure and awkwardness. If we proceed from a reflected concept of the world, then we can no longer say in the proper sense of the word that humans come into the world through their birth. A nameless something which is nothing without the others comes into a situation from which it cannot expect anything definite or anything good, unless it has come to people who promise it a definite, good world. According to this, the world into which the newcomer comes is nothing but a promise that the older

106

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

inhabitants make to newcomers—a promise that, because of the instability of worldly circumstances, is predisposed to being broken. The question about nothingness thereby gains a new form. It can mean that nothing is promised to the world's newcomers so that they, too, do not promise themselves much from existence and develop an inclination to return to where they came from—a motif that has its place in all religions of deliverance. Or it can mean—perhaps only hint—that the great promises made are nothing, that nothing of the highest expectations life holds for the world is to be fulfilled. Nothingness would be accordingly a title for the notorious gap between the newcomer and the relations pertaining to arrival. The unhomeliness of coming into the world has its ground in the unavoidable unreliability of human promises. This is not to be ascribed to an irresponsible individual carelessness but to the fact that the world of promises is, according to its nature, un-tenable, something to be held onto only with luck and effort. In unhomeliness the ineluctable tendency of promises toward the untenable or un-keepable is revealed. Only because of it does our coming into the world lean toward nothingness, toward the invalid, the objectless, the unreal, the miscarried. To be sure, every birth is, in itself, a promise, but because the world as promise is tinged by untenability, every birth is a plunging into the untenable. One could even say that every birth is afflicted with a trace of the miscarried. Humans do not come into the world as if it were unquestionable that they and the world exist: they are from the start born to one side, and they set out into unhomeliness. Nietzsche truncated this relationship when he spoke of nihilism as an eerie guest who visits the life of the present. It is not the case that an otherwise solid, self-assured life receives a frightening visitation in its crises: life, in and of itself, is a visit to eerie unhomeliness. We always drive something off, we always drift off a little; the chain of life possesses in the human an open link. As a living being, the human is therefore a priori an utter problem, an impossibility, a monstrosity, a miscarriage. Between the human and life there is from the beginning a gap, the space of panic that newcomers experience on their arrival. This gap is the space in which nothingness is something essential: our essence. The world is built into this gap: in it world can appear and arrive, across it are spanned the high wires of the promise on which humans venture out like tightrope walkers. In the light of these considerations, the human is not a living being but a being that has to lead a life. Without leading a life, human life is nothing in a double sense: not life, and not human. Humans must first promise themselves their lives before they can lead them. And because, for us, what is decisive happens under the lead of promises, we rely on them being kept. Human life-keeping (Lebenshaltung) is supported by promises. Humans are thus not living beings but life-leading beings, and the leading of their lives depends on keeping promises that tend to untenability. Because of this untenability, humans are only inadequately characterized as life-leading beings; they are much more marked by the shadow of untenable promises that falls on them. Since the tenability of our promises is not guaranteed by anything, humans are characterized not only by keeping and leading a life but, from the start, by miskeeping and misleading life as well.

Eurotaoism

107

This makes it understandable why life only unwillingly, and only under extreme compulsion, comes down to giving account of its primary unhomeliness. Indeed, the usual sense of accounts is to document life as something calculable, stabilizing, homely and profitable. The original promise of life, philosophically called "reason," consists precisely in filing suit against the non-kept promise. Incursions of the irrational are in general perceived as scandalous and disastrous because with the breaking of reason's promise a foreboding emerges that the world's promises can mean nothing at all. This foreboding is what humans cannot bear, but its effects first make humans into what they are: promises that are kept and that give themselves the lie. This state of affairs explains why every anthropology that does not work through to a philosophy of birth remains insipid. The insipid theory of the human begins straight away with the human as living being, as labouring being, as talking being, or as social being, but forgets to say what it promises itself and its audience with its talk about humans. From the viewpoint of a philosophy of birth, the human is the being who was reckless enough not to be an animal, and who promised itself something from existence. Anthropology is the science of recklessness, recklessness of building forms of life on promises. This recklessness has made history, and history is perhaps only the table of contents of all possible forms of recklessness that populate the globe, or a rogue's novel about evolutionary confidence tricks. We can best conceive of what embodies the serious business of life, as opposed to these stories of recklessness, when we see that the world is not far from perishing in a last battle of false promises. The impression cannot be avoided that in the era of developed cultures, particularly in the last two centuries, humans have promised themselves something that does not lie in the realm of the possible. Anthropology as science of recklessness becomes philosophy when it elaborates the subject in its generality as the keeper of untenable positions. Subjectivity consequently can no longer be treated in the form of a theory of the underlying but must assume the form of a theory of keeping, holding and bearing. If for humans the world is fundamentally structured as a promise, then the human as subject of the promise is its keeper or bearer. Even the function of self-preservation or self-upkeeping (Selbsterhaltung)—that philosophically has so often been determined as an original drive or basic striving of the subject— only refers to a general keeping through which the world is borne as promise. The history of the subject is coextensive with the process of the promising, the keeping and the breaking of worlds. Of course, the fact that modern philosophy has placed its wager on subjectivity indicates that it summoned the courage to promise itself and to keep its promises to the utmost. The philosophy of subjectivity is a logical machinery that proceeds from the axiom that in the thinking subject it has identified the keeper of all possible promises. In it the subject is conceived of as self-keeper who knows how to keep to its own worldpromise to the end. Accordingly, it is no longer appropriate to translate the word "subject" as the subjugated or the underlying one but as the self-keeping, freebearing one. As subject, the human is guarantor of promises by which the

108

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

miscarried animal provides for itself a world. Only where the subject performs its hold-giving contribution does the world as a definite world maintain itself for the human. Only by means of this contribution does the arrival in the world avoid a fall into nothingness. The subject as self-keeper holds off its own fall. Its fundamental exertion is nothing other than holding onto itself. Subjectivity does not mean a tranquil underlying, but a self-exerting. It is no accident that the philosophies of subjectivity, on the most developed level, turn into theories of labour; the word "labour," however, after its philosophical career with Hegel and Marx, preserves only a faint memory of the old brute exertion of keeping alive: drudgery, grinding exertion. What the philosophies of subjectivity designate as spontaneity is an exertion; however, they do not properly grasp the real ground of the subject's exertion. This becomes particularly clear where subjectivity is thought as pure activity. The fundamental exertion of the subject, especially in the post-Kantian systems, is conceived of as a pure wanting and a being able to act, and it is interpreted by a metaphor of the leap, as a leaping out of itself. In truth, the fundamental exertion that produces spontaneities is the trace of the miscarriage in the human. Humans only become subjects because they do not come into the world merely through birth, but have to provide additional exertions to establish a world and to stay in it. Subjectivity is, as idealism teaches, pure activity. This activity, however, is not a deed-action, a self-positing or a definite deciding. Rather, it is identical to the exertion of coming into the world through self-birthing: a counter-move to the pre-subjective, miscarried setting out into unhomeliness. The subject is that which tries to become and to be its own world by holding on and keeping true itself. This self-keeping reveals itself as abstinence (Enthaltsamkeit), as keeping true to one's own principles, as self-grounding (Selbstbegriindung), as independence (Selbstandigkeit, self-standingness), as self-preservation (Selbsterhalten, self-keeping). The history of the subject is therefore from the very beginning a history of stands and stances, from the Stoa to existentialism, from the desert prophets to the cool young city dwellers. The subject always confronts us as a centre of exertion holding itself together, as the ego of a stance it holds: whether it holds to itself by holding back from all disturbing, frightening, seductive influences; whether it straightens itself up against an unholy world by means of a hold on God; whether it constitutes itself as a rational ego held up by reason, that in turn is determined as the "self-keeper of its own laws"; whether, as the overpowerer of existential weariness, it tries heroically to hold itself up to make of itself a gift to the world; whether it knows itself, gloomily and resolutely, to be held out in nothingness; whether, in anti-Oedipal manner, it rides waves on the erection of its desire; or whether it holds itself to the style of its own way of writing and observes itself out of the corner of its eye to see how it eludes itself. The subject is always at work, giving itself a hold in a stance with a self-birthing exertion. Through the fate of mis-birth the subject is from the beginning condemned to the exertion of stabilizing its stance in a non-guaranteed world of its own promises. The human as subject, viewed neurophysiologically is, probably nothing but a self-hypnotic system that induces stances in itself. Accordingly, the much

Eurotaoism

109

puzzled-over subjectivity is accordingly the naturally arising autogenic training of a stance. Stances are by their nature always expectant stances toward the existing world and the keeping of its promises. In particular, they are expectations of the repeatability of already acquired stance programs. This is true even of those who, in accordance with Stoic tenets, do not expect anything from the world as long as it does not surprise them and destroy their composure. There can be no doubt that the autonomy of the subject so cherished by all idealists, and more generally by all stance thinkers, implicitly refers to this drama of holding on to one's own promises. What is autonomy other than the subject's freedom to pretend to itself whatever it wants—to promise to itself what it pleases and in so doing to keep itself undisturbed by any reality? So much is obvious: to the extent that the subject gains its hold by holding onto what it promises itself, in order to even out the world's deficiency with a hypertrophic coming-into-the-world, precisely to this extent does it insist on tendentially worldless, or at least, antiworldly attitudes. To speak in spatial metaphors, the subject with its stances toward the world is always against, beside and above things, but never in them. The problematic of the subject thus contains an antiworldly self-breeding as an elevated coming-into-the-world. Nietzsche is responsible for this. He was the one who in his Genealogy of Morals put the autogenesis of the subject on the agenda. To breed an animal that is allowed to promise . . . is that not precisely that paradoxical task which nature has posed with regard to the human? Is it not the essential problem o/the human?. . . . Precisely that is the long history of the emergence of responsibility. That task, to breed something that is allowed to promise, includes. . . within itself to make the human calculable!... If we place ourselves... at the end of this enormous process . . . then we find . . . the sovereign individual, . . . the human with its own, independent, long will that is allowed to promise, . . . [the] possessor of a long, unbreakable will. . . . (Schlechta 1954, 2:799-801) Nietzsche's naturalistic gaze sees that the human is the problem that nature has with itself. How nature comes to it remains unclear, but the allegorical way of speaking of the self-posed task of nature makes nature appear like an ambitious mother who celebrates herself in her own offspring. Nietzsche's rhetoric of human "elevation" reveals the self-birthing scheme of a life marked by the highest promises—combining the symptomatic revulsion of self-perfecting subjectivity at the miscarrying handicaps of the mediocre, at the feminine, and at the natural. What is completely unbearable precisely for me? That with which I alone cannot cope, that makes me suffocate and languish? . . . That something miscarried comes close to me. . . . What else is there by way of distress, privation, bad weather, lingering illness, toil, loneliness which one cannot endure? Basically, one can cope with anything else, born as one is to a subterranean, struggling existence. One comes into the light every now and again, one experi ences his golden hour of victory every so often—and then one stands there as at birth: unbreakable, taut, ready for something new, for something even more difficult, even more distant. . . . (Schlechta 1954, 2:788).

110

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

The self-birth of the subject, Nietzsche's pictures say, is a birth into a status (Stand). It is the birth into an erection which, without a sideglance at the possibilities of a bearable lying down or being borne, leads straight away to a standing by virtue of one's own rising. For Nietzsche, the self-birthing, selfelevating subject is not of the same essence as the passively born subject born into simple miscarriedness. The self-begetter possesses as a sign of its own chosenness the will to the dreadful. Through this will those are singled out who experience their coming into the world as an adventurous exodus, as a path into vastness. To bring itself into the world in a dignified way, the resolute selfbegetter must rid itself of the mediocre and the convenient. Who would not much rather fear himself (if he could at the same time admire himself) than not fear himself, if in doing so he would not be able to rid himself of the nauseous view of the miscarried, the belittled, the stunted and poisoned? (Schlechta 1954, 2:788)

The proximity to the miscarried and those born alien is unbearable to the selfbearer because its phantasma of birth into the standing status has precisely the function of suppressing the horror of its own birth. In the struggle of birth the subject steps in a fantastic way to the mother's side so as to avoid being her child. It wants to draw the eerie unhomeliness of its own existence completely into itself so as not to feel its lostness in existence. When it is a matter of unhomeliness, the subject is more inclined to bear monsters or even to put itself in a frightening way into the world than to allow the fearful to thunder over it. Perhaps this self-birthing, this elevated subjectivity, is only the exertion of the original evasion of an unbearable origin? A series of extraordinarily paradoxical movements results from self-birthing exertions that are the characteristic feature of subjectivity: a begetting that leads immediately to standing; an expending that is really a holding on to oneself; an overflowing that grants nobody anything of one's own superfluity; a communicating that exhausts itself in presenting its own communicativity. With these paradoxical gestures, the subject becomes a mother who does not bring any real children into the world except motherless self-standing monsters of independence, "works", "theories", miraculous beings. As self-begetter the subject steps into the position of its own mother, it becomes mother of God who bears itself in its arms as a female phallus or a male child of God—a child that cannot come into any world other than the world of its own will. Because the subject can only come into its own world, it has from the start an unbridgeable distance from the world of others. Abstemious stances develop from this distance. When the subject assumes a stiff stance—vis-a-vis enticements of the alien world such as talk, current affairs, fame, women, princes—it does so not because of a morbid leaning toward asceticism but by virtue of a clear inclination to serve only a single exertion. His motherly instinct, the secret love of what is growing in him, puts him into situations where one can relieve him from thinking of himself. . . not . . . because of a meritorious will to contentedness and naivete, but because this love's highest master demands it of them (these situations) thus; . . . thus

Eurotaoism

1' 1

wills it, (his) dominating instinct, . . . at least for the periods of great gestation. (Schlechta 1954, 2:852)

Nietzsche discovers thus the birth of asceticism out of the exertion of self-birth. Asceticism of this kind does not mean a refusal of the will; it is on the contrary the expression of the highest focusing of will, lofty concentration of all partial forces in a single will. In Nietzsche's discourse on the will to power, a still confused idea of the possibility of a univocal existence seeks expression: the idea of the possibility of a monothematic will. The will's single-mindedness (Monothematik) channels the will to power into the canal of self-birth. Everything that an uncompromising, focused will-to-itself can will is eo ipso self-production, self-imagination, self-representation, autonomization, selfbirth. Insofar as asceticism trains the will to abstain from parasitical offshoots of the will, it serves the subject's self-birthing exertion. Through asceticism the subject becomes its own content. Only those who can abstain contain themselves, maintain themselves, restrain themselves within their own laws and become retainers, standers, holders, positers, projecters, givers and founders under their own power. Nobody can fail to hear the masculine tone in this program of self-restraining abstinence. One gets the impression that the subject is only the philosophically encoded dream of a permanent erection from the cradle to the grave. The selfbirthing setting-up of the subject does in fact contain the logic of masculinity as the labour of one's own stand and status. "Masculinity" in the specific sense, therefore, only exists in connection with the phantasma of the self-standing stiff; the man is he who stands his ground (seinen Mann steht). Insofar as European metaphysics came about as maieutic, as the midwife of subjectivity, it was inevitable that it completed itself as a metaphysics of subjectivity. It is thus closely associated with the phenomenon of the self-birth of the man human. A post-metaphysical phenomenology of spirit, by contrast, must take the form of a narration of birth that again pays regard to female competency. Heidegger, who undertook the analysis of standing in its generality, could only pose the question as to the essence of metaphysics within the framework of the history of metaphysics itself, and he could only demonstrate the answer, >vhich he understood as a destruction of metaphysics, formally and in gestures. He did this by showing, in a monomanic, strict meditation, how every standing and placing is so by being in existence—whereby "being", as pure condition of every standing, presents the structure of a groundless stand or an unplaceable original standing. Heidegger's abstention from psychological and anthropological argumentation—originally his most radical achievement—now becomes recognizable as limit of his thinking. As soon as thinking enters into the meditation on self-birthing structures, it achieves a deeper destruction and at the same time a more substantial salvaging of the metaphysical discourse on being and nothingness than Heidegger was able to achieve. What subjectivity is in its metaphysics as well as in its ontic dynamics is to be intimately comprehended in a grammar of self-birth. Perhaps philosophy is left with only one thing to do: to meditate on subjectivity, devoting to it the deepest understanding in order to

112

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

surpass it. Or to put it in a better way: to imitate it and be in solidarity with its presumptuous as well as its tragic traits, its miscarried as well as its unavoidable positionings, its sublime as well as its comical overstrainings. If strenuous rigour in philosophizing has a sense, then the following: to surrender oneself to the surge of the most strenuous exertions in order to ascertain the limits of the exertion. The limits of my exertion are the limits of my holding: limits of holding out, holding ground, holding off, upholding, holding back. Where exertion ends, standing-by-oneself comes to its limit and there begins that which "lies differently." For the subject, what lies behind this limit is initially only what succumbs to exhaustion, fatigue, overtaxing, devastation. Behind the limit the stances show themselves to be untenable, the promises false. That is the limit behind the forest from which the hero in the tree sees nothingness advancing and devouring. This nothingness is the subject's empty interior, its collapse, its lostness, its impotence. Nothingness is the obviously advancing untenability of what has been promised; it is the desperate de-realization and wearing down of the real to a holding fixture for positions long since recognized as untenable; it is the wave of existential weariness that rolls over the dam of broken expectations. This nothingness intrudes into the self-experience of the overstrained subject when it reaches the limits of holding a stance. Only through its own overstraining does the subject reach the point where it sees through its grand orthopedics. What no external critic can tell it, it experiences in the symptoms of its own overexertion. In having set up the world as a unique contrivance for the holding of untenable or scarcely tenable promises, it now runs the danger of being crushed by the collapse of its own unstable constructions, and the still greater dangers of suffocation in one's own stance or explosion at the first slackening of tension. With the collapse of a stance it becomes clear that self-adoption, selfgrounding, self-control, self-stance, in short, all self-birthing exertions, rely on preconditions inaccessible to the subject's independence or self-standing. Collapses lead to the ground which underlies all settings-up. On the ground it becomes clear that all self-standing always includes an extraneous-standing, and that every self-stance stands on an other. From the ground it becomes clear that even a self-birth driven to the extreme cannot make more out of itself than what a birth has already made of it. In it, too, nothing absolutely enduring and holdable comes the world. What comes into the world, no matter where, is something that is neither a living being nor a life-leading being but a floating being, a danger-being, a love-being. At the turning point between the subject's self-setting up and its fall lies that which Heidegger called the "turning" (Kehre)—a word that for Heidegger's intellectual biography and for the world history of European thinking could constitute the common denominator. Independently of the stylization of such a turning point in the history of being, "turning" can be the title for the subject's relaxation from self-begetting overtaxings. It designates the transition from a mode of being resolved to accomplish everything to one of letting go. The

Eurotaoism

113

transition to a tranquil letting-go is itself anything but tranquil; it is pure explosiveness—a moment of great danger. As turning it means especially the preventive turning against the destructivness unleashed by the collapse of extreme positionings. Letting-go thus does not only lead away from false exertions but even more from false conveniences. Just like the first birth into unhomeliness, the second (into a tranquil letting-go) is not possible without a passage through dreadful exertion. Letting-go hints at the possibility of the selfbegetter re-discovering, on the summit of its struggle, the apparently simple fact that it has already been born. Once the rage of self-birth has consumed itself in the struggle, the subject—in the non-inducible experience of the turning—can surrender itself to the circumstance that it is already there. Letting-go is a sublime defeat in a struggle based on error, on the fundamental error of the subject, on the error that I am. Whoever loses this struggle has won. Letting-go is like ajoyful recovery from a sickness, the sickness of living as such: to be there by virtue of an infinite deficiency in being. A new kind of self-consciousness grows out of this defeat that is a recovery: the self-consciousness of the subject that has worn itself out on the impossible becomes tranquil. Whereas the subject's selfbirth is an eternal agony and represents the grotesque but unavoidable attempt to come into one's own world under one's own direction, to lean serenely on the first birth means to re-discover the indispensable. With this a self-respect is set free that no longer owes anything to illusion and struggle. The discovery of the indispensable presupposes the Odyssey of subjectivity. On this journey, the lying stories about self-standing and self-upkeeping are spun out and worn out until they become threadbare and tear. At their demise, through the thin-worn threads of one's own will, the indispensable glimpses from which the subject on its departure drifted away with fateful force. Thus, at the end of its wearing down, the subject becomes transparent to itself as untenable fiction, as a tremendous overexertion, as a divine lie. Then it discovers itself in the indispensable (Unumgangliche). Heidegger, in one of his most lofty texts, announces that humans must first become mortals (beings who leave the world). He chooses the weaker dispensation, compared to the dispensation that humans must first become born beings, natives (beings come into the world). Human's fin-iteness (Endlichkeit), compared to its beginning-ness (Anfanglichkeit), is the lesser problem. The postmetaphysical turning to the finite earth cannot be led so much by the star of mortality—which will always have to remain a theme of metaphysical temptation—as by the star of nativity. The basic error and the most elementary human blindness is not a refusal to acknowledge death, but a refusal to remember birth, that one was born. In spite of this—or rather because of it—the subject's life, insofar as it organizes itself as self-upkeeping in the world, is an enterprise to stem the horror of miscarriage, a measure to hold back the original falling out of the world. Humans, when they really do not want something, produce the objectivist illusion that they are dealing with the impossible; thus it is no wonder that among millions scarcely one person can concretely recall her or his birth, although from the physiology of memory nothing suggests that even

114

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

archaic material could not be recalled. We are here and nobody knows how. All talk starts in the middle, in not knowing, without recollection; but no talk overcomes the supercession of all reflection by birth. This not knowing (no matter whether it is understood as an original late-coming or as an original premature arrival, as a fundamental belatedness or as a fundamental deferment) is deeply bound up with the compulsion to produce self-made realities in which one knows one's way around. For this reason we come into a world that seems to be nothing other than the product of our own assumptions, ideas and inventions. We gain the impression that we brought with us the world into which we have come. And because the minimum that everyone who comes into the world possesses from the start is one's own helpless and hungry existence, a hungry and helpless autism underlies every construction of worlds out of the subject's property. This autism is a setting-oneself-up-in-oneself, a keeping-onproducing, a putting-outof-place, a pathetic-pathological keeping-distance. It contains incidentally, a boundless debate with, a purely diplomatic relation to, reality, an addiction to language that, on the one hand, means only itself, and on the other tends towards agreement with others about things which amount to promises that cannot be kept, even collectively: communicative autism, a culture of talking about the inconsequential, an inclination to a consensus about what misses the point. Almost everything produced by today's science factory falls under the rubric of this organized talking beside the point that self-satisfiedly moves vocabularies and procedures back and forth in a vacuum. This would not be a bad thing if science were also in substance what it is in form: thought-sport. In its substance, however, it is the cognitive contrivance for keeping unkeepable promises, the logical partner of economic and military record holders, banner holders, standard holders, mobilizers. If the subject reaches the limit of self-birthing exertion, then it can conclude from its own exhaustion what is otherwise unacceptable: that the standing in its self-standing does not stem from itself. Older stands go through the subject, older situations come to stand in it; older structures of things, that hold and hang together, also hang and hold together in the subject. In the collapse, what has been falsely set up is brought to the ground. One can call it earth or nature or mother. The subject that comes to the ground can belatedly grasp its "true nature"; the urge to have no nature; the drive to burn the earth under its feet; the yearning, as motherless self-begetter, to come out of the miscarried, the suffocating, the unbearable. Everything that is subject, from Zarathustra to Hitler, writes a single story under the title "Mein Kampf." This is the story of a false birth into a false world and a rebirth into a right world, about last battles and apotheoses. This last chapter, of course, is always written by those who survive the subject's catastrophes. The subject can also comprehend that it is consistent with its nature to assume its naturalness, its bornness, its beginning-ness. In most cases it only comes to this insight at the cost of a severe depression—insofar as depression is the state in which subjects again begin to feel the weight of the world. The ecological dimension of truth here manifests itself: that only borrowed alleviations have to be given back.

Eurotaoism

115

Depression ceases when the subject stops working against gravity. No false promises, no false keeping, don't overtax yourself, let go of things, lie down flat, get up properly, don't forget flying, find the point of levitation. It now seems as if the simple things always and unavoidably emerge only at the end of a long spiritual path. In a thinking that stands under the compulsion to exertion this is in fact the case: the subject's path to the world has the structure of a detour into the elementary. On this way, the self-evident appears last. Insofar as philosophical thinking was always entangled in the drama of the subject's exertions, it seems to be condemned always to opt for the detour as the shortest way to things. Where heroes think, the long path is the only acceptable and possible one; for them, overexertion is the minimal input. But counterposed to this heroic model—that can only admit the self-evident as something re-found at the very last minute—an unheroic consciousness also has to be given its due, a consciousness for which insights do not result only via the detour of madness. There is another beginning of thinking that does not enter the long path of the subject. Like Hercules at the fork in the path, consciousness has from the beginning the choice between the short and the long path, between the Odyssey and the stroll, between the tragedy and the satyr's play. Even when the choice has to fall on the long path—because self-begetters do not have any other choice—the rights of the short path are not to be denied. Herein lies the sense of the confrontation between Plato and Diogenes for the critique of metaphysics, as it has been handed down in the anecdotes of antiquity. The other way out of overexertion is not to enter it, as the illumined Athenian bum, Diogenes, demonstrated. Hidden traces of pre-metaphysical wisdom run from Kynicism through the age of metaphysics and subject philosophy, and finally come out into the open in its twilight. Just as when in the period of the setting up of metaphysics as "higher" theory, the other thinking withdrew into pantomime, comedy, literature and lower theory, so in this period of the collapse of metaphysics and subject philosophy the voices of wisdom again become audible. These voices are those of an eternal dissidence—voices of children, women, rogues, ecstatics. For them, the stances and positions of the subject have curious features and, in view of the subject's record for self-standing, they can do nothing but shrug their shoulders. They know in another way about the world's unhomeliness: they balance on this side of fundamental principles above the everyday chasms. And the subject who has "come down in the world," if it is serious about its resignation, has to let itself be shown arts that remain unknown longest to those who see the simple last. III. Eurotaoism Whoever Whoever Whoever Whoever Whoever Whoever

stands on his toes does not stand firm. spreads his legs does not come forward. shows himself does not glow. presents himself does not gleam. argues for himself remains unsuccessful. puts himself forward is not great. (Tao Te King, 24th Saying)

116

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

On the concept of Eurotaoism I first have to remark that I have my doubts about it; second, that it amuses me; third, that I credit it with designating a very important problem—perhaps our most important problem. If what has already been said is not Eurotaoism, then we shouldn't talk about it anymore.

With the "Nightwatchman of Greek Philosophy": Nietzsche's Way to Cynicism Horst Butter In the immense secondary literature on Nietzsche relatively little attention seems to have been paid to the influence of kynic motives and ideas on both the form and substance of his philosophy. This is the case despite the fact that Nietzsche explicitly associated himself with Kynism 1 in a number of aphorisms,2 while at the same time adopting the literary style,3 the manner of philosophizing, as well as important concepts and figures4 of this school of antiquity. A close examination of the main philosophical project of Nietzsche, the transvaluation of values, moreover, reveals his kinship with the intention of Kynism to achieve a "recoinage of the coin."5 The phrase "Umwertung der Werte" may even be considered a fairly complete rendition into German of the kynic phrase "paracharattein to nomisma,"6 both denotatively and connotatively. The reasons for this neglect in the interpretation of Nietzsche may be found in the tendency in modern philosophy, current since Hegel, to render philosophy more scientific and systematically exact and comprehensive. This tendency has led to a neglect and disparaging of the literary and anecdotal traits formerly associated with philosophy in its pre-scientific phase. The result has been that genuine philosophic movements such as Kynism, for which no systematic evidence can be found and the doctrines of which have been preserved primarily in anecdotes and sayings about the lives of philosophers, have been defined out of philosophy. Additionally, the more philosophers have attempted to imitate the exactness of the sciences, the more the original meaning of philosophy as a way of life has been lost from view. The same reduction in the meaning of philosophy, from way of life to scientific system, which has led to a rejection of Kynism, had also originally resulted in a lack of understanding of Nietzsche as a philosopher. Needless to say, the downgrading of a philosophical teaching which does not emphasize logical doctrine but considers all doctrines as a secondary expression of the personal is curiously out of place in any consideration of Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, above all, believed that a philosophy needs to be lived as a personal expression of character.7 He had little besides utter contempt for the academic philosophy of the schools of his time, as no doubt he would also have had for the schools of our time. Nietzsche's philosophizing was an attempt to go behind the increasingly sterile ways and modes of modern thinking, divorced from any lived experience, and to reawaken the meaning that philosophy had at its origin in antiquity, as therapy and as "spiritual exercise."8 In this endeavor, the ancient Kynics, the proponents of the "shortest way to happiness," appeared particularly attractive to him for providing a lived alternative to the various dogmatisms proceeding from the figure of Socrates, from Platonism, and from 117

118

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Christianity, his chief enemy. The Kynics provided a counterpoise to the tendency of all idealisms and all systems to emphasize the concept at the expense of life. Being resolutely materialistic, the Kynics seemed to provide an antidote to the poisoning of human nature brought about by metaphysics and the "idealism" of Plato. They were aware of the decadence bora of the resentment against life, and their program of transvaluation was conceived specifically as a cure for the destructive suffering of resentment and as a therapy aimed at restoring the joys of the body. They also considered established culture and morality as being counter-natural and, as such, leading to the problem of the "lost body,"9 a problem arising from the attempt to house all value in the "immortal" soul at the expense of the mortal body. In the following I shall argue that Nietzsche's philosophy, in its aspect of an "inverted Platonism," is very much indebted to ancient Kynism. Nietzsche found in the Kynics much material for his attack on the various Platonisms as well as other idealisms. Yet his philosophy does not succeed in restoring a kynic position, but remains caught in the ambiguity of modern cynicism. My argument is based on the distinction drawn by some scholars recently between ancient Kynism and modern cynicism. Accordingly, Kynism was a philosophical movement, founded by Antisthenes and Diogenes of Sinope, that argued for an alternative cultivation of primary human nature more in accord with the rhythm of nature in general than the established mores. The Kynics emphasized those elements of human existence that were repressed by established culture. They insisted that all human existence is rooted in animality, which they saw as the source of human freedom, and as the condition of human equality. Viewed in this light, ancient Kynism has frequently been seen as an expression of the political demands of the repressed strata of society against the various philosophies of oppression. By contrast, modern cynicism is an adoption of kynic arguments by the ruling elements of society in the service of continued oppression. It is truth-telling and revelation of the "secret" teachings of mastery in the service of ideological fortifications of systems of rule. Kynism was a genuine philosophy, while cynicism is a set of political ideologies. One author who has developed the theory of cynicism describes it as: "enlightened false consciousness . . . (which is modernized false consciousness, that has been enlightened in vain)" (Sloterdijk 1983, 1:37).10 Nietzsche's interest in Kynism goes back to his early days as a philologist, when he attempted to research the sources of Diogenes Laertius" and to discover the exact origins of the philosophical gems unconsciously transmitted by this "nightwatchman of Greek philosophy."12 Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the only philosophical texts with which Nietzsche was thoroughly familiar were Plato's dialogues and the anecdotes and doctrines recounted in Diogenes Laertius' Lives.13 Among these doctrines, those associated with Kynism seemed to suggest an alternative to the line of development originating from Heraclitus, the last of the "tragic" philosophers (Schlechta 1954,3:349-413, 730, 757)14 and leading to Plato via Parmenides, and thence continuing on to Aristotle and Christianity. This alternative line suggested a much higher

. . . Nietzsche's Way to Cynicism

119

evaluation of the Sophists than that traditionally accorded them, mainly because of their negative image in the Platonic dialogues. It suggested, in particular, a revaluation of the teaching of Gorgias, the chief among the philosophic mediators between philosophy in the "tragic" age and Kynism. Nietzsche's kinship with the ancient Kynics, noted already by philosophers in his lifetime, 15 albeit rather negatively, may be seen in the aspects of literary figures and forms, philosophical motives and also anecdotes and metaphors in his work. A brief overview of the relationship between Kynism and Nietzsche would seem appropriate. 16 There are first and foremost a number of statements, mainly from his later writings, where Nietzsche explicitly links his thought with Kynism. Thus, in Ecce Homo he characterized his previously published books as "achieving here and there the highest that can be attained on earth, cynicism . . . " (Schlechta 1954, 2:1102). Simultaneously in a letter to George Brandes, written in November 1888, he designates his Ecce Homo as "cynicism that will become world historical" (Schlechta 1954, 3:1334). In the same manner the preface to the Will to Power declares that "Great things demand that one either keep silent about them or that one speak of them in a great manner: great, that means cynically, and with innocence" (CM 1967, VIII, 3:271). Further, in Aphorism number 26 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche asserts that "Cynicism is the only manner in which base souls touch on that which is honesty; and the higher man must open his ears wide to every expression of coarse as well as refined cynicism, and he must congratulate himself, whenever the buffoon and the scientific satyr express themselves without shame, especially to him" (Schlechta 1954, 2:592). The philosophical character in the last quote also opens our eyes to a whole range of figures and forms that play a very important role in the work of Nietzsche. The important notion of the philosophical fool and the domain of comedy and parody associated with it has hitherto not been recognized sufficiently. Nietzsche, to be sure, assumed the masks of tragedy and of critic of morality; but besides these, the mask of the comedian, of the "Philosopher in the fool's jacket," an expression with which he characterizes the kynic Bion of Borysthenes, is of equal significance. And as we know from a study of Diogenes Laertius, the mask of the fool and the comedian was a preferred role assumed by the philosophers associated with the kynic school in antiquity. Indeed, the Kynics originated a new literary style, or rather a mixture of styles, that attempted to present serious matters in the guise of the laughable, thus combining the masks of tragedy and comedy. Nietzsche was very much impressed by this kynic style, the spoudogeloion. After an earlier critical rejection of all stylistic mixtures, 17 identified by him notably in the Platonic dialogues but seen as more radically present in the kynic dicta, he utilized this style more and more in his own work to the point where he characterized himself in his final correspondence shortly before his breakdown as "condemned to entertain the next eternity with bad jokes."18 The standpoint of comedy is then fully assumed in The Joyful Wisdom where it relativizes the tragic. In this book

120

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

the last aphorism of Book IV, which introduces the figure of Zarathustra, is entitled "Incipit tragoedia," but Book V, significantly entitled "We fearless Ones," ends in its epilogue on a comic note with the "most malicious, gayest and most kobold-like laughter" (Schlechta 1954, 2:259). The entire book is then concluded by the "Songs of Prinz Vogelfrei," which are veritable spoudogeloia both in content and form. In this connection it is also important to recall that Nietzsche increasingly seemed to broaden the tragic standpoint assumed in his earlier works and came to see himself more and more as "philosophical satyr," as "Hanswurst" (Schlechta 1954, 2:592). He thus followed directly in the footsteps of the kynic Bion who, as we read in Diogenes Laertius, "clothed philosophy in the motley clothes of the hetairai" (Diogenes 1925, 4:52). There is, in addition, Nietzsche's decided cosmopolitanism and his identification with Europe as a spiritual unity. He thus assumed a stance toward the political communities of his time that very closely resembles the attitudes taken by the Kynic and Stoic philosophers toward the disintegrating poleis of their time. Like them, Nietzsche saw his striving as a human task that transcended national frontiers and involved itself with the work of creating spiritual order in isolation from contemporary culture. Isolation of oneself, the cultivation of hermitage and the attempt to attain an autarkic existence were for Nietzsche, as for the Kynics, the ascetic means for the attainment of a stable order of new values. We must, however, also consider Nietzsche's direct discussions of kynic philosophy as well as his direct references to it. On the whole, Nietzsche considers Kynism as a philosophy of decadence, hence not as the highest possible expression of the philosophic type, which is the tragic.19 The latter was replaced on the stage of world history by Socrates and his followers who, as Nietzsche believed, are the original decadents that destroyed tragic culture. Socrates and his followers, moreover, originated a first transvaluation of values under which "counternature" gradually assumed the force of instincts and initiated the reign of lies and priestly representatives of the lie. Socratism then achieved its full expression in Christianity which has since then dominated human evolution. The original transvaluation, effected by decadent weaklings who successfully turned their resentment against life into morality, has led since then to that total corruption of life in which all values are upside down. Thus decadence means that original truth has become falsehood, and original good has become evil.20 The above theme runs through the entire thinking of Nietzsche, linking his early works with his last publication, the Antichrist. Now, when Nietzsche speaks of wishing to effect a transvaluation of values, he means to indicate a second transvaluation which reverses the effects of the first transvaluation produced by Socrates and his fellow decadents. It appears that, in this context, he viewed the Kynics as having had a similar intention. They, too, although decadents like Nietzsche, were aware of the disease from which they suffered and hence conceived a philosophy as a therapy with which to cure mankind of the disease of Socratism. The kynic project of "paracharattein to nomisma" was for

. . . Nietzsche's Way to Cynicism

121

Nietzsche the first attempt by philosophers to cure themselves and to "retranslate man back into nature," by first effacing the decadent image of the first coinage produced on the original nature and then replacing it with the second coinage, more in accord with the original material. The Kynic is the prototype of the philosopher who rejects all established morality, refuses to feel ashamed of his animality, even sees in animality as well as in childhood a higher form of existence, and wishes to restore the body to its innocent enjoyment of itself in self-sufficiency and without mediation through possessions. He preaches a return to nature and opposes all worship of the concept; he is anti-metaphysical, does not believe in the immortality of the soul, but instead sees the goal of life in an unashamed and egoistic maintenance of animal existence. Moreover, the Kynic does not merely teach the transvaluation to others but assumes it as a lived maxim in the practical conduct of his life. His philosophical askesis is a form of convalescence in which the individual attempts to cure himself from the disease of decadence. It seems that this is the manner in which Nietzsche understood Kynism. Now, the philosophical project of "recoining the coin," of eliminating the "false" coinage of human nature established by decadence, and of replacing it with a "true" coinage more in accordance with the original material from which the coin is made, must necessarily encounter lack of comprehension and resistance in a culture of decadence. Just as the original Kynics were reviled and misunderstood, so Nietzsche also expects to be misunderstood and fought. Hence, his very frequent designations of himself and his thought as untimely. 21 Given the necessary conflict between a culture steeped in the disease of decadence and a philosophy that identified this culture as disease and wishes to cure mankind of it, the mask of the fool and clown is a very appropriate disguise for a philosopher to assume. And we see that mask presented very prominently in the figure of the madman and his lantern who proclaims the death of God. 22 This appears to be a direct allusion to the figure of Diogenes and his lantern. The parallels between Nietzsche and ancient Kynism established above could be enlarged considerably. A full discussion would go beyond the bounds of this essay. But two further points may be established in conclusion: one Kynic motive that figures very prominently in Nietzsche is the appeal to physiology. As an example of this one could mention the critique of Wagner's music in The Joyful Wisdom (Schlechta 1954, 2:241, [368]),23 on grounds of its negative effects on physiology, in particular on the human metabolism. Physiology, however, is appealed to in a number of other works. This recalls the kynic critique of culture as corrupting the innocent bodily pleasures by imposing on men a sense of shame for bodily functions. Nietzsche here also follows the Kynics in linking an increase in suffering to a progress in civilization based on the cultivation of the sense of shame. The antidote to this would be to reawaken the simple joys of an animal existence that can be happy in complete selfsufficiency and self-forgetting: hence Nietzsche's definition in "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historic" of the animal as a "perfect cynic" (Schlechta 1954, 1:212).

122

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Similarly, a very prominent metaphor in the works of Nietzsche is the metaphor of false coinage. Falsification of the coin is something with which Nietzsche very frequently reproaches Wagner, Socrates, Schopenhauer as well as Christianity. This recalls the kynic motive of "false coinage" associated with the figure of Diogenes.24 The parallels between Nietzsche and Kynism and the influence of kynic motives on his work are so numerous, that the designation of his philosophy as neo-kynism seems justified. One of the first critiques of the works of Nietzsche as a Kynism is generally negative. Thus, Nietzsche is seen as dangerous and hence worthy of rejection precisely because he is a Kynic. Here, however, I should like to raise the question of Nietzsche's Kynism from a reversed perspective: to what extent is Nietzsche's philosophy in fact an attempt to assume the kynic stance in the modern context? And secondly, can such a Kynism be successfully realized under the conditions of our time? In other words, to what extent has Nietzsche's project of "recoining the coin" been successful? These questions are implied by Nietzsche's own formulation in the second Untimely Consideration about the joys of forgetting the past and the burden of memory: "If a form of happiness, if a striving after new happiness is in any case something which retains the living in life and urges him to life, then no philosopher is more justified than the cynic: for the happiness of the animal as the perfect cynic is living proof for and justification of cynicism" (Schlechta 1954, 1:212). A more precise formulation of our question would then be: to what extent is Nietzsche's philosophy a Kynism in the above sense in that it induces a forgetting of decadence? Can it even do so, or are there internal contradictions which prevent his philosophy from realizing its aim? Let us begin by recalling to mind the basic elements of kynic philosophy. The reference by Nietzsche, in the sentence quoted, to animal happiness is at any rate squarely within the tradition of Kynism; for in their attempt to live a life kata physin, the ancient Kynics modelled themselves on the perceived imperturbability of animals. Thus, Diogenes is supposed to have attained his enlightenment upon observing the behavior of a mouse (Diogenes 1925, 6:22). The starting point for the founders of the kynic way, Antisthenes and Diogenes of Sinope, is the recognition that established laws, customs and institutions more or less imposed upon humans a life para physin, an unnatural or counternatural mode of existence. The original minting of the coin of human nature had established a way of life which necessarily rendered men unhappy by forcing them to feel ashamed and guilty about simple acts of bodily existence. Civilization had multiplied human wants and had replaced the pleasures and joys of merely being alive with a plethora of acts of striving to attain pleasures via the possession of objects. Kynic philosophy here implies a distinction between two kinds of pleasure: 1. A primary pleasure gratuitously associated with the mere movements of being alive; this pleasure cannot be striven for. 2. A secondary pleasure that must be striven for in the incorporation of objects; this latter pleasure is always an elusive substitute for the former.

. . . Nietzsche's Way to Cynicism

123

The more humans are removed from primary pleasures by civilization the more they need to strive for secondary pleasures, and the more uncertain lasting satisfaction becomes. Hence the kynic injunction against striving for pleasure, that is to say, secondary pleasure.25 Civilization para physin also implies the establishment of inequality of access to the satisfaction of wants. This inequality of access to pleasure in turn leads to the growth of resentment as a character trait in those that are short-changed by life. These latter no longer experience the primary pleasures of the body and cannot get enough access to secondary pleasures. Their resentment eats them up from within and renders the satisfaction of want even more elusive (Diogenes 1925, 6:5).26 The further the progress of civilization para physin, the greater is the amount of unhappiness. The founders of Kynism therefore defined the task of philosophy as a return to a life kata physin. And this required that the coin of human nature be reminted. This recoining requires first and foremost a renunciation of pleasureseeking and a reduction of wants to an existential minimum (Diogenes 1925,6:6, 3).27 Since, however, the established customs have become fortified into habits and into second nature, this false second nature needs to be erased by means of a continuous struggle and replaced by one that does not violate the life kata physin. This struggle involvesponos, which is both pain and effort. The ancient philosophers, including the Kynics, used the term askesis for this struggle to reshape secondary human nature. And askesis was believed to be a continuous effort, because no one can start with a clean slate. For the Kynics, the aim of askesis was the reawakening of the primary joys of mere physical existence involving exercise, both on the physical and psychic planes, in unbroken sensuality. It was an effort, so to speak, to recapture the "lost body."28 In all of this, it is important to realize that for the Kynics a life kata physin was inherently pleasurable and joyful, including it seems, a death kata physin. They experienced original nature as wholly pleasurable and considered suffering and pain to issue from an unnatural process of civilization. Moreover, they also believed that men had more or less ready access to this realm of joy, albeit with an effort of continuous vigilance and struggle, involving both mental and physical askesis.29 It is equally important to realize precisely where the suffering and unhappiness of humans originate, according to Kynism. Thus, worry, anxiety, resentment and disease as well as all the rest of the sufferings that afflict men do not have their source in the original physis of men but derive partly from a process of civilization, a second physis that is at variance with the rhythm of primary physis, and partly from the conflict between primary and secondary physis. The therapy profferred by philosophy consisted, then, in rendering that division and conflict conscious and in re-educating tastes and desires so as to establish a harmonious functioning of personality. The therapy itself might involve pain and suffering that are akin to that experienced by an athlete in training. The aim of the training envisaged by philosophy was the overcoming of physical suffering through the attainment of health based on avoidance of excess

124

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

in all things and maintenance of suppleness through gymnastics. Similarly, psychic suffering was to be overcome by the attainment of tranquillity of soul based on the maintenance of mental agility and control over negative emotions. Tranquillity of soul, moreover, did not signify the absence of emotion but the continuous and unshakeable presence of positive emotions such as joy. The kynic teachers frequently attempted to transmit their teaching by shocking men into an awareness of their unnatural modes of existence. In particular, they attempted to show forth the falseness of the sense of shame associated with the basic human animal functions of sexuality and metabolism. Hence their frequent rejection by established society and their designation as being shameless. It is this element of insistence on the animal foundation of human existence which has survived into modern culture in the form of cynicism. It is important to realize both the affinity of modern cynicism to ancient Kynism as well as the profound differences between them. Recent scholarship has traced the genesis of modern cynicism and has shown how cynicism is an inverted version of ancient Kynism used not in the service of liberation but in the service of continual repression.30 The distinction between ancient Kynism and modern cynicism is particularly relevant to a consideration of Nietzsche's philosophy as a neokynism. In Nietzsche's work the separation between the two terms is not yet made, and much of Nietzsche's attack on modern culture is afflicted by the terrible ambiguity of being both kynic and cynical. Indeed, I shall here argue that Nietzsche does not fully achieve a kynic position but remains partially caught in the stance of modern cynicism. There is a fundamental ambiguity that runs through his entire work, of which the phrase "will to power" is a telling indication. Nietzsche does succeed in rethinking important elements of kynic philosophy, more perhaps than anyone else in the history of philosophy, but he remains caught within the ethos of a culture based on domination and exploitation which he translates back, as ineffable constituents, into the nature of things. Hence his kynic return to fundamentals ultimately remains tied to a cynical denial of the liberating potential contained in his philosophy. The first phase of his "second life," namely the use of his philosophy by European imperialists as a justifying theory, is well grounded in his work. It cannot entirely be ascribed to the nefarious influence of his sister.31 Many elements of his thinking are exactly appropriate to the usages which the various proponents of "new orders" have found in it. Nietzsche therefore neither succeeded in curing himself of the disease of contemporary culture which he so admirably diagnosed and criticized, and from which he suffered so deeply, nor does his philosophy offer a convincing form of therapy to complement its diagnosis. The transvaluation suggested by him would not be a real change in the human condition but would preserve some of the worst features of human history under a different sign and as sanctioned by the very nature of things. Before his philosophy can become therapy, either personally or politically, the cynical elements in it have to be disengaged from the kynic elements. The latter aspects, the truly kynic ones, would indeed provide a therapy for the spiritual disorder presently afflicting large portions of humankind.

. . . Nietzsche's Way to Cynicism

125

Let me use as an example of Nietzsche's cynicism his experience of nature. Ancient Kynism, like most other schools of ancient philosophy, was based on the fundamental distinction between a life kata physin and a life para physin. Philosophy was conceived as a way of guiding souls toward a life kata physin, on the supposition that only in this manner was it possible for humans to be happy. This belief further implied the theory that suffering devolved upon humans from a life para physin. In short: kataphysin was pleasurable and joyful, para physin was painful and full of suffering. One further expression of the above distinction was the distinction between health and disease. And the philosopher was conceived to be analogous to the physician whose task was the maintenance or restoration of health.32 Now we find the same distinction in Nietzsche's works in the conceptual distinction between "Natur" and "Widernatur." Thus in Ecce Homo he considers his philosophy as an attempt "against two millenia of counternature and scorn for man" (Schlechta 1954, 2:1111). Similarly, Christianity is frequently designated as "Widernatur" that has become instinctual. The natural is often identified with the instinctual, and decadence is defined as a weakening and distortion of instincts, a degeneration of instincts (Schlechta 1954, 2:1106, 1109).33 Moreover, the entire analysis of resentment is phrased in terms of the contrast between disease and health. Thus, disease is characterized as a "kind of resentment itself" (Schlechta 1954, 2:1077) and resentment is seen as that which one should avoid at all costs when ill, but which one finds difficult to avoid because it is one's natural inclination in illness (Schlechta 1954, 2:1077) to feel resentment. The above insight we also find in kynic philosophy.34 In the same train of thought, Nietzsche estimates his own interminable illnesses as constituting a positive force that guided him to the depths of his being and which for that reason he would not have missed. This "biopositivity"35 of disease as a stimulus to heightened intelligence we also find prefigured in the kynic concept oiponos as the necessary suffering a convalescent must undergo in order to rid himself of a life para physin. Despite the similarity between Nietzsche's philosophy and ancient Kynism stated above, it appears that Nietzsche's experience of nature and the natural was fundamentally different. Nothing is more revealing in this regard than the title of one of Nietzsche's compositions dating from the year 1861 when he was barely 17:"Schmerzistder Grundtonder Natur"(Janz 1979, 1:89-91). Similarly, the only composition that Nietzsche published and the text of which he jointly authored with Lou-Andreas Salome contains the line: "Hast du kein Gliick mehr iibrig mir zu geben, wohlan! noch hast du deine Pein. . . ."36 It appears thus, that the fundamental experience of nature in the life of Nietzsche was pain, a very marked difference from the experience of the kynics of the life kata physin as inherently pleasurable and joyful. Indeed, the conception of pain and suffering as constituting the heart of reality and of disgust (Ekel) at the enormity of suffering is central to the thought of Nietzsche. It is a conception which he held throughout his life and without which his notions of the tragic, the ideas of the

126

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

affirmation of life despite pain, and of amorfati, of pain as the great liberator of the spirit as well as his re-definition of pleasure as a series of painful stimuli (KH, 1968, 693-702) would not make sense. His entire philosophy is in a way an attempt to come to terms with the possibility of a most fundamental pessimism, a pessimistic perspective so dark that the Satyr Silenus' wisdom, as related in Sophocles' statement that "Nothing surpasses not being born" (Sophocles 1939, 1224), appears as an accurate description of reality. Throughout his life, Nietzsche struggled to affirm existence joyfully, including an affirmation of the most intense pain and suffering, despite this pessimistic belief and despite the almost continuous presence for him of intense pain. I believe that this affirmation is at the furthest remove from the intention of the founders of Kynism. Thus Nietzsche believed that an investigation of reality conducted without illusions and with complete truthfulness revealed a state of affairs so horrible that life itself became unbearable. Hence, men had to construct for themselves illusory worlds of grand purposes and intelligent designs in nature merely to be able to bear a pointless existence. Life itself from this perspective comes to be viewed as the foremost disease; since life, however, does not wish men to draw the logical conclusion and end the disease of life by committing suicide, it causes men through their faculty of phantasy to construct dream worlds of "beautiful seeming." This view of life as a disease was so ingrained in Nietzsche that he even interpreted two famous death episodes from the lives of ancient philosophers in terms of this perspective. Thus the last request of Socrates to his friends, at the end of the Platonic Phaedo, not to forget to tell his wife to sacrifice a cock to the God Asklepius is seen by Nietzsche to represent the ultimate irony: with this request Socrates revealed that he too was a pessimist who realized that life was a disease and with this wish was being grateful to the God of Healing for finally ridding him of life.37 Nietzsche was so convinced of the veracity of his vision that he believed that this was the only true explanation of the event when, in fact, another explanation which is more in tune with the rest of Platonic teaching is equally plausible.38 Similarly, the story about the death of Antisthenes in Diogenes Laertius is interpreted in like manner. Antisthenes, who suffered great pain on his deathbed, supposedly asked someone to rid him of this pain (ponos). When Diogenes, his pupil, replied by showing him a dagger as a means of freedom from ponos, Antisthenes rejoined that he wished to be liberated from pain and not from life.39 Now, Nietzsche was so convinced of the truth of his vision that he believed that Diogenes in this episode expressed the same idea by his action and that Antisthenes merely did not have the courage of his convictions.40 This is said despite clear textual evidence to the contrary; there is no support whatsoever for the belief that Diogenes or Antisthenes or any other Kynic considered life a disease from which one should be freed, the sooner the better. It should be clear that with a view of this kind, it is impossible to be among those philosophers who, like Democritus as well as the Kynics, approach life

. . . Nietzsche's Way to Cynicism

127

laughingly. Nietzsche is thus much more to be accounted a "crying philosopher" in the manner of Heraclitus. It would seem impossible to be among the Kynics with such a dark vision of reality. And Nietzsche's frequent assertions that he is able to laugh despite the horror of life, and his assumption of the mask of comedy, are unconvincing and forced. His humour is unconvincing even as a species of "gallows humour" and reveals more of the cynic than the Kynic.41 It is as unconvincing in him as the pretence found throughout his writings that he is an expert in feminine psychology and a superb connoisseur of the nature of woman. We may ask what events shaped Nietzsche's experience of life and nature so that he came to see them through the mask of Dionysos-Zagreus, the destroyer God who revels in cruelty and destruction. First and foremost we may list here as explanations the enormous and almost continual suffering that Nietzsche experienced throughout his life. It is difficult to find another philosopher whose biography is so entirely a Passion as that of Nietzsche; his thought is indeed a pathetos logos. In this aspect, his character assumes the proportions of that of a saviour (Janz 1979, 3:31-3).42 Nietzsche's suffering, however, had a focal point of which he was very much aware and which he also diagnosed as constituting a general disease of European culture. The core of suffering of this last disciple of Dionysus concerned hiseros, or rather his eros manque. Indeed, one writer referred to Nietzsche, aptly, as "Dionysus without eros."43 A statement very revealing in this regard occurs in the fragment of a tragedy about Empedocles dating from the year 1870/71. This fragment is interesting also for the reason that it contains in germ several key ideas that only later found their elaboration in the works of his maturity. Among these are the ideas that both pity and fear should be avoided, that religion and art are ways of constructing domains of illusion by which men hide the infinity of the world's sorrow from themselves so as to bear life, and that science is the stimulus by which art and religion are unveiled as illusions. But the idea that 1 wish to emphasize here is that, as sketched in the second act of the projected drama, nature, whose infinite sorrow is revealed through Dionysiac art, is identified with woman: "Das Weib als die Natur" (Nietzsche 1920, 3:261). As we know from Nietzsche's biography, his relations with women were the domain of his most intense suffering. 44 Nietzsche never experienced the redeeming power of the love of a woman and thus remained imprisoned within his own psyche. He made numerous attempts to escape from his prison that became more and more desperate, the more advanced his state of enforced isolation became. This inability to find his soul mate then produced in him this very odd mixture of deep fear, admiration, longing and thorough misunderstanding. The sorry facts of Nietzsche's life in this regard help to explain his entire attitude toward suffering and his readiness to identify suffering as the deepest stratum of reality, as its foundation, as it were. Other philosophies also had considered suffering together with joy as an ineluctable part of reality. Thus, the idea of the inevitability of suffering in the uninstructed life is contained in the kynic notion oiponos; the Kynic Antisthenes even enjoined his followers

128

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

to welcome theponos that life brought them as an opportunity for creativity and spiritual development. Spiritual development, moreover, required painful efforts (Diogenes 1925, 6:11,12). It should be emphasized here, however, that Nietzsche's psycho-pathology was not merely his own personal disorder, but may be considered as his personal expression of part of the general disease afflicting Christian culture. This disorder of Christian culture has taken the form of hostility toward pleasure, especially the pleasure of sensuality. It finds its most virulent expression in those profound and widespread distortions of eros in which eros becomes linked to suffering and cruelty, inflicted both on oneself, as well as on others. A telling indication of this peculiar "cultivation" of eros is to be found in the frequent portrayals of cruelty in Christian art. Indeed, one of the central symbols of Christianity is an act of torture. Apparently, one does not find this emphasis on cruelty in the art of other cultures and other religions. Nietzsche himself was aware of this disease of the Christian self, as we can see from one of his dicta in Jenseits von Gut und Bose: "Christianity gave Eros poison to drink—he did not die from it, but degenerated into vice" (Schlechta 1954, 2:639). Nietzsche's pessimistic attitude toward life and nature and his affirmations of cruelty, endowing it with philosophical dignity, are therefore not merely his personal idiosyncracies. In these pathological traits of his character he was strikingly and emphatically Christian. Should any one object at this point, that the above train of thought is based on illegitimate psychologizing, he should be reminded that Nietzsche himself believed that writing, especially among great philosophers, is always an "involuntary biography of soul." No one has insisted more strongly than has Nietzsche on the connection between a person's thinking and his neuroses, on the link between sickness and vision. The sections of Ecce Homo entitled "Why I am so wise," and "Why I am so clever," both imply that sickness is conducive to introspection and that the sick person knows better what he lacks than the healthy one knows what he has. An even more instructive philosophical parallel to Nietzsche's insistence on suffering we find in the Buddhist notion that all existence is dukkha. This term, however, is usually translated by the wrong term "suffering," when it really also connotes the ideas of impermanence, transience, insubstantiality as well as pleasure and joy. 45 But both the Kynics and the Buddha taught that suffering, although infinitely reproducing itself, can and should be transcended. Neither taught that men need embrace and affirm their sufferings. No one is required by any kind of intention of achieving high aims, of becoming a great man or even an overman, to affirm, nay, even seek his suffering. But the seeking of suffering is precisely what Nietzsche suggests. He suggests not only that suffering needs to be sought and affirmed but also, what is more, that the cruel infliction of suffering on others is necessary to the attainment of high aims. Thus he believes that oppression, utter cruelty toward the weak, the enslavement of the many, as well as torture, are necessary for the breeding of the higher types. 46 It is one thing to say that, as life is, all sentient beings are prone to

. . . Nietzsche's Way to Cynicism

129

suffer, but it is quite another thing to promote suffering actively, either in oneself or in others (Schiitte 1984, 133-61).47 Neither Kynism nor Buddhism saw the aim of human striving to lie in promoting suffering, but rather to consist in the reduction of the suffering of all sentient beings. One wonders if Nietzsche would have gone as far as he did in embracing the undercurrent of sado-masochism in European culture, if his own suffering, particularly in regard to eros, had not been so hopeless. Indeed, his frequent active promotion of suffering and cruelty seems to owe much to this dark side of European culture, a possibility of existence made real to him by his inability to extricate himself from his masochism (Schiitte 1984, 351-61). In my judgment then, it has to be recognized that much of Nietzsche's philosophy is an expression of the very disease, the "pneumapathology" of European culture, which he so trenchantly diagnosed but from which he was unable to cure himself. While he diagnoses correctly and points the way toward a cure, he also in many ways proposes methods that would perpetuate the disease. Following him completely would mean learning to love being ill, and this not in the sense of an illness that is a temporary part of convalescence in the manner of a cleansing experience, but more profoundly in the sense of an eternal recurrence of the sado-masochistic character as the exemplary expression of contemporary spiritual disorder. What makes Nietzsche so important as a philosopher is the fact that he understood his own culture so well and that he was able to diagnose the spiritual disorder that underlies it. We have seen that one part of this spiritual disorder is the experience of nature as horribly painful. This experience is not peculiar to Nietzsche but constitutes, in myjudgement, an important element of the attitude that underlies the technological and scientific domination of nature. It is as if scientific practices as currently defined were based on the tacit belief that nature cannot be trusted, that it has nothing but unhappiness in store for us and that, hence, we must subdue it completely and, if possible, replace it with a second nature entirely of our making. This second nature should then be more amenable to our striving for happiness, defined as the absence of pain. The second component, hence, of the modern attitude toward primary nature, linked closely with the experience of it as horror, is one of unmitigated hubris. Paradoxically, however, the consistent maintenance of the stance of hubris requires that primary nature be seen both as horrible and as a set of givens, meaningless in themselves and ready to be exploited and violated by man in any manner he chooses. Thus, nature is interpreted both as conferring meaning by being painful and as meaningless by being merely particles moving randomly in the void. These contradictory interpretations are to be found side by side in a variety of modern structures of thought, as for example, in the ideology of Social Darwinism. Similarly, it appears as if modern men had invented science motivated by a mistrust of nature, calumniating it first as horrible and painful, and then misinterpreting it as being matter infinitely pliable to the exercise of human willing. We find both of these attitudes toward nature also in Nietzsche. And paradoxically, the rejection of sense in nature and the imputation to it of cruelty are to be found alongside a feeling for the wonderful healing powers of

130

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

nature. Thus Nietzsche contrasts the knowledge that, following Goethe, we all have of nature as the supreme palliative for our souls with the hubristic attitude toward nature implied by science.48 He even writes against the "calumniators of nature" and he is aware of the cynicism with which advanced stages of nihilism consider nature. 49 He is aware of the tendency of nihilistic artists to view nature as well as history cynically, to see in both the horror of a complete absence of goodness and justice. Simultaneously he hopes that such nihilistic perspectives and such cynicism will be overcome in the future by the culture created from the new values that are the result of the transvaluation initiated by him. Yet, he is unable to translate his cynicism into a true Kynism, and he remains at a level at which it is impossible to appreciate the call of ancient philosophers to lead a life kataphysin. His final word in this respect seems to be his critique of the Stoic life kata physin in aphorism nine of Beyond Good and Evil: "You wish to live in accordance with nature? Oh you noble Stoics, what deception of words! Imagine a being, such as is nature, squandering without measure, indifferent without measure, without purposes and without consideration; without pity and justice; fertile, barren and uncertain at the same time; think of indifference itself as a power, how could you live in accordance with this indifference?" (Schlechta 1954, 2:572-3)

It can be said, then, that the contradictory attitudes toward nature to be found in Nietzsche are a reflection of the vacillation in his thinking between a cynical affirmation of nihilism and a kynic recreation of a life kata physin. Indeed, in this vacillation Nietzsche's thinking may be more timely than he would wish; for it is an open question whether our culture as a whole with its cynical affirmations of nihilism in all of its forms will be able to recapture the kynic core of its cynicism, and whether mankind will thus achieve the transvaluation of values that will restore the rhythm of its life to the great rhythm of nature. The existence of a human being of the type of Nietzsche raises the most serious questions about the state of our culture. A culture has to be very deeply corrupted to make possible such an existence. The attempt by this most valiant and most suffering of philosophical spirits to live the crisis of our times to its terrifying conclusions within himself deserves our deep admiration. Yet, it is by no means certain that Nietzsche in achieving the pinnacle of nihilism has truly advanced beyond it, or that his existential experiments can provide us with the materials by which to reorder our souls and our communities. Endnotes 1. My paper as a whole follows the distinction between ancient kynism and modern cynicism drawn in both Peter Sloterdijk 1983, passim; and Heinrich Niehues-Probsting, Der Kynismus des Diogenes undder Begriffdes Zynismus, especially 195-214, 243-306. See above, pp. 3-4, 1415. 2. Cf. the statement in Ecce Homo in which Nietzsche characterizes his writings as "the highest that can be achieved on earth, namely cynicism," in Schlechta 1954, 2:1102 (3). Cf. also the statements in Jenseits von Gut und Bose, in Schlechta 1954, 2:592 (26) and in a letter to Peter Cast in Schlechta 1954, 3:1269. See also the statement in the preface to the Wille zur Macht: "great things demand that one keep silent about them or that one speak of them greatly, that is, cynically and with innocence," CM 1967, VIII:271.

. . . Nietzsche's Way to Cynicism

131

3. For the stylistic influence of the ancient Kynics on Nietzsche see Niehues-Probsting, Der Kynismus, 250-278. 4. Chief among these concepts and figures is the character of the man with a light in search of truth, in Der Wanderer und sein Schatten, inSchlechta 1954, 1:884(18); and "Der tolle Mensch" in Z)/e Frohliche Wissenschaft, 2:126-128 (125). See also the notion of the "philosophical dog" in Der Fall Wagner, Nachschrift, 2:931 and in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 1:1008. 5. A more literal rendition of the Greek designation for the root metaphor of Kynism, "paracharattein to nomisma." See note 24 below, for the very frequent allusions to "false coinage" in Nietzsche, as well as the association of "false coinage" with the figure of Diogenes. Diogenes 1925,6:20-21. 6. It seems established beyond a doubt that Nietzsche's main project of achieving a re-valuation of values is a continuation of the kynic project of the same name. Cf. Curt PaulJanz(1979), 2:236. 7. See the statement in Jenseits von Gut und Bo'se that "every great philosophy is the confession of its author . . .", Schlechta (1954), 2:571 (6), as well as Nietzsche's frequent excoriations of modern school philosophy. See also the statement that the purpose of philosophizing was not "truth, . . . but health, future, growth, power, life . . .", in the preface to Die Frohliche Wissenschaft, 2:12. 8. On the idea that philosophy in antiquity was a form of "spiritual exercise" see Pierre Hadot, Exercices Spirituels et Philosophic Antique (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1981). It appears that Nietzsche's conception of philosophy touches upon the ancient understanding, but does not include its full practical range. Nietzsche still thinks of philosophy too intellectually and as confined to the mental. 9. The phrase corps perdu appears to derive from Antonin Artaud; it describes very aptly the personal problem of Nietzsche as well as a part of the cultural disease which he diagnosed. 10. See also Niehues-Probsting, Der Kynismus, 184-305. 1 1 . CM 1967, II, 1:75-245. 12. The second of Nietzsche's essays on Diogenes Laertius has seven pages that are devoted to the kynic Menippos, a personage important also for his influence on Nietzsche's stylistic mixture of the tragic and the comic. (CM 1967, II, 1:233-41). 13. The Kynics were for Nietzsche a part of the Socratic counter-movement to decadence; they were distinguished from Plato by their greater vitality, honesty and by being closer to animality. Cf. Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historic, and Die Philosophic im tragischen Zeitalter, as well as Nachlass; in Schlechta 1954, 1:212; 3:358, 735. 14. The sophists are praised for being great realists and for having first exposed the "higher swindle" of morality. 15. Cf. Ludwig Stein, Friedrich Nietzsche's Weltanschauung undihre Gefahren (Berlin: 1893), who uses the term cynic as a reproach. Stein also suggested the term "neo-cynicism" for Nietzsche's philosophy. 16. The following section is indebted to Niehues-Probsting, Der Kynismus, 250-278. 17. Cf. Die Geburt der Tragodie, Schlechta 1954, 1:80. 18. Letter to Jakob Burckhardt, dated January 6, 1889. 19. Cf. Nietzsche's characterization of himself as "the first tragic philosopher . . . who has simply become . . . the eternal joy of becoming" in Ecce Homo, Schlechta 1954, 2:1110. 20. Cf. the central thesis of the Genealogie der Moral, as well as the description of the Pauline inversions of Christ's teachings in Der Antichrist. 21. On the untimeliness of Nietzsche see Eric Blondel, Nietzsche, le corps et la culture (Paris: P.U.F., 1986), 14-15. 22. Die Frohliche Wissenschaft, 125; Schlechta 1954, 2:126-8. 23. This aphorism is significantly entitled: "The Cynic speaks." 24. Suffice it to mention here three references to "false coinage" from Der Antichrist, Schlechta 1954, 2:1199 (38), 1204 (42), and 1206 (44): "All concepts of the church are recognized for what they are, namely the most wicked false coinage possible for the sake of devaluing nature and natural values," and "Paul . . . this falsifier of coins out of hatred"; and "the Bible this false coinage of words and gestures presented as art." 25. Diogenes 1925,6:3. 26. Antisthenes seems to have been the first philosopher to have made envy and resentment a topic for discussion and a subject involved in the ponos of Kynic askesis. 27. Diogenes 1925, 4:6, 3. Autarkeia was preached chiefly by the Kynics and their successors, the Stoics. 28. The recapture of the body was of the foremost importance for Nietzsche. See Eric Blondel, Nietzsche, le corps et la culture, 275-319.

132

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

29. For the twofold askesis of the Kynics, involving mental and physical exercises, see Diogenes 1925, 6:70. 30. Cf. in particular Peter Sloterdijk 1983, see note 1 above. 31. For a discussion of the internal contradictions in Nietzsche's "Dionysian" consciousness that prevented him from fully transcending nihilism, see Ophelia Schiitte 1984, especially 133-160, 189-193. Schiitte stresses Nietzsche's contradiction between an "intended affirmation of life and his reactionary and nihilistic politics," 188. 32. Cf. Diogenes 1925, 4: 70. 33. Cf. also the terms "Instinktabirrungen" versus "Instinktsicherheit". 34. Cf. the statement attributed to Antisthenes that "just as iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious are consumed by their own character." Diogenes 1925, 6:5. 35. On the very important role that disease played in Nietzsche's life as a stimulant to creativity, see Curt Paul Janz 1979, 2:9-31. Janz himself adopts the concepts "bionegativity" and "biopositivity" from Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum and Wolfram Kurth, Genie, Irrsinn und Ruhm (Basel: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, 1961), 401. 36. Cited by Nietzsche when discussing Zarathustra in Ecce Homo, Schlechta 1954, 2:1129. 37. Discussed in Die Frohliche Wissenschaft, 340, and in Gotzenda'mmerung 12, both in Schlechta 1954, 2:201-2, 955. Cf. the discussion of Nietzsche's relation to Socrates in Pierre Hadot, Exercices, 82-90. 38. Cf. Hadot, Exercices, 82-90. 39. Cf. Diogenes 1925,6:18. 40. CM 1967,11:196. 41. Cf. the place of laughter in desperation in the days of Nietzsche's breakdown, Curt Paul Janz 1979, 3:24. 42. Nietzsche's identification with Dionysus-Zagreus was especially pronounced in the days in which he wrote the Wahnzettel and the famous letter to Burckhardt. He was undoubtedly aware that Soter, saviour, was one of the cognomina of Dionysos. 43. Cf. the very illuminating study of Nietzsche's relationships to women by Henry Walter Brann, Nietzsche und die Frauen (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, Herbert Grundmann, 1978). The phrase cited is one of the chapter titles in the book. See especially 107-120. 44. Cf. Brann, Nietzsche und die Frauen, passim. 45. For a very illuminating comparison of Nietzsche's philosophy with Buddhism see Freny Mistry, Nietzsche and Buddhism (New York/Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), especially 166-197 on the transfiguration of suffering. But Mistry does not stress the differences between Nietzsche and the Buddha enough, especially as regards suffering. 46. Cf. Schiitte 1984, 133-61. See also the very perceptive biography of Nietzsche that shows the connections between his pathologies and his philosophy by Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche. A Critical Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980). 47. Cf. also Hayman, Nietzsche, 351-361. 48. See Human, Ail-too-Human, The Gay Science, Genealogy, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, and Nachlass; all in Schlechta 1954, 1:435; 2:172, 854; 3:232, 617. 49. See The Gay Science and Nachlass, in Schlechta 1954, 2:172-3; 3:617.

"Nihilism: 'Thus Speaks Physiology'" Richard S. G. Brown

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche makes the rather categorical claim: ". . . the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body" (part one, 4). In a work which is replete with exaggeration couched in poetic, figurative, and metaphoric language, one fact might easily be overlooked. Nietzsche is making this claim literally and takes this claim very seriously: "Body am I entirely." Within the context of Zarathustra, a book which is addressed to "all or no one," Nietzsche attempts to persuade those few who are capable of actualizing their potential for self-mastery, for self-overcoming, to give the earth a human meaning. However, those few who might be capable, who might have the necessary capacity to act, are able to give the earth a human meaning literally only in virtue of their bodies. Listen rather, my brother, to the voice of the healthy body: that is a more honest and purer voice. More honestly and purely speaks the healthy body that is perfect and perpendicular: and it speaks of the meaning of the earth. 1 (Zarathustra, part 2, chapter 3) Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning. (Zarathustra, part 1, chapter 22, sec. 2) Even as early as Dawn, Nietzsche claimed that our perspectives could be reduced to our physiology: ". . . our moral judgments and valuations are only images and fantasies concerning physiological processes unknown to us, a kind of habitual language to describe certain nervous irritations" (Dawn 119; emphasis mine). At the time of Dawn, Nietzsche was impressed by man's "inner machinery" (129), his "subtle and complicated mechanism" (22), the "machine about which we know so little" (86). Given the perceived relationship between man's unknown physiology and the values which we hold, Nietzsche's later references to physiology, especially in relation to values, must be regarded as his provocative call to come to know the underlying physiological causes for our valuations. "With knowledge, the body purifies itself; making experiments with knowledge, it elevates itself; in the lover of knowledge all instincts become holy . . . " (Zarathustra, part 1, chapter 22, sec 2); ". . . life itself forces us to posit values; life itself values through us when we posit values" (Twilight of the Idols, chapter 6, "Morality as Anti-Nature", sec. 5). Nietzsche is advocating a "physiology of perspective," a "perspective theory of affects" (Will to Power, 462).2 In this sense, the body literally speaks insofar as our values are nothing but functional equivalents for our underlying physiology, the health or sickness, the wealth or impoverishment of our bodies. However, in spite of the fact that physiology dictates perspective, physiology must itself be regarded as just one of the many perspectives from which Nietzsche understands the human enterprise. It is, nevertheless, a perspective from which Nietzsche 133

134

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

speaks with considerable familiarity and acumen. He was not a mere dabbler in matters physiological. In light of the above remarks, this paper has set before it a twofold task: on the one hand, to investigate the relationship between physiology and valuation in Nietzsche's thought in general, focusing exclusively on moral valuations and, on the other hand, to investigate the relationship between physiology and nihilism by viewing nihilism specifically as merely a subclass of what Nietzsche refers to as "physiological valuations."3 It is undoubtedly a truism to state that Nietzsche is particularly interested in the origin of our moral values. He claims, for example, that our coming to know the origin of our moral values is considered to be "... a question of the very first rank because it is crucial for the future of humanity" (Ecce Homo, chapter 10 ["Dawn"], sec. 2). Nietzsche blames our ignorance, or our error based on ignorance, concerning the origin of our moral values not only for the ills which befell him personally in the course of his own life (see Ecce Homo, chapter 5 ["Why I am so Clever"], sec. 2, for example) but, more importantly perhaps, for the universal ills of mankind as well: "Error is the most expensive luxury that man can permit himself; and if the error happens to be a physiological error, then it is perilous to life" (Will to Power, 454). However, before we can gain a reasonable purchase on the relationship between physiology and the origin of our moral values, it is necessary to establish precisely what Nietzsche himself understands not only by the term "morality" but also by ". . . the meaning of the act of evaluation itself?" (Will to Power, 254). Nietzsche offers a very straightforward definition of "morality" in Ecce Homo: "Definition of morality: Morality—the idiosyncrasy of decadents, with the ulterior motive of revenging oneself against life—successfully. I attach value to this definition" (chapter 17, ["Why I am a Destiny"], sec. 7). At the same time, Nietzsche's definition of "moral evaluation" also provides the locus for physiology and its relationship to moral values: ". . . moral evaluation is an exegesis, a way of interpreting. The exegesis itself is a symptom of certain physiological conditions, likewise of a particular spiritual level of prevalent judgments: Who interprets?—Our affects" (Will to Power, 254). The general principle which lies behind these particular passages can be found throughout Nietzsche's published works. As we shall see, it has two different formulations, the second formulation standing in an inverse relation to the first. The first formulation, in nuce, is simply Nietzsche's claim that ". . . moralities are also merely sign language of the affects" (Beyond Good and Evil, 187), or to express it in another way: "Morality is merely sign-language, mere symptomatology . . .""(Twilight, chapter 8 ["The 'Improvers' of Mankind"], sec. 1).

Both Nietzsche's definitions of "morality" and "moral evaluation" reflect the important link which he believes to exist between morality (or specifically the values of morality) and physiological idiosyncrasy. Nietzsche was attempting ". . . to understand moral judgments as symptoms and sign languages which betray the processes of physiological prosperity or failure . . ." (Will to Power,

"Nihilism: 'Thus Speaks Physiology'"

135

258). Moral value judgments, insofar as they successfully take revenge on life, betray just this process of physiological failure. By the same token, it would appear at first glance that some species of moral value judgment must betray physiological success. . . . could one reduce the value of an action to physiological values: whether it is the expression of a complete or an inhibited life?—It may be that its biological value is expressed in this—. (Will to Power, 291)

If we were to take Nietzsche's first formulation of this physiological principle seriously, it would mean that our moral valuations are simply surface values, mere symptoms or signs which map or reflect some deeper, underlying physiological state of affairs. For this reason, Nietzsche may claim that ". . . moral values are only apparent values compared with physiological values" ( Will to Power, 710; emphasis mine). We are aware, for the most part, only of the moral values or symptoms appearing on our moral skin while we are essentially ignorant of the underlying physiological state of affairs, wherein the true origin of our "moral idiosyncrasy" is to be found. Given this principle, Nietzsche can seriously ask, "What is the meaning of the moral idiosyncrasy?—I mean in a psychological sense, also in a physiological sense . . ." (Will to Power, 270; emphasis mine). Although Nietzsche does make the occasional reference to physiology in a positive way, for example, by referring to "physiological purification and strengthening" and "physiological well-being," most of his references to physiology are negative and reflect the so-called moral idiosyncrasy, using the term "moral" in this expression as Nietzsche usually does, that is, pejoratively. This is the case because, strictly speaking, "morality" entails physiological failure, decadence, fatigue, and inhibition. Thus, Nietzsche speaks about "physiological exhaustion," "physiological degeneration," "physiological fatigue," "physiological error," "physiological confusions," "physiological decadence," "physiological depression," physiological weakness," "physiological defeat," the "physiologically deformed and deranged," the "physiologically askew," the "physiologically inhibited," "physiological indisposition," "physiological depravity," "physiological susceptibility to suggestion," "physiological states of distress," the "physiological contradiction" of modern man, and even the "physiological overexcitability" which pertains to everything decadent.4 Nietzsche offers several examples of cashing in the apparent surface values or symptoms of morality for their underlying, negative physiological counterpart for ". . . almost everything which unphilosophical crudity designates by the name 'vice' is merely this physiological incapacity not to react. . ." (Twilight, chapter 9 ["What the Germans Lack"], sec. 6). Similarly, "Every error, of whatever kind, is a consequence of degeneration of instinct, disintegration of will; one has thereby virtually defined the bad. Everything good is instinct . . . " (Twilight, chapter 7 ["Four Great Errors"], sec. 2).5 At this point, I hope that it is easier to understand what Nietzsche might have had in mind when he referred to "physiologists of morality" (Beyond Good and

136

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Evil, 26), or advocated a "proper physio-psychology" (Beyond Good and Evil, 23), or, for that matter, identified himself as a "physiologist" (Twilight, chapter 10 ["Expeditions of an Untimely Man"], sec. 43). It is perhaps not surprising that in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche confessed that he was engrossed in the study of physiology at the time he was writing Human, All too Human: "A truly burning thirst took hold of me: henceforth I really pursued nothing more than physiology, medicine, and natural sciences" (chapter 7 ["Human, All too Human"], sec. 3).6 With this in mind, we can understand why Nietzsche regarded ". . . the body and physiology [as] the starting point: why? . . . (Will to Power, 492): it is precisely in the body, in human physiology, that we find the origin of all". . . physiological valuations and racial conditions" (Beyond Good and Evil, 20), that is, ". . . physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life" (Beyond Good and Evil, 3); indeed, the "physiological capacity for life"(O« the Genealogy of Morals, book 3, sec. 11); emphasis mine). Following this particular line of reasoning, Nietzsche appears to be the precursor of yet another modern thinker, namely, the sociobiologist, Edward O. Wilson. Wilson advocates what he calls a "biology of ethics." According to Wilson, . . . innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political practice flow.7 Wilson's biology of ethics is his attempt to translate man back into nature; it appears to have a general similarity to Nietzsche's attempt to do the same thing by means of a proper physio-psychology. For according to Nietzsche, . . . man is, relatively speaking, the most unsuccessful animal, the sickliest, the one most dangerously strayed from its instincts—with all that, to be sure, the most interesting]—As regards the animals, Descartes was the first who, with a boldness worthy of reverence, ventured to think of the animal as a machine: our whole science of physiology is devoted to proving this proposition. Nor, logically, do we exclude man, as even Descartes did: our knowledge of man today is real knowledge precisely to the extent that it is knowledge of him as machine. (The Antichrist, 14) The second formulation of Nietzsche's physiological principle appears to be a simple corollary of the first but it would be closer to the truth if we understood it to be the first principle albeit running in the opposite direction. In other words, in the first formulation, Nietzsche argues that our surface values (morality) can be read as a sign language of the underlying affects or physiological state of affairs in the herd, race, or individual holding these particular values. In the second formulation, however, Nietzsche claims that it is possible to read from the physiological needs or existential parameters of a herd, race, or individual to their respective values, that is, to be actually in a position to predict the morality or moral values that should be a reflection of the underlying physiological needs. The clearest statement of this second formulation is in Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

"Nihilism: Thus Speaks Physiology'"

137

"A Thousand and One Goals:" "Verily, my brothers, once you have recognized the need and land and sky and neighbour of a people, you may also guess the law of their overcomings, and why they climb to their hope on this ladder" (part 1, chapter 15). Not only are there two formulations of this physiological principle but Nietzsche seems to think that the second formulation precedes the first in importance. The philosopher qua physiologist should move primarily from underlying physiology to surface value and not the other way around. . . . it is equally necessary to engage the interest of physiologists and doctors in these problems (of the value of existing evaluations). . . . Indeed, every table of values, every "thou shalt" known to history or ethnology, requires first a physiological investigation and interpretation, rather than a psychological one; and every one of them needs a critique on the part of medical science. The question: what is the value of this or that table of values and "morals?" should be viewed from the most divers perspectives; for the problem "value for what?" cannot be examined too subtly. (On the Genealogy of Morals, book 1, sec. 17).

Nietzsche has already said that it is "crucial to the future of humanity" to come to recognize the origin of our moral values. A "proper physio-psychology" does not descend into the depths beginning with the surface values. This would constitute the mode of the first formulation of the physiological principle. But given the second formulation, and given that Nietzsche took it even more seriously than the first, it is even more crucial for the future of humanity to address the problem of the origin of our moral values from the opposite direction, from physiological needs themselves, e.g., the land, the sky, the neighbour of a people. Following this second mode, Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo: "I am much more interested in a question on which the 'salvation of humanity' depends far more than on any theologians' curio: the question of nutrition. For ordinary use, one may formulate it thus: 'how do you, among all people, have to eat to maintain your maximum of strength, of virtu in the Renaissance style, of moraline-free virtue?" (chapter 3 ["Why I am so Clever"], sec. 1). What Nietzsche is asking essentially—and in all seriousness, I would add—is "What is known of the moral effects of different foods? Is there any philosophy of nutrition?" (The Gay Science, 7). One will ask me why on earth I've been relating all these small things which are generally considered matters of complete indifference: Answer: the small things—nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness—are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far. Precisely here one must begin to relearn. (Ecce Homo, chapter 3 [Why I am so Clever"], sec. 10)

It is difficult to believe, at first glance, that Nietzsche can be serious about such "small things" as ". . . nourishment, abode, spiritual diet, treatment of the sick, cleanliness, and weather . . ." (Ecce Home, chapter 15 ["Why I am so Clever"], sec. 10). Yet, this claim and many of the examples which he offers in (theoretical?) support of it are not, I think, offered in jest, in spite of the fact that,

138

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

from our historical vantage point, they might appear to border on the ludicrous. For example, Nietzsche offers us the physiological ramifications of the German and English diets on the form and content of their thinking (Ecce Homo, chapter 3 ["Why I am so Clever"], sec. 1); the physiological repercussions of silence (Ecce Homo, chapter 2 ["Why I am so Wise"], sec. 5); the physiology underlying the cause of ressentiment and how it destroys the individual (Ecco Homo, chapter 2 ["Why I am so Wise"], sec. 6, and On the Genealogy of Morals, book 3, sec. 15); the physiological relationship between religious neurosis and its dietary commands (Beyond Good and Evil); the physiological effect of seeing the ugly, the results of which can be measured on a dynameter (Twilight, chapter 10 ["Expeditions of an Untimely Man"], sec. 20); or the stupidity of allowing women, who know nothing about the physiological after-effects of their cooking, into the kitchen (Beyond Good and Evil, 234). It is by means of this second formulation and its relationship to Buddhism that Nietzsche establishes the connection between physiology and nihilism. Nietzsche claims that the three negative attitudes of man represented in the perspectives of skepticism, pessimism, and ultimately nihilism, perspectives which reflect ever increasing degrees of discontent with knowledge, life, and value respectively, are connected in some fashion with physiology. . . . skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological condition that in ordinary language is called nervous exhaustion and sickliness. . . . (Beyond Good and Evil, 208)

According to Nietzsche, the physiological cause of scepticism is the sudden intermingling of blood from classes which, for a considerable period of time, had been kept apart. It appears that psychological doubt follows from the fact that the new generation has inherited standards of value from both sides of the family, and, after so many intervening years, it is to be expected that these standards of value would be radically different and more often than not opposed to one another. 8 At the same time, the origin of pessimism also has a physiological connection. However, Nietzsche distinguishes between the actual cause of pessimism itself and the cause of the spread of pessimism within a nation or people. We are told, for example, that pessimism is contagious. But rather than increasing morbidity, pessimism simply signals that this morbidity is already present. "One succumbs to it [pessimism] as one succumbs to cholera: one's [physiological] constitution must already be sufficiently morbid" (Twilight, chapter 10 ["Expeditions of an Untimely Man"], sec. 6). However, the spread of pessimism (Nietzsche's paradigm here is Buddhism), has a most curious and thought-provoking link with physiology. 9 It is, quite literally, food for thought. Pessimists as victims. Wherever a deep discontent with existence becomes prevalent, it is the after effects of some great dietary mistake made by a whole people over a long period of time that are coming to light. Thus the spread of Buddhism (not its origin) depends heavily on the excessive and almost exclusive reliance on rice which led to a general loss of vigour. (The Gay Science, 134)

"Nihilism: 'Thus Speaks Physiology1"

139

A diet of rice is said to be a contributing cause of the spread of Buddhism, but by itself it is insufficient to serve as the cause or origin of pessimism generally or, as in this case, Buddhism specifically. The origin of moral values depends not only on the variables of external conditions such as climate, weather, nourishment, and recreation, but it also depends to a considerable extent on the internal physiological condition (needs or demands) of the herd, race, or individual confronting these external variables.10 It is a question of initial physiological capacity; it is reducible to the question: "of how much are you physiologically capable and what are you able to do about it?" Any answer that is existentially worthwhile for Nietzsche cannot be haphazard; it must necessarily presuppose some recognition of the two principles of physiology. It is on this very issue, in fact, that Nietzsche separates negative Buddhism from negative Christianity. Nietzsche's fundamental charge against Christianity is that modern European man is essentially depraved. Nietzsche defines "depravity" as the loss of natural instincts, in particular, the instinct to grow and to enhance one's power (Antichrist, 6). To lack these natural instincts, to lack will to power, means that the individual posits values which are actually hostile to life, thus moving from pessimism to nihilism. 11 However, whenever there is a general decline in the will to power, there results a "physiological regression, a decadence" (Antichrist, 17). It is precisely this decline in the will to power which results in, that is, which has as its consequence, a physiological retardation and weakness. Christianity and Buddhism, as kindred, nihilistic or decadent religions, both presuppose, on the one hand, a population that suffers greatly from existence and, on the other hand, a population that lacks from its beginning the physiological capacity or capability of overcoming this suffering. Morality and religion originate when the amount of pain suffered outweighs the amount of pleasure enjoyed. Nietzsche refers to this as the "formula for decadence" (Antichrist, 15). So the problem faced by both Christianity and Buddhism, though faced in two entirely different ways, is the same: how to avoid suffering when you lack the physiological capacity, i.e., the will to power necessary for its overcoming? In Nietzsche's mind, Buddhism distinguishes itself from Christianity, in spite of the similarities of their initial position, by not only acknowledging but, in fact, actually utilizing, physiological facts, facts which accord with nature. Christianity, on the other hand, is condemned by Nietzsche precisely because it is not only ignorant of those same physiological facts but, as a result of its ignorance, makes errors against life. Buddhism, for example, at least in Nietzsche's view, is said to advocate egoism (Antichrist, 20), going so far as to prescribe it as a religious duty. Since this is in accordance with natural instinct and physiological fact, Buddhism is lauded by Nietzsche as a physiology and not condemned as a morality, as a value system which actually promotes life negation rather than promoting life itself.12 The Buddha, according to Nietzsche, was adept enough as a physiologist to prescribe a sufficient number of external variables which would effectively

140

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

control or curb the depletion of the initial physiological capacity of his followers. In other words, the Buddha prescribed physiological valuations from the bottom up, a regime to overcome depression, ressentiment, and pessimism which were detrimental to human existence.13 On the basis of these physiological conditions a state of depression has arisen: against this depression Buddha takes hygienic measures. He opposes it with life in the open air, the wandering life; with moderation and fastidiousness as regards food; with caution towards all alcoholic spirits; likewise with caution towards all emotions which produce gall, which heat the blood; no anxiety, either for oneself or for others. He demands ideas which produce repose or cheerfulness—he devises means for disaccustoming oneself to others. He understands benevolence, being kind, as healthpromoting. (Antichrist, 20)

While Christianity, as a morality par excellence according to Nietzsche's earlier definition, was successful only in revenging itself against life for the suffering which it could neither endure nor overcome, Buddhism was successful in confronting this suffering inherent in existence and in finding a means for overcoming the resulting depression which this encounter caused. In other words, the Buddha prescribed an "anti-pessimistic diet."14 The initial internal conditions of that people or nation may have been physiologically depressed, decadent, degenerate, or inhibited, but the Buddha's value system (strictly speaking, it can no longer be regarded as a morality) at least curtailed the disintegration, preserved the status quo. Therefore Nietzsche can say of the Buddha: "It is not morality that speaks thus; thus speaks physiology" (Ecce Homo, chapter 3 ["Why I am so Wise"], sec. 6).15 Now the only question which remains is the question of the origin of nihilism and its connection, if there is one, to physiology. "Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?" (Will to Power, 1). At first glance, it is not so simple a task to identify the precise origin or cause of nihilism. For the most part, Nietzsche describes the so-called nihilistic religions of Christianity or Buddhism (though as moralities both Platonism and Kantianism will do as well) not as proceeding or emanating from physiological decadence, as might initially have been expected. In one passage, for example, Nietzsche says that "Christianity, nihilism, tragic art, physiological decadence . . . come into prominence at the same time. . ." (Will to Power, 851; emphasis mine). The four together represent simultaneous symptoms of decline. Similarly, regarding the "Physiology of the nihilistic religions," we are told that they are each "... a systematized case history of sickness employing religious-moralistic nomenclature" (Will to Power, 152). In neither passage is sickness or physiological decadence said to be the actual cause of nihilism. Nevertheless, the question of the origin of nihilism remains: "Why did life, physiological wellconstitutedness, everywhere succumb?" (Will to Power, 401). . . . it is an error to consider "social distress" or "physiological degeneration" or, worse, corruption, as the cause of nihilism. . . . Distress, whether of the soul, body, or intellect, cannot of itself give birth to nihilism (i.e., the radical

"Nihilism: Thus Speaks Physiology'"

141

repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Rather: it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one, that nihilism is rooted. (Will to Power, 1)

If the cause of nihilism is not physiological degeneration, distress, corruption, or sickness, what could it possibly be? Nietzsche's claim is that the antinaturalness of Christian morality has itself caused (rather than having been caused by) physiological degeneration. This is possible because, as Nietzsche's interpretation goes, Christian morality is pathological and it thereby accelerates the physiological degeneration of mankind: ". . . the growth of physiological and moral ills among mankind is the consequence of a pathological and unnatural morality. The sensibility of the majority of men is pathological and unnatural" (Will to Power, 52; emphasis mine).16 Christian morality is a disease (Will to Power, 273); it is, for Nietzsche, a sign of power in its decline.17 What remains to be considered at this point is what Nietzsche refers to as the "type of Zarathustra" (Ecce Homo, chapter 11 ["Thus Spoke Zarathustra"], sees. 2 and 6). The question which this type raises is, essentially, how two radically opposed types of No-sayer can be distinguished from one another when they appear, at first glance, to be doing precisely the same thing, to wit, saying No. Like Buddhism and Christianity, Zarathustra says No. How then can he differ qua type from these other forms of nihilism, given the fact that nihilists say No? The psychological problem in the type of Zarathustra is how he who says No and does No to an unheard-of degree, to everything to which one has so far said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a No-saying spirit. . . . (Ecce Homo, chapter 11 ["Thus Spoke Zarathustra"], sec. 2)

Nietzsche's answer appears to be physiologically straightforward. There are, in effect, two basic physiological types:18 those who have ascending will to power and those who, relatively speaking, do not, the latter representing will to power in its decline. Buddhism, on the one hand, advocates physiological valuations from the bottom up (using Nietzsche's second principle) and as a consequence preserves itself. Christianity, on the other hand, by advocating moral values from the top down (which Nietzsche reads using his first principle), essentially erodes, in its ignorance, its own physiological base. Nevertheless, in spite of these important differences, the two religions are fundamentally the same since both represent the No saying of physiological decline. "Every individual may be regarded as representing the ascending or descending line of life" (Twilight, chapter 10 ["Expeditions of an Untimely Man"], sec. 33).19 What seems to complicate the simplistic picture of the bifurcation into ascending and descending types is the fact that the No-sayers are not readily confined to the descending type category. Yes-sayers, it seems, must, at least initially, be No-sayers as well. But unlike the No-sayers who speak against knowledge, life, and value itself from the perspective of physiological decline, ascending No-sayers (if we may coin the phrase) say No specifically to the negative values and judgements which reflect, indeed expose and signal,

142

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

physiological decline. Zarathustra literally embodies the ascending No-saying attitude. He represents a "physiological presupposition," namely, the "great health" (Ecce Homo, chapter 11 ["Thus Spoke Zarathustra"], sec. 2); he is an immoralist 20 because "Whoever must be a creator always annihilates" (Zarathustra, part 2, chapter 15). So it is that Zarathustra actually accelerates the advent of some species of nihilism by destroying, annihilating, unnatural, moral values, so that natural physiological values—ascending counterparts, if you wish, to Buddhist values—may be put in the created vacuum. Those who are too weak physiologically to live without "morality" will perish; those with great health will overcome morality and, in the process, enhance their power. Thus the nihilism of physiological ascent overcomes, hopefully, the nihilism of physiological decline which currently threatens the future of humanity. For in nihilism, as with everything else in Nietzsche's thought, "thus speaks physiology." Either abolish your reverences or—yourselves! The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be—nihilism?—This is our question mark. (The Gay Science, 346) Endnotes Wherever possible 1 have used the Kaufmann translation. For these Notes I have used the following abbreviations: WTP = Will to Power GM = Genealogy of Morals CW = The Case of Wagner Twi = Twilight of the Idols EH = Ecce Homo Anti = The Antichrist GS = The Gay Science BGE = Beyond Good and Evil Dawn = The Dawn of Day Zara = Thus Spoke Zarathurstra 1. Cf. GS, sees. 120 and 382. 2. Cf. sees. 259 and 481. 3. Aesthetic valuations, although they can be distinguished from moral valuations, are nevertheless subject to the same relationship to physiology. See, for example, WTP, sec. 811, sec. 813; GM, sec. 4 and 8, the latter concerned specifically with "the physiology of aesthetics" and CW, sec. 5, sec. 6, sec. 7. ("Toward a Physiology of Art"). 4. I have attempted to limit my references only to those passages which use the term "physiology," or its cognates, explicitly. Wherever possible I have used the Kaufmann translation, "physiological purification and strengthening" (WTP 953) "physiological well-being" (GM III, 11) "physiological exhaustion" (WTP 230) "physiological degeneration" (CW 7, WTP 1, Twi "Four Great Errors" 2) "physiological fatigue" (WTP 222) "physiological error" (WTP 454) "physiological confusions" (WTP 586) "physiological decadence" (WTP 851) "physiological depression" (GM III, 17) "physiological weakness" (EH "Wise," 1) "physiological defect" (CW 7) "physiological contradiction" of modern man (CW, Second Postscript; Twi "Expeditions" 41; CW Epilogue offers Nietzsche's explanation for this phenomenon), "physiological askew" (EH "Why I write such good books," 5)

"Nihilism: 'Thus Speaks Physiology'"

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

143

"physiological over-excitability" pertaining to everything decadent (Twi, "Expeditions" 37) "physiological inhibited" (GM III, 18) "physiological indisposition" (Anti 25) "physiological depravity" (Anti 4) "physiological susceptibility to suggestion" (WTP 809) "physiological states of distress" (Twi, "Four Great Errors," 6) "physiological deformed and deranged" (GM III, 1). Other examples include: ". . . man's 'sinfulness' is not a fact, but merely the interpretation of a fact, namely of physiological depression—the latter viewed in a religio-moral perspective that is no longer binding on us" (GM III, 16); "What is good?—All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness" (Anti 2). Following George J. Stack, Nietzsche and Lange (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), I would have to say that Nietzsche's interest in physiology in particular began shortly after his reading of the first edition of Lange's History of Materialism in 1866. The first section of Human, All-tooHuman was written in 1877 and published the following year. However, Nietzsche seems to have adopted a Langean view as early as 1872. See also Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographic (Miinchen: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981), 1, 239, 407, 504-507. In May of 1868, Nietzsche was preparing to write a doctoral thesis which would have focused on the concept of the physiological organization of man since Kant. In this regard, I think D. Breazeale, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the early 1870's (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 25, footnote 56, misses the mark when he states that "despite the appearance of conflict with some of his other views Nietzsche often toyed with speculations about the physiological determinants of thought and behaviour, though he had nothing very profound to say on this subject and most of these speculations remained in his notebooks." On the contrary, far from toying with these speculations, Nietzsche took them very seriously; they came to occupy, and gradually even to preoccupy, his thinking in the works published after 1878. Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 196 (biology of ethics) and 5. The passage continues: ". . . it [skepticism] always develops when races or classes that have long been separated are crossed suddenly and decisively. In the new generation that, as it were, has inherited [vererben] in its blood diverse standards and values, everything is unrest, disturbance, doubt, attempt; the best forces have an inhibiting effect, the very virtues do not allow each other to grow and become strong; balance, a certain center of gravity, and perpendicular poise are lacking in body and soul" (BGE 208. Cf. the use of "perpendicular" at Zara I, 10). Cf. "Danger for vegetarians.—A diet that consists predominantly of rice leads to the use of opium and narcotics, just as a diet that consists predominantly of potatoes leads to the use of liquor. But it also has subtler effects that include ways of thinking and feeling that have narcotic effects. This agrees with the fact that those who promote narcotic ways of thinking and feeling, like some Indian gurus, praise a diet that is entirely vegetarian and would like to impose that as a law upon the masses. In this way they want to create and increase the need that they are in a position to satisfy" (GS 145). Similarly, "Perhaps the modern European discontent is due to the fact that our forefathers were given to drinking through the entire Middle Ages, thanks to the effects on Europe of the Teutonic taste. The Middle Ages meant the alcohol poisoning of Europe.—The German discontent with life is essentially a winter sickness that is worsened by the effects of stuffy cellar air and the poison of stove fumes in German living rooms" (GS 134). Perhaps the modern-day equivalent to Nietzsche's views would include the following: the neurotransmitter dopimine as the cause of Parkinsonism (too little) and possibly schizophrenia (too much); pink environments having a calming effect; food allergies as the cause of hyperactivity. A Globe and Mail article (September 22, 1986) related that a Belfast man had an assault charge dropped against him on the grounds that his allergy to potato chips caused his violent behaviour. Cf. "Whenever we encounter a morality, we also encounter valuations and an order of rank of human impulses and actions. These valuations and orders of rank are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd: whatever benefits it most—and second most, and third most— that is also considered the first standard for the value of all individuals" (GS 116. The first formulation of Nietzsche's physiological principle can also be found at Dawn 542; BGE 242; Twi "Socrates," 2; CW Epilogue; and WTP 373). Although Christian morality has its origin in this negative perspective of life, it nevertheless manifests whatever will to power it has as instinct for self-preservation. It does this paradoxically by means of its negative values for, according to Nietzsche, even the "nihilistic will

144

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

wants power" (Anti 9). "Christianity in particular may be called a great treasure house of ingenious means of consolation: it offers such a collection of refreshments, palliatives, and narcotics; it risks so much that is most dangerous and audacious; it has displayed such refinement and subtlety, such southern subtlety, in guessing what stimulant affects will overcome, at least for a time, the deep depression, the leaden exhaustion, the black melancholy of the physiologically inhibited. For we may generalize: the main concern of all great religions has been to fight a certain weariness and heaviness grown to epidemic proportions. One may assume in advance the probability that from time to time and in certain parts of the earth a feeling of physiological inhibition is almost bound to seize on large masses of people, though, owing to their lack of physiological knowledge, they do not diagnose it as such: its "cause" and remedy are sought and tested only in the psychological-moral domain (this is my most general formula for what is usually called a "religion"). GM III, 17. The "ascetic ideal" is another paradoxical or self-contradictory type, someone who seems to will his own negation, "life against life," but by willing nothingness, wills, and lives. See particularly GM III, 1 and GM III, 12. 12. See Freny Mistry, Nietzsche and Buddhism: Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), 19-50 for an analysis of Nietzsche's view of nihilism in its relationship to Buddhism. 13. Cf. "This was comprehended by that profound physiologist, the Buddha. His 'religion' should rather be called a kind of hygiene, lest it be confused with such pitiable phenomena as Christianity: its effectiveness was made conditional on the victory over ressentiment" (EH "Wise," 6). 14. Cf. GS, sec. 357. 15. Cf. "Morality no longer the expression of the conditions under which a nation lives and grows, no longer a nation's deepest instinct for life, but become abstract, become the antithesis of life— morality as a fundamental degradation of the imagination, as an 'evil eye' for all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence, misfortune dirtied by the concept 'sin'; well-being as a danger, as 'temptation'; physiological indisposition poisoned by the worm of conscience . . ." (Anti 25). 16. Cf. EH "Destiny," 7; Twi, "Improvers," 2. 17. Nietzsche offers a physiological explanation for slave morality (GM I, 10); of Christianity (EH "Dawn," 2); and a physiological account for rejecting Christianity (Anti 47; GM III, 17). 18. There is even a physiological exception to this. Compare the following passage: "In every healthy society, there can be distinguished three types of man of divergent physiological tendency which mutually condition one another and each of which possesses its own hygiene, its own realm of work, its own sort of mastery and feeling of perfection. Nature, not Manu, separates from one another the predominantly spiritual type, the predominantly muscular and temperamental type, and the third type distinguished neither in the one nor the other, the mediocre type—the last as the great majority, the first as the elite" (Anti 57). 19. Cf. "And if such world affirmations or world negations tout court lack any grain of significance when measured scientifically, they are the more valuable for the historian and psychologist as hints or symptoms of the body, of its success and failure, its plentitude, power, and autocracy in history, or of its frustrations, weariness, impoverishment, its premonitions of its end, its will to the end" (GS, Preface, Second Edition). 20. Cf. "Fundamentally, my term immoralist involves two negations. For one, I negate a type of man that has so far been considered supreme: the good, the benevolent, the beneficent. And then I negate a type of morality that has become prevalent and predominant as morality itself—the morality of decadence or, more concretely, Christian morality. It would be permissible to consider the second contradiction the more decisive one, since I take the overestimation of goodness and benevolence on a large scale for a consequence of decadence, for a symptom of weakness, irreconcilable with an ascending, Yes-saying life: negating and destroying are conditions of saying Yes" (EH "Destiny," 4).

Remarks on Nietzsche's Tlatonism' Stanley Rosen This paper is intended to clarify the sense in which Nietzsche may be said to engage in a rhetoric of nihilism. The topic will be explored by way of a comparison between Plato and Nietzsche. The first step in articulating the structure of the investigation is to distinguish two different senses of the expression "rhetoric of nihilism." This distinction will lead directly to an explanation of the pertinence of the comparison just proposed. One may engage in the rhetorical assertion of nihilism, for example, by insisting upon the salutary and liberating consequences of the thesis that "everything is permitted." Conversely, one may employ rhetoric in order to conceal the destructive consequences of a nihilism that is in effect already present but not entirely recognized. Although these types of rhetoric are in principle distinct, it is obvious that they may also be combined. Nietzsche himself combines these two rhetorics in a way that is both straightforward and perplexing. On the one hand, he argues that nihilism is the liberating precondition for the greatest example of creativity: the creation of a new table of values. In the course of making this argument, Nietzsche distinguishes between the "noble" or creative and the "base" or decadent nihilism. The difference between the noble and the base nihilism is not "objective" or veridical but consists in the difference between the active and reactive determination of the spirit. The difference is thus one of response; in each case, the situation to which we respond is the same. Since the "facts" (to the extent that there are any facts) are in both cases the same, one cannot be converted from base to noble nihilism by empirical evidence or deductive argumentation, whether scientific or metaphysical. What we require here is a rhetorical transformation of mood. At the same time, Nietzsche makes entirely clear that the "facts" themselves, when properly understood, guarantee the base nihilism. Proper understanding is synonymous with decadence. To say this in another way, Nietzsche tells us quite candidly that nihilism is the proper response to a sound understanding of the truth. It is for this reason that Nietzsche avoids a vitiating self-contradiction when he asserts that there is no truth, that is to say, no truth other than an intrinsic chaos which validates any, and therefore no, comprehensive interpretation or evaluation of human existence. He is also entirely explicit in advocating a "forgetting" of the truth that there is no truth, or a veiling over of this truth by a rhetorical invocation to health and creativity. If we keep in mind both aspects of Nietzsche's presentation of nihilism, then our first general impression of his rhetoric is that of incoherence, not to say chaos. If the difference between the noble and the base nihilism is merely one of mood (namely, the desire to create as distinguished from the absence of desire), 145

146

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

then noble nihilism is a false version or duplicitous mask of base nihilism. Health turns out to be sickness, namely, lying, or a refusal to face up to the truth. In this case, Nietzsche, the self-styled first honest philosopher, is merely another decadent thinker who lacks the courage and integrity to teach mankind that creativity is delusion, or more sharply, that values are intrinsically valueless. How can one mood be better than another when "better" and "worse" are themselves perspectives, that is to say, consequences of moods, of the presence or absence of desire or the will to power? If moods are physiological, then to say that health is better than sickness is simply to assert the perspective of health, or to utter the platitude that power is more powerful than impotence. A somewhat deeper reflection on Nietzsche's rhetoric may lead us to the following possibility. On the face of it, there is no way in which to reconcile a stirring invocation to creativity with a passionate unmasking of the sameness of creation and destruction, that is to say, of the valuelessness of every creation. No doubt it is (psychologically) true that a creation is valuable for its creator, but this is a perspectival truth, or what Nietzsche himself calls a salutary delusion. If Nietzsche's sole, or overriding, intention was to incite us to create new values, then he should have suppressed his brutally frank destruction of every basis, natural or supernatural, for distinguishing between the valuable and the valueless. One may claim that the destruction of all such bases is necessary for the greatest act of creation, that of the basis itself. In this case, however, creation is rooted in selfdeception, or in unexamined and hence dishonest enthusiasm. Conversely, however, it cannot be likely that Nietzsche's main purpose was to instill in the human race the same extreme decadence that he attributes to himself. If this were so, then his regular celebration of creative forgetting or rebirth would make no sense. We may therefore be tempted to look for a deeper level of intention, one in which these two apparently incompatible sides to Nietzsche's rhetoric are unified. What could such an intention be? Perhaps Nietzsche was addressing two distinct types of human spirit, with the intention of enlightening one type in the truth that there is no truth (or that art is worth more than the truth), and the concomitant intention of obfuscating the understanding of another type by deceiving it into a Dionysian frenzy of renewal. Perhaps. But does this unify the two rhetorics or simply reassert them as distinct and co-ordinate? Or is Nietzsche's deepest teaching precisely this: that there is no intrinsic unity, but only two types of response to chaos, each with its intrinsic excellence, each with its appropriate moment in any given cycle of the eternal return of the similar? This possibility leads to a further reflection. Perhaps the tension (if not indeed the contradiction) intrinsic to the simultaneous addressing of these two distinct (and incompatible) types is itself "perspectival" or local, that is, historical and, in the deepest or Greek sense of the term, political? This line of thought carries with it the corollary that Nietzsche's rhetoric of nihilism can be understood, not as the expression of his underlying ontology, whether implicit or explicit, but rather as the consequence of his conscious rejection of the very possibility of ontology. And this in turn brings us to the

Remarks on Nietzsche's 'Platonism'

147

heart of the matter. Without a doubt, the most influential interpretation of Nietzsche in our century is that of Heidegger, according to whom Nietzsche is a metaphysician: the last of the Platonists who constitute the history of Western metaphysics. Our own suggestion runs directly counter to this interpretation. There can be no question of establishing in a single article as thorough and detailed an interpretation of Nietzsche as Heidegger has given us in his extensive essays and volumes devoted to that task. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable for us to examine in some detail the essential Heideggerean thesis, to the effect that Nietzsche was an unwitting Platonist. Indeed, we are required to examine this thesis, given the plain evidence of the nature of Nietzsche's texts, which have been summarized in the opening paragraphs of this essay. The texts are at once explicit, directly intelligible, and incoherent or mysterious. Nietzsche insists upon his own profundity, and he warns us that everything deep loves a mask. It is not prima facie evident that there is no metaphysical ground underlying the incoherent elements of Nietzsche's rhetoric. But neither is it prima facie evident that the ground is, as it were, both metaphysical and fractured. If we take seriously Nietzsche's reference to masks, and his distinction between esotericism and exotericism, it is more likely that the concealed ground, whether or not metaphysical, is coherent and both well-understood and intended by Nietzsche. In the course of investigating the essential contention of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche, it will also be necessary to arrive at some determination of the nature of Platonism. Once again, only persuasive indications can be offered in this article. The most we may hope for is that these indications are enough to stimulate the exhaustive study of Plato's dialogues that would be required for any serious approach to the thinker concealed behind the masks of dramatic personae, themselves concealed within the complexities of texts that cannot be readily identified as either poems or philosophical treatises, but which are surely closer to poetry than to the philosophical treatise. When we put to one side the scholastic interpretations of Plato, and look directly at the dialogues, we find something resembling the situation just noticed in Nietzsche's texts. The surface is entirely rhetoric, and a rhetoric in which the parts seem to every careful reader both to constitute a whole, and again, as soon as we scrutinize them in detail, to cancel one another out. The fundamental difference between Plato and Nietzsche, taking them as they present themselves to us, is that Plato says nothing in his own name, whereas Nietzsche states everything in his own name, including the thesis that everything is permitted. 1 It seems initially plausible that the difference between Plato's rhetoric of indirection and Nietzsche's rhetoric of frankness is at least partially explicable by the radically different historical circumstances under which they wrote. If this is right, we are again pointed away from metaphysics and ontology toward politics in the comprehensive sense of the term. Needless to say, this in itself does not prove that Plato was no Platonist, that is to say, no metaphysician. It does nothing more than to suggest the following hermeneutical principle. If we start with the texts, and therefore as good philologists (hence very much in the spirit of Nietzsche himself), then the initial and massive evidence at our

148

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

disposal is neither metaphysical nor ontological, but rhetorical or poetic. To give a crucial example: we cannot understand Plato's dialogues by starting with the various fragmentary discussions within them of the "Platonic Ideas". To the contrary, we arrive legitimately at the discussions of the Ideas only after we have mastered the rhetorical presentation of these discussions. Those who take their bearings by the Ideas, and who elaborate a "theory" (in the modern or constructive sense of the term) of Ideas in direct contradiction to the dialogical procedure of Plato, may very well become Platonists, or at least produce something called Platonism. In no way, however, does it follow from this procedure that Plato was himself a Platonist. The history of Platonism begins with Aristotle, not with Plato. In an age of hermeneutics, with its correlative emphasis upon textuality and writing, it seems entirely acceptable to distinguish between Plato, the author of the Platonic dialogues, and Platonism. I shall not argue in this essay that Heidegger is mistaken in identifying the history of Western metaphysics as Platonism. My point is instead that neither Nietzsche nor Plato is a Platonist. In providing evidence for this point, I shall hope to illustrate the difference as well as the similarity between these two authors. In the remarks to follow, I shall contend that neither Nietzsche nor Plato advocates a "metaphysics" in the sense of an "ontology" of the Being of beings (Sein des Seienden). This is not an oversight on their part, nor have they "forgotten" to ask the question concerning the nature of truth or of Being as contrasted to the Being of beings. I shall also contend that it is an integral part of the teaching of both Nietzsche and Plato that it must be presented by means of a complex rhetoric. The importance of rhetoric is in each case the consequence of the impossibility of ontology. The difference between the Nietzschean and the Platonic rhetoric provides us with the best way in which to formulate the difference between their fundamental doctrines. I would offer the following provisional statement of this difference. Nietzsche replaces the "ontological" concerns of his predecessors with poetry or art, whereas Plato transforms the poetic presentation of ontology by the pre-Socratics into an unresolvable quarrel between poetry and philosophy. The Platonic dialogue is precisely between poetry and philosophy. The Nietzschean monologue, even as dramatically represented by the speeches and cryptic conversations of Zarathustra, is an acknowledgment of the triumph of poetry. Let me emphasize a further point. The triumph of poetry guarantees the triumph of nihilism, namely, of the ineradicable priority of nothingness as the origin or condition of creation, but also as the "essence" of each creation. The radical nullity of the super-human "cosmos" is the necessary condition for the elevation of human beings to the status of creative gods. This helps to explain Nietzsche's double rhetoric. The need to establish radical nullity must be the stepping-stone to the rhetorical inducement of creative intoxication. Plato avoids nihilism only if he can sustain the conversation between poetry and philosophy. It would be tempting to say that the conversation must be

Remarks on Nietzsche's 'Platonism'

149

philosophically sustained, but this formulation is easily seen to be defective. This is immediately obvious from the poetic nature of the dialogues. Whether or not Plato possessed a "secret" or unwritten teaching, it is immediately obvious that he was unable to present a philosophical formulation of the conversation or quarrel between poetry and philosophy. As is plain from similar quarrels in our own century, as well as from the nature of the case, if philosophy is like mathematics, phenomenology, or fundamental ontology, it cannot sustain or ground itself, but must be sustained or grounded by poetry or rhetoric. Even if we assume that the principles of things, or the correct methods of philosophical investigation, are mathematical or quasi-mathematical, it remains necessary to justify philosophy, and precisely with respect to its turning-away from human or non-mathematical experience, or else with respect to the distortion of the non-mathematical by the mathematical. This problem does not arise for Nietzsche, because he rejects the mathematical or reduces it to a product of psychology, more specifically, of spiritual production. However, he faces an analogous problem because he also reduces the spirit (the ego, selfconsciousness, etc.) to physiology, and physiology to chaos. The quarrel between Heidegger and Platonism, which we shall consider primarily in terms of his quarrel with Nietzsche, is thus a continuation of the long-standing quarrel between poetry and philosophy. My fundamental objection to Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche can now be stated. On Heidegger's account, "Platonism" is indistinguishable from poetry, namely, from the production of a world by the will to power. It follows that Heidegger himself is the only genuine philosopher, or the true Plato, namely, the thinker who sustains the quarrel between poetry and philosophy through the medium of a new, third type of language that is neither poetry nor philosophy. This interpretation is erroneous because it attributes an ontology to Plato, or let us say an ontological intention, which culminates in poetry. It is also erroneous in attributing an unconscious ontological commitment to Nietzsche. An accurate account of the history of philosophy would then look something like this. There are three fundamental "positions" or teachings: 1) the position of Plato and Heidegger, or genuine Platonism, namely, the attempt to preserve the quarrel between poetry and philosophy in a third language that is the origin of both; 2) "Platonism", or the self-deluded attempt to replace poetry by a fundamentally mathematical philosophy which is actually itself poetry; 3) the teaching of Nietzsche, or the self-conscious recognition that poetry is triumphant over philosophy. What is today called "postmodernism" is a version of the teaching of Nietzsche. And now to the evidence. I shall have to present many details, but there is no other way in which to make my case. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche's thought is fundamentally metaphysics. Heidegger means by metaphysics "the truth of beings as such in their totality" ("die Wahrheit des Seienden als solchen im Ganzen") (Heidegger 1950, 193). If we take Nietzsche seriously as a thinker, we find that thinking is for him "representing the existent as the existent" ("das Seiende als das Seiende vorstellen"). Heidegger adds: "every metaphysical

150

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

thinking is onto-logy or it is altogether nothing" ("Jedes metaphysische Denken ist Onto-logie oder es ist uberhaupt nichts") (Heidegger 1950, 194). To be sure, Nietzsche does not envision himself as a metaphysician or ontologist, but rather "as the countermovement against metaphysics; that is, for him, against Platonism" ("als die Gegenbewegung gegen die Metaphysik, d.h. fiir ihn gegen den Platonismus") (Heidegger 1950, 200). Nietzsche announces the death of God, namely, that "the supersensuous world is without effective force" ("die iibersinnliche Welt ist ohne wirkende Kraft") (Heidegger 1950, 200). But Heidegger replies that Nietzsche's thought "as mere countermovement remains . . . in fact necessarily, like every 'anti', detained in the essence of that against which it applies" ("als blo/3e Gegenbewegung bleibt . . . jedoch notwendig wie alles Anti—im Wesen dessen verhaftet, wogegen sie angeht") (Heidegger 1950, 200). Nietzsche remains entangled in metaphysics or the thinking of nihilism, i.e., the "absence of a supersensuous, obligatory world" ("Abwesenheit einer iibersinnlichen, verbindlichen Welt") (Heidegger 1950, 200). We may summarize the balance of Heidegger's argument in the Holzwege essay as follows. For Nietzsche, the history of Western metaphysics is nihilism, namely, devaluation (Entwertung) and transvaluation (Umwertung). Nihilism, and hence metaphysics, is the production or projection of values (Werte) and hence their "deconstruction" (Heidegger 1950,206). Values are in turn perspectives or viewpoints. Heidegger quotes Nietzsche: "The standpoint of 'value' is the standpoint of conservation, intensification conditions with respect to complex patterns of the relative extent of life within Becoming" ("Der Gesichtspunkt des 'Werts' ist der Gesichtspunkt von Erhaltungs, SteigerungsBedingungen in Hinsicht auf komplexe Gebilde von relativer Dauer des Lebens innerhalb des Werdens") (Heidegger 1950, 210).2 Values are the conditions for the possibility of life; as such, they are direct expressions of the will to power: "Will to power, becoming, life, and Being in the broadest sense signify the same thing in Nietzsche's language" ("Wille zur Macht, Werden, Leben und Sein im weitesten Sinne bedeuten in Nietzsches Sprache das Selbe") (Heidegger 1950, 213). The conditions are not transcendental: they are the will to power, or the will willing itself. In other words: "Der Wille zur Macht ist das Wesen der Macht") (Heidegger 1950, 217). Hence life is nothing "beyond" itself, and points to "nothing" beyond itself. There is no supersensuous or transcendental dimension. The will to power is "the innermost essence of Being" ("das innerste Wesen des Seins"),3 namely, of Being (Sein) in its metaphysical sense: "the existent as a totality" ("das Seiende im Ganzen") (Heidegger 1950, 218). But the will evidently presents itself within human life in two different forms: as truth and as art. Nietzsche reverses Platonism by making art prior to truth. Art is "the essence of every willing, that opens perspectives and occupies them" ("das Wesen alles Wollens, das Perspektiven eroffnet und sie besetzt") (Heidegger 1950, 222). These perspectives are values: metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche stamps Being with the seal of values: "when the Being of beings is stamped with value, and when its essence is thereby sealed, then every way to the

Remarks on Nietzsche's 'Platonism'

151

experience of Being within this metaphysics is ... extinguished" ("Wenn das Sein des Seienden zum Wert gestempelt und wenn damit sein Wesen besiegelt ist, dann ist innerhalb dieser Metaphysik . . . jeder Weg zur Erfahrung des Seins ausgeloscht") (Heidegger 1950, 238). Nietzsche's thought is therefore not the overcoming, but the completion, of metaphysics, and hence of Platonism. To say that art is worth more than the truth is for Heidegger to say only that art is a more intensive, life-enhancing manifestation of the will to power than is the truth. Art and truth remain values. But why do values conceal the essence of Being? We cannot repeat Heidegger's argument here, which is in any case wellknown. I will merely remind you of some of the highlights. Values are projects of subjectivity and hence they reify Being, i.e., cover it over with the specific manifestations of the human will as mediated by the "Platonic" apparatus of Ideas, categories, and correspondences (Heidegger 1961, 1:529 ff). According to Heidegger, Nietzsche is a Platonist because he imposes onto Being the "what is it?" (ti esti) or "what," and so the "look" or viewpoint of the knower (Heidegger 1961, 1:208, 2:14 ff). Heidegger says: "The truth is for Nietzsche not the essence of the truth" ("Die Wahrheit ist fur Nietzsche nicht das Wesen des Wahren. . . .") Nietzsche, like Plato and all of Western metaphysics, neglects "the question about the essence of truth" ("die Frage nach dem Wesen der Wahrheit") (Heidegger 1961, 1:175). The Platonic form (eidos) and the Nietzschean value (Wert) are the two endpoints, the alpha and the omega of metaphysics, namely, the covering-over of Being, and hence of truth as non-dissimulatedness (Unverstelltheit) (Heidegger 1961, 1:215), by the specific manifestations of Being. In other words, Being must show itself as beings; but these conceal the showing-forth itself, or what shows itself as other than itself. Metaphysics cannot be blamed for observing the beings (ta onta), since these are alone directly visible, and therefore accessible, to the theoretical intelligence. From the very outset, the desire (eros) to know and the desire for certainty or power (Wille zur Macht), coincide. But it is only with Nietzsche that this coincidence becomes explicit. Ta onta are consequently not, when taken as what is, the direct manifestation of Being, but the concealment of ta onta by perspectival products of the will to power. Discursive intelligence (Dianoia), ratio, reason (Vernunft) are the demiurgic or poetic makers of a double concealment of Being. This double concealment remains in force even though, like Nietzsche, we succeed in revealing its identity as double concealment. For Nietzsche, what we call "knowing" is the schematizing of chaos (CM 1967, VIII,3:125 [14, 125]). In other words, the "world," or the consequence of artistic perspectivism, is intrinsically chaos. This thesis appears at all stages of Nietzsche's thinking. We find it, for example, at the beginning of Book 3 of The Gay Science: "The total character of the world is indeed for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a missing necessity, but of a missing order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and the rest of our aesthetic humanizing names" ("Der Gesamtcharakter der Welt ist dagegen in alle Ewigkeit Chaos, nicht im Sinne der fehlenden Notwendigkeit, sondern der fehlenden Ordnung, Gliederung, Form,

152

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Schonheit, Weisheit, und wie alle unsere asthetischen Menschlichkeiten hei/3en") (Schlechta 1954, 2:115). In the fragments dating from 1886/87, Nietzsche emphasizes that not only is there no "thing in itself" or "subject in itself"; there is also no appearance (Erscheinung) (CM 1967, VIII,2:48 [9, 91]). All categories by which we distinguish '"a world in itself from a world as appearance" (" 'Welt an sich' von einer Welt als Erscheinung") are "of sensuous origin: read off from the empirical world" (sensualistischer Herkunft: abgelesen von der empirischen Welt") (CM 1967, VIII,2:55 [9, 98]). But the empirical world is itself a construction: "the world of the 'phenomena' is the manufactured world, which we feel as real. The 'reality' lies in the continuous repetition of similar, known, familiar things, in their logicized character, in the belief that we can here calculate, compute" ("die Welt der 'Phanomene' ist die zurechtgemachte Welt, die wir als real empfinden. Die 'Realitat' liegt in dem bestandigen Wiederkommen gleicher, bekannter, verwandter Dinge, in ihrem logisierten Charakter, im Glauben, dass wir hier rechnen, berechnen konnen") (CM 1967, VIII,2:59-60 [9, 106]). However, contrary to Heidegger's interpretation, Nietzsche does not fail to raise the question of the essence of truth. He does, of course, give a non-Heideggerean answer to this question: "the opposite of this phenomenal world is not 'the true world', but the formlessunformulatable world of sensation—chaos—therefore another manner of phenomenal world, one which is for us 'unknowable' " ("der Gegensatz dieser Phanomenal-Welt ist nicht 'die wahre Welt', sondern die formlosunformulierbare Welt der Sensation—Chaos—also eine andere Art Phanomenal-Welt, eine fiir uns 'unerkennbare'") (CM 1967, VIII,2:60 [9, 106]). When Nietzsche says that the world is an art-work giving birth to itself (CM 1967, VIII, 1:117 [2, 114]), he means that chaos produces continuously changing images of itself which, as visible, are false, but as changing, are a true representation of chaos. To employ a term from Plato's Sophist, each world is a phantasm of chaos. "The world, that somehow concerns us, is false; that is, is no fact but a thickening and rounding-off of a meager sum of observations; it is 'in flow' as something becoming, as an ever newly self-displacing falsehood which never approaches the truth: for—there is no 'truth' " ("Die Welt, die uns etwas angeht, ist falsch, d.h. ist kein Thatbestand, sondern eine Ausdichting und Rundung iiber einer mageren Summe von Beobachtungen; sie ist 'im Flusse', als etwas Werdendes, als eine sich immer neu verschiebende Falschheit, die sich niemals der Wahrheit nahert: denn—es giebt keine 'Wahrheit' ") (CM 1967, VIII,1:112[2, 108]). Let us first observe that Nietzsche is not reiterating a Kantian standpoint here. The world is not a synthesis of categories and sensations (Empfindungen); to the contrary, categories are themselves "read off from the empirical world" ("abgelesen von der empirischen Welt"). They are the perspectives or values projected onto "sensations," i.e., what Kant calls "Empfindungen", but which Nietzsche identifies as chaos. But as so projected, they are not constructions of the transcendental ego. "The living is Being; there is no other Being" ("Das Lebende ist das Sein: weiter giebt es kein Sein") (CM 1967, VIII, 1:12 [1, 24]).

Remarks on Nietzsche's 'Platonism'

153

There is nothing beyond life, i.e., Becoming. And life is desire (Begehren), not thinking (Denken): "—our thinking and evaluating is only an expression for underlying governing desires—the desires specialize themselves ever more: their unity is the will to power" ("unser Denken und Wertschatzen ist nur ein Ausdruck fiir dahinter waltende Begehrungen—die Begehrungen spezialisieren sich immer mehr: ihre Einheit ist der Wille zur Macht") (CM 1967, VIII, 1:30). Becoming is already a derivative notion or the level at which desires (Begehrungen) "specialize" as the interplay of subject and object, as a world, as a false image of chaos. It is appropriate to compare a Nietzschean "world" to a Platonic "fantasm" for the following reason. The fantasm conceals the original by distorting its "measurements," yet at the same time adjusts these to human perspective, and hence may fulfil a salutary function. Needless to say, chaos has no intrinsic "measurements" (or "measures"), but for this reason, an "accurate" image of chaos would itself be chaotic, and hence useless, not to say harmful, to human beings. Perhaps the fundamental difference between Plato and Nietzsche is that for Plato, there are originals, together with a pre-discursive vision that somehow allows us to regulate our discourse in such a way as to distinguish between the salutary and the harmful, the noble and the base, the true and the false. For Nietzsche, there are no such originals. The original is chaos. It therefore necessarily follows that "salutary" and "harmful," "noble" and "base," and of course "true" and "false," are all derivative notions. They are interpretations. I take this to be a crucial point in Nietzsche's thought: the unity of desires is the will to power. But unity is logical structure; it is the world of intelligible things (onta). "Toward the understanding of logic:. . . the will to similarity is the will to power" ("Zum Verstandnis der Logik . . . der Wille zur Gleichheit ist der Wille zur Macht") (CM 1967, VIII, 1:104 [2, 90]). Hence the will to similarity or sameness (Gleichheit) and also the eternal return of the same, are products of the will to power. Here we can indeed employ a Heideggerean expression. The will to power is the will to will. The will to power wills itself, not as a "self," a unified world, or a principle, but as an unending process of chaotic transformations of chaos. This process is as such always the same: it is the eternal return of the same. The distinction between the Platonic or Kantian "supersensuous" world and the perspectival world of appearances is overcome by recognition of these two worlds as products of the will to power. But the will to power is itself the identity within difference of these two worlds, and as such, the unity of each. It is itself accordingly a product, and hence a false image, a fantasm, of chaos. "All unity is unity only as organization and interplay" ("Alle Einheit ist nur als Organisation und Zusammenspiel Einheit") (CM 1967, VIII, 1:102 [2, 87]). Nietzsche's double rhetoric, which we may very loosely associate with his distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, is then "united" by the absence of a unifying bond or center: the center is chaos. Nietzsche inserts his own will to power into this absent center. He has not, to repeat, forgotten to think the nature of truth. He explicitly thinks it as chaos. He certainly fails to

154

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

explain why or how chaos manifests itself, first, as a continuously changing series of worlds, and second, as bifurcated into viewer and viewpoint. He does not explain how he himself, or his will to power, exhibits the intrinsic unity required to assume the status of a creator god in the heart of chaos. But how could he, since any such explanation would bring order out of chaos? Chaos would lose its ontological priority. For Nietzsche, this is impossible, because every explanation of the structure of the world is already a perspective. As such, it is an imposition of unity onto chaos by the will to power, which is itself not genuinely fundamental except as a perpetually changing image of what is alone the same, precisely as always other: chaos. The following observation might be made at this point. Is not the thesis of intrinsic chaos itself an interpretation? I believe that we are required to answer this question in the affirmative. But nothing needs to be changed in our own understanding of Nietzsche as a result of this affirmation. Either the interpretation of the "whole" (to use the official philosophical term) as chaos is an accurate or a false image. If it is an accurate image, then the whole is indeed chaos; furthermore, what seems like the coherent, or at least cohering, dimension of Nietzsche's doctrine collapses into internal disorder. But this is to say that the coherent dimension of Nietzsche's teaching is a false image of chaos. It is a salutary or noble lie. If, on the other hand, the interpretation is a false image and the whole is not intrinsically chaos, then there must be an underlying order or cosmos, and Nietzsche's regular account of chaos is a lie. Could it be a noble lie? The only conceivable justification for such an interpretation would be that Nietzsche regards it as salutary to convince human beings of intrinsic chaos in order to persuade us, or rather to trick us into believing, that we are, or can be creators. Chaos is then a false image of order; Nietzsche is a "reverse Platonist." In somewhat different terms, Nietzsche would then presumably believe that, whereas there is a natural order, this order is bad for human beings. I do not regard this as an implausible hypothesis in itself, but in the present context, it carries with it an insuperable difficulty. If it is necessary to deny that there exists a natural order in order to persuade human beings that they are able to create new worlds, or values, then reflection persuades us that the correct vision of the natural order prevents creation. This could in turn be so if and only if the natural order in fact prevents creation, and does not merely discourage it. Otherwise, the "correct" vision of natural order would not be correct. Differently, and more directly, stated, all that Nietzsche would need to do is to explain that the natural order discourages, but does not prevent or forbid, creation. And in this case, the natural order permits creation, regardless of the difficulty of the creative act. Indeed, Nietzsche himself regularly insists upon this difficulty, as is most dramatically evident in his doctrine of the superman, but in other ways as well. The net result of this line of reasoning, which I shall break off here, is that Nietzsche ought to teach not that there is no natural order, but that there is a natural order certifying human creativity. This is obvious from the fact that the

Remarks on Nietzsche's 'Platonism'

155

thesis of intrinsic chaos robs creation of its intrinsic value. In other words, the incoherence in Nietzsche's teaching, manifest in the two types of rhetoric which we are attempting to reconcile, is a disastrous consequence of a supposedly prudential concealment of the truth about the whole, namely, by the false but noble image of intrinsic chaos. On this alternative, then, Nietzsche is shown to be, not simply incoherent, but incompetent, and in fact, stupid. I cannot believe that any reader will find this an attractive hypothesis. I conclude that we are required to accept the doctrine of intrinsic chaos as Nietzsche's own, that is, as seriously advocated by him, even though it is also correct to call it an interpretation. The "correctness" of the interpretation will be demonstrated by Nietzsche's success in convincing human beings of its truth, that is, by the imposition of his will to power. I therefore doubt that Heidegger is right to say that Nietzsche had not thought out the relation between the will to power and the eternal return (Heidegger 1961, l:425ff). The will to power is not the willing of what was and what will be, as Heidegger asserts. Instead, it is the unity of what I shall call here the subjective and objective sides of what was and what will be. It is the chaotic unity of creator and creation. I agree with Heidegger that the will to power is "only the unfolding of the original and preceding project of existents as eternal return of the similar" ("nur die Ausfaltung des urspriinglichen und vorgangigen Entwurfes des Seienden als ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen") (Heidegger 1961, 1:427). But the eternal return is only the unfolding of chaos, which is neither one nor many, neither same nor other, but all of these at once. It may seem paradoxical, yet I believe it to be true that Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche is too "rationalist." Heidegger insists upon making a kind of conceptual sense out of Nietzsche, perhaps because he insists upon regarding Nietzsche as a metaphysician or ontologist. But the eternal return is not a "ground" in any metaphysically useful sense. As Nietzsche recognized, it is the most frightening, most extreme form of nihilism: "Let us think this thought in its most frightening form: [existence] just as it is, without sense and end, but unavoidably returning, without a finale in nothingness: the eternal return" ("Denken wir diesen Gedanken in seiner furchtbarsten Form: so wie es ist, ohne Sinn und Ziel, aber unvermeidlich wiederkehrend, ohne eine Finale ins Nichts: die ewige Wiederkehr") (CM 1967, VIII, 1:217 [5, 71]). Heidegger would no doubt reply that if I am right, then, precisely, Nietzsche conceals Being underneath the manifested worlds or false images of chaos. I prefer to say that Nietzsche neither forgets nor conceals Being: he explains it quite explicitly. Being is chaos. If it were not chaos, one could not create new worlds. The analogous thesis in Heidegger's own thought does not refer to an original chaos, but its consequences seem to me to be entirely similar to those of Nietzche's thought. For Heidegger there is an unintelligible origination, unintelligible because concealed by that which is originated. One may take an "active" or a "passive" attitude toward Heidegger's central thesis. Either we may argue that the unintelligibility of the origin renders it irrelevant to human speech and deed, and

156

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

hence that we are free to create, or at least to interpret our speeches and deeds as creations. Or else we may hold that each "mittence" of Being, i.e., each gift of a world by the invisible origin, is a destiny, not a human act of creation, and in fact, that creation is impossible, or in other words, that human action is "meaningless" in the strict sense that it is necessitated by the origin. I might add that, on either alternative, Heidegger appears to be a "Platonist" himself, as Derrida, if I have rightly understood him, has argued at length. Whether this makes Derrida superior to Heidegger depends upon whether we prefer an incoherent account of intrinsic incoherence to a veiled account of coherence. Heidegger does not employ the notion of the will to power in his own postmetaphysical thought; other reasons aside, he no doubt wishes to overcome the concealment of Being by subjectivity: "With the subjectivity of the subject, the will comes into view as its essence. Modern metaphysics, as the metaphysics of subjectivity, thinks the Being of beings in the sense of willing" ("Mit der Subjektivitat des Subjekts kommt als deren Wesen der Wille zum Vorschein. Die neuzeitliche Metaphysik denkt als die Metaphysik der Subjektivitat das Sein des Seienden im Sinne des Willens") (Heidegger 1950, 225). But the notion of power is implicit in the notion of Heidegger's virtually untranslatable technical terms "Ereignis," "Geschehen," "Geschenk" (event, happening, gift) and so on. Heidegger separates the implicit power of Being from human willing. But this simply guarantees human ontological impotence; it does not guarantee that Being will show or give itself in any but a concealed form. "Nature loves to hide," as Heracleitus pointed out. Perhaps that is why we must put her to the torture. However this may be, Heidegger has explained nothing that is left unexplained by Nietzsche. In my opinion, Heidegger merely returns to the metaphors of Neo-Platonism, Christianity, and a kind of postmodern Romanticism. Nietzsche, to my taste, is more straightforward. Heidegger's denial of the possibility of ontology is veiled by the ambiguous hint of creativity, a hint that is compromised by the fatalistic dimension in his account of the origin and its "gifts." Nietzsche more straightforwardly denies the possibility of ontology. There is no logos of the Being of beings as a totality (Sein des Seienden im Ganzen), because logoi are false images of chaos; false images in the Platonic sense of phantasmata. As such, they may be better or more understandable than correct images, but only because they conceal the chaos at the heart of things. If we attempt to separate Being from its accumulated interpretations, the resultant "sematic substratum" is chaos.4 And chaos admits of no questioning. There is nothing to question. In other words, to the extent that Nietzsche speaks of Being, he never identifies it as "presence" (Anwesenheit) in the "Platonist" sense. "That everything returns, is the most extreme approach of a world of becoming to a world of Being: peak of contemplation" ("Da/3 Alles wiederkehrt, ist die extremste Annaherung einer Welt des Werdens an die des Seins: Gipfel der Betrachtung") (CM 1967, VIII, 1:320 [7, 54]). In speaking of Being, Nietzsche recognizes that its false image, Becoming, is "without sense and end" ("ohne

Remarks on Nietzsche's 'Platonism'

157

Sinn und Ziel"). Being is, so to speak, meaninglessness and goallessness. It is absence (Abwesenheit, apousia), or nothingness (Nichts). Meaning, formal structure, the falsification of the senses by reason: all this, together with Being, "is an empty fiction. The 'apparent world' is the only one: the 'true world' is merely a supervenient falsehood. . ." ("eine leere Fiktion ist. Die 'scheinbare Welt' ist die einzige: die 'wahre Welt' ist nur hinzugelogen . . ."). And again in Gotzen-Ddmmerung: "the signs which one has given to 'true Being' are the signs of non-Being, of nothingness—one has constructed the 'true world' out of the contradiction to the actual world: an apparent world in fact, insofar as it is merely a moralist-optical deception" ("Die Kennzeichen, welche man dem 'wahren Sein' der Dinge gegeben hat, sind die Kennzeichen des Nicht-Seins, des Nichts—man hat die 'wahre Welt' aus dem Widerspruch zur wirklichen Welt aufgebaut: eine scheinbare Welt in der Tat, insofern sie blo/2 eine moralischoptische Tauschung ist") (Schlechta 1954, 2:658, 960). Some time ago I observed that the fundamental role assigned by Nietzsche to chaos makes it impossible for him to explain appearance or becoming. Nietzsche is not a Fichtean Idealist, for whom the subject-object distinction, and hence the structure of the world, is a project of the Absolute Ego. Perhaps one can say that Nietzschean chaos anticipates the Derridean differance. There is no ontological foundation for the "moralist-optical deception" ("moralisch-optische Tauschung"): if there were, Nietzsche would indeed be a "Platonist" in the Heideggerean sense. On the contrary, the absence of such a foundation, the primacy of nothingness (Nichts), the meaninglessness (Sinnlosigkeit) of the eternal return, are one and the same condition for the transvaluation of values or the creation of a new world, by what we may dare to call a "world-historical" manifestation of the Will to Power. And this, I suggest, is Nietzsche's "Platonism": he employs a gennaion pseudos, a noble lie that is the foundation of the distinction between the noble and the base, the high and the low, the active and the passive nihilism. The noble lie is the concealment of the truth about chaos, but not in the sense that this truth is never stated. On the contrary, Nietzsche is quite explicit about the absence of truth. He is explicit about the advocacy of a noble forgetting of the intrinsic meaninglessness and goallessness of every creation. Up to a point, this is exactly like Socrates' explicit procedure in the Republic, where he makes it entirely clear that the so-called "just" city is based upon a noble lie. However, this and other moments of unusual Platonic frankness are muffled by what one might call a salutary or medicinal (also a Platonic term) rhetoric. Plato's sober rhetoric, one could suggest, points to a partly Nietzschean conception of human beings as estranged within nature. His mad or "Dionysiac" rhetoric points to a transcendence of human existence, not to its political salvation. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Plato also possesses a sober political rhetoric which is akin to his mad rhetoric in its dependence upon the notion of a natural order, that is, of an order at least sufficient to sustain phronesis, or the judgment of intelligence. Plato is thus more complex than Nietzsche, or as one could also put it, radically less frank.

158

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

It would be tempting to refer to the doctrine of the eternal return as Nietzsche's "esoteric" or genuine teaching. The doctrine of the world creative function of the will to power would then be the transition between the genuine and the "exoteric" or "political" teaching of what is called in Thus Spoke Zarathustra the superman (Ubermensch). This terminology, which is derived from Nietzsche's own use of the terms, is nevertheless too cumbersome, since Nietzsche is equally frank about both sides of his teaching. Perhaps it would be better to say that Nietzsche's dual frankness constitutes his esotericism, which is concealed by the "positive" or creative (i.e. the Dionysian) element. The result of this concealment is precisely the exoteric conception of Nietzsche as a "liberator," a conception which is especially evident among the "postmodern" thinkers of the Left. One may suspect that Nietzsche adjusted his rhetoric to fit the tenor of the late nineteenth century, or in other words, that he made use of "advanced" or late modern materialism and decadence (which he endorses rather than denies) in such a way as to make possible salutary creation rather than the equally likely reign of the last men. The difference between Nietzsche's and Plato's rhetoric (not quite so great as seems to be the case at first sight) is then partially explained by the difference in historical circumstances, as I noted earlier. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche makes clear that all gods are human inventions and that the beyond (Jenseits) is "a heavenly nothingness" ("ein himmlisches Nichts"). In the same passage Zarathustra adds: "and the belly of Being indeed does not speak to humans, unless it be as a human" ("und der Bauch des Seins redet gar nicht zum Menschen, es sei denn als Mensch"). He goes on to identify the voice from the belly of Being as his ego (Ich): "yes, this I and the contradiction and chaos of this I speaks still most honestly of its Being, of this creating, willing, evaluating I, which is the measure and the value of things" ("Ja, dies Ich und des Ichs Widerspruch and Wirrsal redet noch am redlichsten von seinem Sein, dieses schaffende, wollende, wertende Ich, welches das Mass und der Wert der Dinge 1st") (Schlechta 1966, 2:297-8). We know, of course, that this "I" is in fact a false image of the unconscious: of desire and the will to power, which are in turn false images of chaos. The world is an interpretation (and in that sense a creation) of the individual I, or a balance of action and reaction in the perspectival world-making of each individual centre of power against the others (CM 1967, VIII,3:162-3 [14, 184]). But the I is a projection of the will to power. Differently stated, every world is an interpretation (CM 1967, VIII,1:34 [34 [1, 115]), but the uniqueness of each interpretation is an illusion or false image of the absolute homogeneity of whatever happens—an illusion identified by Nietzsche as a "moral perspective" (CM 1967, VIII 2, 20f]). And "who interprets?—our affects" ("wer legt aus?— Unsere Affekte") (CM 1967, VIII,1:159 [2,190]). Art is worth more than the truth 5 because the illusion of uniqueness is necessary for the enhancement of life (even though the unique is merely a local manifestation of power). This is expressed by Nietzsche in the following fragment: "My main thesis: there are no moral phenomena but only a

Remarks on Nietzsche's 'Platonism'

159

moralistic] interpretation of these phenomena. This interpretation itself is of extra-moral origin" ("Mein Hauptsatz: esgiebt keine moralischen Phdnomene, sondern nur eine moralaische] Interpretation dieser Phanomene. Diese Interpretation selbst ist aussermoralischen Ursprungs") (CM 1967, VIII, 1:147 [2,165]). When Nietzsche says: "the same text permits countless interpretations: there is no 'correct' interpretation" ("Derselbe Text erlaubt unzahlige Auslegungen; es gibt keine'richtige'Auslegung") (CM 1967, VIII,1:35 [1, 120]), he is not making a purely philological observation. However, neither is he asserting the primacy of uniqueness. The multiplicity of interpretations, the relativity of meanings, or what one might call the hermeneutical nature of Being, are all an illusion, albeit a salutary one. The "extra-moral" origin of moral interpretation is chaos, the primacy of nothingness, the most extreme form of nihilism. "The will to false appearance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming and to change . . . is deeper, 'more metaphysical' than the will to truth, to actuality, to Being" ("Der Wille zum Schein, zur Illusion, zur Tauschung, zum Werden und Wechseln ist tiefer, 'metaphysischer' als der Wille zur Wahrheit, zur Wirklichkeit, zum Sein") (CM 1967, VIII,3:320 [17, 3]). Life depends upon, and in its human form is itself, deception and concealment. The Dionysian yeasaying to the world as it is "including the wish for its absolute recurrence and eternity" ("bis zum Wunsche ihrer absoluten Wiederkunft und Ewigkeit") (CM 1967, VIII,2:121 [10, 3]) is thus the transition point between Nietzsche's esoteric doctrine (comprehensive nihilism) and his exoteric doctrine (the affirmation of a life-enhancing creation of new values). Sobriety is first the clear perception of chaos, meaninglessness, purposelessness. Next, this perception induces Dionysian intoxication or recognition that the primacy of chaos is the condition for the possibility of creation. Then the Dionysiac forgets, or suppresses, the Apollonian dimension within his intoxication, and thereby in fact creates or interprets. Or as Nietzsche says of the "coming philosophers" ("kommende Philosophen") in Beyond Good and Evil, "all philosophers up to now have loved their truths. But they will certainly not be dogmatists. It must offend their pride, even their taste, if their truth is indeed supposed to be a truth for everyman. 'My judgment is my judgment: no one else has an easy right to it'—so perhaps will such a philosopher of the future speak" ("alle Philosophen liebten bisher ihre Wahrheiten. Sicherlich aber werden es keine Dogmatiker sein. Es mujS ihnen wider den Stolz gehen, auch wider den Geschmack, wenn ihre Wahrheit gar noch eine Wahrheit fur jedermann sein soil . . . 'Mein Urteil ist mein Urteil: dazu hat nicht leicht auch ein anderer das Recht'—sagt vielleicht solch ein Philosoph der Zukunft . . ."). This entire paragraph (Der Freie Geist, no. 43) contains a beautiful formulation of Nietzsche's transitional teaching. Allow me to call it an esoteric formulation of the exoteric: "in the end must it be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, subtleties and shudders for the refined, and, altogether and in brief, everything rare for the

160

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

rare" ("zuletzt mu/3 es so stehn, wie es steht und immer stand: die gro/ten Dinge bleiben fiir die Gro/ten iibrig, die Abgriinde fiir die Tiefen, die Zartheiten und Schauder fiir die Feinen und, im ganzen und kurzen, alles Seltene fiir die Seltenen") (Schlechta 1954, 2:605). "The coming philosophers" ("Die kommenden Philosophen") are the "supermen" or creators who have been intoxicated by their own strength into forgetting the sober, clarifying, and hence decadent truth that there is no truth. This passage reminds one of Socrates' surprisingly blunt statement in the Philebus (28C): "the wise all agree, thereby exalting themselves, that intellect (nous) is their king of heaven and of earth." One should compare here Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. To say that the true world is graspable by the wise is equivalent to saying "I, Plato, am the truth" (Schlechta 1954, 2:963). It is at this point that we touch upon the genuine "Platonism" of Nietzsche, and so too upon the fundamental difference between Plato and Nietzsche. The question is one of rhetoric, not of ontology. I would not deny that the many enigmatic discussions in the dialogues of forms (eide and ideal) point to a crucial difference between Plato and Nietzsche. But the Ideas of Socrates, as he tells us in the Phaedo, are the "strongest hypotheses" and "safest response" (100A, 100B) that he can make about the natures of things. As I have shown elsewhere in detail, there is no ontology in Plato, no univocal sense of Being as presence (Anwesenheit).6 There are, of course, fragmentary, inconclusive and playful discussions of what we could at most call fragments pointing toward ontology. Contrary to Heidegger's contemporary proxy, Derrida, the Platonic forms are absent from discursive thinking, whether written or spoken. I will give some indication here of the essential support for this statement. There is a discontinuity between Eros and the Ideas or "hyper-uranian beings" in the Phaedrus that makes ontology impossible. This is easily illustrated by a careful analysis of Socrates' myth of the soul, and especially of the culminating vision of the hyperuranian beings by the philosophical soul, which sees them as distinct from the Olympian gods. The charioteer of the philosophical soul raises his head only above the surface of the cosmos "and is carried around by the revolution, disturbed by the horses and viewing the beings with difficulty."7 Exactly the same disjunction follows from the still fashionable linguistic or predicationalist interpretation of the Sophist. Linguistic constructions or concepts are not pure forms but discursive images of the silent conditions of discourse. Linguistic horizons are scientifically neutered versions of Nietzsche's perspectives. For this reason, much if not all of 20th century "analytical" philosophy is at bottom a kind of pallid Nietzscheanism. So long as one insists upon a distinction between semantics and syntax, one preserves the distinction between Plato and Nietzsche. However, the distinction between semantics and syntax is rooted in a disjunction between silence and speech. And a speech without meanings is as silent as a Platonic intuition (noesis) of pure meanings. For our present purpose, the result is as follows. The so-called "middle" doctrine

Remarks on Nietzsche's 'Platonism'

161

of Platonism terminates in the silence of vision, whereas the so-called "later" doctrine of Platonism, if it is a proto-Fregean doctrine, terminates in Nietzschean linguistic perspectivism or constructivism. As a consequence, if there is any difference between Plato and Nietzsche, it is the difference between silence and speech. Nietzsche, the paradigm of late-modern decadence, enunciates with all possible clarity his esoteric and his exoteric doctrines. Plato does not. There is an exoteric discussion of the distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric in Beyond Good and Evil "the exotericist . . . sees things from below upward,—the esotericist however from above downward! There are heights of the soul from which, when we look out, even tragedy ceases to have a tragic effect" ("der Exoteriker . . . von unten hinauf die Dinge sieht—der Esoteriker aber von oben herab\ Es giebt Hohen der Seele, von wo aus gesehen selbst die Tragodie aufhort, tragisch zu wirken") (Schlechta 1954, 2:595 (par.30)). This is, so to speak, the level of the Apollonian, just before one surrenders to the Dionysian intoxication of what Socrates calls in the Philebus the self-exaltation of the wise. Plato, on whose "hiddenness and Sphinx-nature" ("Verborgenheit und Sphinx-Natur") Nietzsche comments earlier (Schlechta 1954, 2:594 (par. 28)), assigns his most extensive discussion of esotericism to the sophist Protagoras in the dialogue bearing his name and to the drunken Alcibiades in the Symposium* Apparently sophists and drunkards are more candid than Platonic philosophers. Or to make the same point in another way, the members of the army of Homer, the partisans of the thesis that everything changes,9 and hence Nietzsche, the disciple of Heracleitus, 10 cannot state their principal doctrine without exposing the exoteric status of all doctrines of stability. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche tells us explicitly: "everything deep loves the mask . . . every deep spirit employs a mask" ("Alles was tief ist, liebt die Maske . . . jeder tiefe Geist braucht eine Maske") (Schlechta 1954, 2:603-4 Plato on the other hand tells us nothing explicitly. Only his masks speak, and to the superficial Geist, this fact is not even visible. When one takes seriously Plato's playfulness, and reflects upon the fact that he wrote dialogues or poems, not treatises on ontology, it is perhaps possible to understand how he might have agreed with the following assertion of Nietzsche: "Art and nothing but art. Art is the great rendering-possible of life, the great guide to life, the great stimulus to life" ("Die Kunst und nichts als die Kunst. Sie ist die gro/3e Ermoglicherin des Lebens, die gro/3e Verflihrerin zum Leben, das gro£e Stimulans zum Leben . . .") (CM 1967, VIII,2:436 [11, 415]). The most radical version of art is the production of values, that is, of a perspective or worldinterpretation. The Phaedrus makes clear that the vision of hyperuranian beings, in which our interpretation of the cosmos is rooted, is deeply problematical with respect to the possibility of a discursive justification of our interpretation. The same point is made by Diotima in the Symposium. Eros, she explains to the young Socrates, is neither mortal nor immortal, but something in between: a daimon. Its power is "to interpret (hermeneuon) and convey the

162

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

things from humans to gods and the things from gods to humans . . . Being in the middle, and so filled up with both, it thus binds together the whole to itself (202D-E). The fundamental theme of the Symposium and Phaedrus can be stated as follows. Whether the Ideas are "beyond" or "within" the world (and so, whether Eros is divine or only daimonic), the purely visible nature of the Ideas makes every interpretation of the world erotic rather than ontological. Nietzsche's "Platonism" then comes to this: what Plato calls "erotic," he calls "intoxicated" (as Heidegger observes: Heidegger 1961, 1:195). Nor should it be overlooked that Plato entrusts the presentation of the doctrine of Eros to a man who is incapable of becoming intoxicated (in Symposium, 176C, 220A). Alcibiades, who points this out, while himself intoxicated, also reveals that Socrates is unerotic. The difficult question is whether the relation between the sober Socrates and the erotic hermeneutic of divine madness is analogous to the relation between the sober and decadent Nietzsche and his prophecies, whether those in his own voice or those presented via Zarathustra, of intoxicated creators of the future. I believe it is more accurate to draw an analogy between Nietzsche and Plato than between Nietzsche and Socrates. We do not need to enter here into the involved question of Nietzsche's portrait of Socrates, although we might note his remark that "Plato, for example, becomes in my hands a caricature" ("Plato, zum Beispiel, wird bei mir zu Karikatur") (CM 1967, VIII,3: [14, 116]). Plato, whom Nietzsche also calls "a great Cagliostro" ("ein grower Cagliostro") (CM 1967, VIII:3:85 [14,116]), is the creator of both Socrates and Alcibiades, but never of an intoxicated Socrates or a philosophical Alcibiades. Nevertheless, it is Socrates who praises intoxication, and Alcibiades who praises sobriety. But this is to say that Plato praises both—exactly like Nietzsche. Once again, the difference between the two is Nietzsche's greater frankness. I believe that this has something to do with Nietzsche's remark that it is today sometimes necessary to speak and act coarsely: "that of which one does not speak loudly and scream, is not there" ("wovon man nicht laut spricht und schreit, das ist nicht da") (CM 1967, VIII,1:37 [1, 134]). Sometimes—but by no means always. But the deepest difference, as I have already indicated, turns on the point of Ideas, although not at all, I believe, in the sense of the usual interpretations. The Ideas are silent paradigms of what eludes discourse even when regulating it. Nietzsche's use of optical metaphors should not prevent us from understanding that if "the total character of the world is indeed in all eternity chaos" ("der Gesamtcharakter der Welt ist dagegen in alle Ewigkeit Chaos"), then there is nothing to see, except for "illusion" (Schein) in Hegel's sense of the term. The absence of ontology in Nietzsche is entirely compatible with a perpetual and comprehensive discursivity: a continuous veiling-over of Nichts with words, i.e., with interpretations. The circularity of the Eternal Return is thus a possible unconscious caricature of the circularity of the Hegelian concept (Begriff). From this "perspective," Nietzsche may be understood as a consequence of Hegel's failure to assimilate Platonic forms or Aristotelian categories, that is, to render intellectual intuition completely articulate. The forms and categories, having been

Remarks on Nietzsche's 'Platonism'

163

assimilated into discourse, cannot serve as a standard external to discourse by which to distinguish sense from nonsense, or truth from art. Outside of discourse, there is—nothing. If we identify "nothing" as chaos, the result is Nietzsche. Nietzsche can and must say everything, precisely because where everything is talk—that is to say interpretation—everything is permitted. Philosophy, precisely by transforming itself into art, becomes nihilism. Plato, on the contrary, says nothing, as he makes clear, for example, in his Second and Seventh Letters (Letters, 314C, 341B-D). The dialogues are art-works about a Socrates grown young (or new) and beautiful; they are not ontological treatises. Philosophy is represented in these art-works by the disjunction between Eros and Idea: it is represented by the fantasms or false images of erotic interpretations of silence. But this is entirely necessary, since there are no accurate interpretations of Ideas. Or better: accurate images would give a false picture of the Ideas because, as accurate, they would not be images at all, but the Ideas themselves. Human beings, however, are not Ideas but lovers of the Ideas. We desire what we lack, yet what we lack "structures" or directs our desire. Everything therefore comes down to the question whether we desire ourselves, whether the Ideas are "perspectives," "values," or "projects" of the will to power. Or does it? For suppose that the Nietzschean thesis is true. If desire articulates itself into perspectivity, do not the same fundamental questions of Platonism remain to be answered? Certainly Nietzsche admits as much, since his "positive" or "exoteric" teaching—unlike that of his 20th-century disciples—stands or falls upon the possibility of distinguishing the high from the low, the noble from the base, the deep from the superficial, and not merely the healthy from the sick or the strong from the weak. As Nietzsche himself says: "It is understood that the perspectives from beneath upward give rise to entirely different expressions than those from above downwards" ("Es versteht sich, da/3 die Perspektive von unten nach oben ganz andere Ausdrucke geben wird, als die von oben nach unten") (CM 1967, VIII, 1:155 [2, 182]). Contrary to Heracleitus, the way up is not the same as the way down. And that is Nietzsche's Platonism. Endnotes 1. It is true that one must distinguish between Nietzsche and Zarathustra. But nothing essential in Also Sprach Zarathustra is missing from the later writings. 2. See also Will to Power, sec. 715 and Colli and Montinari (1967), vol. 8, MS 11, sec. 73:278-9. 3. See Nietzsche's Will to Power, sec. 693, and CM 1967, VIII,3:52 [14, 80]). 4. Cf. Jean Granier, Le probleme de la verite dans la philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), 304; "C'est la le sens de la these capitale de Nietzsche selon laquelle . . . I'Etre est toujours et necessairement Etre-interprete." 5. See CM 1967, VIII,3:318-24 [17, 3-4]). 6. See my Plato's Sophist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 7. Plato's Phaedrus, 248a: "kai mogis kathorosa ta onta. . . . " 8. See Protagoras, 316-17 and Symposium, 215 ff. 9. See Theatetus, 152-153. 10. Cf. Schlechta 1954, 2:99.

This page intentionally left blank

Nihilism and Technology Barry Cooper

"Nihilists," said Arkady, speaking very distinctly. "Yes. It used to be Hegelians, and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you manage to exist in a void, in an airless vacuum; and now please ring the bell, brother Nikolai, it is time for me to drink my cocoa." Turgenev Fathers and Sons 1 knew a little man called Bliggs. He worked in a railroad office, a simple, dusty, little man, harmless at home and out of it until he read of Napoleon and heard of the thing called a Superman. Then somebody told him of Nitch, and he read as much Nitch as he could understand. The thing went to his head. Morals were no longer for him. He used to go home from the office and be a Superman by the hour, curse if his dinner was late, and strut the length of his little home with a silly irritation which he mistook for moral enfranchisement. Presently he took to being a Superman in business hours, and the railroad dismissed him. They know nothing of Nitch in such crude places. It has often seemed to me that Bliggs typified much of the present moral movement. Stephen Leacock "The Devil and the Deep Sea" George Grant, the only political philosopher this country has produced, once remarked that, during the century since Nietzsche wrote, "his opinions filtered down unrecognized through lesser minds to become the popular platitudes of the age, but also what he prophesied is now all around us to be easily seen" (Grant 1969, 25). The current level of vulgarization of Nietzsche's thought is not perhaps as easily seen as what is all around us. What is all around us, in turn, is not so easy to characterize as to see. Heidegger considered Nietzsche's the "final thought of Western metaphysics" (Heidegger 1984, 2:232). He has characterized what is all around us as a technological order, and our age as the age of the world-view. Moreover, he explained how the age of the world-view and the technological order were connected. 1 Heidegger and Nietzsche were great thinkers who dealt with large matters that are very difficult to think through. In order to gain some purchase on the problem, I would like to consider Hegel to be the last metaphysician and place Nietzsche in the spot Heidegger claimed as his own. The justification for proceeding out of Heideggerian order will depend on what turns up. I am taking the risk of greater scholarly disapproval by considering Hegel mediated by the interpretation of Alexandre Kojeve. Such risks, Nietzsche said, are unavoidable in "experimental philosophy." In the first section I sketch briefly the context within which I would locate Nietzsche's reflections on nihilism and technology. That context is provided by the accounts of Kojeve and Jacques Ellul. Second, I consider Nietzsche's version of the great modern catastrophe, the death of God, and its chief implication for

165

166

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

modern technological society, namely ass-worship. In the third section I look at Nietzsche's alternative to ass-worship, which I call self-conscious nihilism. It remains questionable whether Nietzsche's alternative mitigates or intensifies the catastrophe. Next I examine Nietzsche's warning about the ass-worship we know as technology and the ass-worshippers he described as Last Men. Finally I raise the question: why did Nietzsche detest the Last Men? In considering that question we are forced to recall the Socratic question, which began political philosophy. I. Nihilism, Technology and Nietzsche We can learn a great deal about our current political and social life by studying Kojeve's interpretation of Hegel. According to that interpretation, the universal and homogeneous state is the final regime and the Napoleonic Empire, consolidated at the battle of Jena while Hegel consolidated the introduction to the System of Science, was its first actualization. Of the several aspects of that regime that are important for contemporary political philosophy, the one that is of greatest importance at present is that it rests on the domination of nature, both human and nonhuman. The dialectic is simple: men have come to see nature as fit to be tooled and have adapted themselves to the tools necessary to do the job. In so doing they re-tool themselves. Nowadays we reprogram ourselves as well, even when we think we are merely hard-wired. The intelligibility of such imagery indicates well enough the essential features of technology. It is not just a tool or a kind of consciousness, however correct those characterizations are. As Heidegger argued, technology is the predominant mode of disclosure of the modern world that has established human and non-human nature as objects of will. The deceptiveness of technology, which requires a Heideggerian hermeneutic of suspicion to reveal it, is that technology can conceal its own meaning. Like glasses at the end of one's nose, it mediates the shape of the world. Specifically, it reveals only man and nature and what encompasses both, namely technology, is not revealed. Indeed, technology prevents its own disclosure. A sociological description that complements this Heideggerian account has been provided by Jacques Ellul. According to Ellul, technology is "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity" (Ellul 1964, xxv).2 It is characteristic of a new epoch, according to Ellul, because for the first time technology has replaced nature as the "milieu" of human life. All social phenomena and human activities are to be understood as being situated within technology rather than as having become influenced by an external technical factor. That is, technology is a method for action. One of the unsettling consequences is that technology does nothing. To be more precise, it dissolves the world while understanding the dissolution of the world as its transformation. Sometimes this is called progress. Turning to the matter of nihilism, the term was coined by Jacobi in the course of critical remarks about Fichte. Jean Paul adopted the term in order to describe

Nihilism and Technology

167

the romantic movement as "poetic nihilism," and the word gained a general currency in Germany among Christians such as von Baader as a synonym for atheism. Hegel re-introduced the category of negation into philosophy whence it passed into the hands of his epigones, including Marx, who in 1843 spoke of the Nichtigkeit of the ancien regime. Negation as a principle of political action became famous with the anarchism of Bakunin and conspiratorial revolutionary terrorists during the reign of Alexander II (1855-81) in Russia, and is with us still. Turgenev and Dostoevsky provided literary form to accommodate the experience of boundless potentiality captured by the slogan: everything is permitted. When everything is permitted, it makes no difference what we do. If what we do makes no difference, then nothing is worth anything. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide a picture gallery of activist nihilists, but as Stanley Rosen has argued persuasively, nihilism is less a historical phenomenon than a perennial human potential (Rosen 1969, xiv). That potential is actualized when reason is detached from its natural affiliation with the good. If the good is not also reasonable then there is no good reason to be reasonable. Why not be unreasonable? There is no good reason not to be. This self-cancelling dialectic may end up in boredom, but it traverses some exciting perversions along the way. If the connection between reasonableness and goodness has been lost or forgotten, then limits to our activities are merely so-called limits, limits we set arbitrarily and that we can as easily deny. The dissolution of reason and the good into potentiality is a summary description of nihilism. The actualization of potentiality undirected by anything other than will, which is itself undirected, is the most prominent feature of technology. If technology is the one best way, as Ellul indicated, it can be directed by nothing: not ideology, not prudence, not piety, not common sense. Technological activities are undertaken because they can be. The active mode radicalizes further the nihilist slogan, transforming it from "everything is permitted" into "everything is possible." And as David Rousset, who survived both Nazi and Soviet camps, once remarked, "normal men do not know that everything is possible." Let us turn now to some of Nietzsche's reflections. II. The Death of God, Technology and Ass-worship In The Gay Science, the death of God was proclaimed three times.3 In Section 108 the similarity with the death of Buddha was stressed: just as Buddha's tremendous gruesome shadow was shown for centuries in a cave, so too with the death of God "there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.—And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too." In Section 125 we find the famous tale of the Madman, and in Section 343, "The Meaning of our Cheerfulness," the death of God is identified as the greatest recent event. These three texts are not connected only at the surface by a common theme. Section 108 both states the death of God as a fact and indicates that the fact of God's death is insufficient: the shadow must be vanquished as well. Why? Section 125 implicitly indicated the reason and described the process. The

168

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Madman, a Diogenes-like character, first cries that he is seeking God—in the marketplace. There he did not find God but men who did not believe in God and who made jokes about His having emigrated or lost his way. The Madman, now provoked, cried not that he sought God in vain or even that God was dead but that he had been murdered. "All of us are his murderers." He then wondered how it had been done and what it meant: "Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?" Like the Madman and Diogenes, do we not need lanterns in the morning to see? Do we not hear the noise of the gravediggers? Do we not smell the divine decomposition? Perhaps not. If we do not, and if God is murdered, how do we avoid the smell and the noise? "How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?" In the absence of suitable festivals of atonement or sacred games, "must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto." The Madman's answer was clear—yet he remained a madman to the men of the marketplace, and perhaps to us as well. Like the credulous Buddhists, men still look to the shadow, the tremendous gruesome shadow. The Madman looked at them gaping at him in astonishment, smashed his lantern, and declared he had come too early: "deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard." Possibly to indicate to his stupid audience what they had done, the Madman entered several churches to sing his requiem for God. He was ejected and, being asked to explain himself, he answered that the churches were, like the Buddha's cave, the tomb of God. In Section 108 we saw the problem posed by God's death; in Section 125 it appears that God did not die of natural causes but that his murderers refused to admit what they had in fact done. Perhaps they were afraid. In any event, they had not yet become gods and attained that higher history. But presumably someday they would; someday the Madman would be on time. Perhaps then the Madman would not appear mad to the men of the marketplace? Perhaps then he would not need a lantern to dispel shadows during the day. In Section 343 Nietzsche explored the implications of God's death but without attributing His demise to murder. The meaning of our cheerfulness was that "we", unlike the shadow-believers, the stupid men of the marketplace, were aware of the fact that God had died. The first shadows of "this greatest recent event" were presently being cast over Europe. Perhaps they were the same Buddhist shadows of section 108. But to us, "the few", whose suspicious eyes were strong enough for this spectacle, it looked as if the sun was going down, as if it was the evening of the world. On the other hand, "the event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means." The multitude, unlike the few, had no idea what must now collapse: "for example, the whole of European morality." The understatement of Nietzsche's "for example" was followed by a more extravagant evocation of breakdown,

Nihilism and Technology

169

destruction, ruin, and cataclysm. Even that was not enough: no one can properly teach "this monstrous logic of terror," not even "we born guessers of riddles,. . . we firstlings and premature births of the coming century." The reason no one could teach it was not, however, because it was unknown to the Firstlings of the coming century. It was known to them as it was known to the Madman. But the Madman's audience was till too stupid or too cowardly. 4 If the Firstlings tried to teach the monstrous logic of terror, the marketplace would proclaim them mad as well. There is a further reason: the monstrous logic of terror does not terrify the Firstlings. They are also, as the title of Book Five indicates, "we fearless ones." They, unlike the Madman's stupid audience or those who appear before God's shadow, have nothing to fear. Indeed, "we look forward to the approaching gloom without any real sense of involvement and above all without any worry and fear for ourselves." Perhaps we Firstlings are still under the influence of the initial consequences of God's death, which "are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn."The death of God, who is here called the old god, presented an opportunity to venture forth; "the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an 'open

sea'. "5 Before attempting a summary interpretation, let us consider some additional texts that express related themes. In the preface to The Will to Power, Nietzsche indicated that he was about to relate "the history of the next two centuries." What is coming cannot come differently, namely "the advent of nihilism." It can be explained before its arrival "for necessity itself is at work here." Besides, it has been announced in hundreds of signs; ears are already cocked "for this music of the future." It is nothing new: "For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect." In contrast to those who feared to reflect was "he that speaks here." He was not afraid; he had done nothing so far but reflect and so could look back to see what will come. He was "the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself." The perfect nihilist speaks in The Will to Power but an implication of his perfection suggests a countermovement, a movement counter to nihilism "that in some future will take the place of this perfect nihilism." But not yet. However that may be, this countermovement presupposes nihilism "because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals— because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these 'values' really had." It may be true that we require new values, Nietzsche concluded, but not yet. We require them "sometime." It was enough for the present to know that "he that speaks here" was the perfect nihilist. The connection between these two texts consists in their being alternative ways of describing a historical development and Nietzsche's place in it. A third text, which placed this development in order, is the passage from Twilight of the Idols,

170

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

subtitled "History of an Error," that described how the true world finally became a fable. As Joan Stambaugh said, it amounts to "Nietzsche's 'philosophy of history' in one page" (Stambaugh 1972, 3). The true world was initially attainable for the wise, pious and virtuous man; but it became female, Christian and "unattainable for now." It then grew elusive as a Kantian obligation, which quickly bored the positivist: "how could something unknown obligate us?" It can't; so let us abolish it. Its abolition is a bright new day, a cheerful breakfast and an embarrassment for Plato. Nietzsche concludes: The true world—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INC1PIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

We will not ask: Whence comes Nietzsche's Zarathustra? Instead we will consider a pair of murderers to whom Zarathustra spoke. The Pale Criminal in Part One of Thus Spoke Zarathurstra was made to pale by an image of what he had done. "He was equal to the deed when he did it," but afterwards the image of the deed dominated his life. "Now he always saw himself as the doer of one deed," which Zarathustra said was madness after the deed. Not to enjoy such madness would be to be active, to be the doer of many deeds. But there was a madness before the deed as well; it could be discerned only deep within the soul of the Pale Criminal. According to the judge who tried him, the Pale Criminal murdered because he wanted to rob. "But I say unto you: his soul wanted blood, not robbery; he thirsted after the joy of the knife." However, his "poor reason" or common sense rejected that joy and demanded utility. "'What matters blood?' she asked; 'don't you want at least to commit a robbery with it? To take revenge?' And he listened to his poor reason: her speech lay upon him like lead; so he robbed when he murdered. He did not want to be ashamed of his madness." In consequence of his poor reason he felt guilt. He was beginning to become normalized. As a result, Zarathustra treated him simply as an exemplar of "good people" whom he found nauseating. "Indeed," he said, "I wish they had a madness of which they might perish like this pale criminal." Instead, "they have their virtue in order to live long in wretched contentment." The second murderer, the Ugliest Man, was the killer of God. In Part Four, Chapter Seven, Zarathustra encountered him in a land of death, a valley that animals avoided except for fat green snakes that came there to die. Zarathustra walked slowly in that place and finally stood still and closed his eyes. He opened them to see "something inexpressible" but he was ashamed to look at this thing and turned to go. Then there arose a gurgling noise that eventually became a human voice, and the Ugliest Man spoke. His first speech after the incoherent gurgle was the tricky speech of a riddle: "guess the riddle that I am." When Zarathustra heard this speech he was seized with pity, but rid himself of it: "I recognize you well," he said in a voice of bronze; "you are the murderer of God! Let me go. You could not bear him who saw you—who always saw you through and through, you ugliest man! You took revenge on this witness!"

Nihilism and Technology

171

Left alone in the valley of death, the Ugliest Man could only gurgle and grunt. But when Zarathustra intruded, the idiocy of his solitude was broken and a kind of community was established. Incoherent gurgle, it seems, is the appropriate "speech" of nihilism. We are reminded here of an observation of Hannah Arendt: "the 'truths' of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought" (Arendt 1958, 3). This is troublesome because speech and coherence makes man a political being. That is, technological "speech" appears to political men as gurgle or mathematical gibberish that cannot be translated back into common discourse. If speech is required to make sense of what men do or know or experience, the direction of technological gurgle is radically apolitical. Perhaps it is antipolitical as well. Neither the Ugliest Man nor the modern technician is content with gurgle. Beginning with the quasi-speech of a riddle the Ugliest Man eventually warned Zarathustra against the "bad" way he had taken. Now, if the Ugliest Man had really murdered God, he would have been content to gurgle. Moreover, he would not know how ugly he was, all "values" having become jumbled with God's passing away. So God must not have been murdered because the Ugliest Man still lived in a world, albeit not a particularly appetizing one. To be precise: the soul of the Ugliest Man, like that of the Pale Criminal, was filled with shadows. Those shadows prevent both from becoming truly nihilistic; they inspire guilt in one and a sense of ugliness in the other. But if nothing matters, there is nothing to be guilty of and nothing is ugly or beautiful, not even the Ugliest Man. In Part Four, Chapter 17, the consequences of the Ugliest Man's act are made clear. The several "higher men" that Zarathustra collected to his cave were, along with an ass, throwing a convalescent party after hearing the song of the Wanderer and Shadow, and Zarathustra slipped out to talk with his animals. "Nausea is retreating from these higher men," he said. "Well then! This is my triumph." Suddenly there was silence and Zarathustra smelled incense: his guests had grown pious and knelt to adore the ass. The Ugliest Man began gurgling and offered up a litany to glorify the ass. The ass obligingly responded in an asinine way. The implications of this masterpiece of comic writing were drawn out in the following section, "The Ass Festival." Zarathustra intervened, shouting like an ass, but louder, and demanded to know what was going on. He asked the Old Pope, "how do you reconcile this with yourself that you adore an ass in this way as a god?" The Old Pope replied that, where divine things were concerned, he was more enlightened than Zarathustra. "And that is proper. Better to adore God in this form than in no form at all!" The Old Pope was joyful "that there is still something on earth to adore." The Wanderer and Shadow blamed the Ugliest Man for awakening the old god. "And when he says that he once killed him—in the case of gods death is always a mere prejudice." Zarathustra questioned the other as well and finally came to the Ugliest Man, whose ugliness was now covered with "the cloak of the

172

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

sublime." Zarathustra asked him why he had wakened the god: "Had he not been killed and finished for a reason?" With the asking of this question, Zarathustra had also reverted. Like the Pale Criminal, his soul asked for a reason. He needed to be reminded of the acte gratuit. Quite properly, then, the Ugliest Man returned Zarathustra's teaching to the master. "O Zarathustra," replied the Ugliest Man, "you are a rogue! Whether that one still lives or lives again or is thoroughly dead—which of the two of us knows that best? I ask you. But one thing I do know; it was from you yourself that 1 learned it once, O Zarathustra: whoever would kill most thoroughly, laughs'".

The Ugliest Man was surely correct. If it is true that with gods death is always a prejudice, if "really" God is a shadow of nothing in the first place, then piety and conscience are ridiculous and can be dealt with only by laughter. Then Zarathustra saw the joke and addressed his guests, calling them roguish fools and jesters. They were wriggling with pleasure and malice because they "had become again as little children, that is, pious." Like children, they had prayed. "But now leave this nursery, my own cave, where all childishness is at home today!" It was true, of course, Zarathustra added, that "except as ye become as little children ye shall not enter into that kingdom of heaven (and Zarathustra pointed upward with his hands). But we have no wish whatever to enter into the kingdom of heaven: we have become men—so we want the earth.'" So they were to leave the nursery as convalescents, recalling that it was they who invented ass-worship. And they were to celebrate it again: "do it for your own sakes, and also for my sake. And in remembrance of me." III. Nietzsche's Alternative

These texts, taken from The Will to Power and The Gay Science, along with the sketch of Nietzsche's "philosophy of history" and Zarathustra's stories indicate that the historical development expressed in the poetic aphorism, "God is dead," is a catastrophe. Whether the knowledge that we have murdered him is any less catastrophic remains to be seen. In any event, the chief reason this historical development is catastrophic is because it is unable to understand itself. It is an unself-conscious catastrophe. Nietzsche's response was to become conscious of the catastrophe and thereby to become self-conscious. To describe this process he used the language of that process, the language of values. Nihilism, he said in The Will to Power, is "the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals" and so must be experienced in order to "find out what value these 'values' really had" (KH 1968, sec. 2). Once we see the value of those prior values we will have transvalued values. Having become perfect or perfected nihilists, we will have gone beyond nihilism. But where to? If it is simply to another set of values nothing will have been changed and we will remain within the horizon of nihilism. We will remain unself-conscious nihilists even while thinking something else. This accounts for Nietzsche's

Nihilism and Technology

173

understatement: "We require, sometime, new values." More specifically, according to Nietzsche, the development of nihilism is the development of philosophy and more especially the development of Christianity. The chief attribute of that double history that contributed to nihilism was the belief in a beyond, in another world that was the home of truth and towards which we should aim. Nietzsche denied any beyond. One of the things that his denial opened as possibility was technical or technological action. Before seeing how, let us consider the implications of ass-worship. The nihilist alone, we saw, gurgled and grunted like the idiot he was. Experientially, being alone is indistinguishable from lunacy: if you are really alone, nothing is to be trusted and all is chaos or private noise. There is no common sense of the world. But the Ugliest Man was aware of his ugliness, at least when he stopped gurgling. Thus he showed himself to be a half-hearted nihilist, which is a kind of coward. He initiated ass-worship because the privacy of chaotic experience was intolerable. Like the Pale Criminal, he too began to become normal. The desire for normalcy, we may say, drives men to ass-worship or to the worship of shadows. In his own times Nietzsche criticized the "English flatheads" for their moralism. They thought they could adopt Christian moral rules but forget about God. But Nietzsche insisted in The Twilight of the Idols that "Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hand." Consequently, "for the English morality is not yet a problem" (Kaufmann 1954, 9:5). Contemporary assworshippers are vulgarizations of the English flatheads: worshippers of several varieties of liberation who manage to combine a rejection of Christian faith with an overwhelming and gruesome compassion for the sufferings of piteous or pitiful humanity. 6 Zarathustra at least would see the comedy of teaching survey research to Inuit so that they could have an opportunity to "know themselves," preserve their "valuable cultural heritage" and still "participate fully in Canadian life." Igloos with satellite dishes! As Harry Neumann observed, "they are pious and moral, however impious or liberated they may seem to fellow jackass worshippers" (Neumann 1982, 284). But the decision in Roe v. Wade, which denied to foetuses the protection of the law and the ability to have "rights," as Grant pointed out to the dismay of these petty liberationists, "raises the cup of poison to the lips of liberalism" (Grant 1985, 71). It is not clear whether either the ass-worshippers or the selfconscious nihilists can drink that poison and exist with no sense of justice. After all, those who provide satellite dishes to Inuit think they are doing something good and significant for the liberation of persons in thrall to a cold nature. In section 12 of The Will to Power, Nietzsche discussed the decline of cosmological values and the ways of attaining the "psychological state" of nihilism. First it can be done by seeking a meaning in events. But none can be found, which is a disappointment. Here nihilism describes the state of mind that recognizes it has wasted its time, perhaps its lifetime, and achieved nothing. Second, one attains the nihilist psychological state by trying, and failing, to

174

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

impose a unity on events. The quest for a universal, which is sustained by faith, brings great satisfaction; but the failure, because there is no universal, brings a corresponding loss of faith—not this time in a non-existent universal, but in one's own value. The reason is simple: "he conceived such a whole in order to be able to believe in his own value." The third and last form recognizes the truths of the first two; becoming has no goal nor is there a unity to it into which one might plunge. In short, it is a deception and a selfdeception to invent a true world. "But as soon as man finds out how that world is fabricated solely from psychological needs, and how he has absolutely no right to it, the last form of nihilism comes into being: it includes disbelief in any metaphysical world and forbids itself any belief in a true world." But what then? The nihilist has become, to use the somewhat un-Nietzschean language I introduced earlier, self-conscious. The term is un-Nietzschean, but the process is not. Section 25 of The Will to Power, "On the Genesis of the Nihilist," described the origin of the self-conscious nihilist in terms of mustering courage to admit what one knows. "That I have hitherto been a thorough-going nihilist, I have admitted to myself only recently."7 Courage is required now to recognize "the reality of becoming as the only reality." But this leads to a further dilemma: one "forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities—but cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it." There is no refuge in truth because the nihilist knows that truth is made or madeup; but how to live with that knowledge or that truth? Nietzsche's answer was to step back or up or at any rate beyond the horizon of truth. Once we know there is no true world or that the world is valueless, then we also know that what made it true in the first place was not the world but our projection of value on to it by way of the categories or concepts of reason. It was faith in the categories of reason that led to nihilism because those categories referred to a fictitious world by which the actual world was measured. Those values by means of which we have measured the world "are, psychologically considered, the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human constructs of domination." The conclusion drawn in Section 12 is clear: affirm the world without consideration of truth. "Once we have devalued these three categories [of reason, namely: aim, unity, and being], the demonstration that they cannot be applied to the universe is no longer any reason for devaluing the universe." Perhaps not. But, considering that "there is no truth, that is, no absolute nature of things nor a 'thing-in-itself'," we reach what seems like the same dreary conclusion: "this, too, is merely nihilism—even the most extreme nihilism" (KH 1968, sees. 12, 13). Becoming a self-conscious nihilist apparently changed nothing. How could it be otherwise? If nothing matters, becoming aware that nothing matters doesn't change things. But it does change the nihilist. Perhaps that matters. Accordingly, there are two kinds of nihilism, one selfconscious, the other not. Or rather, to use Nietzsche's terms in The Will to Power, there is nihilism that is "a sign of increased power of the spirit" which he called active nihilism, and nihilism that is "decline and recession of the power of the spirit," which he called

Nihilism and Technology

175

passive nihilism (KH 1968, sec. 22). The difference between the two kinds of nihilism appears in terms of endurance. It is easy to endure the world as an unself-conscious nihilist but hard as a self-conscious one. Active nihilism "reaches its maximum of relative strength as a violent force of destruction," whereas its opposite is "the weary nihilism that no longer attacks; its most famous form, Buddhism; a passive nihilism, a sign of weakness" (KH 1968, sec. 23). Self-conscious nihilism, which acknowledges there is no true world, measures its strength by what it can endure without lies. "To this extent, nihilism, as the denial of a truthful world, of being, might be a divine way of thinking" (KH 1968, sec. 15). What does this mean? Is it beyond human capacity and "really" divine? Or is it just an ideal that appears divine until it is achieved? If it is "really" divine, we are back into unself-conscious nihilism, the nihilism of passivity. But if it is just an ideal, we are again under way, active and strong, and bent on destroying it as ideal. This is the hard way. But again we must ask: how is it possible? Nietzsche's answer in The Will to Power comes much later, in Section 676: "in the long run, it is not a question of man at all: he is to be overcome." Or rather, man overcomes himself the hard way and becomes "divine." This is easier said than done, but it has been done. Or do we just think it has? Let us say, at first, that the Overman is ambiguous and obscure. But let us add that the condition for the advent of the Overman is to know that truth is a value, a form of the will to power, an attempt to fix and stabilize what "is" flux. Truth leads to unselfconscious nihilism, a "falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for—there is no 'truth'" (KH 1968, sec. 616). And knowing this returns us to self-conscious nihilism. Following the account of the ass-festival, Nietzsche made a similar point in Zarathustra. After Zarathustra's drunken song he made speeches, telling his guests that they were no longer children but men, and so they wanted the earth, he raised the terrible question: who shall be lord of the earth? After singing a song named "Once More," in the morning after the night of the ass-festival, Zarathustra arose "strong as the morning sun that comes out of dark mountains." He then addressed the sun using words almost identical to those of the prologue: "you deep eye of happiness, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?" Zarathustra could apparently endure interpretation without the guidance of the sun. But can we? To speak historically: until the advent of nihilism, the will to power could speak innocently about truth and even about the will to truth. This was false to itself and to "truth" but it was not known to be false. But after the advent of "this uncanniest of all guests," which means politically after Hegel and Marx, this act of will was no longer innocent but guilty, and it knew itself to be guilty. Neither Nietzsche nor the Bible foresaw a return to innocence. Virginity cannot be recovered. We must and can go on to a new mode of existence where truth is "endured on a dare" (KH 1968, sec. 1041). This Nietzsche called "experimental philosophy." It has gone through the truth of nihilism "to a Dionysian

176

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

affirmation of the world as it is," to which Nietzsche attached the "formula" amor fati (KH 1968, sec. 356). The affirmation of the world as it is, namely as meaningless, alters the Dionysian affirmer, if not the world. Or, if you like, by altering the affirmer the world is also altered. The hard way, the way of strength, is endured by the transformative and selftransformative affirmations; but this is no longer just endurance. IV. Nietzsche's Warning about Ass-worship, And Why He Hated The Last Men Before considering what the hard way may mean for political philosophy, let us reconsider the easy way. Science, truth, or technology, there is no doubt, "was grasped and promoted by those who divined in it a weapon of war." The scientists, moreover, solved problems in order to be right against particular people: "it is revenge above all that science has been able to employ—the revenge of the oppressed, those who had been pushed aside and, in fact, oppressed, by the prevailing truth" (KH 1968, sec. 457). Nietzsche understood technology and science, considered by themselves, much as did Hegel and Ellul: "Science—the transformation of nature into concepts for the purpose of mastering nature— belongs under the rubric 'means'" (KH 1968, sec. 610). And yet, Nietzsche was still tentative (sec. 403): Evolution of man. a) To gain power over nature and in addition a certain power over oneself. (Morality was needed that man might prevail in his struggle with nature and the "wild animal"). b) If power has been attained over nature, one can employ this power in the further free development of oneself: will to power as self-elevation and strengthening.

In Zarathustra, the Conscientious Man denounced the Old Magician with his promises of science: "You are seducing us, you false and subtle one, to unknown desires and wildernesses. And beware when such as you start making speeches and fuss about truth] . . . you are like those whose praise of chastity secretly invites to voluptuous delights" (Kaufmann 1954, bk. 4, chap. 15). Taking the vengeance of truth together with the conditional "if power has been attained over nature," it may mean that power over nature is not possible and our thinking that we exercise it is just another form of ass-worship. Perhaps, on the other hand, it means that power over nature, which is real and not deceptive, can be employed otherwise than in the free development of oneself. Perhaps, indeed, that alternative employment will be accompanied by selfdeception so that we think it is employed in this free development of oneself. This interpretation is not a contradiction of Blanchot's observation that Nietzsche saw "that from now on all the world's seriousness would be confined to science, to the scientist, and to the prodigious power of technology "(Blanchot 1977, 122). It is true that if nihilism is a going beyond what is given, it is necessarily the horizon of all science and technology. But at the same time it is

Nihilism and Technology

177

important to notice the word "seriousness." Nietzsche's word for serious is stupid. "A 'scientific' interpretation of the world" he wrote in The Gay Science, section 373, "might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning." It all depends on whether we think The Gay Science is a serious book, on whether we dare laugh at shadows. To Zarathustra's question, "who shall be masters of the earth?" the answer seems to have turned out to be: the stupid. Speaking historically, the nineteenth-century bourgeois known to Nietzsche was a man of small ambition and low sights. The portrait drawn in Zarathustra's Prologue was repeated later in Book Four, Chapter 13, sections one to three. They are men, as George Grant has said, who "will gradually come to be the majority in any realized technical society" (Grant 1969,33). The Prologue tells of Zarathustra's going down, as Socrates did in the Republic, from the high place to the low town. Zarathustra went alone, first meeting a saintly silvan hermit who had not heard the news of God's demise. He then proceeded to the town at the edge of the woods. Like the Madman, he found the people in the marketplace and received a similar reception. They were awaiting some entertainment, a tightrope walker. Zarathustra preached a sermon proclaiming the Overman, but the people laughed at him and said they wanted to see the tightrope walker. Zarathustra then preached a sermon that began: "Man is a rope, tied between beast and Overman—a rope over an abyss." But that concession to stupidity was lost on them. "I am not the mouth for these ears," he said. "Must one smash their ears before they learn to listen with their eyes?" Zarathustra then proceeded to smash their ears. What are they proud of? he asked. Their education: "it distinguished them from goatherds." They do not like to hear the word contempt applied to them because it offends their pride. Zarathustra smashed their ears with a speech of contempt that engaged their pride. Man is running out of steam; soon he will have no goal beyond himself. Soon the Last Man will be here. Such a one asks himself big questions: "What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" And then he blinks. The Last Man is very stupid. He is small and on a small planet whose small ambition is to live long, whose joy is to rub bodies together for warmth, whose aversion is illness (but he can relieve it with a little poison for agreeable dreams). "And much poison at the end for an agreeable death." There is plenty of entertainment, but none of it strenuous; for the same reason, no one is poor or rich, no one rules or obeys. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. "Formerly, all the world was mad," says the most refined, and they blink. One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled—else it might spoil the digestion. One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has regard for health. "We have invented happiness," say the Last Men, and they blink.

178

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

The crowd clapped and were delighted and called upon Zarathustra to turn them into Last Men. Nietzsche's joke was plain enough. These intellectuals, snobs who look down on goatherds and up to no one and nothing, have had their ears smashed with Zarthustra's contempt. But they are too stupid to notice; they are beneath contempt. Nietzsche explained the joke in the passage in part four entitled, "On the Higher Man." He recalled his first encounter with men. "I committed the folly of hermits, the grand folly: I stood in the market place." He learned from that experience that he had no concern with the mob and no need to speak into "long mob ears." What was the point in smashing asinine ears? To the higher men to whom he spoke in part four, Zarathustra again explained God's death and their own resurrection, which followed from it. Of the stupid, he recalled that they believed in equality: "before God we are all equal. Before God! but now this God has died. And before the mob we do not want to be equal. You higher men, go away from the market place!" The resurrection of the higher men, Nietzsche said, would be followed by the Overman; the contempt that the Higher Men felt for the Last Men allowed Zarathustra to hope that man would not be preserved. "The most concerned ask today: 'How is man to be preserved*? But Zarathustra is the first and only one to ask 'How is man to be overcome'?" The small people who wish only for a long life and a pleasant death "preach surrender and resignation and prudence and industry and consideration and the long etcetera of the small virtues." These womanish, servile, nauseating preachers of smallness "are the Overman's greatest danger." More particularly, Nietzsche indicated that, lacking a common goal, mankind cannot be said to exist (Zarathustra, bk. 1, ch. 15). If ever the small ones created a mankind infused with democratic-socialist mediocrity, its destruction would be that much more to be desired.8 The counsel of large-scale murder is a hard political teaching, but it is one from which we have not flinched. Perhaps the simplest contemporary comment on Nietzsche's warning was provided by one of his most assiduous pupils, Norman Mailer. In an interview in 1962, Mailer said that "our best hope for no atomic war is that the complexities of political life at the summit remain complex . . . let us try to make them more complex. That is a manly activity. It offers more hope for saving the world than a gaggle of pacifists and vegetarians." It is, perhaps, a sign of the times that Mailer has more recently repudiated the hope he shared with Zarathustra (Mailer 1986, 242-3). Even so, the question remains to be put to Nietzsche: if nothing matters, what is wrong with the Last Man? If we eventually become Dionysian enough to embrace the amorfati, if we finally overcome revenge, do we not also will the existence of the detested Last Men, the gaggle of pacifists, vegetarians, and intellectuals stinking with resentment? If not, why not? V. Conclusions: What Can One Do? These questions take us to the centre of the matter posed implicitly in the quotations placed at the head of this essay. In terms of the simple sociology of the technological society, we wonder how servile cleverness undertaken for the

Nihilism and Technology

179

relief of man's estate has made it possible for warriors to obliterate that estate. As Blanchot remarked: present-day man believes himself to be definitive, stable in his nature, happy in the small circle closed around himself, resigned to the spirit of revenge; yet, pushed by the impersonal force of science and by the force of that event which liberates him from values, he possesses power in excess of himself— even without his trying to surpass himself in that power. Present-day man is of the lowest rank, but his power is that of a being who is already beyond man: how would this contradiction not harbour the greatest danger? (Blanchot 1977, 123-4)

What is to be done? Or, more modestly and more accurately, how are we to understand what Nietzsche has brought to light? Consider Nietzsche's option. He might have left matters with his gay science, a joyful atheist-nihilist science that ridicules all ass-worshippers. But he didn't. He was "aristocratic" enough to ask the Socratic question: how ought one to live? But he was un-Socratic enough to refuse the dialogic exploration of that question. His answer was not the Apollonian logos but the Dionysian song and dance. But it is not clear that a reliance on unconscious instinct or on singing and dancing answers, or rather, solves, the Socratic question. If the Dionysian will to overpower is the core of human reality, then everything, including the Last Men, must be caused by it. Human creativity is unbounded, but Nietzsche feared that it would be used only to create more Last Men living peacefully as equals. The Overman, however, would not have even this fear because his will to overpower would will the eternal return of past inequality and war as well as egalitarian liberation. In the absence of the Overman, there would be only the will of the Last Men. Nietzsche's loathing for them, however, returned him to the world of political ambition—because of his fear, and thus his revenge on reality that permits Last Men. One can see Nietzsche's dilemma in an "epistemological" light as well. If Apollonian reason and communication is derived from a Dionysian depth, then it is impossible to know that depth. There can be no examination of it because it would entail driving Apollo down into the depth. If Dionysian instinct is instinct, it is not a logos; it is a dance, not choreography. As depth, it has no manifestation, and to manifest it, to Apollonize Dionysus, is to restore the nihilism that the depth was meant to overpower. Nietzsche, unlike Freud, did not try to map the unmappable with a scientific probe. But Nietzsche did detest the Last Men, and for a nihilist this was inconsistent. What does this inconsistency mean? Peter Petrovich Kirsanov wished his cocoa and the railroad fired Bliggs: the common sense world, however remotely, has a concern with how one ought to live, with morality, as Leacock said. Nietzsche's detestation of the Last Men, his "aristocratic" tastes, indicated that he too, after a heroic effort to avoid the realities encountered by common sense, was returned, by his own integrity, to where Socrates began.9 Harry Neumann argued that education's only serious question consists in understanding the alternatives: political philosophy or nihilist science

180

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

(Neumann 1984, 365-74). "Science emerges," Neumann said, "when anyone, from caveman to contemporaries, declares his independence from philosophy. Prior to this declaration of independence, there is no science as such." There are only several sciences: Aristotelean science, Thomist science, Lysenkian science, social science, Christian science. Their subordinate status was indicated by the several adjectives; the adjectives, transformed into substantives, refer to different articulate accounts of the whole. Science simply emerges when a negative answer is given to the question: are there any restraints to scientific experimentations? In the language we used earlier in this essay, such a "scientific" society is the technological society and it is directed virtually, if not actually, by the universal and homogeneous state. According to this account, "philosophers are scientists whose deficient selfknowledge is responsible for apparently ineradicable illusions about themselves and consequently about science." By their own dim lights, philosophers engage in discussion with fellow citizens about moral and political things. They examine opinions and common-sensical notions to see if they make sense. Socrates, we know, claimed not to be wise, though he sought wisdom and was persuaded that the crucial question was to know what was good, not for a nihilist individual, for whom such a question would not make sense, but for himself and for his fellow citizens. Even when his fellow citizens proved reluctant partners in conversation, or half-hearted nihilists, Socrates was still concerned with what was good for himself. As a result, the question of the good life is also the question of the good regime. The good regime or political order is not a question at all for a nihilist. For contemporary nihilists, whether hard and self-conscious or flabby and unselfconscious, the best regime, or rather, the necessary regime, is the technological society that expresses the widest possible application of will, namely the universal and homogeneous state. This regime looks like tyranny to the political philosophers. (The most thorough and inconclusive exposition of this matter is found in the discussion by Strauss and Kojeve of a nearly forgotten text of a much neglected Greek). The more scientific or technological any contemporary regime is, that is, the more it is grounded on individual rights and entitlements, the more its citizens or its subjects recognize that it is held together by force and by propaganda or lies. As Neumann said, "in scientifically enlightened herds, the police are the heart of politics." We must understand the term "police" in its wide Hegelian sense: scientific regimes are bureaucracies. Some of the bureaucrats are armed, some are not, but all practice administrative technologies. To sum up: pre-scientific philosophers saw themselves as political because of the need to communicate with others, to discuss the great common-sense questions. There were differences of opinion and there were friends and enemies. The difference between them was sanctified by piety or patriotism. In the contemporary world it is sanctified by Hegelian fragments of the slogan of the French Revolution. More precisely, it is sanctified by a hatred of wrong opinions or by a spirit of revenge.10 The problem for political philosophy is that we are called upon at once to be Nietzschean nihilists so as to ridicule the

Nihilism and Technology

181

technological ass-worshippers, but at the same time it seems impossible to avoid common sense and its singular question: what is the good life? Endnotes 1. Both pieces are conveniently collected in English by William Lovitt in Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1977). 2. In fact, Ellul used the term "technique" not technology. The difference is unimportant here. 3. I have occasionally made some slight changes to Kaufmann 1954, 1966, 1969 and 1974, and to KH 1968. Zarathustra and Twilight references are from Kaufmann 1954. 4. See KH 1968, sec. 1041; Kaufmann 1966, 39; and Kaufmann 1969, preface, 3. 5. Nietzsche spent much of the balance of book five dealing with various diminished refusals of the open sea. Section 124, immediately prior to the Madman, ends with an evocation of the absence of land. 6. Cf. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (in Kaufmann 1954), bk 2, ch. 6. 7. See also Twilight of the Idols (in Kaufmann 1954), "Maxims and Arrows", sec. 2. 8. See KH 1968, sec. 1054, and Kaufmann 1966, 225. 9. One might say that he retraced Socrates' steps; see Plato's Phaedo 96a-100e, where Socrates explains why he had to turn away from direct experiences of reality because he found those experiences incoherent. In Nietzsche's language, he needed a world (Kaufmann 1966, 150). 10. See Zarathustra, bk. 2, chs. 7 and 20, and Will to Power, sec. 765.

This page intentionally left blank

Zarathustra, Nihilism and the Drama of Wisdom David Goicoechea We shall think about the rhetoric of nihilism in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Such a reflection could easily become fanciful. There is no explicit treatment of either "rhetoric" or "nihilism" in the text. However, we might interpret the rhetoric of nihilism by placing it within the context of the drama as a whole. But that approach is also difficult because the text does not refer to itself as a drama. If an interpretation is to be fruitful we need to clarify the rhetoric of nihilism in terms of the dramatic context and the dramatic context by means of the rhetoric of nihilism. In order to leap into this hermeneutic circle we might go to the theme of wisdom as a guide. Like the themes of love, revenge and self-overcoming the wisdom theme does run from the beginning to the end of Zarathustra. But it has the special advantage in that it becomes a drama within the drama. Zarathustra's treatment of wisdom emerges as the wisdom drama. That smaller drama plays a special role within the larger drama of the text as a whole. Wisdom is especially linked with the development of Zarathustra's use of the rhetoric of nihilism. Wisdom is especially linked with the drama of Zarathustra. Thus, wisdom is a suitable third thing by which we might clarify the rhetoric of nihilism and the drama of Zarathustra. Zarathustra works and plays with the theme of wisdom at key points throughout the text. It appears ambiguously both at the start and at the close of "Zarathustra's Prologue." What appears in English simply as "wisdom" arises throughout the text as "Weisheit" and also as "Klugheit." What is translated as "folly" is found throughout as "Torheit" and also as "Narrheit." I mentioned this only in passing to indicate that wisdom is an illusive guide. There is the wisdom of the bee and the serpent, of the camel and the lion, of the female and the child. To understand the theme of wisdom we will step with the aid of the wisdom drama into the drama as a whole and then return to confirm the meaning of the scattered wisdom passages. But the rhetoric of nihilism is involved in that circle. It may seem that we are compounding our problem by trying to treat these three issues at once: wisdom, nihilistic rhetoric and the drama of Zarathustra. The approach, however, simplifies as well as compounds. By considering them only insofar as they touch upon one another we reach a focal point, and thinking can begin. Zarathustra's first words about wisdom which open the prologue are: Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it. I should like to give it away and distribute it, until the wise among men have again become happy in their folly and the poor happy in their wealth. (Kaufmann 1971, 10) 183

184

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

These words of wisdom are strangely ambiguous. They indicate different wisdoms. First, there is the wisdom of Zarathustra. He has a wisdom that he both likes and dislikes. He has gathered it in abundance, presumably because he likes it. He wants to give it to others, presumably because it will add to their fortune. And yet, it is too much. There is a heaviness about it that he does not like. He wants to get rid of it. His own wisdom is ambivalent. Second, there is the wisdom of the wise among men. They are not yet happy in their folly. They seem to have wisdom to the exclusion of folly. And yet, Zarathustra sees that they still have folly and that it is their true wealth. The wisdom that he wants to share with the wise among men is that they recognize their folly and see that it can make them happy. Thus, there is more than ambivalence here. There is multivalence. There are at least three kinds of contending wisdom: 1) the wise among men want a wisdom without folly, 2) Zarathustra has a wisdom with folly that makes him weary, 3) Zarathustra has insight that there is a wisdom beyond weariness. The wisdom passage which ends the prologue confirms the ambiguity. Zarathustra concludes the prologue as he began it with an insight into illusive wisdom. He says: These are my animals . . . the proudest animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun. . .. That I might be wise through and through like my serpent! But there I ask the impossible: so I ask my pride that it always go along with my wisdom. And when my wisdom leaves me one day—alas, it loves to fly away—let my pride then fly with my folly. (Kaufmann 1971, 25)

Here Zarathustra wishes for wisdom but realizes that he will never be cunning through and through like his serpent. He might be loaded with wisdom like the bee which is weary of his honey, but he cannot be wise through and through because he is also proud. He asks his pride to accept his wisdom. But one day his wisdom will leave him. Wisdom might not accept his pride. But Zarathustra sees another possibility. Perhaps folly can fly with his pride instead. This insight begins to introduce the movement of the drama: there are not only different kinds of wisdom, there are different stages of wisdom. These kinds of wisdom do not peacefully coexist. They are polemical. In fact, the first stage is one of wisdom pure and simple. The third stage is one of folly without wisdom. They are in utter opposition. The ambiguity or multiformity is still there at the beginning of book one. In the "On the Three Metamorphoses,"Zarathustra asks about the camel: "Is it not humbling itself to wound its haughtiness? Letting its folly shine to mock its wisdom?" (Kaufmann 1971, 26). The camel is humble without pride. And yet, even for him there is the curious interplay between wisdom and folly. The camel in humility could be wise through and through. Even so, in mockery it bears the burden of a guilty folly. In these first three quotations about wisdom there is the mingling of wisdom and folly. There is the allegorical rhetoric of bee, serpent and camel. That rhetoric is nihilistic, connecting wisdom with the negativity of weariness, departing and mockery. How are we to interpret this blend of wisdom and folly, these animals, this negativity? Already the image of the camel is an indication of the structure of the drama. Zarathustra begins book one, chapter one by telling about the three metamor-

Zarathustra, Nihilism and the Drama of Wisdom

185

phoses of the spirit; how it becomes camel, lion and child. One could argue that this imagery is relatively unimportant and that it is no longer developed after the first chapter. However, attention to the wisdom theme shows that this is not the case. As the wisdom of the camel is referred to in the first chapter of book one, so the wisdom of the lion is referred to in the first chapter of book two: Indeed, you too will be frightened, my friends, by my wild wisdom; and perhaps you will flee from it, together with my enemies . . . would that my lioness, wisdom, might learn how to roar tenderly! (Kaufmann 1971, 85)'

This leonine wisdom is wild and frightening. That must be because of its connection with folly. The camel wisdom is tame and harmless. The leonine wisdom roars without any tenderness. Its rhetoric is nihilistic as it negates the camel wisdom. However, Zarathustra also looks forward to a more tender and gentle roaring. He ends this first chapter of book two saying: My wild wisdom became pregnant on lonely mountains; on rough stones she gave birth to her young, her youngest. Now she runs foolishly through the harsh desert and seeks and seeks gentle turf—my old, wild wisdom. Upon your heart's gentle turf, my friends, upon your love she would bed her most dearly beloved. (Kaufmann 1971, 85)

Here the folly of the wisdom of the lioness is explicit as she runs about foolishly. She is not only weary, but also lonely. Her habitat is harsh. The negative rhetoric is building up. However, she is longing to get beyond it. She seeks and seeks gentle turf. She seeks a love that is tender for the rest of her child. This passage connects wisdom also with lion and child. The structure of the drama is building up. Zarathustra as lion stands in the middle of the drama looking back negatively at the camel wisdom and forward positively to the child folly. Other wisdom passages of book one confirm and make clearer this dramatic structure. When we first meet Zarathustra in the prologue he is forty years old and coming down from his mountain cave loaded with his new wisdom of folly. He has been up at his cave for ten years making the transition from camel wisdom to lion wisdom. So the text of Zarathustra reveals the first and second acts of the drama only in a multitude of flashbacks, dreamlike in their condensation and interpenetration. We do not directly see how spirit became camel or lion. We learn of this only through the leonine rhetoric of negativity against the camel attitude. Throughout book one, Zarathustra is in the town of the Pied Cow communicating with the people and the wise among them through his words and works. He tells of the camel wisdom's weak and nasty origin in resentment. He warns that its flower and fruit will thus be weak and nasty too. Zarathustra as lion fights with the camel's dragon of morality. That morality prefers the soul and despises the body. It seeks the afterworld and denies the earth. With its dualistic separation of wisdom and folly it loves good and hates evil. With his negating wisdom Zarathustra says to the despisers of the body: "There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. And who knows for what purpose your body requires precisely your best wisdom?" (Kaufmann 1971, 35). The dramatic context makes the struggle between lion and camel much clearer.

186

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

The camel wisdom is dualistic. Camel wisdom is opposed to folly. Mind is opposed to body. Afterlife is opposed to this life. The camel wisdom is nihilistic because it negates folly, body, this life. The lion wisdom in its opposition to the camel becomes dualistic and nihilistic also. Instead, it negates wisdom, mind and the afterlife. Mind according to the camel is supposed to be the seat of a superior wisdom, the theoretical wisdom of reason. Zarathustra as lion argues that the body has a wisdom that the mind knows not. To those who joyfully suffer the passions Zarathustra says: "It is an earthly virtue that I love: there is little prudence in it, and least of all common wisdom" (Kaufmann 1971, 36). Zarathustra proclaims the earth rather than the afterworld. His wisdom is not a prudence that calculates the most certain means to reach security. Wisdom for him is not a moral or intellectual virtue in the camel sense. It is not a means to eternal happiness. In the chapter "On Reading and Writing," Zarathustra tells us why the lion wisdom is negative and harsh. He says: "Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent—thus wisdom wants us; she is a woman and always loves only a warrior" (Kaufmann 1971, 41). As Zarathustra battles the dragon of camel morality he is called upon by the wisdom he loves to be violent, brave, unconcerned and mocking. The wisdom he loves is not a moral virtue of the golden mean nor an intellectual virtue that knows ultimate causes. She is a woman who loves warriors. Zarathustra is a lover of this woman. He wants to be loved by her. She makes demands upon him. Zarathustra's wisdom is not the wisdom of Plato's Republic or of Aristotle's Metaphysics and Ethics. It is also not the wisdom of the Phaedo which sees the love of wisdom as a dying. About the preachers of death Zarathustra says: "Their wisdom says, 'a fool who stays alive'—but such fools are we. And this is surely the most foolish thing about life" (Kaufmann 1971, 45). Those who are weary and renounce life, the camels, look forward to death as the passage to the afterlife. In their eyes, Zarathustra's lion wisdom is foolish. It loves this life. Yet, life has something foolish about it. The weak want to leave it as an escape. But the strong too are willing to die. Lion wisdom is foolhardy as it is not afraid to die at the right time. It is willing to die for higher life but not a higher afterlife. Such is the lion's folly. So it is with wisdom in book one, which gives us the camel and the lion and their struggle. Camel wisdom has an 'en soi' being. It is a solid wisdom which rejects folly as evil. It has no awareness of the negativity within itself. But the lion points out its weary weakness which is resentful. The lion wisdom has a 'pour soi' being. It is aware that it is shot through with folly and negativity. It is aware of its own weariness, loneliness and harshness as it negates the camel wisdom. But, its nihilism is more humane. It negates in order to affirm because, in the drama, the lion is not only fighting the camel, she is also giving birth to her child. She longs especially for a speech that is more tender. Book two, chapter one, not only introduces the lioness wisdom and her child, but also this new speech. Zarathustra says: "New ways I go, a new speech comes to me; weary I grow like all creators, of the old tongues" (Kaufmann 1971, 84). Now we are ready to behold spirit as it brings forth the child. Books two, three and four present the third act of the drama in three wisdom scenes. They portray

Zarathustra, Nihilism and the Drama of Wisdom

187

the transition of spirit from lion to child. This last metamorphosis is a movement from the lion's wisdom folly to the child's folly. It is a transition of speech as well as of spirit. It is a movement from the rhetoric of nihilism to the poetry of affirmation. The three wisdom scenes of the third act are no longer expressed in rhetorical oratory. Rather they are expressed in the new speech of poetic song. The first wisdom scene is found in the middle of book two in "The Dancing Song." The second wisdom scene takes place at the end of book three in "The Second Dance Song." The third wisdom scene of act three of the drama takes place at the end of book four in the songs which end the book, but especially in "The Drunken Song." In the first dancing song, Zarathustra is involved in a love triangle with two women, Life and Wisdom. Zarathustra begins by singing Life's praises. She responds by speaking ill of herself which Zarathustra finds enchanting. This is the beginning of the wisdom drama within the drama of Zarathustra. She says she is changeable, wild, wicked, a woman in every way. Then Wisdom is critical of Zarathustra for loving Life. Wisdom suggests that he projects his will, his wants and his love upon Life. Zarathustra almost tells Wisdom the truth but he resists. He loves Wisdom because she reminds him so much of Life. He loves Wisdom, but his greater love is for Life. The two women are jealous of one another. Life once asked Zarathustra about Wisdom and he responded fervently: "Oh yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? . . . She is changeable and stubborn; often I have seen her bite her lip and comb her hair against the grain. Perhaps she is evil and false and a female in every way; but just when she speaks ill of herself she is most seductive." (Kaufmann 1971, 109)

Life did not know whether Zarathustra was singing of her or of Wisdom. At the beginning of this new speech there is a new approach to wisdom. Before wisdom was seen as bee, serpent, camel and lioness. Now she is seen as a woman. But still there is ambiguity. It is difficult to distinguish clearly the woman Wisdom from the woman Life. They are so much alike. And yet there is the dramatic tension of hatred and jealousy between them. There is a good deal of silence in this song. Zarathustra almost tells Wisdom what he thinks of her, but we do not discover what that is. In this first scene there is negativity and struggle. There is little clarity as to what it is all about. The first song about Life and Wisdom is mostly mystery that will receive some light in the later scene. At the end of the third book, after Zarathustra has convalesced from his great nausea at eternal recurrence, there is "The Other Dancing Song." There is still the love triangle, but Wisdom has nearly faded out of the picture. Zarathustra sings of his love for Life. Even if she be a young tease, he seeks no revenge against her. Now that he has convalesced and loves eternal recurrence he can love Life in all her foolishness. At first, he threatens her when she hurts him. He says that he has not forgotten his whip. Keeping time with his whip she shall dance and cry. But she admonishes him. She covers her delicate ears and says:

188

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism "O Zarathustra, don't crack your whip so frightfully! After all you know that noise murders thought—and just now such tender thoughts are coming to me." (Kaufmann 1971, 226)

The speech is becoming more and more tender. It is moving further and further from the rhetoric of nihilism. Life is leading Zarathustra along the path of love, of amorfati. She tells him that they are two good-and-evil-for-nothings. Being beyond good and evil they are alone together so they had better love each other. Life says to Zarathustra: "That I like you, often too well, that you know; and the reason is that I am jealous of your wisdom! If your wisdom ever ran away from you, then my love would quickly run away from you too." (Kaufmann 1971, 226)

Again this song is rife with ambiguity or with more and more folly. Life says she loves Zarathustra because they are so much alike in being beyond good and evil. She loves him because they have only each other. She loves him because she is jealous of his wisdom. But then she says that if Wisdom ever left him she would leave him too. We are now approaching the departure of Wisdom which was first hinted at the end of the prologue. There we saw that one day wisdom would leave Zarathustra and he wished that then his folly might fly with his pride. We are now ready for the metamorphosis. At the end of the song Life tells Zarathustra that she is aware that he wants to leave her. He answers hesitantly: "Yes, but you also know—" and I whispered something into her ear, right through her tangled, yellow, foolish tresses (Kaufmann 1971, 227). She answered: "You know that, O Zarathustra? nobody knows that." And we looked at each other and gazed on the green meadow over which the cool evening was running just then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was. (Kaufmann 1971, 227)

What is this secret between Life and Zarathustra? The rest of the song which ends with "The 'Yes' and 'Amen' Song of the Seven Seals" reveals that it is the secret of the love of eternal recurrence. Zarathustra can love the girl, Life, in all her wild folly because his love has discovered a "joy—deeper than any agony." What Zarathustra whispered into her ear was that he knew the link between her agony and ecstasy, the link between her good and evil. She might bite him with her sharp little teeth. She might infuriate him with her catty, nasty smallness. But, the joy of his love for her could let him say "yes" and "amen" to all of that. The joy of his love for her could let him say: "bite me again! Be nasty again! Just the same way! Do it over and over again! I love it!" That is how strong he had become in his convalescence. When he first saw the vision of eternal recurrence and heard its riddle he was nauseated through and through by life's nasty littleness and cruel evil. But then he was weary in his lack of power. However, he was healed. In his convalescence he came to an amor fati that could let him love Life even to the point of willing her eternal recurrence.

Zarathustra, Nihilism and the Drama of Wisdom

189

Zarathustra's new love of Life has implications for Wisdom. These two females have been jealous of one another. As Zarathustra comes to such an unqualified love of Life his love of Wisdom becomes more and more qualified until finally at this point there is nothing for her to do but to depart. Camel wisdom was linked to love of the afterlife. It was a prudence which would try to avoid the finitude of this life through resignation. The lion wisdom which loved this life and did not forgo it for the afterlife could still try to avoid this life's sufferings. But now that Zarathustra loves Life totally even together with the agony she brings him—for her agony is linked with her joy and her joy is greater than her agony—Wisdom as timid prudence and weary negation must depart. Wisdom has been the mirror-image handmaiden of Life. Who would love Wisdom as much as Life unless he loved the afterlife? When Wisdom is not loved, she leaves as any wise female should. But Life said to Zarathustra that she would cease to love him if he ceased to be wise. That is true. Life will be even harder on a foolhardy Zarathustra than she would be on a prudent Zarathustra. When he does not prudently plan for the future he will have to pay the price. Life is hard on him anyway. She will be harder if he is not wise. But that is fine with Zarathustra. Life does not have to love him totally even though he loves her totally. His convalescence means that now he has enough strength to love even more than he is loved. The inseminated egg of spirit became the caterpillar-like-camel. It then became the pupa-like-lion. Now it is emerging from the cocoon as the butterflychild. In scene one of this third act it sheds, like a waking psyche, the wrappings that have restrained it. In scene two it spreads its dampened wings to dry. Now we are ready for scene three at the end of book four where it flies in the innocent dance of the "yes" and "amen" saying. In the middle of book four Wisdom is still present. There remains some nihilistic rhetoric. There has been the cry of distress. There is about to be "The Song of Melancholy." In the middle of this melancholy party stood Zarathustra's eagle bristling and restless, for he had been asked too many questions for which his pride had no answer, and the wise serpent hung around his neck. (Kaufmann 1971, 279)

The convalescence still has to be completed. Zarathustra has to go through the last stage of his creative illness and overcome his pity for the higher men who are crying in distress. Just a few sentences after we see that the crafty serpent is still around the eagle's neck Zarathustra says: "First someone must come—someone to make you laugh again, a good gay clown, a dancer, and wind and wildcat, some old fool" (Kaufmann 1971,279). This coming of the fool is the theme of the final scene of the drama. With the departure of Apollonian wisdom there is the arrival of Dionysian foolery. There is the inspiration of sexuality and intoxication. The eagle and the serpent are still with Zarathustra as the magician sings his song of melancholy. The song which sees science as born of fear is itself a child of the suffering of the great nausea. It is still a fuss about truth that seeks the lure

190

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

back into prisons. But it does have the refrain "only fool! only poet!" This is a significant linking. Only a fool. No longer a moralistic rhetorician. Poetic affirmation is building up as clowning laughter increases. The song of "The Daughters of the Wilderness "finally dispels the higher men's distress. This song of the foolish, luring, oriental girls heals the strange old men of their crafty prudence. Then there is the "Ass Festival." It is the beginning of "The Drunken Song" initiated by the wine bibbing ass who brays "yeah!" "yeah!". His "yeah" becomes the "yes" of the "yea" saying men. Soon all are saying it. The double inspiration of Dionysus in intoxication and sex has done its work: in the whirl of the gay wine and in the swirl of lovely legs, the old fools see a joy deeper than any sorrow. The foolishness of amor fati has taken hold of them. Nevertheless, right up until the end even of the drunken song the crafty serpent remained. As midnight approached Zarathustra put one finger to his mouth and said "come!". And presently it became quiet and secret around; but from the depth the sound of a bell came up slowly. Zarathustra and the higher men listened for it; but then he put one finger to his mouth another time and said again, "Come! come! midnight approaches." And his voice had changed. But still he did not stir from his place. Then it grew still more quiet and secret, and everything listened, even the ass and Zarathustra's animals of honor, the eagle and the serpent. (Kaufmann 1971, 319)

But at the very end, which is the chapter of "The sign" of a new beginning, the serpent is not there. On the next morning after the Dionysian festival with the ass of folly and the foolish girls and the wine, Zarathustra arises and walks out into the morning sun. He looked questioning into the height for he heard the sharp cry of his eagle above him. "Well then!" he cried back; "thus it pleases and suits me. My animals are awake, for I am awake. My eagle is awake and honors the sun as I do. With eagle talons he grasps for the new light. You are the right animals for me; I love you." (Kaufmann 1971, 325).

So ends the drama. Wisdom has departed. Zarathustra's love of the woman, Life, became so great that lady Sophia just up and left. The drama is, in fact, in praise of folly.2 Such is the new speech. It ends in the praise and thanksgiving of the "yes" and "amen." As the drama progresses the silence of Zarathustra increases in significance. He put his finger to his mouth. He never even said that the serpent was not there. He only said, "Well, then, thus it pleases me," when he looked up and saw the eagle without the serpent. At the end of the drama he is totally beyond the rhetoric of nihilism. He has nothing of the camel's protest against folly and of the lion's protestation against that protest. Such a rhetoric of nihilism that never moves beyond itself might be for the fire hound. But Zarathustra had already said to him: Believe me, Friend Hellishnoise: the greatest events—they are not our loudest but our stillest hours. Not around the invention of new noise, but around the invention of new values does the world revolve. It revolves inaudibly. (Kaufmann 1971, 131).

Zarathustra, Nihilism and the Drama of Wisdom

191

A rhetoric of nihilism that becomes fixed might be for the foaming fool whom they called "Zarathustra's Ape." That fool had borrowed some of Zarathustra's phrasing and cadences and he also liked to borrow from the treasures of his wisdom (Kaufmann 1971, 175). But a foaming fool is not a laughing, dancing fool like King Lear's. Zarathustra told him that if he could not see good then he should pass by. Such is Zarathustra's message about the rhetoric of nihilism. It is necessary to the drama of spirit, but it is only two steps along the way. The wisdom drama is such that it must be overcome. The step for which it prepares is the poetic praise and thanksgiving which is beyond Platonic negation and the tragic protest. The rhetoric of nihilism is on the way toward the "yes" and "amen" saying. The drama of wisdom is part of the larger dramatic text. This larger and more complicated dramatic text is Zarathustra's discovery that the amorfati, the affirmation of life, the love of eternal recurrence is a praise of folly. It is a praise beyond rhetoric, a praise that even in its folly is beyond nihilism. Endnotes 1. Nietzsche's association of wisdom and the wilderness is appropriate and in keeping with the wisdom tradition. Many sages have gone to the wilderness to grow in wisdom. Also, the association of wisdom with the beast of prey is in praise of folly. The camel is a good, domesticated herbivore. The lion is an evil, wild carnivore. That Zarathustra loves the evil as well as the good, the wild as well as the tame, is central to his affirmation of life. 2. Erasmus in his In Praise of Folly continues and greatly develops the Socratic theme that Zarathustra here expands. The lady Sophia personification begins in the "Book of Proverbs." The female folly is there disparaged.

This page intentionally left blank

Afterword On the Coincidence of Our Preoccupation With Nietzsche Tom Darby With an attitude of solemnity, books often end as they began. This is not so here. When I reflect on what preceded this afterword, I am brought to a jarring question: Why are we so preoccupied with Nietzsche? For those of us who were students during the sixties or early seventies it is likely that we studied the thoughts of Hegel or thoughts about his thoughts or thoughts derived from them. Concerning the latter, I have in mind everything ranging from Marx and Freudo-Marxism to the Frankfurt School. For a long while much was either an extrapolation of or a detraction from Hegel, or so it seemed. And today we seem to be preoccupied with Nietzsche. It was, however, neither the logic of history nor was it some coincidence of logic and history that brought us from there to Nietzsche. But much of our being brought here was due, I think, to coincidence. What do I mean by this? Coincidence is an odd word, an odd word because its meaning is double. First, it connotes the casual coming together of things or events. It makes us think of the frivolous and the fashionable. Next, it connotes an unexpected yet important coming together of things or events. It makes us think of those incidents for which there is at first no apparent reason but, after the fact, much obvious, and sometimes even profound, meaning. What I am thinking of is this previous concern with Hegel and things Hegelian and what this says about and has to do with our present preoccupation with Nietzsche. I. From Nietzsche to Hegel In the current American subject index to Books In Print there are four times as many titles directly relating to Nietzsche as there were ten years ago, and more than eight times as there were 20 years ago. Why? one asks; why all this interest in Nietzsche? I think Hegel is a clue, for it was through Hegel that Marx, for a time, was made acceptable to Western liberals, and it was in part this attempt to legitimate Marx that led to much of our previous preoccupation with Hegel. But I would argue also that it was, in part, our preoccupation with Hegel that led us to Nietzsche. The other part, whether pertaining to Hegel or to Nietzsche, has to do with the frivolous, to put it crudely, with fashion, and to this I will return. Since it is Hegel, and our earlier preoccupation with him, who takes us to Nietzsche, it is with Hegel that we must begin. In my opinion, it began long before most of us were born, with the publication of George Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness, in 1923. His presentation brought many Marxists of that time, of the decades of the depression and the second war, and of the post-war 193

194

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

decade of the fifties, to see Marx through Hegel, and allowed many to participate in and intensify the argument that the real Marx, the "legitimate Marx," was the "early Marx," the "humanistic Marx," the "Hegelian Marx." This purification of Marx through Hegel, with pinches here and there of Freud, and yes, even Nietzsche, culminated in Adorno's work on the "Authoritarian Personality" and in Habermas' work that is still being carried on today by those whose faith in the Enlightenment project is unswerving. As these things often do, especially here in North America, the change in perspective took a long time. During this long time other things were going on and some of those things are more familiar. I speak of the rise of fascism and most specifically the rise of the Teutonic variety, Nazism. But, I also speak of Heidegger who, we have not forgotten, wrote more than anyone else about Nietzsche, and who, we have been told, was a Nazi. These are the coincidences to which I referred: Marx on the left, Nietzsche on the right, Marx legitimated by Hegel in such a way as to apologize for the abuses of Stalin and Bolshevism, and Heidegger thinking and writing about Nietzsche whom the Nazis used and claimed, before and during the war. Thus, although it is uneven, here is a recapitulation of the coincidence: while Hegel was used to justify Marx, it was more difficult for Heidegger to justify Nietzsche. Hegel could not read Marx, yet, through others, Hegel apologizes for him. Heidegger could and did read Nietzsche, and while nowhere in what he has to say about him does he ever admit to fascism, the mere association of Nietzsche with his greatest explainer taints Nietzsche and befuddles and embarrasses others who subsequently have tried to understand and explain him. These range from the benign presentation of a "gentle" Nietzsche by Walter Kaufmann to Deleuze's overt attempt to minimize his association with fascism or with Heidegger's interpretation, and to Karl Lowith's and Hannah Arendt's apology for Heidegger that rested on the claim that his own association with fascism was at least trivial if not altogether ambiguous. While it is true that, in part, Nietzsche's soiled reputation has been cleaned up by diminishing either his association with fascism or his association with Heidegger, most recently the enhancement of his reputation and our current preoccupation with him comes through Hegel. II. On the New World of Hegel and Nietzsche One of the most famous passages in the Phenomenology of Mind is in the preface where Hegel announces the arrival of the New World (Hegel 1967, 75). The rest of the book is a pronouncement of this arrival and an explanation of the revelation of the possibilities of that world. That world, Hegel explains, is not only necessary, but because it is necessary, it, in Hegel's formula, is rational. The story is now familiar. The logos of history culminated in this New World and because it did so in Hegel's time, Hegel was able to understand why it was the most significant event, alas, the last event of all events. As we also know, Hegel was able to see only the "shape" and "outline" of this New World: what he saw and what we got have been in dispute ever since. We also know that this is where Marx comes in, but it is also where Nietzsche comes in.

Afterword On the Coincidence of Our Preoccupation With Nietzsche

195

For some reason, a reason to which I shall return, Nietzsche does not bother to go back to where Marx came in, he does not bother with Marx's explanation of what Hegel saw the New World to be like. But as we probably will remember, Nietzsche does go back to Hegel. The first place he does this is in the first part of Thoughts Out of Season, the section that we know of as the "Use and Abuse of History." Here he identifies historicism, and Hegel as its most exemplary teacher, as the root of the sickness of Europe. This is a sickness born of the conviction that we are the superfluous "Grayheads" of a history that is over, epigoni, leftovers left only with our relentless memory. We will remember that Nietzsche, while diagnosing this Hegelian sickness, is optimistic enough to prescribe a cure, but soon after he loses his optimism and pronounces the sickness terminal. Eventually, he gave it a name. That name is "nihilism." This nihilism, this sickness, results from our inability to forget, to forget what we know, or to forget what we have come to think we know. What have we come to think we know? The answer, at least Hegel's answer, is everything, or wisdom. Thus he tells us, still in the same area of the preface to the Phenomenology, that we can put away our quest for wisdom and instead possess it (Hegel 1967, 70). It is this claim to absolute knowledge and the attendant end of history that Nietzsche railed against, and herein lies the clue to our preoccupation. Our preoccupation with Nietzsche is like one of those Derridean traces, the sign of an absent thing, and the "thing" is but the rehearsal (repetition) of the logic of identity, resulting in the Absolute and the end of discourse, or in wisdom and the end of History. The outline of this "absent thing" was traced by Alexandre Kojeve before the second war resulting in his persuasive pronouncements on "the end of human Time or History" and his claim that Hegel's philosophy, because it was the last philosophy, was both the end of discourse and the end of man, therefore "the end of negativity" (Kojeve 1969, 157-162). While many of Kojeve's students could not accept the conclusions reached by their teacher, all of them seemed to take those conclusions seriously. One in particular, who both took them seriously and accepted them, was Georges Bataille. Closely following Kojeve in his own presentation, Bataille explained that negativity does not disappear at the end of history, it is merely "unemployed" (Bataille 1955, 1954; Derrida 1978, 251-277). Bataille tells us that Hegel did not know the extent to which he was right when he wrote the preface to the Phenomenology (Bataille 1955, 42; Derrida 1978, 260). Near those words written about the "New World" and "Wisdom," Hegel teaches of the power of the negative, and in this famous passage likens it to death (Hegel 1967, 93). Further along, in the section on "Lordship and Bondage," he speaks of the beginning of this process, the beginning of the end of this leitmotiv of History itself. While the evolution of the end of history was begun by the master's negation of life—by his "looking the negative in the face"—it culminates in the victory of the Bondsman or Slave. Part of the complete triumph of slavishness lies in what Hegel says of the master: his "independent consciousness is according to the consciousness of bondsman" (Hegel 1967, 237). At this turn—where the master's affirmation of himself (his independent

196

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

consciousness), born of the original risk of life, is transformed into the truth of the slave—the repressed slave becomes the inheritor of the Earth, and this is where Bataille takes his own subtle turn against Hegel. This he does, in Jacques Derrida's words, by interpreting Hegel against himself (Derrida 1978). It is through this turning of Hegel against himself that we are better able to see what Bataille means by "unemployed" negativity. Derrida followed Bataille closely when he said: We believe, quite simply and literally, in absolute knowledge as the closure if not the end of history. . . . As for what "begins" then, beyond absolute knowledge, unheard of thoughts are required, sought for across the memory of old signs. (Derrida 1973, 115) To see what Nietzsche railed against, one must ask what can be made of this "trace"—the "old signs"—of the logic of identity: what "begins" beyond it? III. Nietzsche and the Slave Revolt When history is over, slaves become masters and masters slaves. But slaves that have become masters are still slaves. Together they become labourers, and together they transform human and non-human nature through the process of production. The vestige of mastery remaining is the element of control in the form of progressively increasing efficiency. But, alas! a labouring master is still a slave, and this is where Bataille, followed by Derrida and then Deleuze, have made a distinction, a distinction that, for them, first gives rise to their interest in Nietzsche, an interest that, in effect, takes them from Hegel to Nietzsche and, in turn, helps to explain our own preoccupation with Nietzsche. This distinction is between the negatives and the affirmatives in the thought of Nietzsche, a distinction made in such a way that Nietzsche is thought to be the following: 1) profoundly anti-Hegelian, 2) in centra-distinction to Hegel, non-dialectical, 3) because non-dialectical, non-negating, and 4) because non-negating, nonmetaphysical. These conclusions, while not exhaustive, are at the heart of much of recent "French" interpretations, and these interpretations primarily rest on how one understands what Nietzsche means by history and whether Nietzsche himself is historical. In the main, contrary to Heidegger, who understood Nietzsche as attempting but failing to overcome metaphysics, those who see Nietzsche as non-dialectical and as self-consciously antiHegelian see him as nonmetaphysical and non-historical. Hence, those who make this initial distinction see Hegel as the last metaphysician, metaphysics as nihilism, and Hegel's philosophy as the consummate expression of the history of nihilism. In order to delineate more clearly the differences that arise from focusing on this distinction between master and slave, let us turn to what Nietzsche means by history. In contradistinction to Hegel and his Phenomenology, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals will engage our attention. It, too, is about this distinction between masters and slaves, or as it turns out, those who negate those who affirm. In Section 10 of the first essay in Genealogy of Morals, in the discussion of

Afterword On the Coincidence of Our Preoccupation With Nietzsche

197

"the slave revolt," he focuses on the dual origins of good and bad. Previously, in Section 3, Nietzsche, following Herbert Spencer, begins "on the road to an explanation" of the origins of our judgments of good and bad, and tells us emphatically that in these judgments mankind has summarized the trace of the memory of its "unforgotten" and "unforgettable" experiences. These experiences are remembered, or better, these are the experiences that cannot be forgotten, because they are remembered as producing pain or pleasure: those that are painful we think of as bad, and those that are pleasurable we call good. This is why the good is identical with the useful or practical and the bad with the useless or impractical. Then Nietzsche goes along this "road," and finds that these notions of good and bad originally arose as high and low, noble and base, and from this opposition results the "slave revolt," the subject of Section 10. Keeping the equation good equals useful, bad equals useless in mind, we can see in Nietzsche's account of the "slave revolt" how this "inversion" of high and low originally began, and how it ended with the reign of the slave and his domain of utility. The section begins this way: "The slave revolt in morality begins when resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values." The revolt erupts with resentment when the slave, the low, wills to change the conditions that define him as low. The conditions that define him, the conditions that make him what he is and not otherwise, his "goodness," or his nature, is what he wills to change. But how does he know his nature, his lowness or slavishness? He knows it in respect to the noble or high nature of the master. Thus, it is in relation to the master, the higher, that the slave wishes to change his nature. This will to change or to negate himself is a backwards willing, a re-sentment, backwards because the slave, to achieve his goal, must be devious. This backwards movement is a reaction against the master: the slave, unlike the master, does not act, for action is dangerous, it is unpredictable and it is painful. So the cunning slave does not confront the impediment of the master directly. He does so indirectly, or, as said before, he is devious. Put another way, the slave attempts to alter the limits and possibilities of all that is "not itself" or, put differently, he wants to make that which is unlike him like him. How does "this resentment become creative and give birth to values?" If the movement of the reaction towards the impediment of the master is backward willing, a negating of the slaves's nature by altering its conditions, the direction the transformation takes is defined by the impediment itself. Since it is the master who is the impediment, the means that the cunning slave employs are directed towards the end of transforming himself by changing the conditions that define him in relation to the master. Thus, resentment is "creative": it builds the road to freedom by transforming the conditions that make possible the difference between the slave and the master, for as Hobbes says in Chapter 21 of Leviathan:". . . Freedom, signifieth, properly, the absence of opposition, by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion; and may be applied no less to irrational and intimate creations than to rational." Thus, the negation of the slave is towards the external, the other, the master, and it is this difference that the slave opposes.

198

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Nietzsche is very clear. The master has no resentment of nature, neither nature qua nature nor any human nature. On the contrary, the master affirms nature, both his and other natures, accepts the given as a gift, and is happy with it. But in his happiness, in his affirmation, he is not vigilant towards the slave, and the cunning slave is able to transform the conditions that make them different from one another. Meanwhile the master spends his days performing bold and noble deeds, which, of course, seen from the standpoint of the slave, appear as mere useless actions. What the slave does is useful. He works. He transforms, and thus negates the given in accordance with the idea of freedom engendered by his relation to the master. The product of these transformed conditions is culture. Indeed, in Section 11, Nietzsche says that slaves are the "instruments of culture," and that they represent "the regression of mankind." I return now to the other part of our preoccupation with Nietzsche. Whereas emphasis had been put on Hegel and his dialectic, in part, because of the publication of Heidegger's Identitat und Differenz in 1957, attention in our time has switched from the logic of identity to the dissemination of difference, and from Hegel to Nietzsche. Heidegger himself contributed to this turn, a turning from Hegel and identity to Nietzsche and difference. Eventually, this led to a Nietzsche without Heidegger. But this change of emphasis from identity to difference was not the only reason for our turn from Hegel to Nietzsche. This other part had to do with the revelation that the end of history is told from the perspective of the slave. I speak at the same time of the end of the history of metaphysics and those speculations about it that began in France with Kojeve's interpretation of Hegel, and ended with Foucault's speculations on the 'end of man' in The Order of Things (Foucault 1970, 385-7) and his statement in the appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge that "whether through Marx or through Nietzsche" we are "attempting to free ourselves from Hegel" (Foucault 1972, 235). So in France it all ended with Hegel, not Nietzsche (as Heidegger would have it). On this point there is consistency among those thinkers in France who were engendered by Kojeve. Hegel is the last, and Nietzsche is a first. Here again is Bataille who, Derrida said, thought most thoroughly and totally about this end: "Nietzsche is to Hegel what a bird breaking its shell is to a bird contentedly absorbing the substance within" (Bataille 1985, 38). Conclusion As we all know, Marx teaches of the abuses of the bourgeoisie and of the inevitability of the victory of the industrial proletariat over a corrupt class of capitalists. Marx and his followers either have great disdain for the bourgeoisie because they are deemed repulsively immoral or simply because they are obsolete. Nietzsche, too, holds this class in low regard, so low that he has dubbed it the class of Lastmen, re-animalized utilitarians whose herds inhabit most of Europe and its hinterlands, Russia and America. Here we find the frivolous side of the coincidence, the side that helps to explain why it is fashionable now to

Afterword On the Coincidence of Our Preoccupation With Nietzsche

199

think about Nietzsche rather than Hegel or Marx. But there is more: as it was pointed out a decade ago, this turning from Marx to Nietzsche occurred because "Marx was not enough,"1 and as it has been noted more recently, "Marx has become boring."2 Hegel said in the Preface to his Phenomenology that the appearance of the "New World" engenders two attitudes: boredom and frivolity. Boredom arises because one concludes that there is nothing left to do, and the frivolous attitude is adopted when it is further concluded that nothing really matters. This happens when and because masters become slaves and slaves, masters. In reference to Deleuze and his own preoccupation with this leitmotiv, Vincent Descombes has remarked: "Here is further confirmation that since Kojeve the master-slave relationship has been a constant in French thought. . . . " And: In some post-Kojevean discourse we witness some curious exchanges. Sometime the "dialectic of mastery and slavery" takes on Marxist connotations: the Master is exploitative, he enjoys his privileges without working. . . . Elsewhere it has a Nietzschean flavour: the modern bourgeois is considered a despicable being because he is no more than an emancipated slave, a freed man who has internalized the Master. (Descombes 1980, 158)

Kojeve was the Marxist who took Nietzsche's Lastman seriously, and others took his cue. Those of whom I speak range from Sartre to Althusser, implementers and elaborators of the "end of history," and then to all those who jumped Marx's ship after the May 1968 riots in Paris, a crew ranging from Althusser to Deleuze to Lyotard. Indeed, this seems to be one of the supreme coincidences of our century. Nietzsche, who so despised the sentiments associated with slavishness, and whose misunderstood teaching at one time was espoused by the Nazis, has been pressed into the service of the left. But, after all, it was Nietzsche himself who taught that matters such as politics are not matters of good and evil, but matters of taste. And at times, perhaps most of the time, cunning slaves are victorious. So the frivolous side of the coincidence turns into the profound side: the history of metaphysics, presented as a phenomenology of freedom, turns out to be a genealogy of slavishness. And as a result, what was presented as absolute truth—wisdom—is seen to be a ruse. It is a ruse because the whole truth turns out to be only the truth of the slave. Thus, the discourse about freedom that supposedly culminates in wisdom is mere rhetoric. It is rhetoric because like all rhetoric, it is a form of work: it is a means that anticipates an end. But when the end—freedom and wisdom—is reached, it is shown to be just that which provided the means itself, the negative. And in this nothing, it culminates: in nihilism. It is a negative with only itself to negate—a negative with no work to do. The rhetoric of nihilism is the work of the negative turned upon itself. And it is with this "unemployed negativity" that we are preoccupied. This preoccupation is a burden that cannot be put away, and, like the camel in the first metamorphosis of Zarathustra, it is born. The burden is not only heavy, but dark and long like the shadow of the dead God in Nietzsche's first pronouncement of the death of God in Aphorism 108 of The Gay Science. The

200

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

end of history and the murder of God indeed comprise a great burden. It is a great burden from this end—the end looking back. And this is the profound aspect of the coincidence: that the "end of history" did happen as Hegel told the tale. But Nietzsche also teaches in Aphorism 125 of The Gay Science that God did not die of "natural causes": that we did not inherit wisdom, and that primogeniture was abolished by revolution. Wisdom was attained through deicide. What does Nietzsche make of this wisdom? Perhaps something of its meaning is found in Zarathustra's first pronouncement to the sun: "Behold, I am weary of my wisdom. . . . " And then he descends from the mountain. Endnotes 1. Werner J. Dannhauser, "The Trivialization of Friedrich Nietzsche," in The American Spectator, vol. 15, no. 5, 1982, 7-13. This is a review article of The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, edited and introduced by David B. Allison. New York: Delta Books, 1977. 2. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster 1987, 217. See especially the chapter entitled "The Nietzscheanization of the Left and Vice Versa," in section two "Nihilism, American Style."

List of Texts Cited This is a list of references cited in brackets in the texts of individual articles. In some cases the bracketed references are abbreviations or short titles, as identified on page ix in the prefatory material. Translations by authors. Unless otherwise indicated, a citation in the text to a German edition of Nietzsche, or to the Colli Montinari edition in French, or to other works not cited in English, indicates that the passage has been translated by the author from the cited text. 1. Nietzsche: Collected Editions Friedrich Nietzsche. Werke in drei Bdnden. Schlechta, Karl (ed.). Miinchen: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1954-65. Gesammelte Werke. Miinchen: Musarion Verlag, 1920. Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Colli, Giorgio und Mazzino Montinari (eds.). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1967-. Oeuvres Philosophiques Completes. Colli, Giorgio et Mazzino Montinari (eds.). Paris: Gallimard, 1976. 2. Nietzsche: Individual Volumes Beyond Good and Evil. Kaufmann, Walter (trans.). New York: Vintage, 1966. Ecce Homo. Kaufmann, Walter (trans.). New York: Vintage, 1969. The Gay Science. Kaufmann, Walter (trans.). New York: Vintage, 1974. The Portable Nietzsche. Kaufmann, Walter (trans.). New York: Vintage, 1954. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Kaufmann, Walter (trans.). New York: Vintage, 1971. The Will to Power. Kaufmann, Walter and R.J. Hollingdale (trans.). New York: Vintage, 1968. 3. Other Texts Adorno, Theodor. "Aus Sils Maria," in Ohne Leitbild, gesammelte Schriften, 10, 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. Altizer, Thomas J.J. Oriental Mysticism and Biblical Eschatology. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Arrowsmith, William. The Dramas and Dramatic Dances of the NonEuropean Races with Special Reference to the Origins of Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963.

201

202

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Assoun, P.-L. Freud et Nietzsche. Paris: P.U.F., 1980. Aulagnier, P. La violence de ^interpretation. Paris: P.U.F., 1975. Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans (Edwyn C. Hoskyns trans.). London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Bataille, Georges. "Black Obelisk." In Visions of Excess (Allen Stockl, Carol R. Lovitts, Donald M. Lesley trans.; Allen Stockl, introduced and edited). Minneapolis, 1985. Bataille, Georges. "Hegel, la mort, et le sacrifice." In Deucalion 5. Neuchatel, 1955. Bataille, Georges. L'experience interieure, 2nd ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. Blanchot, Maurice. "The Limits of Experience: Nihilism." In The New Nietzsche, edited by David B. Allison. New York: Delta, 1977. Bloom, Allen, The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Bultmann, Rudolf. Theology of the New Testament (Kendrick Grobel trans.). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951. Cohen, Hermann. Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (Simon Kaplan trans.). New York: Fredrick linger, 1972. Dannhauser, Werner. "The Trivialization of Friedrich Nietzsche." In The American Spectator, vol. 15, no. 5, 1982. Deleuze, G. Difference et repetition. Paris: P.U.F., 1968. Deleuze, G. Nietzsche et la philosophic. Paris: P.U.F., 1962. Deleuze, G. Nietzsche and Philosophy (Hugh Tomlinson trans.). New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Derrida, Jacques. Eperons. Le style de Nietzsche. In the bilingual edition titled Spurs. Nietzsche's Styles, with translation by Barbara Harlow. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Derrida, Jacques. La voixet lephenomene. Paris: P.U.F., 1967. Translated as Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs (David Allison trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978. Descombes, Vincent. Modern French Philosophy (L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding trans.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library, 1925. Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society (John Wilkinson trans.) New York: Vintage, 1964.

List of Texts Cited

203

Fink, Eugen. La philosophie de Nietzsche (H. Hildenberg and A. Lindenberg trans.). Paris: Minuit, 1965. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (a translation of Les Mots et les Choses). New York: Random House, 1970. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and a Discourse on Language (A.M Sheridan Smith trans.). New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Freud, Sigmund. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-. Glucksmann, Andre. "Premeditations Nietzscheennes," Critique 21, 131, 1965. Grant, George. Time as History. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1969. Grant, George. English-Speaking Justice. Toronto: Anansi, 1985. Habermas, Jiirgen. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwolf Vorlesungen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985. Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind (J.B. Baillie trans.). New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Heidegger, Martin. Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche. Pfullingen: Giinther Neske, 1961. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche (P. Klossowski trans.). Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Heiddeger, Martin. Nietzsche (David Farrell Krell trans.). San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology (William Lovitt trans). New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Janz, Curt Paul. Friedrich Nietzsche. Biographic. Miinchen: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979. Kierkegaard, Soren. On Authority and Revelation. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Kojeve, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Allan Bloom ed., James H. Nichol Jr. trans.). New York: Basic Books, 1969. Kofman, S. Un metier impossible, lecteurs de "Construction et analyse". Paris: Galilee, 1983. Lacan, J. Le Seminaire, Livre 1, Les ecrits techniques de Freud. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Laruelle, F. Nietzsche contre Heidegger. Paris: Payot, 1977. Mailer, Norman. In Esquire interview (June 1986), 242-3. Marietti, Angele K. Le livre du philosophe, edition bilingue. Paris: AubierFlammarion, 1969. de M'Uzan, M. "Le meme et 1'identique." De Van a la mort. Gallimard, 1977.

204

Nietzsche and The Rhetoric of Nihilism

Nancy, J.-L. and Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe. Textes de Nietzsche. Rhetorique et langage, presentation et traduction. Poetique 5:111, 1971. Nehamas, Alexander. "Transcendent and immanent perspectivism in Nietzsche," Nietzsche-Studien 12:473-90, 1983. Neumann, Harry. "Nietzsche: the Superman, the Will to Power and the Eternal Return." Ultimate Reality and Meaning 5:284, 1982. Neumann, Harry. "Political Philosophy or Nihilist Science: Education's Only Serious Question." In Natural Right and Political Right: Essays in Honor of Harry V. Jaffa, edited by Thomas B. Silver and Peter W. Schramm. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1984. Ricoeur, P. De ^interpretation, essai sur Freud. Paris: Seuil, 1965. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letter to Witold von Hulewicz, Letters. 1910-1926 (Jane Bannard Greene and M.D. Herder trans.). New York: Norton, 1948. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Rosen, Stanley. Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay. New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press, 1969. Schiitte, Ophelia. Beyond Nihilism. Nietzsche Without Masks. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984. Sloterdijk, Peter. Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983. Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of the Mind. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus. Harvard: Loeb Classical Library, 1939. Stambaugh, Joan. Nietzsche's Thought of the Eternal Return. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. Stern, J.P. A Study of Nietzsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Strong, Tracy. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Weber, Max. Ancient Judaism (Hans H. Gerth trans.). New York: The Free Press, 1952. Wensinck, A.J. "The Semitic New Year and the Origins of Eschatology." Acta Orienta, 1-2, 189. Wilson, Edward O. On Human Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Contributors Thomas J.J. Altizer teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the State University of New York (Stony Brook). He has written extensively on literature and theology, and his recent books include History as Apocalypse. Constantin V. Boundas is in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario. Richard S.G. Brown writes and teaches philosophy at Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario. Barry Cooper is in the Department of Political Science at the University of Calgary. His list of books includes The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism and Alexander Kennedy Isbister. David Goicoechea teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario. He is editing a forthcoming collection of essays entitled The Question of Humanism. Horst Hutter teaches and writes in the area of political philosophy in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. Claude Levesque teaches at the Universite de Montreal, and has written widely on Nietzsche and modernity. His most recent book on Nietzsche is Dissonance. Lise Monette writes and teaches in the Department of Philosophy, Universite de Quebec a Montreal, and she is a psychoanalyst. Francois Peraldi is a member of the Department of Linguistics, Universite de Montreal, and he is a psychoanalyst. Jean-Michel Rey, Paris VIII, has written extensively on Nietzsche, modernity and psychoanalysis. Stanley Rosen is Evan Pugh Professor of Philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University. He has recently published Hermeneutics as Politics and The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry. Peter Sloterdijk, Munich, has written extensively on contemporary philosophical problems. His book Kritik der zynischen Vernunft is now available in an English translation. Tracy B. Strong is a member of the Department of Political Science at the University of California (San Diego). He is the author of Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, and an editor of Nietzsche's New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics. Gianni Vattimo is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Torino, and his writings on Nietzsche, Heidegger and modernity are widely known in Europe and North America. 205