Nietzscheanism

Before I begin, I must make it clear that I am a 'traditional' Nietzschean (i.e. neither Objectivist nor 'LaVeyan Satanist'). The Will to Power is an ontological force of interpretation, not a psychological impulse; the fundamental world-state is one of Becoming, thus negating all philosophies - such as Objectivism - that, following from the liberal Locke, rely upon a conception of identity as something static and correlative to consciousness; and any political philosophy that relies upon 'human nature' for grounding must by unequivocally false, insofar as man lacks an innate nature.

To begin:

Nietzsche's ontological weltanschauung is summed up in one passage from the Nachlass, section 708:

"If the motion of the world aimed at a final state, that state would have been reached. (a common criticism leveled at teleological world-views, i.e. Hegelianism and its Neo-Hegelian successors - Dionysus) The sole fundamental fact, however, is that it does not aim at a final state; and every philosophy and scientific hypothesis (e.g. mechanistic theory) which necessitates such a final state is refuted by this fundamental fact.

I seek a conception of the world that takes this fact into account. Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated, which amounts to the same thing); the present must absolutely not be justified by reference to a future, nor the past by reference to the present. "Necessity" is not in the shape of an overreaching, dominating total force, or that of a prime mover; even less as a necessary condition for something valuable. To this end it is necessary to deny a total consciousness of becoming, a "God," to avoid bringing all events under the aegis of a being who feels and knows but does not will: "God" is useless if he does not want anything, and moreover this means positing a total value of "becoming." Fortunately such a summarizing power is missing (- a suffering and all-seeing God, a "total sensorium" and "cosmic spirit" would be the greatest objection to being).

More strictly: one must admit that nothing has being - because then becoming would lose its value and actually appear meaningless and superfluous.

Consequently: one must ask how the illusion of being could have arisen (was bound to arise);

Likewise: how all value judgments that rest on the hypothesis that there are beings are disvalued.

But here one realizes that this hypothesis of beings is the source of all world-defamation (the "better world," the "true world," the "thing-in-itself.")

1. Becoming does not aim at a final state; does not flow into "being".

2. Becoming is not merely apparent state; perhaps the world of being is mere appearance.

3. Becoming is of equivalent value every moment; the sum of its values always remains the same; in other words, it has no value at all, for anything against which to measure it, and in relation to the word "value" would have meaning, is lacking. The total value of the world cannot be evaluated; consequently philosophical pessimism belongs among comical things."

Here we have outlined in its simplest form the entire philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

1. Ontology - the world exists in a state of Becoming; not Hegelian Becoming (which seeks itself and finds itself in the end in Being), but something much more again to that which the Greeks regarded as kaos: constant movement (the Heraclitean 'strife') without being a means to an end. This itself leads us into

2. Ethics - there are no ends; consequently there can be no means. To treat an individual as a means to an end is not unethical or immoral, simply delusional. Practically because it burns bridges (one is only a 'means to an end' until that end is reached, but one still exists); philosophically because it presumes that the final goals, once reached, are whole in-themselves and represent an end of something.

3. Epistemology - precisely how does one attain direct knowledge of a world constantly in the flux? One doesn't. The will to power, psychologically, is a force of interpretation: it permits us to chart and graph and dileneate relationships where none naturally exist (I've mentioned before Nietzsche's implicit nominalism before, as suggest by his "leaf/leaves" metaphor in "On Truth And Lie In An Extra-Moral Sense").

I will no doubt be required of this forum to disprove the common conception of Will-To-Power-As-Psychological-Egoism, so here goes. Will to Power 692:

"Is "will to power" a kind of "will" or identical with the concept "will"? Is it the same thing as desiring? Or commanding? Is it that "will" of which Schopenhauer spoke of as the "in-itself-of-things"?

My proposition is: that the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization, that this will does not exist at all, that instead of grasping the notion of the development of one definite will into many forms, one has eliminated the character of the will by subtracting from it its content, its "wither?" - this is in the highest degree the case with Schopenhauer: what he calls "will" is a mere empty word. It is even less a question of a "will to life"; for life is merely a special case of the will to power - it is quite arbitrary to assert that everything strives to enter into this form of the will to power."

Here we have hit upon something not much touched upon in Nietzschean scholarship: the concept of the "development of one definite will into many forms". This is clearly something analogous to Schopenhauer's principium individuationis, the 'principle of plurality' in all things Schopenhauer identifies as the effects of space and time on the Will in Book One of The World as Will and Representation. For Schopenhauer, it is 'one will, many forms'; for Nietzsche, however, the will to power, rather than being a singular (rather monolithic entity), is in fact plurality itself.

Plurality and are mutually intertwined (even in the aesthetics - the Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic from The Birth of Tragedy in fact is a degree of the intensity of this plurality). If we accept that Nietzsche's ontology is true, we must accept the corollary to this: consciousness itself is not a static entity, but instead exists in a continuum of becoming ("overcoming and being overcome").

This goes against the traditional relationship between consciousness and identity posited by liberal philosophers from Locke to Rand, and leads Nietzsche to understand consciousness as a social construct and not an innate inner-state of Being:

"The role of "consciousness": -- It is essential that one should not make a mistake over the role of "consciousness": it is our relation to the "outer world" that evolved it. On the other hand, the direction or protection and care in respect of the co-ordination of the bodily functions does not enter our consciousness; any more than spiritual accumulation: that a higher court rules over these things cannot be doubted - a kind of directing committee on which the various chief desires make their votes and power felt. "Pleasure," "displeasure" are hints from this sphere; also the act of will; also ideas."
- Will to Power 524

And again, from The Gay Science V:

"The problem of consciousness (more precisely, of becoming conscious conscious of something) confronts us only when we begin to comprehend how we could dispense with it; and now physiology and the history of animals place us at the beginning of such comprehension (it took them two centuries to catch up with Leibniz's suspicion which soared ahead). For we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also "act" in every sense of the word, and yet none of all this would gave to "enter our consciousness" (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our lives takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive this may sound to older philosophers. For what purpose, then, and why consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous?... it seems to me as if the subtlety and strength of consciousness always were proportionate to a man's (or animal's) capacity for communication, and as if this capacity in turn were proportionate to the need for communication. But this last point is not to be understood as if the individual human being happens to be a master in communicating and making understandable his needs must also be most dependent on others in his needs. But it does seem to me as if it were that way when we consider whole races and chains of generations: Where need and distress have forced men for a long time to communicate and to understand each other quickly and subtly, the ultimate result is an excess of this strength and art of communication - as it were, a capacity which has gradually been accumulated and now waits for an heir who might squander it... Supposing that this observation is correct, I may now proceed to surmise that consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication; that from the start it was needed and useful only between human beings (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it also developed only in proportion to the degree of this utility."

This flies in the face of liberal philosophy (the main object of my attack, which includes but is not limited to Objectivism) by suggesting that consciousness and identity, far from being things that are innate, are instead created by social relationships with the outside world and are also in a constant state of change.

To simplify at the risk of sounding superficial: one is at times a student, a son, a worker, and so forth. Each of these are identities; and each time one 'inhabits' one identity one adopts the consciousness suited to that particular role.

Again: hierarchical relationships determine consciousness.

And finally: I am an anarchist for precisely this reason.

More later, as I get responses.

Post 1

Monday, April 30, 2007 - 2:29pm

Mr. Benjamin Russell Ingram:

In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton pens several criticisms against Nietzsche. As someone who has devoted a good deal of thought to existentialism in general and Nietzscheanism in particular, I find these criticisms very well put, and am interested in hearing what you think of them.

-GWL

***

Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction?
You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig
is fat.

I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will.
It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something
that is called egoism. That, indeed, was simpleminded enough;
for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. To preach
anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life a war
without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to
drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism.

All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson,
are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can
hardly wish. And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found
quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they always talk
of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite
the opposite. Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To
desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act
is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject
everything else.

Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm:
he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something
bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not
any mass of common morality behind it. He is himself more preposterous
than anything he denounces. But, indeed, Nietzsche will stand very
well as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence.
The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not
a physical accident. If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility,
Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation
and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will
not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.

The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless--one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything.
The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite
equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special.
They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is--well, some things
are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.

[Saint] Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting
all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche.
She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan,
when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in
Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them.
I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain
things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth,
the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back.
Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she
endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a
typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And then I thought
of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche,
and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time.
I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger
for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc
had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not
praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid
of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow.
Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only
praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at
their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one,
more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person
who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.

This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche,
whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker.
No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker;
but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold.
He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words:
as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard,
fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question
by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said,
"beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say,
"more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil."
Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it
was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say,
"the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all
these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man,"
or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers.
Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know
in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce.

Post 2

Monday, April 30, 2007 - 5:20pm

Hello Gottfried,

I'm sorry to say this, but Mr. Chesterton, like his more atheistic fellows Rand and Mencken, seems to have misunderstood Nietzsche as nothing more than a liberal volitionist. In truth it would be erroneous to state that Nietzsche is simply a proponent of psychological and ethical egoism (to be sure, he does prefer egoists to altruists as a "higher type", but we must not forget that his "highest type" are capable of passing no judgments whatsoever). Psychologically the Will to Power manifests itself not in conscious egoism but in the 'eternal recurrence', which I hold to be something akin to Freudian repetition.

The Will to Power must be understood ontologically before any actual progress in interpreting Nietzsche can be made.

Post 3

Monday, April 30, 2007 - 7:41pm

I'm sorry to say this, but Mr. Chesterton, like his more atheistic fellows Rand and Mencken, seems to have misunderstood Nietzsche as nothing more than a liberal volitionist.

Mr. Chesterton understood Nietzsche very well, and was actually one of the first thinkers to appreciate his philosophical importance. Chesterton would not be justified in throwing Nietzsche in with the other will-worshippers if he had not already reduced his doctrine of the 'higher man' to nothing more than a poetical mish-mash devoted to a designation without referent.

In truth it would be erroneous to state that Nietzsche is simply a proponent of psychological and ethical egoism (to be sure, he does prefer egoists to altruists as a "higher type", but we must not forget that his "highest type" are capable of passing no judgments whatsoever).

Nietzsche's Will-to-Power is just as contradictory as the 'higher man' which it espouses. It is impossible for a conscious human to refrain entirely from judgment.

Psychologically the Will to Power manifests itself not in conscious egoism but in the 'eternal recurrence', which I hold to be something akin to Freudian repetition.

Eternal recurrence is based upon a dubious cosmological principle, viz. the universe's cyclical infinity.

The Will to Power must be understood ontologically before any actual progress in interpreting Nietzsche can be made.

Ontology is the study of being. The will-to-power, as you've explained above, is a doctrine of becoming which denies being. As such, there exists no ontology by which to understand it.

Post 4

Monday, April 30, 2007 - 8:39pm

Nietszche was a narcissist.

Thus completeth my analysis.

- Sir Rufus Xavier Sarsparilla... the Third.

Post 5

Tuesday, May 1, 2007 - 3:20am

"Mr. Chestertone understood Nietzsche very well."

Obviously not if he made the same mistake that Rand and LaVey and Mencken and other third-rate reactionary interpreters made in reducing him to a mere psychological or ethical egoist, a position I've disproven with the above quotes. Nietzsche was not a Social Darwinist, not a 'radical individualist', not a libertine in any sense and not an egoist.

"Nietzsche's Will-To-Power is contradictory... it is not possible for a conscious human..."

Hence its being an unattainable goal to work towards.

"Eternal recurrence is based upon dubious..."

Erroneous cosmological interpretation. From Deleuze's essay Active and Reactive:

"The Eternal Return is thus the answer to the problem of passage. And in this sense it must not be interpreted as the return of something that is, something that is one or that is the same. We misconstrue the expression "eternal return" when we take it as the return of the same. It is not being that recurs, but, rather, that recurrence itself constitutes being insofar as it affirms becoming and passing. It is not some one thing that recurs, but the recurrence is itself affirmed by the passage of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the Eternal Return does not designate the nature of what recurs, but, to the contrary, the fact of recurring difference. This is why the Eternal Return must be conceived as a synthesis: a synthesis of time and its dimensions, a synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, a synthesis of being and becoming that affirms becoming - a synthesis of double affirmation. The Eternal Return, then, itself depends not on a principle of identity but on one that must in all respects fulfill the demands of a truly sufficient reason.
Why is mechanism so wrong an interpretation of the Eternal Return? Because it neither necessarily nor directly implies the eternal return, and because it does not entail the false consequence of a final state. This final state is held to be identical with the initial state, and, to that extent, one concludes that the mechanical process would once again run through the same set of differences. This is the basis for the cyclical hypothesis so often criticized by Nietzsche. For we do not understand how this process can possibly emerge from its initial state, or re-emerge from its final state, or run through the same differences once again, and yet not even have the power to run through whatever differences there are once. The cyclical hypothesis is incapable of accounting for either the diversity of coexisting cycles or (above all) the existence of diversity within the cycle. This is why we can only understand the Eternal Return as the expression of a principle that serves to explain diversity and the reproduction of diversity, or difference and its repetition. Nietzsche presents such a principle as one of his most important philosophical discoveries. He names it Will to Power. "I call it 'will to power' because it expresses the characteristic that cannot be thought out of the mechanistic order without thinking away the order itself."'

Any attempt to correlate Nietzsche's Eternal Return with either cosmological recurrence or 'reincarnation' is faulty; it is the result of a misreading or a nonreading of his works. How can something roughly correlative with the principium individuationis of Schopenhauer's philosophy lead to a return of the same? It is the very principle of difference - Derrida took this idea and ran with it.

"The will to power, as you've explained above, is a doctrine of becoming which denies being... no ontology by which to understand it..."

Unless you missed out on the tremendous explosion of postmodern-Nietzsche literature that began in the sixties and hasn't really let up yet, I'd say it's full well understandable. Bataille's base materialism is a good place to start for an ontology which takes into account difference and the effects of Becoming while at the same time dening subjective idealism.

"Nietzsche was a narcissist."

Thus spake the Objectivist.

Post 6

Tuesday, May 1, 2007 - 10:56am