Summary of The Tragic

At this point I feel I've beaten the ideas in this first chapter on The Tragic to within an inch of their life, so I'll just end with a couple of quotes that summarize the main idea, and then a remark on another interesting passage.

Two quotes seem to me a basic summary of what's wrong with our view of the world, and how to fix it.  

1) The non-tragic view always wants to judge life against some form of transcendent ideal.  Anything which happens that does not fit with this ideal must be denied and negated, even though it has more power of reality, so to speak, than whatever ideal condition is not happening.  This is what Deleuze means by saying that the ascetic ideal introduces a contradiction in to the will which separates what it can do from what is should do.  It invents an interior will which must be disciplined into inaction, and punished after the fact.  For this, it substitutes an 'exterior' will which is nothing but its action.

For a long time we have only been able to think in terms of ressentiment and bad conscience. We have had no other ideal but the ascetic ideal. We have opposed knowledge to life in order to judge life, in order to make it something blameworthy, responsible or erroneous. We turned will into something bad, something stricken by a basic contradiction: we have said that it must be rectified, restrained, limited and even denied and suppressed. It was only any good at this price. (NP, 35)

2) We reverse this tired worldview by affirming everything, disciplining nothing.  All will creates.  It is creation, force, and power.  When we affirm that the will (and not necessarily our will alone) simply operates, that its outcomes are part of chance, we break the spell of the ascetic ideal.  We abandon our craving for its to be different and affirm the tragic as joyful.  Just this is the cessation of suffering.  

According to Nietzsche it has never been understood that the tragic = the joyful. This is another way of putting the great equation: to will = to create. We have not understood that the tragic is pure and multiple positivity, dynamic gaeity. Affirmation is tragic because it affirms chance and the necessity of chance; because it affirms multiplicity and the unity of multiplicity. (NP, 36)

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If we understand existentialism as a humanism (as Sartre famously did), then we must understand that Nietzsche was not an existentialist.  The freedom and affirmation he is talking about do not come from some mystical interiority, but rather from something more akin to a mystical exteriority.  His idea of the way meaning arises from a fundamentally meaningless existence doesn't involve the anxiety of a fully formed individual who finds themselves somehow dumped into the world, as if God had kidnapped and blindfolded us before depositing us on the stage of Waiting For Godot.   Instead, meaning arises only when the meaninglessness is affirmed completely.  This happens only when we empty even the interiority of our craving for meaning, and affirm its exteriority, its constructed-ness, its randomness.  Instead of conceiving of this craving as a force which disciplines the chaos of life, we affirm that it too is another aspect of that life affirming itself, and affirming us along the way.  Delueze argues that this is a fundamentally different perspective than other existentialists who might be superficially similar to Nietzsche and are often discussed in the same breath.

It is not sufficient to ask: "What does the other think, is this comparable to what Nietzsche thinks?" Rather we must ask: "How does this other think? And how much ressentiment and bad conscience remains in his thought? The ascetic ideal, the spirit of revenge, do they continue to exist in his way of understanding tragedy?" Pascal, Kierkegaard and Chestov, knew, with genius, how to take criticism further than ever before. They suspended morality, they reversed reason but, ensnared in ressentiment, they still drew their strength from the ascetic ideal. They were the poets of this ideal. What they oppose to morality, to reason, is still this ideal in which reason is immersed, this mystical body in which it takes root, interiority — the spider. In order to philosophise they need all the resources and the guiding thread of interiority, anguish, wailing, guilt, all the forms of dissatisfaction. (NP, 36)

The Problem of Existence 3 -- Existence Is A Game of Chance

In subsections 11 and 12 (pgs. 25-29) Deleuze leaves Heraclitus behind and tries to describe a specifically Nietzschean concept of existence as an innocent game.  Naturally, this game has the same paradoxical recursive structure we tried to describe last time.  But Nietzsche feels its stakes a little differently than Heraclitus.  As a 'late' thinker, Nietzsche's biggest problem is not to avoid a premature judgement of existence, but to escape the nihilism he sees looming in the wake of the collapse of the Christian interpretation of existence.  

"One interpretation among others was shipwrecked, but as it passed for the only possible interpretation it seems that existence no longer has meaning, that everything is in vain" (VP III 8). (NP, 23)

Nietzsche's solution to nihilism isn't to invent some new transcendent meaning for existence that replaces the Christian one.  Nor is it to claim that this meaning must somehow come from within the authentic individual in the sense that (humanist) existentialism argues.  Both of these would just be other ways of depreciating existence, of blaming it if it falls short of some eschatalogical goal (whether this is the grace of God or our own mysterious 'free will' -- which as we've seen are perhaps not so different).  In fact, the root of the problem lies in thinking that existence needs a goal or purpose to justify it.  Instead, Nietzsche would like to push nihilism so far that it overcomes itself and converts into its opposite.  He tries to conceive of the idea of an existence that has absolutely no meaning or purpose in a positive light.  As a result, he wants us to affirm that existence is entirely a game of chance.  We are asked to take joy in the view that all of existence is entirely random.

This new metaphor has the effect of turning the moments of the game we saw last time (becoming and the being of becoming) into the throw of a dice. 

The game has two moments which are those of a dicethrow - the dice that is thrown and the dice that falls back. Nietzsche presents the dicethrow as taking place on two distinct tables, the earth and the sky. The earth where the dice are thrown and the sky where the dice fall back ... (NP, 25)

Though it may seem that these would be two distinct throws of the dice taking place on two distinct tables, we've already seen that any logic of opposition, in this case between "throwing" and "falling back" or between "earth" and "sky", is done away with through the depth of affirmation.  Becoming went so far as to affirm the being of becoming.  Likewise, if we affirm existence as a dicethrow, throwing and falling back become two asymmetric sides of a single cycle.  This is why Deleuze emphasizes repeatedly that there is a single throw of the dice.  

It is not a matter of several dicethrows which, because of their number, finally reproduce the same combination. On the contrary, it is a matter of a single dicethrow which, due to the number of the combination produced, comes to reproduce itself as such. It is not that a large number of throws produce the repetition of a combination but rather the number of the combination which produces the repetition of the dicethrow. (NP, 25)

The idea that a single and unique combination keeps coming up, so that all the multiple throws are effectively a unity, reminds me of the absurd coin flipping scene in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  It gives us a new pair of non-dual terms that are only superficially opposites: chance and necessity.  In affirming this one throw, in this moment, as entirely chance, we end up affirming its inseparable connection to all the other throws in all the other moments, and thereby affirm all of existence as nothing but chance.  But this affirmation is exactly what brings this moment and its combination back again, and with it everything else, thus converting pure chance into absolute necessity.  

The dice which are thrown once are the affirmation of chance, the combination which they form on falling is the affirmation of necessity. Necessity is affirmed of chance in exactly the sense that being is affirmed of becoming and unity is affirmed of multiplicity. (NP, 26)

[ 

One might object here that we could see each individual moment as a completely separate and atomic chance.  Wouldn't chance be better affirmed if there were no connections between past, present, and future, and each moment appeared to us unrelated to any other?  While intriguing, I think there are two problems with this idea.  First, it requires us to have some definition of 'a moment' as a thing can exist intrinsically on its own.  But we don't really have a sense of what the smallest moment might be; if we pay careful attention we seem to find ever-smaller instants that might qualify, strongly suggesting that we are only ever encountering the specious present.  Second, and more importantly, our actual experience of any moment is almost never of it as something utterly unrelated to all other moments.  Even if we focus carefully on the smallest slices of time accessible to us, we don't discover that they increasingly bear no relationship to one another and that time ceases to have an order to it.  Even an instant seems to carry its context of its experience with itself.  The hypothesis of the atomic moment would thus involve condemning as illusory a great deal of our experience.  This runs counter to the idea we're developing that all of experience is to be affirmed, and none of its negated as mere illusion or madness or hallucination.  On top of this, we would be left with a seemingly insoluble problem of how we ever thought that there was a connection between moments.  It seems impossible for the illusion of continuity to get off the ground and keep flying if moments are inherently individual.

]

The non-duality of chance and necessity is precisely the context for the Eternal Return, which alternately sickens and elates us. If we see that to fully affirm even one moment we must affirm all of them (and all the suffering and pettiness we know they contained) ER becomes the greatest weight.  But if we see that our affirmation of any moment must liberate and redeem all the rest of them, we may join Nietzsche in saying, "... never have I heard anything more divine" (GS, #341).  It's as if chance is such a densely woven fabric that in picking up any thread of it, we inevitably drag along the whole.  Chance affirmed as a whole becomes necessity, which necessarily brings back the single moment of affirmation that perpetually relaunches the cycle of return.  The secret of ER always lies in the understanding that what comes back is everything and all the things. 

What Nietzsche calls necessity (destiny) is thus never the abolition but rather the combination of chance itself. Necessity is affirmed of chance in as much as chance itself affirmed. For there is only a single combination of chance as such, a single way of combining all the parts of chance, a way which is like the unity of multiplicity, that is to say number or necessity. There are many numbers with increasing or decreasing probabilities, but only one number of chance as such, one fatal number which reunites all the fragments of chance, like midday gathers together the scattered parts of midnight. This is why it is sufficient for the player to affirm chance once in order to produce the number which brings back the dicethrow.  (NP, 26)

The overarching point in all this is to understand that in losing a final transcendent meaning and purpose, the universe does not thereby lose any concept of order and law.  Return is the immanent law of becoming.  Just as we saw that starting with becoming, we also affirmed the being of becoming, we find that starting with chance, we also affirm the necessity of chance.  These double affirmations are the true mark of a good player, one who is untouched by a craving that the universe should be different, one who has overcome all desire for negation, and has, "released the world from its servitude under purpose".  That's why the good player doesn't need multiple throws to get the 'right' combination; when we live affirmatively, every toss is heads, no matter how tragic.  

The Problem of Existence 2 -- A Metaphysics of Affirmation

The problem is how to affirm existence instead of negating and even blaming it.  Last time we outlined a practical way to approach the existential aspect of this question by taking a detour through the four noble truths of Buddhism.  The Buddha suggests the path towards positivity starts when we stop craving for existence to be any different than it is.  But just how is it?  The Buddha doesn't answer this question for us; he was famously uninterested in metaphysical questions.  Nietzsche, on the other hand, certainly was interested in metaphysics, and Deleuze spends subsection 10-12 (pp. 22-29) trying to describe an existence we can unreservedly affirm 'as it is'.  This would amount to an existence that is innocent, that isn't seen as a punishment or something we need to take revenge on. 

In fact the question is not: is blameworthy existence responsible or not? But is existence blameworthy . . . or innocent? At this point Dionysus has found his multiple truth: innocence, the innocence of plurality, the innocence of becoming and of all that is. (NP, 22)

We actually already have an idea of what an innocent existence would look like.  It's the world of forces and difference that Deleuze introduced us to right from the beginning.  Force is innocent.  It does what it does because it has a "natural aggression".  Though we saw that force is neither atomic nor material, it has the same type of innocence we often ascribe to natural law -- it just does what it must.  Forces push.  We also saw that a force capable of dominating an object (ultimately another force) possess or appropriates it and gives it a sense.  In this context, the problem of existence becomes a question of what force is capable of giving a sense, a meaning, to existence as a whole.  So, the question becomes, what existing force is capable of giving all of existence the meaning of innocence?  Deleuze characterizes Nietzsche's response as immediately paradoxical -- only a force strong enough to affirm that there is no such thing as 'existence as a whole' is capable of affirming all of it.    

What does "innocence" mean? When Nietzsche denounces our deplorable mania for accusing, for seeking out those responsible outside, or even inside, ourselves, he bases this critique on five grounds. The first of these is that "nothing exists outside of the whole".  But the last and deepest is that "there is no whole": "It is necessary to disperse the universe, to lose respect for the whole" (VP III 489). Innocence is the truth of multiplicity. (NP, 22)

A force that could sum up or judge all of existence as a totality can only be one that comes from outside existence.  All the forces within existence are finite and relative.  They never exist by themselves or in-themselves.  As we've seen, 'a' force is already multiple because it requires a power differential between a dominant and a submissive side.  It is what it does, which is push on an object.  Only a fictitious force, like God, could dominate all of existence at once and provide it a meaning once and for all.  The innocent, almost mechanical, working of force is the precise opposite of some sort of divine plan that governs the universe from beyond.  This suggests that there's a difference between affirming 'existence as a whole', which is a fictitious unit, and affirming all of existence by affirming every 'part' of it.  "Innocence is the truth of multiplicity," means that existence becomes innocent when the force dominating it is able to affirm that it is merely a part of an existence that necessarily has many other parts.  It's clear that this creates a completely paradoxical relationship between the part and the whole, as well as between the power and powerlessness of the force capable of affirming the innocence of existence.  But then, there's no way to avoid paradox when dealing with a non-dual philosophy, which as we'll see shortly is what this theory amounts to.

First though, Deleuze spends some time using the idea that our force is so often incapable of affirming existence to provide another perspective on the root cause of the Greek or Christian (or Buddhist, depending how you interpret it) accusation of existence.  The result is a kind of psychology of force.  It's only when our own force fails in its attempt to make sense of existence, and we decide that no mortal force could be capable of affirming its senseless chaos and suffering, that we invent a force outside of and separate from existence which does not act in it.  This move creates the image of an all-powerful will whose force actually refrains from doing anything within existence.  But of course, that image is merely a form of wish fulfillment on the part of our failed force.  We project an image of God in order to preserve our own sense of power in the face of suffering our failure to see the meaning of existence.  We imagine ourselves in the image of God: all-powerful, but refusing to act.  Thus we insert a 'moral gap' into the action of force, separating what it can do from what it should do.  As if we would ever dream of taking your bullshit money!  We rebrand our lack of power as ascetic renunciation.

Whatever does not let itself be interpreted by a force nor evaluated by a will calls out for another will capable of evaluating it, another force capable of interpreting it. But we prefer to save the interpretation which corresponds to our forces and to deny the thing which does not correspond to our interpretation. We create grotesque representations of force and will, we separate force from what it can do, setting it up in ourselves as "worthy" because it holds back from what it cannot do, but as "blameworthy" in the thing where it manifests precisely the force that it has. We split the will in two, inventing a neutral subject endowed with free will to which we give the capacity to act and refrain from action (GM 113). (NP, 23)

While it's somewhat of a tangent, I think this sheds a lot of light on the very Christian notion of "free will".  We invent the concept of a mysterious interior will that differs from what we actually do.  Under which circumstances is this a useful invention?  Only when: 1) we can't make sense of what is going on with someone (or with ourselves), and 2) we nevertheless want to punish someone (including ourself) even though we don't know why they did what they did.  Not completely understanding how the world of force functions is an eternal human problem.  When the Greeks faced it, they essentially punted and invoked a confusing overdetermined interplay of human and divine wills with Fate.  And if someone did something you didn't like, you tried to take revenge on him then and there for his actions, and didn't worry much that maybe it wasn't ultimately his fault.  Christianity though, as the "religion of love and forgiveness", has to invent a clear conception of free will ... in order to be able to find you guilty and punish you ... even for your intentions!  Even today, the only reason most people want to believe in free will is so that they feel okay about punishing others.  Without the obfuscation of free will, we would have to spend time figuring out why bad things happen, and so be forced to admit our nearly complete ignorance in this regard.  The concept of Free Will is just an elaborate short cut to its ultimate aim -- righteous and justified revenge.  You can only blame people who are 'free'.  We besmirch the innocence of existence because we are sore losers, or as Deleuze puts it, bad players.

Alas, we are bad players. Innocence is the game of existence, of force and of will. Existence affirmed and appreciated, force not separated, the will not divided in two - this is the first approximation to innocence.  (NP, 23)

Existence is affirmed when we see it, win or lose, as an innocent game, as the play of force and of will.  Delezue illustrates this new characterization of the world of force by connecting it to Nietzsche's reading of Heraclitus.  Heraclitus, as the first philosopher of becoming, is an obvious precursor to Nietzsche.  Here though, Deleuze draws out a number of other parallels, with the ultimate goal of showing that Nietzsche's innocent existence is like the game of chance that Heraclitus describes in this fragment: "Time is a child playing draughts, the kingly power is a child's."  

Heraclitus is the one for whom life is radically innocent and just. He understands existence on the basis of an instinct of play. He makes existence an aesthetic phenomenon rather than a moral or religious one. (NP, 23)

For Heraclitus, existence exactly as it 'is' is already just.  It doesn't need to be judged or redeemed but simply appreciated, valued, as a work of art -- aesthetically.  This turns existence into a peculiar game where the style of play matters more than winning or losing (which I think is what Deleuze is trying to convey by calling it an "instinct" for play).  Heraclitus' idea of existence as innocent play is opposed to Anaximander's idea of it as guilty work.  These two represent the metaphysical version of the existential opposition we drew between a Nietzschean affirmation of existence and its Christian negation.  Anaximander gives us the original version of the metaphysical Fall myth -- Being is crucified on a cross of Becoming.  The blameless unity of the One falls into the sin and suffering of the Many. 

[Anaximader] said "Beings must pay penance and be judged for their injustices, in accordance with the ordinance of time" (cf. PTG 4 p. 45). This means; 1) that becoming is an injustice (adikia) and the plurality of things that come into existence is a sum of injustices; 2) that things struggle between themselves and mutually expiate their injustice by thephtora; 3) that things all derive from an original being ("Apeiron") which falls into becoming, into plurality, into a blameworthy act of generation, the injustice of which it redeems eternally by destroying them ("Theodicy") (PTG). (NP, 20)

Heraclitus, by contrast, is a non-dualist -- this existence is just as it should be, and there is no other, better, existence behind this one.  Instead of affirming only being and negating becoming, he, "... made an affirmation of becoming".  This deceptively simple slogan, however, conceals not only a reversal of Anaximander's primacy of being over becoming, but a complete abandonment of its dualistic and oppositional logic.  

We have to reflect for a long time to understand what it means to make an affirmation of becoming. In the first place it is doubtless to say that there is only becoming. No doubt it is also to affirm becoming. But we also affirm the being of becoming, we say that becoming affirms being or that being is affirmed in becoming. Heraclitus has two thoughts which are like ciphers: according to one there is no being, everything is becoming; according to the other, being is the being of becoming as such. (NP, 23) 

The being of becoming (or "affirming being in becoming") is the metaphysical version of the paradox we encountered in discussing a force that could affirm all of existence.  The problem is that if we simply say there is only becoming, we end up denying being.  This just swaps the position of being and becoming and inverts the dualistic scheme.  Our experience of being turns into a mere illusion if we take becoming to be the sole nature of reality.  In this way we would become guilty of hypostatizing reality when we should see only the non-reality of becoming.  But the whole point is to leave behind this schema and not negate anything.  At its deepest, "to make an affirmation of becoming" is literally to make becoming into an affirmation of being, of its 'opposite'.  There's no clearer statement of non-duality than this -- there's no opposition, there's no negation, there's only affirmation, which affirms even its opposite.

For there is no being beyond becoming, nothing beyond multiplicity; neither multiplicity nor becoming are appearances or illusions. But neither are there multiple or eternal realities which would be, in turn, like essences beyond appearance. (NP, 23)

Affirming the being of becoming is such a paradoxical idea that I need to pause here and flesh it out some more.  I think a similar paradox is at the core of the Mahayana concept of emptiness.  As I've heard Taft say many times, "emptiness doesn't mean that it isn't there".  Seeing the emptiness of phenomena doesn't make them go away.  What we're after in emptiness is not the negation of a perceived reality and not a condemnation of it as mere illusion.  Our goal is only to see that the phenomena is constructed, fabricated, dependently originated, and not something that exists essentially, in-itself and on its own.  Emptiness means that there are no essences.  In fact, at its core, emptiness itself is empty, and instead of being experienced as some vacuity, converts into the overflowing fullness of experience -- beautiful display.  

If my analogy is useful, the being of becoming should be something akin to empty arisings.  In other words, it's our everyday perceptions of the world, treated not as illusions, but as a manifestations of a becoming which affirms itself so completely that it transforms into its 'opposite'.  An emptiness which becomes all phenomena.  We might say that becoming produces being in the same way that emptiness fabricates phenomena, though this formulation risks misunderstanding both becoming and emptiness as substantive entities, rather than something more like the process of affirmation.  In both cases, the important things to grasp is that the identity of whatever phenomenon we're looking at is constructed through its relation to other phenomena whose identity is constructed in a similar fashion.  Instead of a solid, reified thing that is in-itself, we discover a sort of hall of mirrors or infinite regress where any unity we grasp dissolves into the multiplicity of emptiness or becoming.  Multiplicity and process are the key things to remember in order to escape the dualistic logic that blames existence because affirmation occupies the intersection of those two concepts.  Becoming and emptiness are the many that are productive or affirmative of the one.  Or conversely, if we choose to think of becoming or emptiness as 'one', it is a one that can only be by affirming itself in the many.  Since this is a non-dual perspective, the question of which side we should call 'one' and which 'many' isn't a coherent one; the important point is that there are two inseparable but asymmetric terms.  Not-two, but not-one either.

Multiplicity is the inseparable manifestation, essential transformation and constant symptom of unity. Multiplicity is the affirmation of unity; becoming is the affirmation of being. The affirmation of becoming is itself being, the affirmation of multiplicity is itself one. Multiple affirmation is the way in which the one affirms itself. "The one is the many, unity is multiplicity." And indeed, how would multiplicity come forth from unity and how would it continue to come forth from it after an eternity of time if unity was not actually affirmed in multiplicity? (NP, 24)

This obscure mystical formula we all seek -- PLURALISM = MONISM -- is what Deleuze considers the driving force behind the Eternal Return.  Returning is the action of an unlimited becoming, one that doesn't stop transforming until it goes so far that it comes back to itself (so to speak).  Or, alternatively, we might think of the way that Return redoubles something as creating a sort of 'opposition' between a thing and itself.  Is this the real thing or its repeated simulacrum?  And if the identity of this repetition requires a transit through an unlimited becoming, then we discover that all this transformation is both necessary to and somehow already packed into that identity.  ER deconstructs the logic of the model and the copy and dissolves identity into a sea of difference that nevertheless reproduces that identity again and again.  For every thing to become everything (or vice-versa) its fixed identity must be lost.  

Heraclitus is obscure because he leads us to the threshold of the obscure: what is the being of becoming? What is the being inseparable from that which is becoming? Return is the being of that which becomes. Return is the being of becoming itself, the being which is affirmed in becoming. The eternal return as law of becoming, as justice and as being. (NP, 24)

If being is produced by becoming, or is becoming's unlimited affirmation of itself, or becoming's own return, then all of the things that are (all of existence) are nothing but affirmation.  It's not that they affirm themselves, but that they only exist as affirmation.  What 'comes back' in the Return is everything, though it comes back emptied of any negation, of any idea that it should be different than it 'is'.  This image of existence is nothing but the play and execution of forces, each of which innocently does what it must given its relative power.  This whole hierarchy of forces together is necessary for the full interpretation of any of the forces.  In fact, since it doesn't exist in-itself, 'a' force is only differentiated or articulated via its role in this hierarchy.  An affirmation which brings everything back to its proper place is a sort of cosmic justice that operates continually from within rather than judging once and for all from without. 

It follows that existence is not responsible or even blameworthy. Heraclitus went as far as proclaiming "the struggle of the many is pure justice itself! In fact the one is the many!" (PTG 6 p. 57). (NP, 24)

Perhaps this view of the identity and difference of forces can finally throw some light on the paradox we started with.  What force is capable of giving a meaning to all of existence?  The temptation is to search for a force so large that we imagine it dominating everything.  But in fact, every force, no matter how small, insofar as it is differentiated from a continuum or field of forces, requires and thus repeats the entire field that gave rise to it.  The cosmos returns in a grain of sand.  We could say that existence has no (global, transcendent) meaning, but that it doesn't need one either, because every force which is affirmed is capable of providing it with a (local, immanent) meaning.  Life as a whole is justified by every individual moment we can live affirmatively.  

Finally, Deleuze returns to apply this same fractal logic to the idea of existence as an innocent game.  

Affirming becoming and affirming the being of becoming are the two moments of a game which are compounded with a third term, the player, the artist or the child. 

The being of becoming, the eternal return, is the second moment of the game, but also the third term, identical to the two moments and valid for the whole. For the eternal return is the distinct return of the outward movement, the distinct contemplation of the action, but also the return of the outward movement itself and the return of the action; at once moment and cycle of time. (NP, 24)

Next time we'll explore at more length this image of the game and it's moments.  In the current context, it just seems meant to illustrate that innocence requires a recursive structure where the whole is reflected in each part.   Or perhaps it would be better to say where every part is reflected in each one until both whole and part are turned into identical infinite series.  The game requires two asymmetric moments.  But the fact that these repeat one another implies a third moment that realizes, or affirms, this identity.  Maybe not-two doesn't mean one, but three -- the symbol of multiplicity.  

The Problem of Existence 1 -- The Carpet Pissers Did This?

With a title like that, you know this is not going to be easy, right?  But we have to make some attempt to understand the extremely difficult middle section of this first chapter on The Tragic (subsections 9-12).  

One part of this section is relatively clear.  It contrasts three views: 1) The Greek idea of human existence as blameworthy, as a sort of punishment; 2) The Christian conception that existence is not only blameworthy, but that we ourselves our responsible for its misery; 3) The Nietzschean notion that existence is completely innocent.  I think I can outline the logic of these contrasts relatively quickly.  Then I feel compelled to add a few comments on the Buddhist view of the problem of existence.  

The second, more metaphysical, part of this section asks how we have to think of existence if we are to believe in its innocence.  This is an extension of the question we ended with last time, the question that defines the tragic perspective on life. How do we make all of existence -- everything -- an object of affirmation, a joy to be experienced rather than a struggle to be judged and condemned?  It's difficult to describe the philosophical view of what existence is that corresponds to this way of life.  But this difficulty is at the root of Deleuze's entire philosophy.  While he doesn't use these terms here, the problem of existence is the same as the problem of the univocity of Being, or the problem of pure immanence.  So I'll do my best to again approach the question of what kind of existence we need to believe in to affirm it absolutely. [Update: all metaphysical questions to be resolved in the forthcoming Problem of Existence -- 2]

For the Greeks, existence was 'Titanic'.  It was literally too much suffering to bear and could only be a punishment inflicted by the gods.  The Orphics had a wonderful myth that illustrates.  The Titans (children of Sky and Earth) killed and dismembered Dionysus.  Then they ate him.  As punishment, Zeus struck the Titans with a thunderbolt that turned them to dust.  Since humans are (partly) made from this dust, they inherited something of the crime and punishment for the killing of Dionysus.  Obviously, Orphism promises that if we atone for this crime, by, you know, becoming Orphics, we can be released from our suffering and reborn exactly as Dionysus was reborn after his dismemberment.  After all, what good is a religion that doesn't solve all your problems, no?

I first learned of this myth back when I was reading Plato.  With the help of Nightingale's background information about ancient Greek language and religion, it's easy to see the marks of Orphism in many dialogues, though particularly in Phaedo.  In fact, it's easy to see that something like this theogeny animates the core of Plato's philosophy.  As beings with a dualistic structure (as wikipedia says of Orphism: "The soul of man (the Dionysus part) is therefore divine, but the body (the Titan part) holds the soul in bondage") we are called to depreciate the sensual in favor of the supra-sensual, to look through the appearances of the world till we see the true reality of the divine Forms.  The familiarity of this myth about existence is exactly why Nietzsche sees it as so pernicious.  It makes us take it for granted that this bodily existence is merely a punishment to endure and escape from. 

Existence seems to be given so much by being made a crime, an excess. It gains a double nature - an immense injustice and a justifying atonement. It is Titanised by crime, it is made divine by the expiation of crime.  Is there at the end of all this if not a subtle way of depreciating existence, of subjecting it to judgment, moral judgment and above all God's judgment? (NP, 20)

Last time we briefly noted the similarity between the dismemberment of Dionysus and the crucifixion of Christ.  Upon hearing the full tale though, it's impossible to miss the correspondence, which goes right down to the sarcophagy involved.  Despite this, Nietzsche see a crucial distinction between the Greek and the Christian version of the dying-and-rising God.  For the Greeks, it's the old gods, the Titans, that bear the responsibility for our suffering.  The Christians revolutionize the same story by making the god die for our sins.  With Christianity, it's our fault, our original sin, that makes a punishment of existence.  This is some next level passive aggressive shit man.  Not only do we feel bad because we're suffering the slings and arrows of an outrageous human existence, but we have to feel bad about feeling bad because it's our own damn fault!  We're only being punished because we're guilty.  This, after all, is the essence of justice.  Only the guilty are made to suffer.  We are suffering.  Ergo, we must be guilty.  This logic is inevitable when we move from the capricious polytheism of the Greek gods to the monotheistic belief in a single 'just' God.  Divine justice is punishment for our sins.

Existence under the Titans may be a sort of punishment, but for the Greeks it's not a punishment we deserve.  It is simply the lot we bear as humans.  This fits perfectly with the confusing overdetermination of events we find in the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Things happen because of mortal actions, or because of the passions of a god, or because of fate, or due to any unspecified combination of these three.  The question of whether existence as a whole is just or not simply doesn't seem to come up.  Who could say?  Certainly not even the strongest and most heroic mortals, who are as much the plaything of forces beyond themselves as anyone.  Any concept of justice lies in the simple and direct notion of revenge.  An eye for an eye is the full definition of someone's just deserts.  He tried to bang my wife (in the parlance of our times) and so I stuck a spear in him.  Even Zeus operates this way, throwing thunderbolts whenever someone pisses him off.

By contrast, though the Christians explicitly disavow the classic motto, they actually accomplish an insidious cosmic expansion of the concept of revenge.  All of human existence becomes, in effect, God's revenge against us for our sins.  If we are expected to give up on our simple, as it were local, human revenge and meekly accept our punishment, it's only because everyone is guilty all the time.  We don't give up the spirit of revenge but spiritualize it.  After all, why punish someone when God is already doing it for you?  And if it seems like he's doing okay now, just wait smugly till he burns in hell.  He can't help but get what he deserves because justice -- revenge -- has become the divine plan.  

For the moment we can leave aside the question of who might want to interpret all of existence as a punishment we ourselves are responsible for.  We've already alluded to Nietzsche's answer: the slave who wants to take revenge on the master.  Here, we're focused on the incredibly far reaching effects this interpretation of existence as universal revenge has had.  For Nietzsche, these cannot be overstated.  Christianity supercharges the Greek myth of the dying-and-rising god by coupling it to the myth of the Fall.  This is a potent and infectious combination that has come to dominate our view of existence.  All morality and all philosophy since then ultimately boil down to the simple idea that life as it appears to us is not as it should be.  The fact that it's not as it should be is our fault, and our only salvation lies in admitting this and trying to escape.  Whether this escape takes the form of seeing Plato's Ideas, or coming to Jesus is secondary.  Life seen as somehow defective, as suffering and as punishment; life that needs to be optimized, corrected, transcended, escaped -- all this is the spirit of revenge.  Life as God's revenge upon us.  And our revenge upon Life.

"Everywhere where responsibilities have been sought it is the instinct of revenge that has sought them. This instinct of revenge has gained such a hold on humanity through the centuries that all of metaphysics, psychology, history and above all morality bear its imprint. As soon as man began thinking he introduced the bacillus of revenge into things" (VP III 458). Nietzsche does not see ressentiment (it's your fault) and bad conscience (it's my fault) and their common fruit (responsibility) as simple psychological events but rather as the fundamental categories of semitic and Christian thought, of our way of thinking and interpreting existence in general. (NP, 21)

[

Those who want to make an attempt to salvage some of Nietzsche's blatant misogyny will find support from Deleuze on pages 20-21.  The basic idea is that the difference between the Greek and Christian views of existence can be summed up by contrasting male and female ideas of revenge.  One avenges a sacrilege, while the other punishes a sin.

... "in original sin, curiosity, mendacious deception, susceptibility to seduction, lust — in short a series of pre-eminently feminine affects was considered the origin of evil . . . Thus the Aryans understand sacrilege as something masculine; while the Semites understand sin as feminine" (NP, 20) 

Given the relative difference in physical power, this perspective has some basis in stereotype.  Women seeking revenge are generally advised to do it in a more 'sneaky' way that involves less open spear thrusting.  Nietzsche's point is that the Christian interpretation of existence is ultimately a way for the weak slave to triumph over the strong master by making the master feel guilty about ruling (this was essentially the same conclusion we came to when examining Hegel's dialectic).  So it does make some sense to characterize this strategy for revenge as "feminine".  Of course, there's also a deeper biographical reason that Nietzsche often chooses 'woman' as the representative of this spiritualized form of revenge -- he hated his mother and sister!  Deleuze only comments obliquely on this biography:

Mothers and sisters; this second feminine power has the function of accusing us, of making us responsible. "It is your fault," says the mother, "your fault if I don't have a better son, more respectful of his mother and more conscious of his crime." "It is your fault," says the sister, "your fault if I am not more beautiful, more rich and more loved." The imputation of wrongs and responsibilities, the bitter recrimination, the perpetual accusation, the ressentiment - this is the pious interpretation of existence. (NP, 21)

But Klossowski considers this question in depth in chapter 7 of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, "The Consultation of the Paternal Shadow".  While I didn't translate this chapter into plain English, the basic idea was that the women in Nietzsche's life acted as conservative forces that always blamed him for ruining his health with his devotion to philosophy.  While outwardly pitying him, their motive was less compassion than a desire to make hime feel guilty for not living up to their bourgeois moral prejudices.  Hence, it's not so surprising that 'woman' often becomes his symbol of guilt and fearful pious conformity.  In fact, like Hegel's slave, woman's power stems directly from her weakness.

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It seems worthwhile to use Nietzsche's framework to evaluate the Buddhist response to the problem of existence.  While every culture and religion is a response to this same question, Buddhism even self-consciously views itself in this light.  The Buddha specifically wanted to know what to do about old age, sickness, and death.  Should we see his response as a depreciation of existence, as a belief that it is a punishment to be suffered, maybe even one we deserve?  Or does it offer us a more affirmative view of existence than the Greek or Christian conception, one perhaps closer to what Nietzsche has in mind with 'The Tragic'. 

I think we can interpret the Buddhist response as similar to the Greek one.  Certainly, this is how Nietzsche (influenced mainly by Schopenhauer) interpreted it -- as a type of nihilism.  And we can find many well known Buddhist ideas that seem to fit with the idea that life is a problem to be overcome.  In fact, we needn't look further than how the first noble truth is often translated: Life is Suffering.  Since the Buddha's avowed goal of Nibbana is a 'going out' (as of a candle flame), a complete cessation of suffering "without remainder", it can certainly seem that he's teaching us to escape from life, to renounce it.  Along these same lines, the traditional Theravadan school sees progress along the path towards awakening as progress towards not being reincarnated and hence re-enmeshed in the endless circulation of Samsara.  This same school also often espouses teachings that denigrate the body and emphasize the purity needed for the spiritual life.  So we can easily see Buddhism as a religion of transcendence that encourages us to opt out of a life of suffering.  Salvation lies in getting off the merry-go-round.

I suggest that this interpretation links Buddhism to the Greek idea of existence rather than the Christian one simply because Buddhism lays much less emphasis on guilt than Christianity does.  While all three religions see existence as blameworthy, the Greeks think it's the gods fault, and the Buddhists mostly see it as simply the nature of the universe.  Only Christianity is convinced that it's our fault.  One could, of course, read the notion of karma as a sort of law of spiritual justice that makes us responsible for our own suffering in a way similar to Christian guilt.  But the fact that this is portrayed as a universal, impersonal, law of cause and effect and not the judgement of god suggests that the stress in Buddhism is not on guilt and sin.  Karma is more like a simple feedback loop that moves us closer to or further away from Nibbana than it is a theory of why we're in the shit in the first place.  In fact, this almost mechanistic view of existence is what leads Nietzsche to see Buddhism as the crowning achievement of nihilism.  Unlike the Greeks and Christians, the Buddhists are atheists.  Existence isn't bad because it's a punishment for something the gods did, nor is it God's punishment for our sins; it's just bad for no reason at all.  For the Buddhist, salvation doesn't lie in God's forgiveness, but only in not existing, in 'going out'.  

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So we can follow Nietzsche in interpreting Buddhism as another negation of life.  However, this would not be my preferred interpretation of the Buddha's original message, and it does a particularly poor job of characterizing many of the later, non-dual, strains of Buddhism (eg. Zen).  I find it both more plausible, and what's more important, more interesting, to see the Buddhist interpretation of existence as something that in actual practice is much closer to Nietzsche's own -- existence is something we can affirm as totally innocent.  Since we have yet to really characterize what this means for Nietzsche [stay tuned for part 2], perhaps an exploration of 'affirmative Buddhism' can help us prepare the ground.

Consider again the first noble truth in light of the idea that we might be looking at a philosophy that radical affirms all of experience.  Instead of translating it as saying that (all of) life is suffering, let's translate it as less of a judgement than an observation -- there is suffering.  As the Buddha says, suffering needs to be fully understood.  This doesn't mean that all of existence is suffering, but simply affirms the undeniable fact that, yeah, sometimes we suffer.  The point is not to universalize suffering but to acknowledge it when it happens and not look away or try to escape it.  

While it might defy Theravadan orthodoxy, this reading of the first noble truth is hardly novel or controversial.  To support it, we actually don't have to look any farther than the third noble truth -- there is a cessation of suffering.  Obviously, this is the whole point of the religion; you can learn to stop suffering.  If we think that "life is suffering", then this would only be possible at death.  But the Buddha says over and over again that the end of suffering can be achieved in this life, not just in some afterlife.  Also, should we perhaps note that the Buddha himself is alive when he gives this talk?  When he says that the cessation of suffering is to be realized, we should read this in a way similar to how we approached the first noble truth.  It's less a true statement about the character of reality than it is a practical observation.  We should understand suffering whenever it arises, and we should realize its cessation whenever we are able to.  Despite the sometimes eschatological vision, I think the cessation of suffering referred to here is actually something we are supposed to realize many times.  Perhaps some ultimate and final cessation, where suffering ends once and for all, is possible within this life (the Buddha clearly claims to have achieved this).  But what I and many other people seem to experience is something more relative and repeated.  There was some suffering but now it stopped.  More suffering will happen, but if we progress along the Buddha's path, more of it stops more often.  In other words the cycles that run from understanding suffering to realizing its cessation get faster and deeper.  In short, the cessation of suffering is not an escape from it, but it's continuous transmutation into joy.  

The tragic is not founded on a relation of life and the negative but on the essential relation of joy and multiplicity, of the positivity and multiplicity, of affirmation and multiplicity. "The hero is joyful, this is what has, up to now, escaped the authors of tragedies" (VP IV 50). Tragedy - frank, dynamic, gaiety. (NP, 18)

This understanding of the third noble truth is bolstered by a (fairly obvious) insight I recently had into the fourth.  The Buddha says that there is a path to the cessation of suffering, and that this path needs to be developed or cultivated.  For a long time I thought that this path -- the noble eightfold path -- was just a lifelong spiritual path defined by a set of religious rules.  After all, the eight branches all talk about the "right" way to do this, that, or the other; so they're like the Ten Commandments, right?  I now think that the reason that the Buddha says this path must be cultivated is because it's a road you travel down again and again.  Each moment to moment journey down the path leads to some cessation of suffering.  The point of cultivating the path is to use it anytime you recognize that you're suffering.  You can go down the path as many times as you need and as often as you suffer, thereby developing it, making it a little wider and easier to get on and follow, each time you go.  The path is like a river that connects any suffering to its cessation.  I say that this reading is obvious (even though I arrived at it after 5 years of meditation) because it now seems to me implicit in both the context of the fourth noble truth, as well as in the contents of the eight branches of the path.  

Consider the context first.  The cessation of suffering is to be realized, but then the path to this cessation is to be cultivated?  If the end of suffering, Nibbana, is a one time destination, shouldn't the fourth noble truth come third?  Don't we cultivate a path only once we already know something about what destination it leads to?  The structure of the noble truths as a whole makes a lot more sense if we see that the fourth intends for us to cycle through the instructions of the first three.  Understand our suffering, abandon its origin (which we'll come to momentarily), and thereby realize its cessation.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  That cycle is the path.

Carefully considering the contents of the path, "just this noble eightfold path", leads us to a similar conclusion.  While the eight copies of the word "right" -- view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration -- at first give the impression that the path is a moral one, I think it's better to see each of the eight branches as advice you can practice in order to make your way towards the cessation of suffering.  That is, they're only right because they work.  In fact, right view is simply seeing the actions embedded in the four noble truths as practical advice for reducing suffering.  This might also imply a metaphysical view like Nagarjuna's equation of dependent origination with emptiness, but that view is not 'right' because it accurately represents reality, but because it liberates us from thinking that existence must be any particular way at all.  Similar things could be said about intention, speech, action, and livelihood.  There's not a single correct way to do these things.  But if you go around intending to harm people, and actually do frequently harm them with your speech or action or livelihood, its probably going to be pretty hard to see the suffering you're causing yourself and the craving that conditions it, and even harder to realize its cessation.  As Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".  So again, the advice isn't primarily moral but practical.  If we're willing to honestly examine our intentions and way of living and try to move these in a positive directions, we're just plain going to feel better.  And finally, the last three branches of the path, and especially the crucial mindfulness one, are quite obviously practical in nature.  They all involve monitoring and modulating our internal landscape in a way that lets us see more of what's going on, and see it without judgement.  Mindfulness especially is a way of affirming all our experience without thereby possessing or identifying with it.  As my meditation teacher says, "This is happening now".  

The entirety of the path then is simply a list of parts of our experience we can examine, and ways we can examine them that lead us in the direction of less suffering.  Their advice can be summed up as "just look".  As the Buddha explains in his later elaboration of dependent origination, the root of our suffering lies in our ignorance, that is, in the way we ignore our own experience. The contents of the path are just a cheatsheet we can use to get back on the road to the cessation of suffering whenever we find that we have, in our own experience, gone in the 'wrong' direction (ie. towards suffering).  We pick any of the noble eight folds and start examining experience.  This examination itself leads in the 'right' direction, and we can immediately feel it.  The path is not a moral doctrine but a practical manual, a compendium of eight important (though perhaps not exhaustive?) tools we can employ again and again, anytime we need them.  We don't walk a single narrow path over the course of a lifetime, but wear a deep and wide groove into our experience so that all of our experience leads to the ocean of Nibbana. 

At this point, you are undoubtedly wondering why your friend and humble narrator skipped over the third noble truth.  I did this because the third noble truth is the one that really clinches the comparison of Buddhism with Nietzsche (and Deleuze).  The short version is: "craving causes suffering".  The more official wording is that suffering is conditioned on craving (it depends on it as a necessary condition rather than a cause), so that craving is the "origin" of suffering.  Hence craving needs to be abandoned if we are to realize the cessation of suffering.  This truth again fits with the understanding that the cessation of suffering is not a single transcendent endpoint we escape into once and for all, but an everyday experience we have again and again.  Hence the path that leads to this cessation is something we travel down many times.  Craving, after all, comes in an amazing variety of flavors.  Biological, erotic, material, social, psychological.  We crave a trip to the urinal.  We crave a blowjob in the airplane bathroom.  We crave a hamburger, a drink, or a Maserati.  We crave to have people think we're smart.  We crave the feeling of being loved.  If we're intent on examining our experience, we see these cravings come and go all the time.  We feel their urgency, the agitation they produce, their demands for action.  And if we can see these individual cravings, and see how they cause us to suffer, we can start to release some of them some of the time.  Sometimes, this doesn't amount to much and we only reduce our suffering a tiny amount for a short time.  Sometimes the cessation is profound and prolonged.  While the path to letting go of each individual craving may differ, there's a secret commonality to craving lying in plain sight.  This secret is what really ties the room together.  

Craving is always craving for it to be different.  It's always the negation of whatever is going on in our experience.  We crave when something isn't as it should be.  Thus, craving always introduces a duality into our experience.  It posits another, better, world, that is not here and now, and thereby rejects or ignores this world that we're actually experiencing.  The third noble truth tells us that our suffering depends on this type of craving, and, conversely, that if we let go of this craving for it to be different our suffering will cease.  This makes affirmation of existence the key to the entire path.  The Buddha is really counseling us to accept suffering, not to resist it and not to fall into ressentiment or bad conscience about it, not to blame existence or our self for the suffering.  Craving and suffering just happen.  Nothing is responsible for them, least of all us.  Despite the fact that it's beyond our control, we nevertheless have a certain freedom to transform suffering.  

Strangely, when we really look at and affirm our suffering, it stops.  At least, it stops being suffering.  Perhaps it would seem less paradoxical if we changed our terminology here to match a popular Buddhist saying -- pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.  Bad things will still happen to us after the cessation of suffering.  We'll still get old and sick and die and so will everyone we love.  But somehow being willing to fully affirm these 'tragedies' robs them of their sting.  In a sense, the third noble truth is teaching us that our suffering doesn't mean anything.  It has nothing to do with justice or judgement or revenge.  It's a problem we add to experience only when we are unable to affirm it.  And it's a problem that disappears as such whenever see it happening, despite the fact that this seeing doesn't actually 'solve' the problem.  

Affirmation is the core of Nietzsche's tragic perspective.  Life affirmed, life led without craving for it to be different, is joyous even when it's 'tragic'.  The bad things that happen suddenly are no longer an accusation of life but an inevitable part of it.  They stay bad from our limited perspective, but are no longer evil, because we affirm that from some larger perspective there's nothing inherently wrong with them.  Shit just happens.  The Buddhist and Nietzschean perspectives coincide as soon as we see that the suffering the Buddha claims our craving is responsible for is only an effect of what Nietzsche is calling the "pious interpretation of existence".  We have some freedom to ease (Buddhist) suffering because it is the product of our own bad conscience and ressentiment, the product of thinking it should be different and assigning blame for why its not.  Conversely, Nietzsche's (tragic) suffering is more like what the Buddha was calling pain.  We convert pain (bad stuff, tragic-suffering) into suffering (evil stuff, non-tragic suffering) whenever we think that this pain should not be happening.  Then we look around for something to blame it on -- the gods, our self, the universe -- and we begin to scheme our revenge for the perceived injustice of it.  If, instead, we affirm that pain, we begin to see that nothing and no one is responsible for it.  

This lack of responsibility is my final point of comparison between Nietzsche and Buddhism.  One of the most crucial insights in Buddhism is not-self (anattā), or its Mahayana generalization, emptiness (śūnyatā).  We've already seen how Klossowksi interpreted the Eternal Return as a similar dissolution of individual identity.  And we'll see more of this idea in the next post when we explore Deleuze's take on the metaphysical view that corresponds to Nietzsche's tragic conception of existence.  Phrased in the ethical or existential terms we've been using here though, the view that nothing has inherent and essential existence translates into an idea of positive irresponsibility.  

Nietzsche takes on the tasks of providing a new ideal, a new interpretation and another way of thinking (GM II23). "To give irresponsibility its positive sense", "I wished to conquer the feeling of a full irresponsibility, to make myself independent of praise and blame, of present and past" (VP III 383, 465). Irresponsibility - Nietzsche's most noble and beautiful secret. (NP, 21)

We are not responsible for our suffering.  And neither is god or the universe at large.  Suffering is chance.  It is contingent (as Stephen Batchelor translates Nagarjuna's word of dependent origination).  This doesn't mean that it is without a law of its own.  But it does call into question the identity of both the victim and the executioner, the identity of some entity to blame for the suffering.  If no one is there craving for it to be different, who is left to suffer?  By affirming all of experience, even this affirmation, we effectively dissolve ourselves into it.  The true affirmation of experience is multiple, expansive, and redoubled.  

The Tragic

There's another name for the mode of existence of the genealogist that we discussed last time -- the tragic perspective on life.  Like many of Nietzsche's ideas though, this name at first glance conveys almost exactly the opposite of what he intends.  Far from the feeling that 'life is a tragedy' or some sort of punishment, the tragic perspective on life is so joyous and affirmative, so fundamentally in love with life, that it sees life's inherent value as justifying any amount of suffering.  This is the depth to which the genealogist carries their affirmation of difference.  Far from being neutral or objective, it reaches the point of affirming even differences that tear their own identity apart, that dissolve them into a sea of interacting forces.  

Deleuze presents the connection between the more metaphysical version of this philosophy that we saw last time and the more emotional or existential version by way of examining the development of Nietzsche's ideas over time.  While The Birth of Tragedy obviously introduces Nietzshce's interest in what tragedy can bring to philosophy, that book's opposition between the collective and the individual, between Apollo and Dionysus, is still presented in dialectical fashion.  The opposing forces are only reconciled and subsumed into a higher unity through a negation: the suffering we habitually associate with tragedy.  It's only later, as his philosophy matures, that Nietzsche begins to see how "offensively Hegelian" (pg. 11) this thesis is.  Gradually, he realizes that the true opponent of Dionysus is not Apollo, but Christ, and that the suffering of Dionysus does not justify the tragedy of individual life by universalizing it, but affirms that life requires no justification even though it involves suffering.  Just as we saw with the distinction between genealogy and the dialectic regarding the question of difference, here it's a question of whether we have a fundamentally positive and affirmative attitude towards life or, on the contrary, see it as something negative that must be overcome.  Dionysus versus The Crucified.  

In Dionysus and in Christ the martyr is the same, the passion is the same. It is the same phenomenon but in two opposed senses (VP IV 464). On the one hand, the life that justifies suffering, that affirms suffering; on the other hand the suffering that accuses life, that testifies against it, that makes life something that must be justified. (NP, 14)

Christianity accuses life of being a bad thing.  With the proper eschatological faith though, we can be delivered from this life, and its suffering given meaning and redeemed as a necessary step on the road to salvation.  It's in this sense that Nietzsche speaks of a Christian nihilism.  Life, in itself and for itself, has no meaning for the Christian.  It would be an irredeemable mass of suffering and torment were in not for the grace of a force outside this life.  In fact, the situation with Christianity is almost worse than nihilism.  It teaches us not merely that life is meaningless suffering, but infers that this suffering is actually our fault -- our original sin leads us to suffer.  Conversely, our suffering is considered proof of our sin.  Suffering is not merely an accusation against life but leads to a conviction that it is bad, that we are at fault, that we are powerless to do anything but pray for an escape from it.  The passion of Christ, the God on the cross suffering for our sins, is the perfect symbol of this attitude towards life.  As we saw with the dialectic, the self-identity of God here develops only through its negation, only through a life of human suffering.  Suffering is the opposite of the divine life.

Dionysus too is crucified, dismembered by the Titans.  But his suffering is joyous one that leads to his own rebirth.  He doesn't escape life but returns to it, only to suffer again.  For Nietzsche, this myth represents an overcoming of the problem Christian nihilism.  It's not simply that a solution is found that justifies life and provides it with meaning.  Christians, after all, find their solution in God.  Dionysus, by contrast, overcomes the whole problem, the whole need for a solution.  Life is so joyous that it doesn't need to have a meaning.  Life, we might say, justifies itself, from within.  And we redeem every moment we are able to affirmatively live, regardless of how much suffering it contains.  

For there are two kinds of suffering and sufferers. "Those who suffer from the superabundance of life" make suffering an affirmation in the same way as they make intoxication an activity; in the laceration of Dionysus they recognise the extreme form of affirmation, with no possibility of subtraction, exception or choice. "Those who suffer, on the contrary, from an impoverishment of life" make intoxication a convulsion, a numbness; they make suffering a means of accusing life, of contradicting it and also a means of justifying life, of resolving the contradiction. (NP, 16)

Dionysus is, in effect, the real hero of every tragedy.  A "joyful hero" (pg. 18) despite his suffering.  His passion encapsulates the tragic worldview which affirms everything, even its own dismemberment.  This is the analog of the genealogist's affirmation of difference, even at the price of her own identity.  And living this way is no small task.

Multiple and pluralist affirmation -- this is the essence of the tragic. This will become clearer if we consider the difficulties of making everything an object of affirmation. Here the effort and the genius of pluralism are necessary, the power of transformations, Dionysian laceration. When anguish and disgust appear in Nietzsche it is always at this point: can everything become an object of affirmation, that is to say of joy? We must find, for each thing in turn, the special means by which it is affirmed, by which it ceases to be negative. (NP, 17)

Embracing the difficulty of tragic affirmation is the crux of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  It is the snake of nihilism that nearly chokes our hero.  Everything small and petty and painful in ourselves has to be affirmed as fully as anything we take pride in.  It's a level of self-love that dissolves the self, and acknowledges each of the forces within us striving for dominance.  Can we take this affirmation itself as the meaning of existence, without thinking that existence should be justified from something outside?  Can we find the "sense" of existence within it -- the force powerful enough to appropriate all of it -- or is, "a god needed to interpret existence" (pg.19)?

 

A World of Difference

Gilles Deleuze.  Nietzsche and Philosophy.  Pop some popcorn folks because this one might last for a while.  There are more good ideas in the first 40 page section on "The Tragic" than I can keep track of or organize into a single thread.  So we're going to have to do this the hard way.  This particular post will only cover the first 4 subsections.

The basic theme of this first subsection (and actually of the whole chapter on The Tragic) is the positive or affirmative nature of Nietzsche's philosophy.  But Delueze uses this concept of affirmation in an unusual way.  Instead of affirming our self identity, or even affirming our own boundaries by saying that we are not any other identity, Deleuze interprets Nietzsche's philosophy as an affirmation of difference, of what differentiates us or holds us apart in a perfectly positive sense.

Difference is of course a term of art that Deleuze will later write a whole book on, encouraging us to think of difference as prior to identity.  Here, though, he's building on Nietzsche's idea of distance, of the separation into levels of hierarchy, that inform his frequent metaphors: noble and base, high and low, aristocratic and plebian, master and slave.  In short, the idea of difference and the affirmation of difference often appears in Nietzsche in terms of the difference between the mode or manner of living of one who commands and one who obeys.  Since it's incredibly easy to misinterpret these two sides of difference as referring to real historical individuals involved in particular relations of dominance, Deleuze has to spend some time clearing the ground and showing us how, for Nietzsche, relations of force (or "strength" or "aggression" -- of "power") underly the creation of individuals long before they can be attributed to those individuals.  Nietzsche's philosophy doesn't begin with concepts like unity and identity.  It begins with pluralism and manifoldness and only produces identity as the outcome of a struggle.

To begin with, the crucial thing is to link difference with differentiation.  As in the progressive differentiation of parts of the body as an embryo develops, or the differentiation of flower and leaf from branch and root, or the evolutionary differentiation of species.  Difference is that which differentiates.  If we hear this biological overtone first, its easier to understand difference as a positive affirmation of distance that has nothing to do with either an inherent self-identity nor with a negation of all other identities.  The leaf does not exist on its own, nor does it negate the tree; it differentiates itself.  Difference is positive and productive.  It produces what we might call a new 'mode of existing' or 'way of life'.  Or perhaps it would be better to say that new ways of being simply are the affirmation of their difference.

The biological metaphor also helps us to understand why Deleuze begins with Nietzsche's concept of genealogy.  Genealogy traces a mode of existing back to the progressive differentiation that produced it.  Since each way of living involves a system of values and priorities that are necessary for it, genealogy involves tracing the history of values by following the differentiation of the corresponding ways of living that give rise to them.  Deleuze sees this genealogical tracing as Nietzsche's update to Kant's idea of critique.  Instead of merely looking at an experience (in Kant's case any metaphysical theory that might occur to us) and opining about its truth or falsity, we go back a step and ask what conditions were required for this experience to exist in the first place.  What was the "condition of possibility" of the experience?  With Nietzsche's twist, this question becomes: given these values, what way of living is implied?  What type of life would create these particular values and value these particular things?  

In fact, the notion of value implies a critical reversal. On the one hand, values appear or are given as principles: and evaluation presupposes values on the basis of which phenomena are appraised. But, on the other hand and more profoundly, it is values which presuppose evaluations, "perspectives of appraisal", from which their own value is derived. The problem of critique is that of the value of values, of the evaluation from which their value arises, thus the problem of their creation. Evaluation is defined as the differential element of corresponding values, an element which is both critical and creative.  Evaluations, in essence, are not values but ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate, serving as principles for the values on the basis of which they judge. (NP, 3)

Naturally, this type of critique also applies to itself.  Genealogy is not an objective historic endeavor.  In fact, the main point of doing it is to actively differentiate our own way of living from the way someone else might live.  Critique does not refute other ideas as wrong, but simply exposes the life that gave rise to them, even as it creates new concepts and values that articulate a new mode of life.  We don't criticize in the name of a higher truth, but in the name of a stronger or higher life that sets itself off at a distance 'above' some other way of living.  

This idea of an active critique obviously begs the question of just what new mode of living is implied by the existence of a genealogist.  The short answer is that the genealogist is someone who sees the world as fundamentally pluralistic, as open to interpretation and change and lacking in fundamental essences (ie. sees it as empty).  This is the "perspective of appraisal" or way of life that will lead us to value concepts that open us up to different experiences.  However, this response isn't immediately obvious from the definition of the genealogist we just saw, so let's spend some time elaborating.  

We know that the genealogist is someone who sees differences in the world, who traces the cascade of differentiation that produces any phenomenon.  But what is the source of these differentiations?  Here, Deleuze introduces us to Nietzshce's fundamental metaphysical building block -- his world does not ultimately consist of objects or even phenomena, but of forces.  

A phenomenon is not an appearance or even an apparition but a sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force. The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology, and a semeiology. (NP, 3)

A field of forces lies under what we see around us.  This is not to say that the phenomena that appear are somehow unreal or illusory, but simply indicates that they are signs of something more going on in the depths.  While this sound intriguing -- forces do stuff rather than be stuff, which already makes them sound different from other candidate metaphysical furniture -- we should still immediately ask what this new metaphysical building block really does for us.  Could it be that all we have accomplished is to change the name of our smallest unit from "object" or "phenomenon" to "force"?  What makes force a better starting point?  This question leads us directly to the most crucial aspect of the concept of force.  There is no such thing as a singular force.  'A' force is never alone, but always in relation to the object that it acts on, which ultimately is nothing but the expression of another force.  Force is thus not an atomic unit at all, but always shows up as a field.  Force is nothing in itself, but only exists in its action and reaction.  Another way of putting this is to observe that forces have no goal other than "domination".  This phrasing is easily misunderstood if we hear it in everyday political terms.  Essentially what Deleuze wants to convey is the blindness of force.  Forces push.  That is all.  They have a "natural aggression" (pg. 3) as a way of being.  But to push, you need to push on something.  Forces push on one another, and since they have different quantities of strength, one becomes the pusher and the other the pushee.  It's this relation of inequality between forces that Nietzshce calls "domination".  And this relation produces the differentiation or distance between forces that leads to the creation of the objects or phenomena which are signs a struggle has occurred.  We might say that through this process of domination, one force becomes object and the other subject (in the sense that it subjects the object to itself).  However we say it, the important point is that forces are never alone and independent, but always multiple and in relations defined by their power.

There is no object (phenomenon) which is not already possessed since in itself it is not an appearance but the apparition of a force. Every force is thus essentially related to another force. The being of force is plural, it would be absolutely absurd to think about force in the singular. A force is domination, but also the object on which domination is exercised. A plurality of forces acting and being affected at distance, distance being the differential element included in each force and by which each is related to others - this is the principle of Nietzsche's philosophy of nature. (NP, 6)

Instead of seeing a static object, the genealogist sees a variable object left as the trace of a whole history of the fluctuating power relations between forces.  Deleuze calls this the "sense" of an object or phenomenon.  Since this sense depends on the relations of power among (potentially) many forces, and the balance of these forces change over time, an object does not have one sense but many and varied senses.  The job of the genealogist -- the art of interpretation -- is to uncover the history of these various senses by diagnosing which forces are in dominant or subordinate roles.  

There is no event, no phenomenon, word or thought which does not have a multiple sense. A thing is sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes something more complicated - depending on the forces (the gods) which take possession of it.  Hegel wanted to ridicule pluralism, identifying it with a naive consciousness which would be happy to say "this, that, here, now" - like a child stuttering out its most humble needs. The pluralist idea that a thing has many senses, the idea that there are many things and one thing can be seen as "this and then that" is philosophy's greatest achievement, the conquest of the true concept, its maturity and not its renunciation or infancy. For the evaluation of this and that, the delicate weighing of each thing and its sense, the estimation of the forces which define the aspects of a thing and its relations with others at every instant - all this (or all that) depends on philosophy's highest art - that of interpretation. (NP, 4)

So the genealogist sees the world in terms of shifting relations of forces acting on other forces.  In other words, she sees the world as an expression or sign of will (to power).  Will is the name gives Nietzsche to a force acting on another force, a relation in which one force commands and another obeys.  It's only in this sense that Nietzsche elaborates the "philosophy of the will" that he originally inherited from Schopenhauer.  The power differential between interacting forces is really what creates the will.  It is not the inherently existing unitary willpower of some subject (even a universal subject) that somehow magically asserts itself on a world external to that subject.  Rather, what we're calling 'a will' is always already multiple, consisting of two sides that exert force on one another.  These two sides are actually both within what we usually think of as a single subject.

Nietzsche's concept of force is therefore that of a force which is related to another force: in this form force is called will. The will (will to power) is the differential element of force. A new conception of the philosophy of the will follows from this. For the will is not exercised mysteriously on muscles or nerves, still less on "matter in general", but is necessarily exercised on another will. The real problem is not that of the relation of will to the involuntary but rather of the relation of a will that commands to a will that obeys - that obeys to a greater or lesser extent. " 'Will' can of course operate only on 'will' - and not on 'matter' (not on 'nerves' for example): enough, one must venture the hypothesis that wherever 'effects' are recognised, will is operating on will" (BGE 36). (NP, 7)

The vision is of a world where there are little wills everywhere, teeming inside each of us, and not some monolithic, self-identical Will that operates as some sort of mystical interiority.  In fact, it would be better to say that the world is will -- "This world is the will to power—and nothing besides!" (WP, 1067).  The agents that we usually think of as exercising their causal will are better understood as the effect of a will that precedes and creates them -- signs that some willing is happening.

While this idea is a pretty straightforward corollary of the concept of force, I feel like it completely upends the age old free will versus determinism debate.  Is the will free or determined?  Yes!  It is both simultaneously and neither individually.  It has a free component and a determined component that correspond to the two sides it always presents.  And what we think of as the feeling of being free, of making our own decisions, arises because the part that obeys and the part that commands seem to occupy the same space without encountering any resistance.  We are free when we simultaneously command with imperiousness and obey without question.  It's only when we encounter a feeling of resistance, a feeling that our commands are not being executed or that our dear leader might not be so all knowing, that we suddenly feel constrained or determined.  

So let's wrap this section up.  Deluze finishes by comparing the affirmative mode of living of the genealogist who sees difference and multiplicity everywhere to the negative will of the dialectician who always represents difference or contradiction as subordinate to identity.  Hegel's dialectic is like the evil twin of Nietzsche's genealogy.  Both seem to trace a path of development from lower to higher stages through a process of struggle.  But the role of difference is diametrically opposed in these two cases.  Hegel always begins with a unity, an identity, that develops by negating itself, by opposing or contradicting itself, and always ends up returning to its self-identity.  Difference here is not a continuum of tiny differentiations but total opposition or negation.  The dialectic is dualistic.  The identity only develops though negating everything it is not (a double negation).  In fact, it's less a process of development than of self identification -- Hegel's famous spiral is actually just a boring circle.  As we've seen, for Nietzsche, difference is always a positive differentiation that asserts and affirms itself without any need to oppose or negate another.  Forces do not contradict one another, they simply differ in their power, leading one to command and another to obey. In this scheme difference isn't overcome or canceled in the name of some higher unity, it is preserved and enjoyed and even increased.  For Nietzsche, difference is both the starting point and the goal, whereas for Hegel it is only a means for an identity to realize its ends, a self-identity somehow missing at its beginning.  

For the speculative element of negation, opposition or contradiction Nietzsche substitutes the practical element of difference, the object of affirmation and enjoyment. It is in this sense that there is a Nietzschean empiricism. The question which Nietzsche constantly repeats, "what does a will want, what does this one or that one want?", must not be understood as the search for a goal, a motive or an object for this will. What a will wants is to affirm its difference. In its essential relation with the "other" a will makes its difference an object of affirmation. (NP, 9)

It is sufficient to say that dialectic is a labour and empiricism an enjoyment. (NP, 9)

This second quote leads us towards a discussion of Hegel's celebrated master-slave dialectic.  For Hegel the master and slave are related dialectically, and the point of his fable is that the slave is ultimately freed to become master because the master feels compelled to have his power freely recognized by the slave.  If you look closely at this curious logic you'll discover that it contains only slaves!  The (initial thesis) master is actually a slave to his need to have his identity as master recognized.  And the slave thus freed to become the (synthesis) master ends up in the same position.  He can only affirm his identity by looking in the mirror provided by all the other slaves.  The dialectic is a universalization of slavery.

Such a force [the dialectic] denies all that it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle of its existence. "While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is 'outside', what is 'different' what is 'not itself and this No is its creative deed" (GM p. 36). This is why Nietzsche presents the dialectic as the speculation of the pleb, as the way of thinking of the slave: the abstract thought of contradiction then prevails over the concrete feeling of positive difference, reaction over action, revenge and ressentiment take the place of aggression. (NP, 9)

Nietzsche's frequent, and easily misunderstood, defense of the necessity of slavery for all of 'higher' culture should be seen in this light.  For Nietzsche, there are and must be both masters and slaves, forces that command and forces that obey.  This is implicit in the definition of force as plural and relative (non-atomic).  There must be a power differential for anything to happen.  Difference is required for any creation.  Without it we lapse into an exhausted state of equilibrium that keeps us returning to guard the same identity we started with.  But if we begin with an affirmation of difference, an openness to what separates or distinguishes rather than universalizes, we immediately find our ever fluctuating levels of power and powerlessness.  Sometimes we are master, sometimes slave.  It all depends on whether we affirm the difference that creates us here and now, or negate it, resist it because it threatens to overwhelm some fixed sense of identity we cling to as essential.  

To return to our starting point then, the concepts created by the genealogist correspond to a life so strong, so powerful, that it has no need to affirm its identity.  Instead the master simply rules, and does not require being recognized as ruler.  And this life affirms its positive difference from the type of life that only affirms its identity through the negation of another.  Genealogy, in other words, is the philosophy of the master, and dialectic the invention of the slave.

What the wills in Hegel want is to have their power recognised, to represent their power. According to Nietzsche we have here a wholly erroneous conception of the will to power and its nature. This is the slave's conception, it is the image that the man of ressentiment has of power. The slave only conceives of power as the object of a recognition, the content of a representation, the stake in a competition, and therefore makes it depend, at the end of a fight, on a simple attribution of established values. (NP, 10)