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)
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