The first part of subsection 3.6 "Principles for the Philosophy of the Will" provides a succinct summary of how Nietzsche's theory of the will to power differs from prior theories of will and power. Then it continues by setting the tone for the next 4 subsections (3.7-3.10) all of which deal in some way with the difference between Nietzschean and Kantian critique. The theme holding all this together is an extension of the question we've been asking for a while now: who or which one critiques?
"Who must undertake critique, who is fit to undertake it?" (NP, 88)
We already know the answer: at bottom, the will to power is always the one that ... (critiques, in this case). We answer this way though, not because the will to power is some general transcendent principle that defines what the will wants in every empirical instance. On the contrary, the will to power is what Deleuze keeps calling a "mobile, variable, plastic" principle. What "power" means is actually defined by (and defines) the relations between forces that characterize any particular instance of the will (which, we recall, is just a force operating on another force). It's almost like saying that power, as the 'principle' of the relation between forces, creates the will (which perhaps explains why Nietzsche can say in other places that, "there is no such thing as 'Will'"). There's no will that does not originate in and reflect a concrete hierarchy of power. In this sense, the theory of the will to power is similar to what we usually call perspectivism, with the important caveat that in Nietzsche's theory, it's the perspective that creates the subject, rather than the pre-established subject that possesses one (or various) perspectives. In the current context, this means that we must acknowledge up front that our critique in not universal, but comes from a particular perspective and embodies a particular will to power, namely, the one that constitutes our will. The principle question then becomes what type of will does our critique express?
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Deleuze does a nice job summarizing his interpretation of the will to power on pages 84-85. The key point is that willing is creative and joyous. The will doesn't want to get a particular object that already exists. Instead, as will to power, it fabricates that object as a valuable thing to want right now, at the same time that it fabricates itself as a willing subject with the power to possess that object. In the will to power it is power that wills, that differentiates one force from another and creates a hierarchy or system of forces.
Will to power does not imply any anthropomorphism in its origin, signification or essence. Will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is the one that wills in the will. Power is the genetic and differential element in the will. This is why the will is essentially creative. (NP, 85)
Power is the ability to affect and be affected, to be connected to or capable of interacting with other stuff. All power 'wants', all it does, is to go to the limit of this ability, to do everything it can do. This limit is defined by the particular quality and relation of forces. There's obviously something circular going on here. Power produces a certain relation of forces where one attains an active quality and others react to it. But then this relation of forces determines the quality of power (affirmative or negative) expressed by the hierarchy that was constructed. Power seems to be expressed through a cycle involving the being of forces (active/reactive) and their becoming (affirmation and negation define a becoming-active or becoming-reactive).
The genetic element (power) determines the relation of force with force and qualifies related forces. As plastic element it simultaneously determines and is determined, simultaneously qualifies and is qualified. What the will to power wills is a particular relation of forces, a particular quality of forces. And also a particular quality of power: affirming or denying. This complex, which varies in every case, forms a type to which given phenomena correspond. (NP, 85)
Power creates a will that wills to fully express this power. This positive feedback loop can't be said to have any goal outside itself. It operates, that is all. Its operations define the signification of an object and the type of subject that values it. Which is why Nietzsche will call it the "bestowing virtue" -- what bestows virtue.
In this way the will to power is essentially creative and giving: it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power. It gives: power is something inexpressible in the will (something mobile, variable, plastic); power is in the will as "the bestowing virtue", through power the will itself bestows sense and value. (NP, 85)
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With this summary of the will to power in mind, we can move on and ask what type of will to power animates Nietzsche's own critique (and along the way analyze what type animates Kantian critique). It will come as no shock that Deleuze discovers a negative will behind the Kantian critique and a positive and affirmative one behind Nietzsche's revaluation of the concept. What's fascinating though is the implications this observation has for our understanding of the whole complex of concepts we've been discussing. Nietzsche understands true critique as an affirmative becoming-active which, paradoxically, is only reached through the way the selective power of the eternal return causes the negative will to power to negate itself, and thus transmute into an affirmation of difference. Essentially, Deleuze is trying to bring the will to power, ER, and nihilism together into a neo-Kantian framework. But this complex is treated in very compressed form, so it will take me a while to unpack it.
Thus the typology of forces and the doctrine of the will to power are inseparable, in turn, from a critique which can be used to determine the genealogy of values, their nobility and baseness. - Of course one may ask in what sense and why noble is "worth more" than base or high "worth more" than low. By what right? There is no possible reply to this question if as we consider the will to power in itself or abstractly, as merely endowed with two opposite qualities, affirmation and negation. Why should affirmation be better than negation? We will see that the solution can only be given by the test of the eternal return: what is better and better absolutely is that which returns, that which can bear returning, that which wills its return. (NP, 86)
We've mostly been discussing the will to power as a philosophical principle "in itself or abstractly". But Nietzsche's whole point has been that behind every object there is a will to power that operates to produce both the sense and value of the object, as well as the signifying and valuing subject that corresponds to it. And behind Nietzsche's philosophy is a concrete will to power that values affirmation over negation. This will operates like an affirmation of affirmation. In other words, it's a sort of self affirmation. But what kind of self could be affirmed here? It can't be our usual conscious, self-identical ego that defines itself as an interiority separated from everything exterior. Nietzsche doesn't believe in the innate existence of this essential and atomic self, and we've seen how he considers its fabrication to be a product of reactive forces and the will to negation. For a concrete will to power to affirm its self, it would actually need to affirm everything -- all the things that go into the hierarchy that define, and are defined by, this will to power. In the simplest schematic example with one active and one reactive force, the affirmative will to power will need to affirm exactly that reactive force without which the active force cannot become what it is. It doesn't affirm its identity, but the difference which distinguishes it from, but also holds it together with, its 'opposite'. The affirmative self is a dissolved self, one that requires a medium in which it re-crystalizes.
But we've seen this whole structure before in exploring the way the eternal return cultivates (selects) through an affirmation so total that it affirms even negation. And we've seen it before in the way that the the joyful is just the affirmation of the tragic. Complete self affirmation must extend even to the affirmation of the 'other'. Conversely, we've also seen that we only reach this active self-affirmation though a becoming-active that proceeded via the reactive force affirming its own power of negation. This is the way the eternal return 'selects' the affirmative will to power. If each concrete will to power wills itself, affirmative power ends up reinforcing itself, while negative power destroys itself. Reactive forces, in affirming themselves and their own power of negation, end up negating themselves and transmuting themselves in a becoming active. By contrast, active forces, in affirming themselves and their own power of affirmation, end up affirming their affinity with negation and the 'other' reactive forces. Perhaps we can think of this affirmation of the 'opposite' either statically, as the affirmation of a necessary multi-layer hierarchy that includes the reactive, or dynamically, as an affirmation of the self-destruction of reactive forces required to become-active. The basic message of ER is that affirmative will to power is self reinforcing; negative will to power is self defeating.
Negation limits itself, whereas affirmation increases without limit. It sounds like we're discussing the difference between a positive or a negative feedback loop. Normally, we think of either of these circuits as "self-reinforcing", and indeed, it's important to understand that either represents a will to power. However, if we look more closely, we see the two types are not symmetrical. A positive feedback loop doesn't reinforce it self so much as simply continue growing and expanding to infinity, engulfing everything it can. A negative feedback loop, by contrast, doesn't actually reinforce itself so much as reinforces or preserves whatever equilibrium point it is set around. In fact, a negative feedback loop tends to diminish itself and turn itself off. In other words, a positive feedback loop genuinely reinforces itself, without needing to have any fixed concept of self; a negative feedback loop does not reinforce itself and is parasitic on some fixed concept of self that is external to its operation. One might be tempted to object here that, surely, DNA replication constitutes a positive feedback loop of geometric growth. Recalling the various critiques of Darwinism we've seen though, we might respond that life is actually the interaction of a positive and a negative feedback loop. Does DNA really try to replicate its self, or does it merely spread or grow in space and time just lie a crystal does? It's only the existence of an error correcting mechanism -- a negative feedback loop -- that introduces the concept of a self here at all. I assert again that what's really positive and creative about life is the variation, not the replication. This variation belongs to no one.
It may not be immediately obvious that this whole discussion is meant to answer the question of "who critiques?". The affirmative will to power is the only true, complete, radical, and immanent critic. And its critique operates through a self destruction of the negative within us. In this sense, critique is always self critique, never the criticism of an other. Finally, this critique is also joyful, in the sense that it increases our power, it removes our limits. Its negation is in service of an active and creative will. It tears down the fabrications and illusions that separate us from our power, it critiques these self imposed limits that made us become-reactive. Imagine Kant with a vajra.
The eternal return transmutes the negative: it turns the heavy into something light, it makes the negative cross over to affirmation, it makes negation a power of affirming. But negation in this new form has become critique: destruction becomes active, aggression profoundly linked to affirmation. Critique is destruction as joy, the aggression of the creator. The creator of values cannot be distinguished from a destroyer, from a criminal or from a critic: a critic of established values, reactive values and baseness. (NP, 87)
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I think once we understand this connection between the concept of critique and the metaphysics of the will to power and eternal return we can easily understand the way the next three subsections contrast Nietzsche to Kant. Subsection 3.7 simply observes that the inner logic of the plan of the Genealogy of Morals mirrors Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Having not read the latter I won't spend any time on this point. Subsection 3.8 tells us that Kant's idea of critique merely intends to replace the content of one ideal with another. He does nothing to critique the form of life that required an ideal to begin with. Since all transcendent ideals are expressions of a negative will to power this means that Kant's notion of critique is still reactive. He critiques pure reason only in an attempt to enshrine a perfected version of it. He critiques our idea of God as a mystification, but then substitutes for it a mystic interiority of the subject that functions the same way. It's a strange betrayal where Kant sets out to make a radical and total critique but arrives at the most conservative possible conclusions -- we should behave as if all our established ideas were true.
If man is a reactive being what right has he to undertake a critique? Does the recuperation of religion stop us being religious? By turning theology into anthropology, by putting man in God's place, do we abolish the essential, that is to say, the place? All these ambiguities begin with the Kantian critique. (NP, 88)
In subsection 3.9 we discover that Kant's notion of immanent critique was merely circular. He wanted reason to critique itself, to discipline itself, to be the judge in its own trial. But this requires some transcendent idea of what constitutes "reason", which of course we can only form through reason. We need never leave the comfort of our established values. By contrast, with his discovery of the will to power, Nietzsche is able to ask how reason is actually formed, and thus to ask whether what needs criticizing is not simply the particular contents but perhaps the whole form of reason.
Trascendental principles are principles of conditioning and not of internal genesis. We require a genesis of reason itself, and also a genesis of the understanding and its categories: what are the forces of reason and of the understanding? What is the will which hides and expresses itself in reason? What stands behind reason, in reason itself? (NP, 91)
As we saw, understanding the connection between ER and the will to power provides for a truly immanent critique. In becoming an active self-destruction of the negative concepts that limits us, Nietzschean critique transmutes our reactive forces into creative and "legislative" forces. We don't critique in the name of some other pre-existing and transcendental value, but in the name of the freedom to impose a law on ourselves as we go -- the law of the Return. The will to power's self-critique and the self destruction we saw it involved are at the same time a form of self creation. As Zarathustra puts it, we don't go over without going under. For Deleuze and Nietzsche, this immanent creation through critique is what defines philosophy and differentiates it from religion.
It is not that the philosopher must add the activity of legislator to his other activities because he is in the best position to do this - as if his own subjection to wisdom qualified him to discover the best possible laws to which men in their turn ought to be subjected. The point is a completely different one: that the philosopher, as philosopher, is not a sage, that the philosopher, as philosopher, ceases to obey, that he replaces the old wisdom by command, that he destroys the old values and creates new ones, that the whole of his science is legislative in this sense. "Their 'knowing' is creating, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is - will to power" (BGE 211). (P, 92)
Finally, subsection 3.10 is a summary of the contrast between Nietzsche and Kant. I think we've covered most of these points, but two of them stand out. First, critique is creative, and what it creates is the Overhuman. If we've been following along, we now can't confuse this concept with some concrete new ideal or goal for individual human beings. The overhuman is a completely different form of the human -- precisely the form that went under itself through critique, and thereby transmuted all the negative and reactive aspects of its previous ideals.
The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the Overman, the overcome, overtaken man. The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility. (NP, 94)
Second, there's an interesting point here about about what Nietzsche means by "irrationalism". We're criticizing reason in the name of the will to power. Clearly, in some sense this will is 'irrational', since it lies outside of reason. Does this that Nietzsche criticizes reason from the perspective of a romantic, that is, on the basis of some sort of feeling or passion? Deleuze answers that no, this is a critique of reasonable thought by some other type of thought. Reason does not have a monopoly on thought that can only be opposed by some other faculty like feeling or sensing. Nietzsche's critique of reason is still from within thought.
It is a serious mistake to think that irrationalism opposes anything but thought to reason - whether it be the rights of the given, of the heart, of feeling, caprice or passion. In irrationalism we are concerned only with thought, only with thinking. What is opposed to reason is thought itself; what is opposed to the reasonable being is the thinker himself. Because it is reason which receives and expresses the rights of that which dominates thought, thought reconquers its rights and becomes a legislator against reason: the dicethrow, this was the sense of the dicethrow. (NP, 93)
This brings up an obvious question. What does this other 'irrational' kind of thought look like? How does our thinking work when it is not dominated by the limits of reason? That's really the question for the rest of this chapter.
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