Having explored the way Nietzschean critique radically extends the Kantian version of it, in what remains of the chapter (3.11-3.15), Deleuze returns to the question that motivated it -- which one values truth? What type of will to power is the will to truth? We've already seen the preliminary answer: the will to truth is a will to stop, to limit. It's the expression of a reactive life at the service of a negative will to power. Now, however, using the framework he built up in discussing the theory of the will to power and the eternal return, Deleuze will trace the genealogy of this will much more carefully. And then he will show us how our thinking can escape the purported obviousness of a desire for truth. He will show us how we can think differently -- which is to say do philosophy -- not by refuting the idea of truth, but by carrying it so far that it self-destructs. At that extreme point, the power of thinking previously defined as a will to truth transmutes itself into art.
3.11
Deleuze interprets the three essays in the Genealogy of Morals as dramatizing (that is, providing an answer to who or which one, which type or role) three successively deeper wills to power that lie behind the will to truth.
1) At first, it seems the one who wills truth wills not to be deceived by the world. The unstated presumption here is that it is 'better' not to be deceived; that being deceived leads to bad things happening.
But this hypothesis presupposes the truthfulness of the world itself. For, in a radically false world it is the will to not let oneself be deceived that becomes inauspicious, dangerous and harmful. In fact, the will to truth had to be formed "in spite of the danger and the uselessness of the truth at any price". (NP, 95)
In fact, even a quick examination of our 'highest', most scientific, truths reveals that they don't do much of anything for us on an everyday basis or without the backing of an enormous technical, political, and social machine. Do you fall down less because you know the floor is 'really' made of atoms? In practice, 'the truth' is often the furthest things from what is beneficial. So the will to truth cannot piggyback off the obviousness of will to the 'good' (which, as we saw, still begs the question of who benefits from the good).
2) Maybe, then, the will to truth is motivated by the will to not deceive. Not being deceived would then be the special case of not wanting to deceive yourself. This reverses the assumptions of the first will because it presumes that the world is always giving us false appearances, and that we'll be better off if we separate out some true reality. Clearly, this will introduces a metaphysical appearance/reality dualism, a dualism that Nietzsche will always trace back to a moral will. The will to not deceive is a will to correct life with knowledge, to improve or purify a dirty, sordid, and deceitful existence. Here we can start to clearly see that a will to truth based on a will to not deceive is the opposite of the tragic perspective. It accuses life of making mistakes and blames it for our suffering.
The man who does not want to deceive wants a better world and a better life; all his reasons for not deceiving are moral ones. And we always come up against the virtuism of the one who wills the truth: one of his favourite occupations is the distribution of wrongs, he renders responsible, he denies innocence, he accuses and judges life, he denounces appearance. (NP, 96)
3) Nevertheless, while the will to not deceive wants a better version of life, distinct from everything it sees around it, it is and remains a will that operates from within this life. The better, more truthful world it posits is, after all, a fiction. The desire to substitute this fiction for real life and call it truth is actually just a symptom of a desire for life to stop, or at least be made as small as possible. The positive aspiration towards truth masks a negative desire to reduce a life that is considered error.
The one who wants another world, another life, wants something more profound: "Life against life" (GM III 13 p. 120). He wants life to become virtuous, to correct itself and to correct appearance, for it to serve as the way to the other world. He wants life to repudiate itself and to turn against itself (NP, 96)
At its deepest level the will to truth is a symptom of the oldest religious belief -- the ascetic ideal. It's an attempt to purifying away life itself. Which, since it can only originate from within life, is a symptom of the weakest type of life, one that can only survive by making itself as small as possible. This type of life is an unholy marriage of reactive forces and the negative will to power, the will to nothingness. It sees even its own life as nothing but suffering, but hasn't the guts to end it all, so merely imagines itself fading to nothing, 'transcending' this world while remaining in it. This is the kind of life that values only truth, and the value of truth for this life lies in the way it saves life by limiting it to its lowest level. The ascetic ideal is a will to nothingness that, because it is wielded by a reactive force, is not carried to its limit.
In fact, it is not the will which is denied in superior values [like truth], it is the superior values that are related to a will to deny, to annihilate life. This will to deny defines "the value" of superior values. Its weapon is to hand life over to the domination of reactive forces in such a way that the whole of life slips further and further away, separated from what it can do, getting smaller and smaller, towards nothingness, "towards the poignant feeling of his nothingness" (GM III 25). The will to nothingness and reactive forces, these are the two constituent elements of the ascetic ideal. (NP, 97)
These three steps form the genealogy of the will to truth, and correspond to the three parts of the Genealogy of Morals -- knowledge (will to truth) stems from morality (the will to the good) which is a branch of religion (the incomplete and reactive will to nothingness, to the divine, the ascetic ideal).
3.12
The genealogy of truth can be read in either direction. So far we've traced back from someone who says they value truth to the ascetic will to power that gives truth a value. Read in the forward direction, however, it provides a description of the cultural evolution from religion to morality to knowledge. We no longer believe in the ascetic ideals of religion. We don't even buy into an absolute morality stripped of religious sentiment. But we certainly still believe in the truth -- we just call it science now.
Let us for a moment turn our attention to evolution instead of genealogy: let us descend again from the ascetic or religious ideal to the will to truth. We must then acknowledge that morality has replaced religion as a dogma and that science is increasingly replacing morality. (NP, 97)
When we see where the value of truth came from, it turns out to be pretty easy to uncover the ascetic ideal latent in our scientific worldview. Consider how often you've heard the 'truth' that we are nothing but an unremarkable chemical reaction strutting on and fretting about a pretty typical planet orbiting a third rate star in one of innumerable galaxies. In other words, the scientists are always telling us that we must accept that we are objectively nothing. On the other hand, we should bow to their objectivity and use the tools of truth to stay as comfortable as possible and live our nothingness for as long as we can. It's a deeply conservative message when you think about it (even though in USA 2023 we would associate this belief in science with a liberal politics). Even though they're proving to us every day that we are not the center of the universe, we are not rational, and we are not even the supreme intelligence, we're supposed to just carry on as before. It's almost enough to make you think there is a global milk conspiracy.
What should we do, however, when we discover that our will to truth is simply a will to preserve the lowest type of life? Does Nietzsche have some new ideal to fill the place successively occupied by the divine, the good, and the true? Of course not. Nietzsche knows as well as anyone the trajectory he himself is heir to. He understands it, feels it, so thoroughly that he wants to take it to its limit. He wants the will to nothingness in the ascetic ideal to become active. He wants to carry through with this will, make it break its alliance reactive forces that limit it and preserve the lowest type of life. In short, he wants to force the ascetic ideal to self destruct. This is the secret to the meaning of the eternal return as a selective (a self-selective) doctrine. It's actually a religious doctrine taken to its extreme point, where the will to nothingness becomes so pure that it destroys the reactive forces and transmutes into a becoming-active. Nietzsche continues the genealogy of the will to truth in the same direction, and leads nihilism to the point where it overcomes itself. And then we are free.
When we denounce the permanence of the ascetic ideal in the will to truth we deprive this ideal of the condition of its permanence or its final disguise. In this sense we too are "truthful" or "seekers after knowledge". But we do not replace the ascetic ideal, we let nothing of the place itself remain, we want to destroy the place, we want another ideal in another place, another way of knowing, another concept of truth, that is to say a truth which is not presupposed in a will to truth but which presupposes a completely different will. (NP, 99)
3.13
One of the rather obscure themes running through Zarathustra is an ambiguous conflict between, and similarity of, wisdom and life. In this subsection Deleuze attempts to clarify their relationship. We've seen how knowledge, if it is based on a will to truth, is always in service of reactive forces. It represents an incomplete will to nothingness that preserves life by limiting it. For Nietzsche and Deleuze, what we call reason or rational knowledge is nothing but a type of thought that disciplines both thought and life.
Knowledge is opposed to life, but because it expresses a life which contradicts life, a reactive life which finds in knowledge a means of preserving and glorifying its type. (Thus knowledge gives life laws that separate it from what it can do, that keep it from acting, that forbid it to act, maintaining it in the narrow framework of scientifically observable reaction: almost like an animal in a zoo. But this knowledge that measures, limits and moulds life is itself entirely modelled on reactive life, within the limits of reactive life.) (NP, 100)
By contrast, an affirmative thought would seek to overcome the limits that reactive life sets on itself. In fact, in a sense, affirmative thought -- that is to say, critique taken to its active limit -- is not different than an affirmative, tragic, type of life. These two affirmations would act like continuations of one another. Instead of reactive life producing a negative and limiting rational thought that only serves to police the limits life 'must' set on itself, an affirmative life produces an affirmative thought that shows this same life new possibilities for living, and thinking, ad infinitum.
A thought that would go to the limit of what life can do, a thought that would lead life to the limit of what it can do? A thought that would affirm life instead of a knowledge that is opposed to life. Life would be the active force of thought, but thought would be the affirmative power of life. Both would go in the same direction, carrying each other along, smashing restrictions, matching each other step for step, in a burst of unparalleled creativity. Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life. " (NP, 101)
This helps us understand the ambiguity in Zarathustra. When Nietzsche uses the word "wisdom" he can mean either of these types of thinking, depending on the context. One type of wisdom, which Deleuze usually calls "knowledge" or "rationality", only serves reactive life and is opposed to an affirmative type of life. Another type, which Deleuze calls "thought" or "art", extends an active life and only opposes reactive forces that limit what life can do. In each case, we get the type of wisdom, the type of thinking, that corresponds to and reinforces our type of life. The idea that there is an opposition between thought and life actually mixes the two viewpoints.
[I don't have a complete theory that maps the ambiguities in TSZ onto Deleuze's schema. But I note that there are two chapters that center on the relationship between, and even the confusion of, Life and Wisdom -- 2.10 The Dance Song and 3.15 The Other Dance Song. These two chapters refer internally to one another, as well as to 1.18 On Old and Young Little Women, which contains that famous line about "not forgetting the whip". It can't be coincidence that all of these chapters deal with women, which of course for Nietzsche is a synonym for deception. If we consider that though and life are almost two forms of a positive power of deception, we might genuinely start to wonder if Nietzsche's misogyny is as simple as it appears to be. In a book whose deepest teaching is the interconversion of opposites, we shouldn't be too surprised to find that male and female are only apparently in opposition.]
3.14
Art is another word for the type of thinking that expresses an active, creative, and affirmative will to power. Deleuze, clearly intends the term broadly, with philosophy counted as a form of conceptual art. The will to art is the 'opposite' of the will to truth. Truth we imagine as some objective universal that can only be approached by a disinterested observer. We like to think we don't create truth, we simply discover it. By contrast, art is created through the interests of an active life, and only fully appreciated when we are drawn into the life of the artist (not so much the biographical life, but the process of creation). Art is also the 'opposite' of knowledge in that it embodies a positive will to falsehood as opposed to a will to truth. Art celebrates its own semblance, and thereby affirms the creative power of life.
The second principle of art is as follows: art is the highest power of falsehood, it magnifies the "world as error", it sanctifies the lie; the will to deception is turned into a superior idea. (NP, 102)
Which is to say that art is the product of nihilism overcoming itself. Art is the becoming-active of the previously reactive forces of thought and life. Here we see the same structure of selection or cultivation we saw with the eternal return. No force simply is active, but forces can become-active. When the negative power of life becomes active and self-destructs, the will to truth is transmuted into a positive will to deceive, to create, to surpass all the limits imposed on life and thought. This is the cycle of critique, as it were, in which the active forces of life are captured by a negative will to power and become-reactive, but then, if they are taken to the limit of their negation, these reactive forces negate even themselves in a becoming-active. We overcome the will to truth only by going under, by affirming precisely the will to power in the form of the will to self-preservation through self-deception, that led us to value truth to begin with.
The activity of life is like a power of falsehood, of duping, dissimulating, dazzling and seducing. But, in order to be brought into effect, this power of falsehood must be selected, redoubled or repeated and thus elevated to a higher power. The power of falsehood must be taken as far as a will to deceive, an artistic will which alone is capable of competing with the ascetic ideal and successfully opposing it (NP, 102)
The fact that there is some sort of cycle here is why I've been placing 'opposite' in quotes. In fact, the whole thrust of this chapter on critique has been to show us how the negative life self destructs and converts into a positive life that continues to transform and propagate. When life is seen as positive and affirmative, there are no opposites. Affirmation affirms even negation. Becoming affirms even Being. Thinking as art becomes a creative extension or re-doubling of the affirmative power of life, the power life has to make things up as it goes, to fabricate. The very nature of an active life is to repeat itself as art, because the activity of life is only in its becoming-active.
3.15
In the final subsection of the chapter, Deleuze contrasts two images of thought -- the "dogmatic" image that what thinking naturally wants is truth, and a new, but necessarily vague, image in which thought is whatever happens when we overcome the limits of our own stupidity. The message is very similar to the third chapter of Difference & Repetition; we have to be forced to think by life, and the purpose of thinking is to envision new possibilities for living.
The dogmatic image of thought is the one we usually take for granted. That any thinking worthy of the name obviously wants truth above all else. That this truth is to be found in a rational inquiry characteristic of humans alone. And that, left to itself, that is, without the interference of irrational passions and politics, pure thinking alone will naturally reveal a single, objective, permanent truth. We've already belabored the idea that the will to this kind of truth is a form of reactive nihilism. What interests Deleuze here is the way that the dogmatic image of thought tries to silence any attempt to look behind it and enquire into the value of truth. We haven't just forgotten to ask the question of truth's value, we have been actively discouraged from seeing it as a question.
The most curious thing about this image of thought is the way in which it conceives of truth as an abstract universal. We are never referred to the real forces that form thought, thought itself is never related to the real forces that it presupposes as thought. Truth is never related to what it presupposes. But there is no truth that, before being a truth, is not the bringing into effect of a sense or the realisation of a value. Truth, as a concept, is entirely undetermined. Everything depends on the value and sense of what we think. We always have the truths we deserve as a function of the sense of what we conceive, of the value of what we believe. (NP, 103)
In other words, the dogmatic image of thought enshrines a completely empty type of thought. In D&R, Deleuze will say that it models thought on simple recognition of what's already there. Why do we think? How? And under what circumstances? These can't even become questions. It's like suggesting that if you simply open your eyes, you'll see everything as it is.
Clearly, a new image of thought is opposed to the dogmatic image in every way. If the dogmatic image is always of reactive thought, the new image asks what happens to thought when the one who thinks is active and affirmative. To begin with, thought ceases to be about truth and becomes an affirmation of the power of falsehood, of creation, of fabrication.
Conversely, our highest thoughts take falsehood into account; moreover, they never stop turning falsehood into a higher power, an affirmative and artistic power that is brought into effect, verified and becomes-true in the work of art. (NP, 105)
But if thought does want truth, then its failure mode isn't error. The worst thing that can happen to dogmatic thought is that it sees pink elephants instead of green ones. By contrast, active thought isn't afraid of being 'wrong'. When it fails it's because it doesn't do anything. In this new image of thought the risk for thinking as such is that it never becomes-active, that it remains reactive. This is what Deleuze calls "stupidity".
Stupidity is a structure of thought as such: it is not a means of self-deception, it expresses the non-sense in thought by right. Stupidity is not error or a tissue of errors. There are imbecile thoughts, imbecile discourses, that are made up entirely of truths; but these truths are base, they are those of a base, heavy and leaden soul. The state of mind dominated by reactive forces, by right, expresses stupidity and, more profoundly, that which it is a symptom of: a base way of thinking. (NP, 105)
Philosophical thinking then becomes a way to combat stupidity by exposing the errors that limit our thought and prevent us from actively thinking, that keeps us reactive. The dogmatic image of thought is a perfect example of stupidity. It encapsulates a presumption of obviousness, and perhaps even a proof of the obvious by the obvious, all of which simply spins an elaborate web of intellectual deduction that prevents us from even thinking about the real problems of life. Most of economics is stupid. Because thinking is hard and hence rare.
The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought. Is there any discipline apart from philosophy that sets out to criticise all mystifications, whatever their source and aim, to expose all the fictions without which reactive forces would not prevail? (NP, 106)
To avoid any confusion though, we should note that the stupidity Deleuze is referring to is always our own. It's never someone else who is stupid. We are the only ones who can be stupid, who can fail to think, who can stay within the limitations of our reactive life. Which means that thinking is a task that constantly confronts us and which we can never have done with. Every era has to do its own thinking because each time and place is defined by its own limits and the reflexive defense of its own status quo.
Stupidity and baseness are always those of our own time, of our contemporaries, our stupidity and baseness. Unlike the atemporal concept of error, baseness is inseparable from time, that is from this rapture of the present, from this present condition in which it is incarnated and in which it moves. This is why philosophy has an essential relation to time: it is always against its time, critique of the present world. The philosopher creates concepts that are neither eternal nor historical but untimely and not of the present. (NP, 107)
A second confusion is possible here if we don't understand the concept of stupidity in the context of the becoming-active of the will to power. Though in a sense, it's a special case of the first confusion. The critique of stupidity is a critique of our own stupidity -- our own culture's stupidity (and not how stupid they were "back then", "before we knew ..."), and our own personal stupidity (and not of those dummies who don't agree with us). But who is it that carries out this critique? In a sense, it's not even us. Certainly, at least, it is not made by our essential self, our true nature, or our core interior identity. Those are exactly the concepts we are criticizing! It's easy to slip into seeing the overcoming of stupidity and the beginning of thinking as the romantic awakening of some powerful homunculus that previously lay dormant inside us. But this myth is actually part of our stupidity, part of what separates us from our power of thought. We don't think 'naturally'. It is not an innate part of our being. Forces can only become-active, and we can only become-thinkers. Thus thinking is something that happens to thought, and only happens when we are forced to think, when something pushes our reactive patterns to their limit.
Thinking, like activity, is always a second power of thought, not the natural exercise of a faculty, but an extraordinary event in thought itself, for thought itself. Thinking is the n-th power of thought. It is still necessary for it to become "light", "affirmative", "dancing". But it will never attain this power if forces do not do violence to it. Violence must be done to it as thought, a power, the force of thinking, must throw it into a becoming-active. (NP, 108)
The violence necessary for thinking, the self-destruction of the negative and stupidity, the merciless selective cultivation of the eternal return, are the final element of Deleuze's new image of thought. Thought is dangerous stuff: "I am dynamite!". It doesn't just recognize. It creates. And in the process of its birth, it necessarily destroys the illusions constitutive of our limited ego consciousness. It's not we who think, but thought that happens to us, and through us, if we live affirmatively. This is what Deleuze is saying when he talks about how thinking requires a culture. Thought is not a product of the interiority of the lone individual, but the flower of a whole culture that merely appears through a solitary thinker. Thus, thought must be cultured (like a bacteria) or cultivated (like a plant). It requires cycle upon cycle of becoming-active, which is perhaps what Nietzsche means by "breeding". It requires the whole genealogy we traced, even if only to overcome it. The culture required for the new image of thought is directly opposed to the method that defined the dogmatic image. Method restricts an infinite natural faculty and prevents it from accidentally falling into error, whereas culture culls away stupidity and enables the creation of something completely unnatural.
Culture, according to Nietzsche, is essentially training and selection (UM III "Schopenhauer Educator" 6). It expresses the violence of the forces which seize thought in order to make it something affirmative and active. We will only understand the concept of culture if we grasp all the ways in which it is opposed to method. Method always presupposes the good will of the thinker, "a premeditated decision". Culture, on the contrary, is a violence undergone by thought, a process of formation of thought through the action of selective forces, a training which brings the whole unconscious of the thinker into play. (NP, 108)
Should we say that true thinking requires us to cultivate a path?
As a final post-script to this chapter, I can't resist pointing out one quote that seems to foreshadow the idea of the nomad war machine. Culture may be a necessary condition for thought, but that doesn't mean it's sufficient. The selective violence of culture can also be captured by those old representatives of the ascetic ideal -- the Church and the State.
The cultural work of active forces constantly risks being diverted from its course and sometimes it does benefit reactive forces. The Church or the State take on this violence of culture in order to realize their own ends. Reactive forces divert this violence from culture, turning it into a reactive force itself, a means of making even more stupid, of lowering thought. They confuse the violence of culture with their own violence, their own force (NP, 109)
This sounds a bit like the State Apparatus capturing the War Machine in A Thousand Plateaus. It would take a lot of re-reading to lay out the details here, but I feel pretty confident that the War Machine finally getting nothing but war as its object (with fascism) is analogous to the moment where a negative will to power (WM) pushes a reactive force (SA) into a self-destructive becoming-active. Thought is dangerous stuff indeed!
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