Well, devoted readers, we have finally reached the end of the Nietzsche bender that began exactly a year ago. It's ridiculous to try and sum up what I've learned this past year in just a few lines, but it seems important to try. First, I learned that I didn't really understand Nietzsche well at all back in college. Back then, I adored and romanticized his polemic poetry of the lone individual. Most of this is actually just there as an initial goad to thinking, but also a trap to ensnare the unwary. There isn't really any individual person in Nietzsche's philosophy; everything is the will to power, the ever-productive and affirmative emptiness. Seeing his philosophy in light of the concept of not-self completely changes what you get out of it. Second, Nietzsche's main point is that nihilism is inevitable and necessary, but that it overcomes itself through action. The world always looks meaningless. It is neither true nor real, but is made through living. The important thing is to live creatively, affirmatively, and joyously, by producing our meaning and reality as we go. To do this, we have to continually overcome the 'objective illusions', like the self, that fool us into thinking that the world is, or should be, any particular way at all. Freedom lies in the glory of making it all up, including making ourselves up. Nihilism is not a problem, but merely a derivative consequence of our joyful creative power.
Of course, in this final post I also want to organize my thoughts about the final chapter of Nietzsche & Philosophy. However, I don't think I'll proceed with the exhaustive detail that I've devoted to the rest of the book. Chapter 5 -- The Overman: Against the Dialectic doesn't really add anything new to the framework that Deleuze has built over the course of the book. Its purpose is to show us again the way the will to power switches valence from negative to positive at the height of nihilism. Nihilism overcomes itself when the negative will, the will to nothingness, targets reactive forces and leads them into a becoming-active self-destructive that, rather then ending in nothingness, actually ends up affirmatively producing something new. This whole cycle is part of the positive and affirmative will to power. Accordingly, the chapter is divided into two parts. Subsections 5.1-5.9 tell the story of the history of nihilism that leads up to the point of its self-destruction. Then, subsections 5.10-5.13 bring us back out of the abyss and look at the some story from an affirmative perspective. The whole thing, then, is a theory of the relationship between affirmation and negation and th way these are not really opposed to one another but interconvert.
When we conceive of the story in this big picture way, however, we risk confusing it with the other great philosophy of the union of opposites -- the Hegelian dialectic. So throughout the chapter though, Deleuze works hard to show us how Nietzsche's story is precisely not a form of dialectic. Instead, we finally realize, Deleuze sees Nietzsche's whole philosophy as a species of radicalized Kantianism. Here we come back to a point that I earlier found completely obscure -- Nietzsche is a rejection of Hegel and and a development of Kant.
Although this supposition must be verified later we believe that there is, in Nietzsche, not only a Kantian heritage, but a half-avowed, half-hidden, rivalry. Nietzsche does not have the same position in relation to Kant as Schopenhauer did for, unlike Schopenhauer, he does not attempt an interpretation which would separate Kantianism from its dialectical avatars and present it with new openings. This is because, for Nietzsche, these dialectical avatars do not come from the outside but are primarily caused by the deficiencies of the critical philosophy. Nietzsche seems to have sought (and to have found in the "eternal return" and the "will to power") a radical transformation of Kantianism, a re-invention of the critique which Kant betrayed at the same time as he conceived it, a resumption of the critical project on a new basis and with new concepts. (NP, 52)
Kant's critical project was still content to take for granted and reconstruct unities like God, self, and world. This left it open to hijack by the dialectic, which packed the entire history of the world into the self-development of these a priori unities. Instead of dealing with the tiny concrete differences that actually change the world, the dialectic is always rearranging the big abstract oppositions that are merely symptoms of underlying mechanism. And if we ask why anyone would interpret the world through this philosophical lens, that is, if we apply Nietzsche's question of "which one" id the dialectician, we discover that the dialectic is always the philosophy of the slave. Deleuze's idea is that Nietzsche rejects the dialectic completely and returns to deepen Kantianism by deconstructing these unities and their development into varying configurations of the will to power. Though Deleuze spends a fair bit of this chapter tracing a history of the various avatars of the dialectic, and distinguishing Nietzsche philosophy from it, I'll mostly skip over this theme. While I can follow the story of the development of the dialectic because it is really just another version of the story of nihilism, my knowledge of Hegel, Feuerbach, Stirner, and Marx is not deep enough to contribute anything useful here.
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Subsections 5.1-5.9 tell the story of the history of nihilism as progress through three phases -- negative, reactive, passive -- culminating in a fourth -- self-overcoming. Deleuze tells the story in several ways in order to flesh out its drama.
1) First, there's the abstract schematic version. It begins when an alliance is formed between the negative will to power (negation -- the will to nothingness) and reactive forces. The result is a negative nihilism where values beyond life are invented, but only as a way of denying this life. While negating this life, positing values beyond it, is the essence of nihilism, this stage doesn't look like 'nihilism' as we usually understand it. In fact, it's characterized by an intense belief in certain values. It's just that these values are always valuable precisely because they constitute a (fictitious) escape from life. In the second stage, the negative will leads reactive forces to triumph over active forces and separate them from what they can do. The result is a reactive nihilism in which reactive forces take over ownership of the previous ideals as if they alone had invented them -- ie. without any help from the will to negation. This stage looks more like what we usually call 'nihilism' because it begins to consider the supposedly transcendent ideals of stage 1 as mere projections of human desires. But while the triumphant reactive forces reject the need for these external ideals, all they've done is take the same ideals into themselves while remaining completely reactive. The value of these ideals still depends on an escape from suffering, so it's almost as if the reactive forces try to escape from themselves through themselves. In the third stage, the final one in the history of nihilism, reactive forces finally see that all values they have created have served the same purpose -- a will to nothingness. The result is a passive nihilism, where reactive forces simply try to stop willing, to stop valuing. Rather than continue to will nothingness, they would rather not will at all. This is the abstract framework that Deleuze has used throughout the book.
2) Second, we can tell this as a historical story about the development of religion. We might think of it as a sort of play in three acts, each of which begins with the stage direction and setting, "God is dead". This famous phrase is not at all meant to deny the existence of God. It was never an ontological proposition, but, as Deleuze puts it, a dramatic proposition.
Speculative propositions bring the idea of God into play from the point of view of its form. God does or does not exist insofar as the idea of him does or does not imply a contradiction. But the phrase "God is dead" is completely different: it makes the existence of God depend on a synthesis, it synthesizes the idea of God with time, becoming, history and man. It says at one and the same time: God existed and he is dead and he will rise from the dead, God has become Man and Man has become God. The phrase "God is dead" is not a speculative proposition but a dramatic proposition, the dramatic proposition par excellence. (NP, 152)
The question is: what does "God is dead" mean? To understand this we have to stage a drama that illustrates the effect of this event. The death of God means different things at different stages in the history of nihilism.
The first act is a negative nihilism that characterizes the judeo-Christian response. If it still sounds strange to call Christianity a form of nihilism you're missing the point. God is actually the great symbol of nothingness, of the 'beyond' life that the reactive life invents to escape its suffering and make itself livable. However, it may at first sound strange to claim that the judeo-Christian tradition dramatizes the death of God. Until you stop and actually take it literally for a minute. Christianity, at least, is clearly all about the death of God. God sends his own Son down to die. The Father is killed in the form of the Son, and then he is resurrected. "God on the cross" is precisely a dramatization of what the death (and rebirth) of God mean. Here, as the three scenes of this act, Deleuze would insert the entire psychological history he traced in From Ressentiment to Bad Conscience (the existence of ressentiment as a raw illness is sort of taken for granted, so the four moments he discusses reduce to three).
The second act of the play takes place in modern Europe. In Nietzsche's understanding, modernity is characterized precisely by the vacuum that takes place when we no longer believe in God and claim only to believe in ourselves (as if we knew who that was). It dramatizes a reactive nihilism where reactive forces now think themselves strong enough to reject the need for the explicit will to negation that led them to triumph and spread their power through a universal becoming-reactive. If God is dead, it's now because we have murdered him. We no longer had use for him and were ashamed of the witness he bore to our reactivity. We claim to be nihilists and 'free thinkers' who believe in progress and science and disavow these old middle-Eastern superstitions. But these are just more ideals that tell us how life should be and reject how it is.
[As a side note to that last sentence, it's important to hear the valences of the two terms. We always think that life should be better, more objective, more stable, more rational, etc ... We think of all of the latter as positive terms. But actually these concepts are just a way to discipline or correct a life that we actually experience as somehow lacking. Their positive valence is inseparable from a negation of this life -- life is impermanent, subjective, irrational, etc ... Nietzsche's whole point is that we should reverse these valences. The positive thing is life as it is -- messy -- and those other adjectives describing how it should be are all insults. Life always should be a particular way, but it never is any particular way at all.]
Perhaps surprisingly, the third act of the Broadway hit God is Dead is set in ancient India. Nietzsche conceives of Buddhism as a passive nihilism that arises when we no longer believe in anything, will anything, do anything. This appears to be the terminal point for reactive forces. The thousand gods they believed in, but who were ultimately revealed as their own personification, are finally well and truly dead. It would be best not to reinvent them. It would be better not to will at all, to simply get off the merry-go-round of existence. In Nietzsche's story, Buddhism is actually a more advanced stage of nihilism than Christianity or Europe, one that modern Europe is only just beginning to catch up to.
3) Finally, the very way that Deleuze has told this story of the history of nihilism forms another dramatization of the idea that God is dead. He has given us the history of God as a concept -- the story of his judeo-Christian birth, his replacement by European Man, and the inevitable quiet death of these interchangeable synonyms for nothingness. It seems that the first two parts of this story bear a similarity to Hegel's dialectical self-development of absolute Spirit, and the final step to the developments in the concept of the dialectic from Hegel to Stirner. As I said before, I'm not going to go into the details here. But in a sense, Deleuze's message is simply that the dialectic is dead. For Deleuze, the dialectic is the epitome of negative thinking, reactive thinking that begins with abstract negation and only proceeds through the negation of negation. It's the philosophy of slaves. There are many avatars of the dialectic, in fact, every step of the history of nihilism could be seen as an avatar of the same will to nothingness. They all have the same form -- essence moves from in-itself to for-itself by alienating itself in negation and then reappropriating this alienation. It doesn't really matter what initial essence you choose (God, Man, Ego, Proletariat). The story is always that this a priori essence is an internal property that is lost and recovered.
Having told various versions of the story of the first three stages of nihilism, Deleuze is now ready to move on to the climax. Since he's used the same framework throughout the book, the idea that nihilism culminates in overcoming itself shouldn't be too surprising by now. This is the moment when the will to nothingness, which was only temporarily allied with reactive forces as a means of spreading ressentiment and making it universal, breaks this alliance and begins to lead reactive forces to their own self-destruction. Nihilism completes itself by converting into affirmation -- the affirmation of destruction that constitutes the becoming-active of previously reactive forces. We might call this final stage, paradoxically, active nihilism.
But before Deleuze describes this climax, he gives us two curious chapters (5.7 and 5.8) that deal with the theory of the "Higher Man". I might pass over these chapters as some sort of elaboration of stage 3 if it weren't for the fact that they try to recuperate Part IV of Zarathustra as, "... the essence of the published Zarathustra" (NP, 164). The idea seems to be that the higher men of Part IV correspond to the various avatars of the dialectic. In a sense, each of the higher men represents a version of the story of nihilism, and yet each is simultaneously conscious that their own story is just another failure, just another dead end, just more nihilism. They all thought that the essence of humanity was X (God, Man, Morality, Species Being, Science, Freedom). But they are all disgusted to see that as X develops dialectically, it just results in some new form of nihilism. So they are each representatives of the highest product of human culture and simultaneously conscious of the fact that this culture only reflects a reactive human essence that always develops into nihilism. Here we need to remember the long digression on the ambiguity of culture in chapter 4. Culture is species activity, precisely the characteristic activity that trains humanity and makes us human. The 'higher' men are the fruit of this activity. But they always discover that this activity is founded on a reactive conception of the essence of humanity. Which begs the question: If humanity is essentially reactive, how can it have a species activity? Or, conversely, if there is a species activity, why isn't its highest product an active and affirmative human, instead of these failed higher men? In fact, what the ruin of the higher men are showing us is that the essence of man lies not in his reactivity, but in the way his characteristic activity is to make forces (including his own forces) become-reactive. Man's essential activity is spreading reactivity. Thus culture is not accidentally diverted by ideologies, but every end product of culture will necessarily be reactive. Everything human culture aims at and selects for will be essentially botched even if it is achieved. This is not because humans are essentially reactive, but because the human-to-human mechanism of culture makes every human become-reactive. How could human cultural activity have become-active and affirmative if the reactive force of man is always working to make everything become-reactive? The highest values of human culture, even the Buddhist value of passive nihilism, always end up devaluing themselves when they sees how they make everything become sick and reactive in practice. In a way, I think Deleuze is trying to explain why we never have a utopia, and why Nietzsche's overhuman doesn't represent a future utopia of the species.
With that we can return to our story in progress ... While the higher men are disgusted with themselves, their activity does not go as far as self-destruction. So they never progress to the fourth stage of active nihilism. In Part IV, Zarathustra is tempted to pity the higher man (to tolerate their reactivity), when they need to be overcome -- this is the point where reactive forces would become-active by turning against themselves. Zarathustra doesn't want just another goal for human culture. The overhuman is not the highest human, but something inhuman, what results when the human in us dies off. With that in mind, we can see that the whole of TSZ is explicitly (Prologue, 2) another dramatization of "God (Humanity) is dead".
The final step in the history of nihilism is its self-overcoming. The will to nothingness has to be taken as far as it can, to the point of completion where it transmutes into its opposite -- affirmative will. At this point not just the values change, but the whole way in which we value changes sign. The value of values now derives from the power they give us to affirm life, rather than from the power they have to negate life and preserve a reactive life. This isn't just a change in valuation but a trans-valuation, a transmutation of valuing.
But Deleuze points out three ways in which it is still a form of nihilism. All values based on the will to escape life -- which is to say all values up this point in history, all the values of history -- are hollow. Transmutation therefore represents total nihilism. Up till this fourth stage, the will to power has only been known to us through its negative form. The motor of our story has been the will to nothingness and its shifting alliances with reactive life. But transmutation shows us the unknown and unknowable (ie. ungraspable by ego) affirmative form of the will to power. It is not about knowing or believing in 'better' or 'truer' values, but about creating values, 'believing' in the (self-fulfilling) power of the false. So transmutation is nihilistic in the sense that it believes in the nothing. Finally, transmutation is completed nihilism because it turns against the reactive forces that earlier helped it spread. The Buddhistic last man of passive nihilism becomes the man who wants to perish of active nihilism. The will to negation converts into a positive and affirmative will to destruction. Reactive forces are thus (self) selected away.
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Now that Deleuze has showed us the full story of how forces become active and the will to power converts from affirmation to negation, he can spend the remainder of the chapter (5.10-5.13) examining what this implies for our understanding of the concept of affirmation. The key point is that affirmation does not mean that something re-places the values denied by nihilism. The history of nihilism and the dialectic was a long parade of different values that all ultimately ended up occupying the same place. Now the place has been done away with entirely. Affirmation is not a new solution to the old problem of nihilism. Affirmation begins when we reach a nihilism so extreme that nihilism itself ceases to be a problem. Instead of retaining its negative sense, the idea that nothing is inherently true or meaningful suddenly acquires an affirmative and liberating sense. This is seeing emptiness. And it frees. When we reach the true depths of nihilism, it suddenly loses its power over us, and instead a 'belief' in nihilism becomes an expression of the fact that no power can block us from creating new values. Deleuze draws a bunch of consequences from the character of this moment of transmutation.
1) He discovers that there is still an important place for negation within affirmation. Instead of being opposed to it, negation is revealed as a part of the development of affirmation. The negative no longer has any power on its own, but just serves as a tool to clear the decks and allow for affirmation. Destruction is the means by which creation happens.
2) Almost as a corollary of this newly subordinate position of the negative, Deleuze points out that an affirmation which does not know how to say no is somehow defective. In TSZ, this is precisely the affirmation of the ass, who throughout Part IV says nothing but "Yea-uh". Because the ass does not no how to say no, he can't truly affirm and create but can only accept things as they are. Like the camel, the ass just patiently bears the load of whatever reality comes his way as his inevitable burden. This purely passive acceptance of reality isn't the same thing as affirmation because it is always founded on the heaviness of the reality we must accept. We always end up accepting all the negative within us, but letting it persist as negative, as a burden we bear or a problem with 'human nature'. Acceptance of the negative truth of the real is not the affirmation which transmutes this negative into a positive falsehood or fabrication. Really seeing emptiness does not merely mean seeing that you are doing something stupid, but also letting go of the idea that what you're doing is stupid. The best tool for this is humor and lightness that lets us see the human within us as a contingent piece of nature we need not identify with. Man accepts Being as it is, but the Overman affirms Life as becomes.
3) If affirmation doesn't affirm things as they are (Being), then what does it affirm? At its highest point, affirmation affirms only itself. The activity of affirmation (a becoming-active) is also the object of affirmation. True affirmation is double. Affirmation doesn't affirm a pre-existent Being and Truth but affirms becoming and falsehood, the affirmative power of creating or fabricating. We've seen this same theme before as the affirmation of the being of becoming (or making an affirmation of becoming). Creation is the affirmative power of difference (not opposition) and this power is itself affirmed.
All of these characteristics of transmutation lead us to an idea of pure affirmation that we can read in several senses. Affirmation is pure because its only object is itself and it therefore endlessly redoubles itself as the affirmation of affirmation of ... But affirmation is also pure in the sense that it is total, with nothing falling outside it or opposing it. Because nihilism overcomes itself, even negation is a part of the power of affirmation. In a sense, its not even 'true' negation since its will to nothingness is put in service of the affirmative will to power. Finally, pure affirmation is the affirmation that purifies itself. The will to nothingness leads reactive forces to become-active and actively self-destruct, which results in the transmutation of this will into affirmation (the Nietzschean, rather than Hegelian, version of the negation of negation). Negation burns itself up or selects itself away, so to speak, or in this conversion, a process which, if repeated, has the power to convert all of negation into affirmation. This is the secret of the eternal return. We substitute a positive for a negative feedback loop, a runaway train for an equilibrium seeking machine. Reactivity can only spread itself so far before it has made everything become-reactive. But when everyone has been infected the sickness has nowhere left to go and no activity of its own. A grand nihilism is the inevitable consequence. But also the point at which we encounter a becoming-active. This new affirmation can spread like wildfire, and because it actually creates activity as its goes, it has no limits. Of course we could imagine some sort of population dynamic here, with active and reactive agents acting like predators and prey or the zombie apocalypse (if there were some anti-zombie antidote). We might wonder about the evolution of these populations over time. But I suspect that we're not talking about the same kind of time in the two cases. Maybe just one becoming-active is enough to transmute the whole world into affirmation all at once?
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