As I said
last time, Chapter 4: "
From Ressentiment to the Bad Conscience" is essentially a systematization of the three essays that compose the
Genealogy of Morals. So I felt obliged to reread the original in order to see how Deleuze's version compares. I think it's mostly fair to say that Deleuze doesn't really add anything
new to Nietzsche's scheme. But the way he synthesizes and organizes the themes of the book, while dispensing with most of its polemic poetry, really does lend a new and not immediately obvious coherence to what Nietzsche is doing.
The Genealogy of Morals in not intended as a realistic history of the evolution of morality, but as a schematic model of the psychological development of the human animal. How did the animal become human? And what type of human did it become? We can ask these questions not only of our culture or species as a whole, but of the development of each individual psyche. It's important to see that Nietzsche is asking a very general question about how we develop the capacity for morality, how we become a psyche capable of supporting a psychology, and not simply how we develop a particular morality or psychology, as if some definitive version of these were the 'natural' endpoint that human social evolution has been aiming at. How did we acquire the depth, the interiority, the 'subjectivity', that can make us such an endlessly interesting animal? Unlike every other history of humanity we've ever read, Nietzsche does not intend to take the morality and psychology of our current culture as a goal, but as a means, as a bridge to the over-human.
4.1
What is the difference between the active and reactive types? Since Nietzsche's metaphysics involves only the will to power expressed through varying relations of force the answer cannot be that this one is
essentially active and this other
essentially reactive. In this world of ordered
difference, both active and reactive must always exist as opposite sides of the same coin. So the question is only whether the reactive forces serve the active ones, or vice versa. Which force is on top?
The master is said to react precisely because he acts his reactions. The active type therefore includes reactive forces but ones that are defined by a capacity for obeying or being acted. The active type expresses a relation between active and reactive forces such that the latter are themselves acted. (NP, 111)
For the master, the active type, reaction still serves action. By contrast, for the slave, the reactive type, even actions serve a reactive force. But how can this reversal happen? Or are we just playing with words here? If the master, in fact, reacts and the slave also acts, how can we tell them apart? This problem is precisely why Nietzsche introduces the term ressentiment. Ressentiment is the 'action' of the reactive type. This peculiar type of action appears when the 'natural' reactions of the active type are no longer acted out or acted on. Ressentiment stems from a block imposed on the acting of reactions. In place of this active re-acting, we get the passive re-feeling of ressentiment.
Ressentiment designates a type in which reactive forces prevail over active forces. But they can only prevail in one way: by ceasing to be acted. Above all we must not define ressentiment in terms of the strength of a reaction. If we ask what the man of ressentiment is, we must not forget this principle: he does not re-act. And the word ressentiment gives a definite clue: reaction ceases to be acted in order to become something felt (senti). (NP, 111)
4.2
How does this blockage come about? Deleuze gives us a very interesting account of the mechanism that casts Nietzsche's theory of ressentiment as a precursor to Freud's theory of the relations between our conscious and unconscious processes. Consciousness is like a mobile and flexible skin that constantly receives impressions from the world. Traces or memories of these impressions are stored in the unconscious warehouse, as it were, that our skin contains. Consciousness, in other words, is a sort of oriented topological boundary between the world and the unconscious. What's important about this boundary is that it normally faces outwards, towards what is happening in the present world, which permits the organism to adapt and re-act much more flexibly than a strictly unconscious process based on past memories would allow.
The reactive unconscious is defined by mnemonic traces, by lasting imprints. It is a digestive, vegetative and ruminative system, which expresses "the purely passive impossibility of escaping from the impression once it is received" ... But the inadequacy of this first kind of reactive force is obvious. Adaptation would never be possible if the reactive apparatus did not have another system of forces at its disposal. Another system is necessary, a system in which reaction is not a reaction to traces but becomes a reaction to the present excitation or to the direct image of the object. This second kind of reactive forces is inseparable from consciousness: that constantly renewed skin surrounding an ever fresh receptivity, a milieu "where there is always room for new things". (NP, 112)
Having consciousness oriented towards the outside, towards the present, is what makes an organism's reactions suitable for action. When reactions are triggered by current conscious impressions they'll pertain to the world at hand. But this orientation has to be maintained by an active force of forgetting that continually empties consciousness, prepares it for new impressions, and keeps it separate from the processing of stored impressions that happens in the unconscious.
Nietzsche defines the faculty of forgetting as "no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression", "an apparatus of absorption", "a plastic, regenerative and curative force." Thus, there are two simultaneous processes: reaction becomes something acted because it takes conscious excitation as its object and reaction to traces remains in the unconscious, imperceptible." (NP, 113)
Forgetting (should we call it '
dropping the ball'?) is an
activity, but an odd sort of activity whose function is merely to keep conscious reactions separate from unconscious reactions by constantly wiping clean the slate of consciousness. What happens if this faculty of forgetting is disturbed? What happens if for some reason our conscious buffer overflows or our skin hardens so that we cannot accept new impressions? In this case, the unconscious traces that had been kept 'repressed' can rise to the surface of consciousness and displace our conscious
reactions. For fairly obvious reasons, our
unconscious reactions, based on the representation of past memory traces, are less likely to be suitable for
acting on. This maladaptation to the world that results from a malfunction of forgetting is what Nietzsche calls "sickness". The activity of our conscious reaction becomes blocked because the orientation of our conscious skin has been
reversed. This is why Deleuze calls this first aspect of
ressentiment "topological". Consciousness is now receiving impressions from
within, it is re-
feeling the unconscious past, instead of re-
acting to the present.
We rediscover the definition of ressentiment: ressentiment is a reaction which simultaneously becomes perceptible and ceases to be acted: a formula which defines sickness in general. Nietzsche is not simply saying that ressentiment is a sickness, but rather that sickness as such is a form of ressentiment. (NP, 114)
4.3
Deleuze leaves the question of just exactly why the membrane of consciousness should get turned inside out in this fashion unanswered. However, he does point out to us that it is not due to a stimulus so strong that it overpowers consciousness -- what we would today call trauma. Some terrible pain may certainly have occurred, but this still begs the question of why the trace of this particular pain should be retained and continually resurfaced as 'trauma'. Moreover, since Nietzsche is not (exclusively) concerned with individual psychology, he's not interested in merely tracing this illness back to a proximate cause that might explain why we reorient towards memories in the case of particular external stimuli. What he's after is diagnosing something like a 'ressentiment syndrome' that would explain why this topological inversion persists, spreads, and even becomes a habit. In other words, he's interested in ressentiment as a type, as a mode of being. While his diagnosis doesn't completely answer the question of how the illness arises to begin with (we'll come back to this), it does help us see the essence of its mechanism.
Ressentiment become a
type when it morphs into the
habit of blame and revenge. This habit can't be explained by the force of the
external stimuli, but only by some sort of
internal disruption, namely, the reorientation of consciousness. Consciousness is a reactive force that evolved to take impressions as input from the world and give actions as output to the world. It's almost
reflective in this sense, just a thin shiny surface that quickly hooks the sensory to the motor in a manner guided by a lot of processing activity that remains unconscious. Regardless of what metaphor we use, the most important point to emphasize is that the surface is
asymmetrical -- one side reflects while the other blocks. When the orientation of this surface gets flipped, the stimuli that come from the world no longer bounce off its external surface, so speak, but penetrate directly inside. Traces of these are then sent back up to its internal surface, which in turn 'acts' to reflect them back inside, and etc ... The consciousness of
ressentiment functions like a one way mirror that lets stimuli in, but never lets anything out, never acts. This. Sucks. Deleuze's point is that this syndrome is incredibly painful
in itself. The problem is
not with the 'objectively' painful external stimuli. The problem is now that we can't have done with
any stimulus. We are trapped in endless
papañca.
Everything penetrates us and bounces around endlessly within us, even the
pleasant sensations. And what we're mainly conscious of is that we can't
do anything about it.
Ressentiment is just an endless re-feeling that
separates us from our ability to act and
reduces our power (negative affect). However, since we don't diagnose our illness correctly, we don't blame our selves but all these objects that keep assailing us. Ultimately
every object is to blame for our pain, even the good ones, because each one reminds us how powerless we are. And so we end up wanting to take
revenge on the whole world.
As a result of his type the man of ressentiment does not "react": his reaction is endless, it is felt instead of being acted. This reaction therefore blames its object, whatever it is, as an object on which revenge must be taken, which must be made to pay for this infinite delay. Excitation can be beautiful and good and the man of ressentiment can experience it as such; it can be less than the force of the man of ressentiment and he can possess an abstract quantity of force as great as that of anyone else. He will none the less feel the corresponding object as a personal offense and affront because he makes the object responsible for his own powerlessness to invest anything but the trace - a qualitative or typical powerlessness. (NP, 115)
4.4 - 4.5
From this description of the mechanism of
ressentiment, we can infer a number of characteristics of the illness. First, the man of
ressentiment has become "spiritual" because his consciousness faces inwards instead of outwards. In fact, since he is
unable to act, his revenge on the objects of the world is entirely
imaginary. The invention and substitution of a new interior world of the spirit is how
ressentiment stabilizes itself as a habit or
type. "Spirit" actually becomes a
means of taking revenge (NP, 116), though what we really triumph over is not the objects of the world but only the
activity within ourselves. Nevertheless, this imaginary or spiritual revenge still has real consequences. The man of
ressentiment is the original touchy passive aggressive type. These unfortunate souls
cannot love in the true sense of the word; nothing pleases them because everything reminds them of their powerlessness. But they hold on to this powerlessness as if it were a power. Because they themselves are
forced to be passive, they turn this passivity into a special form of power they call 'selflessness'. Their only action is
judgement; they judge whether others are as weak and inactive as they are, because
they benefit from this lack of activity.
Lack of activity is actually the only thing that benefits them. Thus they invent
morality, which is nothing more than a paean to their own
weakness, a glorification of not-acting and an accusation leveled against a hostile world of activity. Now we can see the mechanism of the dialectical inversion Deleuze introduced us to all the way back at the
beginning of chapter 1. The inversion of the orientation of consciousness means that the man of
ressentiment defines himself entirely through
negation.
"You are evil, therefore I am good." In this formula it is the slave who speaks. It cannot be denied that values are still being created. But what bizarre values! They begin by positing the other as evil. He who called himself good is the one who is now called evil. This evil one is the one who acts, who does not hold himself back from acting, who does not therefore consider action from the point of view of the consequences that it will have for third parties. And the one who is good is now the one who holds himself back from acting: he is good just because he refers all actions to the standpoint of the one who does not act, to the standpoint of the one who experiences the consequences, or better still to the more subtle standpoint of a divine third party who scrutinizes the intentions of the one who acts. (NP, 121)
4.6
Deleuze's description of the characteristics of ressentiment culminates in the
paralogism of substance that expresses the core illusion this type needs to believe in. Substance is just a force abstracted from its power of acting. To invent a substance we have to imagine that things are
not happening as they are. We have to imagine that they could be different, that an active force
could have not act, and that the reactive force of the man of
ressentiment could have acted. As if he would ever dream of taking your bullshit money! Substance is just the passive neutral
actor left over when we imagine away all of the real actions. In it we see the first glimmerings of 'free will'. The whole idea is based on the metaphysical fiction of a force
separated from what it can do, a force whose power is
not expressed in its actions but somehow bottled up
within itself. Obviously, the powerlessness of the man of
ressentiment himself is the model for this entity.
Here we have the foundation of the paralogism of ressentiment: the fiction of a force separated from what it can do. It is thanks to this fiction that reactive forces triumph. It is not sufficient for them to hold back from activity: they must also reverse the relation of forces, they must oppose themselves to active forces and represent themselves as superior. The process of accusation in ressentiment fulfills this task: reactive forces "project" an abstract and neutralised image of force; such a force separated from its effects will be blameworthy if it acts, deserving, on the contrary, if it does not. Moreover it is thought that more (abstract) force is needed to hold back than is needed to act. (NP, 123)
Deleuze breaks this paralogism down into three stages.
1) We invent the idea of a causality that separates cause from effect. In reality, what we call an effect is just an extension of a cause, just as what a force does is not separate from the force, but simply an expression of what that force is.
Force is first repressed into itself, then its manifestation is made into a different thing which finds its distinct, efficient cause in the force. (NP, 123)
Nietzsche's metaphysics of force doesn't leave room for a force in-itself, separated from its relation to other forces. I think the similarity to a Mahayana metaphysics of emptiness is not incidental here, nor is the similarity of Nietzsche's critique of causality to the idea of dependent origination. Dependent origination is not the same as causality. The 'units' that dependently arise are not substantial entities with firm boundaries, but empty phenomena that interpenetrate. This means that the world is much much too complex for us to separate phenomena clearly enough to call one cause and the succeeding one effect. But this complex world is still ordered, and it is ordered by whatever perspective we take on it at the moment, whatever "way of looking" we are employing. What we normally call a cause is actually just the most salient and perhaps manipulable variable a system presents for us. The 'cause' of the light going on is the light switch (and not the wiring, power plant, energy source, electrons, etc ...). I think this may be what Deleuze means here.
An imaginary relation of causality is substituted for a real relation of significance. (NP, 123)
2) We project this fiction of a neutral force that may or may not act onto a substrate, which then gives us the idea of a substance or subject.
3) We judge the quality of this force or subject not by what it does, but by what it doesn't do. In other words we judge it morally, which is to say inversely to its actual power.
As soon as forces are projected into a fictitious subject this subject proves to be blameworthy or deserving - blameworthy if active force performs the activity which is its own, deserving if reactive force does not perform the activity which it . . . does not have. (NP, 124)
4.7
There's a certain creativity involved in the invention of the paralogism of the moral substance. Nietzsche attributes this creativity historically to the Jewish priests. They were the ones who invented the fiction of a force-that-could-have-not-acted, which suddenly gives meaning to the pain of an inverted consciousness by rebranding its enforced passivity as being a force-that-could-have-acted-but-did-not. With the intervention of the Jewish priest, the man of ressentiment no longer fights against his illness, and in fact no longer even sees it as an illness, but as a mark of his moral virtue. The priest gives him a new story where the origin of his problem is inverted ("you are evil" -- even though it's my reactive illness causing me pain) and then projected outside himself ("therefore I am good" -- so I can feel justified in taking revenge on you).
Deleuze breaks both ressentiment and bad conscience into two aspects or moments. The first is a "raw" of "topological" one that illustrates them as a sort of syndrome (as we saw, the reversal of the orientation of consciousness in the case of ressentiment). The second moment develops the first in the sense that the flower 'develops' the plant. The Jewish priest develops ressentiment by giving it a meaning, he interprets its pain as a symptom of a moral universe, thus ushering in its "typological" second moment. In a sense, the priest actually cures the patient, though only by making the disease more intractable and invisible. Though it's not immediately apparent, I think what Deleuze wants to convey by drawing this distinction between a first and second moment (topology and typology) is that some creative cultural intervention is necessary for these psychological quirks to become full blown types. Some will must see the potential of these reactive forces, then organize and propagate them. In other words, there is a will to power that makes use of the raw reactive forces, and makes them become or develop. This is the will to power of the priest as a cultural institution. So I think the emphasis on these two moments is our first glimpse of a problem we will return to -- the creative violence of culture.
4.8
So both
ressentiment and bad conscience have a development. But there's also a development from one to the other. Bad conscience is the next natural development after the
triumph of
ressentiment orchestrated by the Jewish priest. With his success,
ressentiment permanently and characteristically blocks the activity of the organism and separates it from what it can do. Which is to say that the formerly active forces have
become reactive. Deleuze has
already shown us how this development works. In becoming-reactive, active forces turn back against themselves and carry out the only 'activity' left to them -- rattling the bars of their cage.
... whatever the reason that an active force is falsified, deprived of its conditions of operation and separated from what it can do, it is turned back inside, turned back against itself. Being interiorised, being turned back against itself - this is the way in which active force becomes truly reactive. "All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward - that is what I call the intemalisation of man . . . that is the origin of the 'bad conscience' (NP, 127)
With this new development, the evil and pain that ressentiment formerly projected outside itself, is now taken back inside. I become evil, I become the source of the problem. This isn't the opposite of ressentiment, but it's further development, the way it spreads its contagion of reactivity and poisons every active force.
In ressentiment reactive force accuses and projects itself. But ressentiment would be nothing if it did not lead the accused himself to admit his wrongs, to "turn back to himself: the introjection of active forces is not the opposite of projection but the consequence and the continuation of reactive projection. (NP, 128)
We've seen how ressentiment was already full of pain. Everything is painful to this type because it merely reinforces its inability to re-act to the world. The Jewish priest provides a cure for this pain by attributing it to evil forces outside of us. Of course, like all good pharmaceutical business models, we can never finish taking this 'cure'. Whatever new stimulus comes along will also be painful, because ultimately we have misdiagnosed the problem. But with the development of bad conscience, and the introjection of the source of the pain, our suffering can now multiply endlessly. We don't even need the world anymore, we can make ourselves suffer. "It's your fault" becomes "it's my fault".
The multiplication of pain by the interiorisation or introjection of force — this is the first definition of bad conscience. (NP, 129)
4.9
Here Deleuze inserts a short chapter on "The Problem of Pain". This actually interrupts the main thrust of the story of how bad conscience develops out of
ressentiment. The aim is to contrast the way that bad conscience blames pain on something
within us with an interpretation that gives pain a meaning
external to us. Of course, one might at first wonder how this latter would be any different than the developed form of
ressentiment, which already seemed to blame our pain on external evils. The key difference lies in the word
blame. What Deleuze has in mind with an external meaning of pain is essentially the
tragic interpretation of life, that doesn't see pain as the ground for an
accusation of life at all, regardless of whether the blame should be directed externally or internally. What if pain doesn't come from an external object or an internal subject, but simply happens as a byproduct of the fact that we are small and the universe is big? What happens to our idea of pain if
no one is to
blame for it?
There are a couple of ways Deleuze answer's this question that don't seem to fit together in my mind. What if pain is simply a sign that we should do something differently? In this case, no one is to blame for our pain, and in a way it becomes a fairly meaningless trigger for action. It just results from the fact that our tiny organism is in ongoing unstable interaction with a great big world. Deleuze might be alluding to this interpretation here. Perhaps every pain a reactive force feels is a pleasure for the active force that dominates it?
Now, pain is a reaction. Thus it appears that its only meaning consists in the possibility of acting this reaction or at least of localising it, isolating its trace, in order to avoid all propagation until one can re-act once more. (NP, 129)
Another possibility is that our pain is a mere byproduct in a different sense -- it happens to give pleasure to the gods who watch our actions as we would watch a drama.
The masters have a secret. They know that pain has only one meaning: giving pleasure to someone, giving pleasure to someone who inflicts or contemplates pain. If the active man is able not to take his own pain seriously it is because he always imagines someone to whom it gives pleasure. It is not for nothing that such an imagination is found in the belief in the active gods which peopled the Greek world: " 'Every evil the sight of which edifies a god is justified'. . . what was at bottom the ultimate meaning of Trojan Wars and other such tragic terrors? There can be no doubt whatever: they were intended as festival plays for the gods" (NP, 129)
While the particular violent Greek version of this idea may not resonate with us, perhaps we can imagine that our pain is somehow necessary as part of the increase in power (ie. pleasure) of some much larger force. Looked at from this larger, tragic, perspective, our pain is not a problem with life, but part of its cosmic drama, so to speak. If we were able to identify with this larger force, perhaps it wouldn't feel like pain at all?
The problem of pain is a deep one that we may have to come back to at the end of the chapter. It relates to the violence of culture that we will discuss beginning in 4.11. The overarching idea seems to be the life is somehow always cutting into itself as a means of developing. As if there were a larger Life that proceeds only at the cost of producing and destroying many small lives. Perhaps this larger Life experiences a sort of pleasure in channeling itself into particular forms? The tree of life enjoys pruning itself? This would be related to the selective power of the eternal return, which works through what one might call a violent method where the negative destroys itself.
4.10
When the force that causes pain is no longer projected outside of us but introjected inside of us, we move from the developed (typological) form of ressentiment to the undeveloped (topological) form of bad conscience. The Jewish 'cure' for pain has been reversed. In a sense, this reversal is a more accurate diagnosis of the pain of ressentiment, which, after all, does stem from a disturbance within the organism and not fundamentally from external objects. As this reversal of a reversal develops however, we move from simply placing the substance causing pain within us to actually identifying with that substance. The thing causing us pain isn't simply inside, it's us, some fault in us, some sin. Historically, this development of bad conscience is guided by the Christian priest, who continues the reactive trajectory of the Jewish priest by reversing the direction of ressentiment.
"If one wanted to express the value of the priestly existence in the briefest formula it would be: the priest alters the direction of ressentiment" (GM III 15 p. 127). It will be recalled that the man of ressentiment, who is by nature full of pain, is looking for a cause for his suffering. He accuses, he accuses everything that is active in life. The priest appears in an initial [Jewish] form here: he presides over the accusation, he organises it. "Look at these men who call themselves good, I tell you: these are the evil ones." The power of ressentiment is therefore completely directed towards the other, against others. But ressentiment is an explosive substance: it makes active forces become reactive. Ressentiment must then adapt itself to these new conditions; it must change direction. The reactive man must now find the cause of his suffering in himself. Bad conscience suggests to him that he must look for this cause "in himself, in some guilt, in a piece of the past, he must understand his suffering as a punishment" (GM III 20 p. 140). And the priest appears a second time [now Christian] in order to preside over this change of direction: "Quite so, my sheep! someone must be to blame for it - you alone are to blame for yourself." (GM III 15 p. 128). The priest invents the notion of sin. (NP, 131)
One interesting aspect of this story is the way it makes Christianity the
natural outgrowth of Judaism not just historically, but
typologically. It's like watching the progression of an underlying disease from one state to another. With the help of the Jewish priest, the reactive forces of
ressentiment actually
triumph over active forces. Ressentiment separates active force from what it can do and makes it
become reactive. It produces a 'good' and powerless slave surrounded by 'evil' and hated masters. If this were the final state of the disease it would be pretty harmless though. It's obvious that this sort of thinking is only likely to catch on amongst those who feel themselves
oppressed. It converts their powerlessness, their very oppression, into a sign of distinction (the
chosen people). If this disease spreads, however, more and more formerly active oppressors are made to become reactive as well. The remaining targets of
ressentiment begin to diminish. Who is left to do all the oppressing if all the active forces have become reactive? If we aren't oppressing
ourselves, we can't
all become slaves. Conversely, if the evil one is
within us, literally
everyone can suffer from the disease. This is the historical genius of the Christian priest, who makes the illness of
ressentiment metastasize.
But, once again, it should not be thought that the new direction of ressentiment in bad conscience is opposed to the first direction. Once again, we are merely concerned with an additional temptation, an additional seduction. Ressentiment said "it is your fault", bad conscience says "it is my fault". But ressentiment is really only appeased when its contagion is spread. Its aim is for the whole of life to become reactive, for those in good health to become sick. It is not enough for it to accuse, the accused must feel guilty. (NP, 132)
4.11 - 4.13
With these three subsections Deleuze launches into the lengthy digression foreshadowed in 4.9. They deal with the meaning of
culture. Culture, for Nietzsche, has to do with
training and
selection. This may seem a slightly odd definition at first. But I think what Deleuze is getting at here is something we're all familiar with. Consider the sort of
self-selection that establishes and maintains the culture of any group. Tech culture. College culture. Church culture. Mediation culture. '
Western culture'. These cultures have a shaping or pruning effect. They are larger forces that selectively cultivate a certain type of individual by elevating some and demoting others. Those who partially fit in are made to fit in better, and those who don't are encouraged to leave. Of course, no one is in charge of these cultures. They have a momentum of their own created by the interaction of the participants. But they operate almost
as if they had a goal, as if there were some
force making a selection.
When Nietzsche talks about Culture, however, he does not have any of these specific cultures in mind, but something more like the capacity to form these cultures. 'Human Culture' selects for individuals capable of participating in these other cultures. As we alluded to at the beginning of this post, it's really what makes us human. It produces the possibility of interaction that enables us to form specific cultural groups. This is why Deleuze will call it our "species activity". He will treat the phenomenon of culture from three points of view -- the prehistoric, the post-historic, and the historic -- which roughly correspond to the means, the end, and the perversion of culture.
The means of culture are violence. Prehistory is, "soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time." (GM, 2.6, pg 65) Nietzsche believes that this pain is necessary to train our reactive forces in such a way that they can acted. We have to be trained to obey something called 'the law'. This isn't any particular law, but simply the principle of the submission of our reactive forces to some more powerful active force.
Every historical law is arbitrary, but what is not arbitrary, what is prehistoric and generic, is the law of obeying laws. ... Prehistoric means generic. Culture is man's prehistoric activity. But what does this activity consist in? It is always a matter of giving man habits, of making him obey laws, of training him. Training man means forming him in such a way that he can act his reactive forces. The activity of culture is, in principle, exercised on reactive forces, it gives them habits and imposes models on them in order to make them suitable for being acted. (NP, 133)
A casual reader might imagine that Nietzsche is saying something similar to Hobbes. In order for the individual to exist in society, he has to give up the gratification of his impulses and submit to the law of the state. Life in pre-history was nasty, brutish, and short, but thankfully the training and self-domestication of culture made all that avoidable. This is precisely what Nietzsche is
not saying. Hobbes (like almost all philosophers) takes as his starting point of civilization someone very much like himself -- a fully formed individual who knows what they want and is capable of controlling their desires. Hobbes' sovereign individual may have all sorts of anti-social designs on his neighbor's wife, but he is already
innately capable of submitting to
his own reason, which of course famously counseled him that it would be smarter to enter into a social contract than to
fix the cable. But this begs Nietzshe's question: how did someone
capable of following a law -- of
giving and then
following even his
own law -- come to exist? Culture, for Nietzsche, is what
creates such an individual from the animal. This is what it means to
act our reactions, to become active and able to make our own (or perhaps in the initial phase our culture's) choices. Hobbes' subject isn't
prehistoric at all, but a projection of himself into the past. His
starting point is for Nietzsche the
end product of culture.
This is precisely the selective object of culture: forming a man capable of promising and thus of making use of the future, a free and powerful man. Only such a man is active; he acts his reactions, everything in him is active or acted. The faculty of promising is the effect of culture as the activity of man on man; the man who can promise is the product of culture as species activity. (NP, 134)
The violence of culture isn't necessary in order to enforce a social contract or keep people from running through the streets raping and pillaging. It's necessary to create a human animal that can remember its promises, and hence control its future self. Nietzsche claims that the model for this inter-temporal structure within an individual is the debtor-creditor relationship between individuals. And he sees this latter relation as a fundamentally violent one where pain becomes the medium of exchange used to settle debts. Pain seems to be the only stimulus strong enough to train us to abide by credit contracts, including the contract with our future self.
This adds a new nuance to the problem of pain that arose in 4.9. Nietzsche seems to believe that the debtor's pain is the creditor's pleasure. This is the unavoidable logic of making pain a medium of exchange. If the training of culture merely depended on the way it teaches us to keep our promises so that we avoid pain, we would be left unable to explain the mechanism which inflicts this pain in the case of a broken promise. In other words, it's easy to see the selective effect of pain, but it's hard to understand the cause that's doing the selecting. For pain to work as a consistent, long-term training mechanism in a society, someone has to play the role of enforcer. But what do they get out of this role? Do they inflict pain as punishment for broken promises out of some altruistic concern for the 'good of the whole'? Nietzsche would consider this answer a moralistic evasion. Whether the enforcer, the causer of pain, is one person or the whole group acting in concert, it seems that there must be some sort of pleasure in inflicting pain, precisely the pleasure of a superior force dominating a weaker one. The equation of my pain with someone else's pleasure, or the equation: "injury caused = pain undergone" (NP, 134), is exactly what Deleuze meant when he talked about the external meaning of pain. Culture is external to us. As a more powerful force, it uses the medium of pain to train our capacity to eventually discipline ourselves. We have to imagine that, from the perspective of this culture, our pain is part of a larger pleasure, perhaps analogous to the way the enforced stunting of a bonsai produces a beautiful shape.
The point of emphasizing this at first somewhat repellent interpretation of pain is to distinguish it from the interpretation that ressentiment and bad conscience provide. Their pain, for these reactive types of consciousness, is always an unequivocally bad thing that should be made to stop. This is the understandable perspective of someone weak and ill and in constant pain. But of course it's also somewhat ironic because the reactive type runs from a Jewish ressentiment that 'cures' pain only by constantly looking for things to kvetch about, to a Christian bad conscience that multiplies pain by making it our own fault. In either case, the meaning of pain is internal, and the opposite of pain isn't pleasure, but just not-pain. Pain, for the reactive man is fundamentally a breakdown of justice, a malfunction in the universe, something that shouldn't be happening, something that he would like, but can never get, revenge for. It's the unanswerable crux of the problem of evil -- if God is so great, why do I feel so miserable? This contrasts with the perspective of the active man produced by culture. He knows that his pain is meaningful because it is a necessary part of the universe, even, from some larger perspective, a source of pleasure. This is the tragic worldview that doesn't try to make pain stop, but affirms it joyously. For him, justice lies in everything being correctly ordered, according to its power, which he knows at times will involve his painful submission to the 'higher power' of culture.
On the one hand, revenge and ressentiment are not the origin of justice. Moralists, even socialist ones, make justice derive from a reactive feeling, from deeply felt offense, a spirit of revenge or justiciary reaction. But such a derivation explains nothing it would have to show how the pain of others can be a satisfaction of revenge, a reparation for revenge. We will never understand the cruel equation "injury caused = pain undergone" if a third term is not introduced - the pleasure which is felt in inflicting pain or in contemplating it. But this third term, the external meaning of pain, has an origin which is completely different from revenge or reaction: it reflects an active standpoint, active forces, which are given the training of reactive forces as their task and for their pleasure. (NP, 135)
We might reduce this idea to a formula: justice is not about righting a wrong, but creating a right, an ability. The active justice of culture is fundamentally opposed to the reactive morality of ressentiment and bad conscience.
But just at the moment we're highlighting the difference between these two complexes, some ambiguities start to creep into the story. The first is an ambiguity within culture itself. The ultimate goal of the species activity of culture is to produce an individual. The post-historic end of the active and selective force of culture is to dissolve itself by being internalized in the active person who can self-select and self-discipline their reactions.
The finished product of species activity isnot the responsible man himself or the moral man, but the autonomous and supramoral man, that is to say the one who actually acts his reactive forces and in whom all reactive forces are acted. He alone "is able to" promise, precisely because he is no longer responsible to any tribunal. The product of culture is not the man who obeys the law, but the sovereign and legislative individual who defines himself by power over himself, over destiny, over the law: the free, the light, the irresponsible. (NP, 137)
In essence, through a process of 'acculturation', we become the larger force of our culture. Once we are capable of giving ourselves our own laws, we no longer need the law. Culture overcomes itself in a "self destruction of justice". This is how a true individual is produced as the end of history, precisely the sovereign individual Hobbes' put at the beginning of history.
The second ambiguity creeps in during history. This is the necessary perversion of culture and confusion between it and reactive institutions. For Nietzsche, the violence of culture is always being made to serve other ends, and 'history' is the history of the degradation of culture as a force. The selective pressure of culture gets weaker and weaker over time precisely because it succeeds in making us so thoroughly capable of joining groups. In this way we turn over further selection to the particular ends of each group, and no longer create the 'generic' individual that is effectively a group of one (our internalized debtor-creditor relation). This is why Nietzsche is always so obsessed with the concept of decadence. The more effective culture is, the more it loses its way. The more power we have, the more stupidity we permit ourselves, the more we can survive. In practice, our culture seems to have selected not for the sovereign individual or law-giver, but for the domestic herd animal or law-taker.
Species activity in history is inseparable from a movement which perverts it and its product. Furthermore, history is this very perversion, it is identical to the "degeneration of culture". - Instead of species activity, history presents us with races, peoples, classes, Churches and States. Onto species activity are grafted social organisations, associations, communities of a reactive character, parasites which cover it over and absorb it. By means of species activity - the movement of which they falsify - reactive forces form collectivities, what Nietzsche calls "herds" (GM III 18). - Instead of justice and its process of self-destruction, history presents us with societies which have no wish to perish and which cannot imagine anything superior to their own laws. (NP, 138)
With decadence, culture doesn't dissolve or disappear into the individual, but becomes all pervasive. Today we are enmeshed in so many cultures that commanding our self seems impossible.
4.14
At this point we return to the main story of the chapter, which is the genealogy of morals. The story so far is: 1) Ressentiment arises as a disturbance of the faculty of forgetting that results in a reorientation of consciousness. 2) Ressentiment develops through the creative intervention of the Jewish priest, who gives meaning to the pain caused by that disturbance. Your pain proves that 'they' are bad, and as a result, you are good. You feel much better after hearing this even though you are still in pain, because now you can at least dream of revenge, even if you cannot act on it because you remain sick and powerless. 3) Bad conscience develops out of ressentiment when the source of the pain formerly projected onto the world becomes introjected inside us. We thus multiply our own pain because what we hate and define ourselves against has moved within us. 4) Bad conscience develops into guilt and sin through the creative intervention of the Christian priest. The thing that is giving us pain and that we are trained to hate, is actually our self. We have some original defect or sin that makes all of our pain our own fault.
We can see that there are two creative moments in this story. In the first, the Jewish priest invents the fiction of an inactive force, the paralogism of the moral substance we explored in 4.6. In the second, the Christian priest invents the notion of the super-ego, the moral conscience that causes pain from within and can never be assuaged by our actions. We saw in 4.10 that his second moment reverses the direction of the ressentiment developed in the first moment. We move from reactively hating a source of pain projected outside ourselves, to actively hating a source of pain within ourselves. While this sounds understandable at first, the more you think about it, the more mysterious the psychology of this reversal becomes. Blaming our pain on another seems like a straightforward misdiagnosis. And at least hating them gives us a way to feel superior about our inferiority. But why would we continually multiply our pain by blaming it on ourselves? What belief would induce us to internalize the source of our pain and not merely separate our active force from what it can do by giving it an imaginary revenge, but actually make active force become-reactive, and start taking revenge on itself?
The long digression on the operation of culture was meant to answer this question. Separately from the story of the genealogy of morals, a historic story, there is a story of the violent prehistory and self-overcoming post-history of culture. Culture instills in us the model of the debtor-creditor relationship whose power asymmetry is expressed in the fact that the pain of one serves as the pleasure of the other. In fact, this debtor-creditor relationship is really the model of what a will is -- a force operating on another force, necessarily creating a hierarchy of power. At first, this relationship is between one person and another more power one. Later it characterizes the relationship between the person and the larger power of the group. Nietzsche traces the evolution of the power we are each indebted to in his second essay; it grows as the power of our collective culture grows. We move from being in debt to another person, to being in debt to our ancestors, to being in debt to God. The debt moves from being something we can potentially discharge through our pain, to being infinite and unpayable. Finally, Christianity lodges the never satisfied creditor directly within us. What we're seeing here is the gradual hijacking of the mechanism of culture by the reactive force of ressentiment. This is what enables reactive force to not merely triumph but to spread and make everything become-reactive. And this hijacking explains what we get from locating the source of pain within us -- it gives us pleasure.
Christianity holds a distorted mirror up to the goal of culture. Culture has trained us to see inflicting pain as a type of pleasure. But it did this only as a means of forming an individual who goes beyond pleasure and pain, who so internalizes the debtor-creditor relationship that they no longer need it to govern their actions. By contrast, Christianity internalizes the most extreme form of the creditor -- God. Instead of merging debtor and creditor, discharging our debt to ourself and making our own law, we are now condemned to pay interest to ourselves ad infinitum, simultaneously inflicting pain on ourselves and feeling the pleasure this gives us, the "voluptuousness of the martyr" (WP, #417).
4.15 - 4.16
One of Deleuze's goals in telling this rather elaborate story of crossbreeding is to show the moments where some creative
will is required. Someone ("
which one?") has to invent the two fictions that allow ressentiment and bad conscience to respectively develop into their higher forms. Ressentiment needed the fiction of
substance. Bad conscience needed the fiction of an
internal 'higher power' (for which is borrowed and repurposed the violent
means of culture). Together, these two fictions constitute a third -- the ascetic ideal. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these two fictions are forms invented by a single underlying
will (ie. a force that operates on other forces and makes them become). Ultimately, our story revolves around the will to
negate this world, to long for a better world beyond. The weak always want things to be some
other way. As Nietzsche says in the final line of the
Genealogy of Morals, in its depths, this will would rather will nothingness than will things to stay as they are ... to
not will.
In its initial sense the ascetic ideal designates the complex of ressentiment and bad conscience: it crosses the one with the other, it reinforces the one with the other. Secondly, it expresses all the ways in which the sickness of ressentiment, the suffering of bad conscience become livable, or rather, are organised and propagated; the ascetic priest is simultaneously gardener, breeder, shepherd and doctor. Finally, and this is its deepest sense, the ascetic ideal expresses the will which makes reactive forces triumph. "The ascetic ideal expresses a will" (GM III 23). We discover the idea of a fundamental complicity (not an identity, but a complicity) between reactive forces and a form of the will to power. Reactive forces would never prevail without a will which develops the projections, which organises the necessary fictions. (NP, 144)
