The Cultivation of the Eternal Return 2

Despite the promise to treat the second half of the "Active and Reactive" chapter as a unit, I completely lost my train of thought.  This post picks up the thread starting from 2.11 to 2.15.  As I said last time though, there are aspects of the whole second half of this chapter (2.8-2.15) that are not yet coming together for me, so what follows is a preliminary reading.

In section 2.11, Deleuze gives more shape to the idea we saw last time that the will to power serves simultaneously as both origin and middle.  The will to power as differential and genetic element determines the quality of forces placed into relation by chance.  But in addition to distinguishing these forces, the will to power also holds them together as related.  Any relationship is defined by the capacity of each force to be affected by others.  Forces that cannot affect one another cannot be related.  They can't come together to form even the most primitive body, a multiplicity that always has both a commanding and obeying side.  As a result, Deleuze will say that the will to power is "manifested" in the capacity of forces to affect one another.  So there's a two step process here.  In step 1, the forces are differentiated or determined by the will to power.  In step 2, a "manifestation" of the will to power is determined by the capacities those forces have for interacting with one another.  

The relationship between forces in each case is determined to the extent that each force is affected by other, inferior or superior, forces. It follows that will to power is manifested as a capacity for being affected. This capacity is not an abstract possibility, it is necessarily fulfilled and actualised at each moment by the other forces to which a given force relates. We should not be surprised by the double aspect of the will to power: from the standpoint of the genesis or production of forces it determines the relation between forces but, from the standpoint of its own manifestations, it is determined by relating forces. This is why the will to power is always determined at the same time as it determines, qualified at the same time as it qualifies. (NP, 62)

Clearly, there's a sort of circle or cycle at work here, where, loosely speaking, the will to power produces forces and forces produce the will to power.  However, for reasons I'm not clear on, the second half of this cycle doesn't seem to be a true "production" but a "manifestation" of the will to power.  Through the cycle, the will to power itself seems to move from potential to actual, from an abstract principle differentiating forces, to something more like a concrete 'force' with an expression of its own.

The passage above still isn't very clear to me.  But Deleuze continues to flesh it out further by relating the idea to Spinoza's definition of power.  Spinoza thought that the power of a body could be measured by all the things that it could be affected by.  There's something intuitively appealing in this definition.  If something has no capacity to affect us, if we can't even register it, so to speak, then our experience is limited in that respect.  A potential experience is denied us in the same way that the thrill of space travel is denied the chimpanzee.  This is in some sense a lack of power, of capability.  Normally, of course, we think of power using more active terms.  My power might more commonly be defined as all the things I control, or that I can do, or that I can affect, rather than the limits of what affects me.  But this way of defining power takes for granted that I know what I am.  A definition like this would characterize that power that I, a pre-determined entity, have, but not the power that I am.  In addition, I cannot have power over something (in the sense we usually mean this) without it first affecting me.  If I don't even register its existence and can't relate to it at all, how can I be said to have power over it?  So the idea of power we're developing here seems almost like a precursor to our usual understanding of the term.  It's more like a sensitivity or receptivity, a capacity to be related to things that lies under our power over them because it constitutes our capacity to register these things (or perhaps fabricate them and our self as things) to begin with.  Power in this sense actually comes before identity.  To know what we are, we look at what we can be related to, as if we were actually defined by the limits of what can 'touch' (affect) us.  

Relating Nietzsche's will to power to Spinoza's idea of power risks trying to explain the obscure with the obscurer.  On top of that, there are subtle differences between the two ideas that nuance the parallel.  For example, what I said above about power preceding identity already departs slightly from Spinoza.  His conatus does seem to have a certain identity, at a minimum the self-reinforcing identity of a feedback loop (Deleuze points out this issue in footnote 2.18).  So, without launching into an exhaustive analysis, what are we meant to take away from the comparison?  Though Deleuze never says it explicitly, I think we are meant to remember that for Spinoza, the actual feelings of a body -- its affects --  were related to the moment to moment increase or decrease in its power of acting.   Positive affect was created when the power of acting of a body increased, and negative affect corresponded to its decrease.  Likewise, the will to power has two qualities, affirmation and negation.  By linking the will to power to Spinoza's theory of affects, Deleuze seems to be seeing the will to power as the feeling of a change in power.  Affirmation is the feeling of an increase in power because it brings more things into our world, so to speak; it connects us to other parts of existence by affirming that they exist.  And negation is the feeling of our world shrinking, the feeling of crawling into our shell and disconnecting from things.  It's as if he was defining the will to power as the derivative of power.  We've already seen that the qualities of the will to power were introduced into the theory of force in order to account for the becoming of forces.  This addition was necessary because an instantaneous snapshot of the power of a force was not enough to characterize it as a force, but reduced it to a mere mechanism and converted the passage of time (qualitative change) into a transcendent dimension. So perhaps what Deleuze is getting at here is that our theory of force has to include both the instantaneous power of forces, but also their instantaneous rates of change.  Both of these variables are necessary to construct a 'phase space' of force.  Differences in power are like a 'spatial' variable that results in different qualities of force (active/reactive), while the rate of change of power is like a 'temporal' variable that results in different qualities of the will to power (affirmative/negative).  

While I'm still not clear yet why the will to power plays a double role (genetic and affective) let's leave this first section with a quote that uses the manner of triumph of reactive forces we discussed last time to illustrate the two step unfolding of the will to power as a feeling of power. 

The affects of force are active insofar as the force appropriates anything that resists it and compels the obedience of inferior forces. When force is affected by superior forces which it obeys its affects are made to submit, or rather, they are acted (agies). Again, obeying is a manifestation of the will to power. But an inferior force can bring about the disintegration or splitting of superior forces, the explosion of the energy which they have accumulated. Nietzsche likes to compare the phenomena of atomic disintegration, the division of protoplasm and the reproduction of organic life (VP II 45, 77, 187). And not only do disintegration, division and separation always express will to power but so do being disintegrated, being separated and being divided ...

1) active force, power of acting or commanding; 2) reactive force, power of obeying or of being acted; 3) developed reactive force, power of splitting up, dividing and separating; 4) active force become reactive, power of being separated, of turning against itself. (NP, 63)

The next subsection 2.12 takes the sequence described here as the default dynamic of forces interacting.   Now that we've discussed the qualities will to power (affects of negation or affirmation) separately from the qualities of force (action and reaction), we can see the triumph of reactive forces in a new light.  They don't triumph by increasing their power (by becoming active) but by decreasing the power of active forces.  Reactive forces separate active forces from what they can do, sever their relations, reduce their capacity, and in short make them become reactive. 

It must not be said that active force becomes reactive because reactive forces triumph; on the con- trary, they triumph because, by separating active force from what it can do, they betray it to the will of nothingness, to a becoming-reactive deeper than themselves. This is why the figures of triumph of reactive forces (ressentiment, bad conscience, and the ascetic ideal) are primarily forms of nihilism. The becoming-reactive, the becoming nihilistic, of force seem to be essential components of the relation of force with force. (NP, 64)

Here we can see the full dynamic of forces.  The will to power determines a force as the active one in a relation.  But then the developing dynamic of that relation determines that this active force manifests a negative will to power.  The active force develops a negative affect, a feeling of being blocked or stymied, so it ends up changing character.  It becomes reactive, and begins to fight against the limits set on it as if these were imposed by a superior external power.  This is a "will to nothingness" in the sense that it's a will to make something (the limits) not exist.  It's a purely destructive will.  Instead of fighting for what it can do, the formerly active force ends up fighting against what it can't do.  It's almost exactly Marathe's distinction between freedom from and freedom to -- freedom from is entirely reactive, the freedom of spoiled children.

Deleuze will go on to talk about the opposite process -- the becoming-active of force -- so why does he present this becoming-reactive as if it were the default case?  The question is related to topics we've already broached like the inevitably reactive role played by facts and laws.  Here he presents it as a question of the "shame of being human".  

But we can ask why we only feel and know a becoming-reactive. Is it not because man is essentially reactive? Because becoming-reactive is constitutive of man? (NP, 64)

I presume that we are defining "man" here as a conscious, rational animal.  We saw at the beginning of this chapter (pg. 39) that consciousness is an inherently reactive force.  In terms of real power it is the slave of the body.  In terms of our conscious explanations of reality, its supposed rationality is the triumph of a slave rebellion that attempts to make the tail wag the dog.  Hence our very "humanity" is the product of the process of becoming-reactive that we just saw described.  Consciousness separates us from the world, restricts its ability to affect us.  Rationality limits our thinking to its laws of common sense.  And beneath the visible tip of these fictions is the submerged iceberg of the unconscious, the body and its power dynamics.  You are not your consciousness, but it certainly encourages you to see it that way.  

Deleuze claims that this is the deepest reason why Nietzsche presents the eternal return as the "greatest weight", and why it at first inspires such nausea in Zarathustra.  Not only will the petty reactive forces also return, but they will even triumph again and again.  Even the active forces will inevitably become reactive.  Even as exciting an evolutionary experiment as humanity will go awry.  If we can't discover a new type of consciousness that would be active, and a new process of becoming-active of forces, the eternal return dooms us to a sort of heat death of forces where all of them eventually express nothing but the negative affects of nihilism.  This would be a much weightier condemnation of existence than simply affirming that our past suffering will also return ... alongside our present happiness.  Instead it would make even our present happiness delusional.  It would also make the Return contradict itself by defining an endpoint.  In short, if there is only a becoming-reactive, ER is the pinnacle of nihilism.

Deleuze follows this distressing vision of a universal becoming-reactive by asking in subsection 2.13 whether there could be a counterbalancing becoming-active.  As a first approach to this question he points out that despite all his criticisms, the power of reactive forces is strangely fascinating for Nietzsche.  His greatest enemies (eg. Christ and Socrates) all come off looking like evil geniuses.  They seem to all possess a secret power, a power of negation and nihilism, to be sure, but one that nevertheless keeps things ... interesting.  

Here we can recognise an ambivalence important to Nietzsche: all the forces whose reactive character he exposes are, a few lines or pages later, admitted to fascinate him, to be sublime because of the perspective they open up for us and because of the disturbing will to power to which they bear witness. They separate us from our power but at the same time they give us another power, "dangerous" and "interesting". (NP, 66)

So Nietzsche's point is not that reactive forces and a negative will to power are necessarily bad.  It even seems there's a possibility that they are strangely creative.  At first, this doesn't seem to make any sense.  Reactive forces, along with forces that have become reactive, are naysayers.  They take orders and try to impose limits based on these orders, or they rage against these limits, respectively.    How could these forces that are necessarily set in motion by others become interesting, creative?  Deleuze only hints at how this might happen in 2.13, and saves the full explanation for the final two subsections.  Basically, reactive forces as such can't be creative.  But if they go so far that they directly affirm their negativity, they can be transformed by a becoming-active.

But whatever the ambivalence of sense and values we cannot conclude that a reactive force becomes active by going to the limit of what it can do. For, to go "to the limit", "to the ultimate consequences", has two senses depending on whether one affirms or denies, whether one affirms one's own difference or denies that which differs. When a reactive force develops to its ultimate consequences it does this in relation to negation, to the will to nothingness which serves as its motive force. Becoming active, on the contrary, presupposes the affinity of action and affirmation; in order to become active it is not sufficient for a force to go to the limit of what it can do, it must make what it can do an object of affirmation. (NP, 68)

We've seen that this idea of enantiodromia is central to Nietzsche's entire philosophy.  When things are pushed to their limit, they convert into their opposite.  In a sense, we're seeing that the affirmation of a limit actually removes it, whereas trying to push it away doesn't work, because it is an entirely negative effort.   This is straight out of Buddhism.  Though of course the deeper point is not that affirmation removes the problem, but that it transforms it, making the previous limit into a phase transition.  

It's at just this point in 2.14 that Deleuze introduces the strange idea that the eternal return is a selective doctrine.  Earlier, he discussed ER as a cosmological doctrine designed to be the principle of an unlimited becoming that rejected all steady states or closed cycles.  This resulted in an interpretation of ER as an infinite splitting of time within each moment.  What returns is everything, but it comes back inside any particular thing.  The idea that this same doctrine of the Return could somehow be selective just doesn't seem to make sense at first.  Selection seems to imply some sort of change between repetitions, as well as some point of view or set of values to base the selection on.  Nevertheless, it's true that Nietzsche does present ER this way sometimes.  He makes its affirmation into an ethical imperative to rival Kant's categorical one. 

As an ethical thought the eternal return is the new formulation of the practical synthesis: whatever you will, will it in such a way that you also will its eternal return. "If, in all that you will you begin by asking yourself: is it certain that I will to do it an infinite number of times? This should be your most solid centre of gravity" (NP, 68)

Interpreting ER this way turns it into an existential selection like the one Kathleen Marie Higgins discussed.   As Deleuze points out, if we were to look at our actions through this ethical lens, we would stop doing all those petty reactive things that we now permit ourselves with the thought that they're just this one time, and it's not a big deal.  The doctrine would truly give each of our actions "the greatest weight" because it would 'eternalize' them in a way analogous to how the categorical imperative 'universalizes' them.  We would have to imagine everything we do duplicated endlessly; we would have to want any action taken to this limit.  I have no doubt that this is part of what Nietzsche had in mind with the idea.  

But in other moments, he seems to present a different version of the Return.  He says that things will return anyhow, whether you believe in ER or not.  This is clearly a perspective that makes more sense given the content of the doctrine.  After all, how are we expected to make an existential selection to act in a certain way if the action has already happened innumerable times?  There's a more mysterious and paradoxical reading of ER that emphasizes a way in which the only action it asks of us is an affirmation of the "unbearable lightness" of our being.  It asks us simply to affirm that there is no selector and no selection, to affirm our powerlessness.  We've already seen this basic idea under the guise of affirming chance.  Now though, Deleuze would like to recast it as a question of a negative will to power going so far that it actually affirms its own nihilism.  At that point it would transmute into its opposite through a becoming-active, just as we earlier saw the affirmation of chance come back in the form of necessity.  

I think Deleuze would like us to think of this transformation as a type of selection.  He's not talking about a selection where someone goes through a list of possibilities and picks out one that best matches a pre-existing scheme or criteria.  That would be how the existential selection we just discussed works.  The deeper selection is something more like a cultivation, an evolutionary or 'natural' selection that works like a selective breeding.  There's no fixed image of what form is to be selected that we can identify in advance.  All the selecting happens at the level of saying "yes" or saying "no" to the results of our experiment.  We select only by deciding to continue cultivating, or deciding to stop.  

This kind of selection as cultivation is meant to be deeper than the existential version because it does away with the need to have a human selector.  The idea here is that the mechanism of the eternal return will automatically and naturally perform this selective cultivation by letting the affirmative forces continue affirming while forcing the negative forces to negate themselves.  The Return is in fact a nihilistic doctrine -- "This is the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the "meaningless"), eternally!" (WP, #55).  But it takes nihilism to its limit, and then affirms even this nihilism.  Nihilism overcomes itself.   

Why is the eternal return called "the most extreme form of nihilism". ... Only the eternal return makes the nihilistic will whole and complete. (NP, 69)

The will to nothingness was the universal becoming-reactive, the becoming-reactive of forces. This is the sense in which nihilism is always incomplete on its own. Even the ascetic ideal is the opposite of what we might think, "it is an expedient of the art of conserving life". Nihilism is the principle of conservation of a weak, diminished, reactive life. (NP, 69)

What happens when the will to nothingness is related to the eternal return? This is the only place where it breaks its alliance with reactive forces. Only the eternal return can complete nihilism because it makes negation a negation of reactive forces themselves. By and in the eternal return nihilism no longer expresses itself as the conservation and victory of the weak but as their destruction, their self-destruction. (NP, 70)

The self-destruction of reactive forces completes the description of the cycle of force that Deleuze has been building up over the course of this chapter (cf. the four point summaries on pg. 63 and 67).  First there was an active-reactive split.  Then reactive forces triumphed by separating active forces from what they can do.  This made them become-reactive, turning against their original affirmative and active character.  Then finally we see that reactive forces, if they go all the way to affirming their nihilistic will to power, can actually destroy themselves in a becoming-active.  While this may sound like some sort of dialectical cycle, Deleuze has already given us the tools to understand how these two cycles are different -- their relations of difference and identity are totally reversed.  For Hegel, affirmation pertained only to identity, not difference (non-identity, otherness).  For Nietzsche, it's only difference that can be affirmed, and identity is always a concept of limit and negation.  His initial active force is constituted not by a self-affirmation but by an affirmation of its difference from, and superiority to, the reactive force.  You might call it a sort of 'self-affirmation from without'.  The active force doesn't negate the identity of the reactive force, but affirms its difference.  The initial reactive force, however, is all about negating the identity of the active force that has mastered it, separating this force from its power and grinding it down.  Then in the becoming-reactive of active force, an active force turns against itself because the original affirmation of its difference is converted into a negation of the limits to that difference (which is almost a sort of 'other-identity') imposed by the reactive force.  And finally, when reactive forces become-active, they end up negating their identity.  The dialectic is always affirming the inside by negating the outside.  Nietzsche is always affirming the outside, even if this happens to mean negating the inside.  The roles of difference and identity, outside and inside, change and stasis, are exactly inverted.

Deleuze outlines this whole process again on pgs. 69-71, starting with the quotes I included above.

Turning against oneself should not be confused with this destruction of self, this self-destruction, in the reactive process of turning against oneself active force becomes reactive. In self-destruction reactive forces are themselves denied and led to nothingness. This is why self-destruction is said to be an active operation an "active destruction" (NP, 70)

The second selection in the eternal return is thus the following: the eternal return produces becoming-active. It is sufficient to relate the will to nothingness to the eternal return in order to realise that reactive forces do not return. However far they go, however deep the becoming-reactive of forces, reactive forces will not return. The small, petty, reactive man will not return. In and through the eternal return negation as a quality of the will to power transmutes itself into affirmation, it becomes an affirmation of negation itself, it becomes a power of affirming, an affirmative power.  This is what Nietzsche presents as Zarathustra's cure and Dionysus' secret. "Nihilism vanquished by itself" thanks to the eternal return. (NP, 71)

The eternal return is a process of purification that works through repetition alone.  An analogy might be the way numbers behave when raised to the N-th power -- presuming N > 1, every starting point greater than one heads off towards infinity, while anything less than one converges towards zero.  On each pass of the cycle, more negation is negated, until we are left with nothing but affirmation, even though this affirmation has become so universal that it includes even negation, so long as this negation goes all the way to its limit and negates itself.  It's quite a circuitous route, anything but a simple circle.  So perhaps a better metaphor than simple exponentiation would be the fractal border of the Mandlebrot set (likewise constructed by the effects of repeatedly raising something to a power).  This complexity makes sense though, since the Return is in service of a universal becoming that never stops producing something new but that only does this by transforming something old.  As Deleuze and Guattarri will later elaborate, it's a music of infinite variations on the same theme -- a cosmic fugue.  

The final subsection 2.15 elaborates on the way that an unlimited becoming flows from a single becoming, from becoming-active alone.  Only the affirmative will to power, and its corresponding affect of joy, can survive the cycle of ER.  I think this is meant to show us how the cycle closes (or perhaps more accurately, opens) and the being of an active force is only produced through the affirmation of becoming.  In other words, the differential and genetic element of the will to power which began the cycle always operates through an affirmation of negation (of difference, novelty, 'mutation').  Being is only produced by the affirmation of becoming (a species of non-being) or by "making an affirmation of becoming".   So within the 'original' active/reactive split is a becoming-active that can only be traced back to the overcoming of another split, ad infinitum.  

The eternal return thus has a double aspect: it is the universal being of becoming, but the universal being of becoming ought to belong to a single becoming. Only becoming-active has a being which is the being of the whole of becoming. Returning is everything but everything is affirmed in a single moment. (NP, 72)

Unlimited becoming, the being of becoming, the time crystal, and anything as the eternal return of everything.  These are all the same idea in various guises.

The Cultivation of The Eternal Return 1

While it may court disaster, I'm going to treat the final nine subsections of chapter 2 (2.7-15) as a unit.  Part of the reason for this is that Deleuze leaves notes at several points that his analysis here is provisional and in need of completion through concepts that will presumably appear later in the book.  Which suggests that your friend and humble narrator's failure to adequately understand this section is not entirely unexpected.  In addition, these subsections hang together as a development of the problem we left off with last time -- what is the relationship between forces and the will to power?  Read what follows as a first draft of a response.

A force doesn't exist by itself, but only in a relationship with another force.  This relationship is a product of chance.  Two forces happen to collide.  However, the way this relationship is structured is due to the principle of the will to power.  The will to power is the differential and genetic element which distinguishes forces at the same time as it holds them together in a relation.  The basic distinction that the will to power creates is that between active and reactive forces.  This is the dualistic split which we saw last time was related to the splitting of time into past and future that happens within every present.  Another way to put this is to say that it is the will to power that causes forces to become active or reactive.  This choice of terminology is no accident.  Saying that the will to power involves forces in a 'becoming' is meant to nuance the idea that the will to power creates forces as such.  In a sense, the will to power is creative, generative.  But in another sense, its role is more like an agent of transformation.  It doesn't create something from nothing, but it always produces something new.  Becoming always starts in the middle, but one of Deleuze's characteristic ideas is to make this middle an origin (or to make the origin a middle).  Clearly this involves us in paradox, or at least in a confusing recursive feedback loop.  This shouldn't be a huge surprise at this point, since the idea that "the origin always already happened and now we're repeating it" sounds almost like a direct restatement of ER.

The paradox of becoming as an origin might be the main force behind Deleuze's decision to introduce a qualitative split even into the will to power.  The will to power splits forces into active and reactive, but is itself split into affirmative and negative qualities.  So the will to power can be an affirmative and creative principle, or it can be a principle of negation, destruction, and nihilism.  It's beyond good and evil.

Affirming and denying, appreciating and depreciating, express the will to power just as acting and reacting express force. (And just as reactive forces are still forces, the will to deny, nihilism, is still will to power: " ... a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! GM III 28 p. 163) (NP, 54)

Force can have two qualities and, independently of that, the will to power can have two qualities (WtP doesn't seem to be associated with any quantity).  This gives us a sort of matrix where, beyond the obvious alliances between active forces and affirmation and reactive forces and negation, a force could be active, but express a negative will to power, and, conversely, a reactive force might somehow express an affirmative will.  These are like secondary effects (splits within splits) that can transform the quality of being of a force, making it become something new.  In other words, things are more complicated than we thought at first.  

As far as I can tell, the point of introducing this complexity is to keep things interesting, in both a theoretical and an ontological sense.  Like we said last time, the will to power is an ontological concept designed to answer the question of how there can always be something new, how becoming can be unlimited.  If forces created by the will to power could be forever and permanently labeled as active or reactive, we would not have accomplished this goal.  In this case the forces would be static and the will to power would sit completely outside the universe, determining the forces at work within it the same way we imagine God's divine plan or natural laws to determine the course of earthly events.  Instead, we have to see the will to power, this seemingly most crucial determining factor, as a sort of nothing-in-itself (in D&R this becomes difference-in-itself, which is related tot eh later concept of the body without organs).  Deleuze never quite says it this way, so maybe I'm missing something, but the real secret of the will to power seems to be that it doesn't do anything.  Despite its power as a principle, it doesn't really act on its own.  It requires forces to act on its behalf and express it, while it alone simply affirms or negates, says "yes" or says "no".  It is pure belief, distinct from desire.  This fits with the idea that the will to power as origin is also a middle.  It's like a pure potentiality, not a pre-existing plan or origin point that comes before every force, but a sort of inexhaustible reserve of possibility that comes between any two configurations of force.  

... affirmation and negation extend beyond action and reaction because they are the immediate qualities of becoming itself. Affirmation is not action but the power of becoming active, becoming active personified. Negation is not simple reaction but a becoming reactive. It is as if affirmation and negation were both immanent and transcendent in relation to action and reaction; out of the web of forces they make up the chain of becoming. (NP, 54)

Adding a second layer of qualities also keeps things interesting from a theoretical perspective, because it allows us to address some obvious questions that come up with the theory of power we've been constructing.  For example, what happens if the slaves win?  What if the reactive forces, though individually less powerful, somehow team up and overcome an active force?  If the only distinction available to us was the active/reactive split defined by a difference in quantity at the level of force, then we would have to say that whatever force in fact triumphs at any moment is the dominant, and therefore active, one.  Adding a second distinction at the level of the will to power allows Deleuze to say that reactive forces don't triumph by virtue of somehow increasing their own power and thereby becoming active, but by decreasing the power of active forces, by separating these forces from what they can do and making them become reactive.  

... even by getting together reactive forces do not form a greater force, one that would be active. They proceed in an entirely different way - they decompose; they separate active force from what it can do; they take away a part or almost all of its power. In this way reactive forces do not become active but, on the contrary, they make active forces join them and become reactive in a new sense. (NP, 57)

If the interpretation of forces depended on nothing but an instantaneous quantitative comparison of power and a corresponding instantaneous quality, it would be a pretty dull affair.  We could simply read the quality of forces at work directly from the current state of the world.  Who is winning now?  Well, then, that's the active one, now.   This way of measuring the power of a force would actually serve to effectively do away with its quality, and ultimately even with its distinction as a force.  As we observed before, this type of temporal atomism is the high point of the mechanistic view of the world, and it surreptitiously serves to deconstruct the notion of force entirely.  It posits one state of affairs with one configurations of 'forces' and then another state of affairs with a different configuration, but there's not really an immanent way to get from the first point to the second.  Why would we even say that the same 'forces' are at work if all we get are two unrelated snapshots?  If we rely on natural law to join the points into a trajectory, we are appealing to something outside the world of instantaneous forces, precisely something that 'forces' them to obey laws.  But this is antithetical to the entire concept of a force as positive 'power of doing' that can only be limited by another (really existing) force.  We might say that since nothing can resist the laws of nature, then they don't even need to push; pushing and resistance to pushing are the essence of force.  Mechanism as a type of 'instantaneous interpretation' actually so dissolves the identity of forces that we lose the concept entirely.    

While a force doesn't have an identity, it does have a becoming.  Forces too must have a becoming, or we will not be able to understand the passage of time.  We need the whole history (the genealogy) of a force in order to interpret it, and in order to value it.  An instantaneous interpretation interpretation oversimplifies the temporal depth of the world of forces.  Genealogy restores to forces a trajectory, a becoming, but an immanent one, where the future is folded inside the present instead of added to the outside.  This is why Deleuze continually insists on the subtlety and delicacy of the art of interpretation.  We have to see the whole unfolding or becoming of a force as somehow contained within the genetic element of the will to power (though this interior will be constructed through recursion).  

Concretely speaking, the point here is that the universe can't be contained in an infinitely thin snapshot and that history of forces matter to an interpretation of their quality.  Thus, even though reactive forces may triumph over active forces in fact, if they express a negative will to power, one that only seeks to separate active forces from their power, then they remain qualitatively reactive even in victory.  

We have said that active forces are the superior, dominant and strongest forces. But inferior forces can prevail without ceasing to be inferior in quantity and reactive in quality, without ceasing to be slaves in this sense. (NP, 58)

At first blush the theory of force may appear to be a species of "might makes right" theory.  Whoever is winning now is the good guy, the active force.  And calling the principle of this theory the "will to power" only seems to reinforce this interpretation.  Everybody wants to win, right?  Now we can see that this is all classic Nietzschean masking and misdirection.   Nietzsche always shouts the opposite of what he means; he only whispers his real message.  In reality, the whole theory of interpreting force and evaluating the will to power behind it shows us that we cannot conclude anything important from the bare fact of the current state of the world.  "There are no facts, only interpretations".  We cannot leave time out of our theory, nor can we add it from the outside.  

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What's more, the very attempt to see the world as a set of inert facts or separated instants is itself a product of reactive forces.  In passage after passage Deleuze points to a deep complementarity between the view that atomizes existence into a set of snapshot facts, the notion that forces must be 'ruled' by laws that limit what they can do, and the triumph of those reactive forces that rob the world of its possibilities.  So, far from the factual might of the law making right, Nietzsche's theory of force suggests that most of the 'powers that be' will, in fact, be the 'wrong' kind of power.   They will only reflect forces of reaction and powers of negation and limit.  But everywhere we look, these slaves appear to be masters.  This is a tricky but crucial point, so I want to spend some time examining in detail the ways Deleuze approaches it.

Deleuze first discusses slaves' peculiar habit of triumphing when he talks about the "inverted image" of the origin in subsection 2.8.  By "origin" he means the point where the will to power differentiates between active and reactive forces on the basis of their difference in quantity of power.  This, though, is only a description of the origin seen "right side up", that is, from the perspective of active forces that affirm themselves through their difference.  The reactive forces have a different interpretation of what happened.

Reactive force, even when it obeys, limits active force, imposes limitations and partial restrictions on it and is already controlled by the spirit of the negative (GM II11). This is why the origin itself, in one sense, includes an inverted self-image; seen from the side of reactive forces the differential and genealogical element appears upside down, difference has become negation, affirmation has become contradiction. An inverted image of the origin accompanies the origin; "yes" from the point of view of active forces becomes "no" from the point of view of reactive forces and affirmation of the self becomes negation of the other. (NP, 56)

Basically, reactive forces see the origin of any new power as a threat that must be eliminated.  For them, difference is always a problem, a departure from equilibrium or a violation of the law.  In other words, these forces see difference as something that should be prevented from having an effect, at best negated, and at worst adapted to in order to preserve the status quo.  Reactive forces are always fighting off the origin of anything new.  Deleuze's example of this inverted image is quite telling:  

Its image then appears as that of an "evolution". 

 

Whether it is English or German, evolutionism, is the reactive image of genealogy. Thus it is characteristic of reactive forces to deny, from the start, the difference which constitutes them at the start, to invert the differential element from which they derive and to give a deformed image of it. (NP, 56)

How does Darwinism see difference, novelty?  As nothing but dangerous mutation!  But it's precisely these mutations that have collected over the eons to define the organism.  A replicator is really nothing but a long history of mutations.  The idea of "mutation" only changes valence when it can be assimilated to the existing organism as an "adaptation".  This is the whole world seen upside down though, as if each organism were the center of the universe, a fixed entity in itself rather than a tiny eddy in a great stream of evolutionary becoming.  In this sense, the survival of the fittest becomes the survival of the most boring replicator; these successfully negate the power any new variation as a threat to their incessant and utterly predictable copying.

"The strong always have to be defended against the weak" (VP I 395). We cannot use the state of a system of forces as it in fact is, or the result of the struggle between forces, in order to decide which are active and which are reactive.  Nietzsche remarks, against Darwin and evolutionism, "Supposing, however, that this struggle exists - and it does indeed occur - its outcome is the reverse of that desired by the school of Darwin, of that which one ought perhaps to desire with them: namely, the defeat of the stronger, the more privileged, the fortunate exceptions" (NP, 58)

The same idea that the power of difference has to be restrained or neutralized appears again in the next subsection 2.9 when Deleuze discusses Plato's Gorgias.  Socrates' final sparring partner in that dialogue is a young man called Callicles who indeed sounds remarkably like Nietzsche (for an example, read the quote in that post).  Callicles argues that power is just power and has nothing to do with our societal concept of justice.  Anyone who argues otherwise is just trying to corrupt the noble youth of Athens and create a herd of slaves trained to disavow their own natural power.  Yeah, I'm looking at you Socrates.  From Callicles' perspective, laws are entirely unnatural.  They serve to limit the power of the strong by separating them from their own capability.  In a stroke of reactive genius, they even try to convince the strongest that they're better off ... submitting to those weaker than them and themselves becoming weak.  

Everything that separates a force from what it can do he [Callicles] calls law. Law, in this sense, expresses the triumph of the weak over the strong. Nietzsche adds: the triumph of reaction over action. Indeed, everything which separates a force is reactive as is the state of a force separated from what it can do. Every force which goes to the limit of its power is, on the contrary, active. It is not a law that every force goes to the limit, it is even the opposite of law.  (NP, 58)

In this context, we can clearly see how Nietzshce's theory of force puts a subtle but significant twist on Callicles' argument that, of course it's better to be powerful than just.  Contrary to what Socrates thinks, justice under the law is just the form of power of the weakest.  Force has its own immanent 'law', its own will to power, which is to try and go to the limit of its power, to do everything it can do.  What's 'natural' is an affirmative will to power that repels any limits to our power.  Reactive forces and their negative will to power can nevertheless triumph by separating an active force from what it can do, by limiting its possibilities.  In fact, everywhere we find an appeal to natural or political law, we're witnessing the triumph of reactive forces.  In practice, the 'law' (perhaps more like the habit) of the world is that the weak typically win and the strong must be defended against this propensity.  In place of a simple measure of "power", Nietzsche substitutes a measure of how actively and affirmatively a forces goes to "the limit of its power".  This completely changes the theory of "might makes right" and prevents us from discovering who is truly powerful just by looking at who currently has the upper hand in terms of numbers.  It becomes a question of what you want to cultivate in your garden.

Finally, Deleuze approaches the same question of how, despite their weakness, the slaves usually win by discussing Nietzsche's critique of positivists and "free thinkers".  We've all met the type of thinker he's talking about here.  This is the modern market fundamentalist or conservative apologist.  These folks pride themselves on their liberalism (in the classic sense) and humanism (in the existential sense).  They always appeal to the open and empirical values of science.  But somehow, mysteriously, their values and conclusions always seem to exactly echo the status quo of the society they find themselves in.  These are the people who argue that the rich are obviously better because they have triumphed in our "free market" economy.  Just as Hegel's absolute spirit reached its culmination as he penned the final line of The Phenomenology of Spirit, the free thinker's scientific history always makes the facts of the moment looks inevitable.  

These are the free thinkers. They say: "What are you complaining about? How could the weak have triumphed if they did not form superior force?" "Let us bow down before accomplished fact" (GM I 9). This is modern positivism. They claim to carry out the critique of values, they claim to refuse all appeals to transcendent values, they declare them unfashionable, but only in order to rediscover them as the forces which run the world of today. (NP. 59)

Free thinkers use facts like a police truncheon to clear Quine's "slum of possibles" and to restore an order threatened by ... well, by all that free thinking.  They are always compelling us with these facts (sound of one hand emphatically pounding table) and what they prove about how the world must be.  For Nietzsche the way this view dresses up its interpretation as an absence of interpretation, as just the facts, makes it the epitome of a weak and reactive force powered by a will to deny itself.  

The measure of forces and their qualification does not depend on absolute quantity but rather on relative accomplishment. Strength or weakness cannot be judged by taking the result and success of struggle as a criterion. For, once again, it is a fact that the weak triumph: it is even the essence of fact. (NP, 60)

Next time we'll explore just how far this will to negate itself can go.

The World Is Neither True Nor Real But Living

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?

Being Immanuel Kant

The first part of subsection 3.6 "Principles for the Philosophy of the Will" provides a succinct summary of how Nietzsche's theory of the will to power differs from prior theories of will and power.  Then it continues by setting the tone for the next 4 subsections (3.7-3.10) all of which deal in some way with the difference between Nietzschean and Kantian critique.  The theme holding all this together is an extension of the question we've been asking for a while now: who or which one critiques?  

"Who must undertake critique, who is fit to undertake it?" (NP, 88)

We already know the answer: at bottom, the will to power is always the one that ... (critiques, in this case).  We answer this way though, not because the will to power is some general transcendent principle that defines what the will wants in every empirical instance.  On the contrary, the will to power is what Deleuze keeps calling a "mobile, variable, plastic" principle.  What "power" means is actually defined by (and defines) the relations between forces that characterize any particular instance of the will (which, we recall, is just a force operating on another force).  It's almost like saying that power, as the 'principle' of the relation between forces, creates the will (which perhaps explains why Nietzsche can say in other places that, "there is no such thing as 'Will'").  There's no will that does not originate in and reflect a concrete hierarchy of power.  In this sense, the theory of the will to power is similar to what we usually call perspectivism, with the important caveat that in Nietzsche's theory, it's the perspective that creates the subject, rather than the pre-established subject that possesses one (or various) perspectives.  In the current context, this means that we must acknowledge up front that our critique in not universal, but comes from a particular perspective and embodies a particular will to power, namely, the one that constitutes our will.  The principle question then becomes what type of will does our critique express?

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Deleuze does a nice job summarizing his interpretation of the will to power on pages 84-85.  The key point is that willing is creative and joyous.  The will doesn't want to get a particular object that already exists.  Instead, as will to power, it fabricates that object as a valuable thing to want right now, at the same time that it fabricates itself as a willing subject with the power to possess that object.  In the will to power it is power that wills, that differentiates one force from another and creates a hierarchy or system of forces. 

Will to power does not imply any anthropomorphism in its origin, signification or essence. Will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is the one that wills in the will. Power is the genetic and differential element in the will. This is why the will is essentially creative. (NP, 85)

Power is the ability to affect and be affected, to be connected to or capable of interacting with other stuff.  All power 'wants', all it does, is to go to the limit of this ability, to do everything it can do.  This limit is defined by the particular quality and relation of forces.  There's obviously something circular going on here.  Power produces a certain relation of forces where one attains an active quality and others react to it.  But then this relation of forces determines the quality of power (affirmative or negative) expressed by the hierarchy that was constructed.  Power seems to be expressed through a cycle involving the being of forces (active/reactive) and their becoming (affirmation and negation define a becoming-active or becoming-reactive).  

The genetic element (power) determines the relation of force with force and qualifies related forces. As plastic element it simultaneously determines and is determined, simultaneously qualifies and is qualified. What the will to power wills is a particular relation of forces, a particular quality of forces. And also a particular quality of power: affirming or denying. This complex, which varies in every case, forms a type to which given phenomena correspond. (NP, 85)

Power creates a will that wills to fully express this power.  This positive feedback loop can't be said to have any goal outside itself.  It operates, that is all.  Its operations define the signification of an object and the type of subject that values it.  Which is why Nietzsche will call it the "bestowing virtue" -- what bestows virtue.  

In this way the will to power is essentially creative and giving: it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power. It gives: power is something inexpressible in the will (something mobile, variable, plastic); power is in the will as "the bestowing virtue", through power the will itself bestows sense and value. (NP, 85)

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With this summary of the will to power in mind, we can move on and ask what type of will to power animates Nietzsche's own critique (and along the way analyze what type animates Kantian critique).  It will come as no shock that Deleuze discovers a negative will behind the Kantian critique and a positive and affirmative one behind Nietzsche's revaluation of the concept.  What's fascinating though is the implications this observation has for our understanding of the whole complex of concepts we've been discussing.  Nietzsche understands true critique as an affirmative becoming-active which, paradoxically, is only reached through the way the selective power of the eternal return causes the negative will to power to negate itself, and thus transmute into an affirmation of difference. Essentially, Deleuze is trying to bring the will to power, ER, and nihilism together into a neo-Kantian framework.  But this complex is treated in very compressed form, so it will take me a while to unpack it.  

Thus the typology of forces and the doctrine of the will to power are inseparable, in turn, from a critique which can be used to determine the genealogy of values, their nobility and baseness. - Of course one may ask in what sense and why noble is "worth more" than base or high "worth more" than low. By what right? There is no possible reply to this question if as we consider the will to power in itself or abstractly, as merely endowed with two opposite qualities, affirmation and negation. Why should affirmation be better than negation?  We will see that the solution can only be given by the test of the eternal return: what is better and better absolutely is that which returns, that which can bear returning, that which wills its return. (NP, 86)

 

We've mostly been discussing the will to power as a philosophical principle "in itself or abstractly".  But Nietzsche's whole point has been that behind every object there is a will to power that operates to produce both the sense and value of the object, as well as the signifying and valuing subject that corresponds to it.  And behind Nietzsche's philosophy is a concrete will to power that values affirmation over negation.  This will operates like an affirmation of affirmation.  In other words, it's a sort of self affirmation.  But what kind of self could be affirmed here?  It can't be our usual conscious, self-identical ego that defines itself as an interiority separated from everything exterior.  Nietzsche doesn't believe in the innate existence of this essential and atomic self, and we've seen how he considers its fabrication to be a product of reactive forces and the will to negation.  For a concrete will to power to affirm its self, it would actually need to affirm everything -- all the things that go into the hierarchy that define, and are defined by, this will to power.  In the simplest schematic example with one active and one reactive force, the affirmative will to power will need to affirm exactly that reactive force without which the active force cannot become what it is.  It doesn't affirm its identity, but the difference which distinguishes it from, but also holds it together with, its 'opposite'.  The affirmative self is a dissolved self, one that requires a medium in which it re-crystalizes.

But we've seen this whole structure before in exploring the way the eternal return cultivates (selects) through an affirmation so total that it affirms even negation.  And we've seen it before in the way that the the joyful is just the affirmation of the tragic.  Complete self affirmation must extend even to the affirmation of the 'other'.  Conversely, we've also seen that we only reach this active self-affirmation though a becoming-active that proceeded via the reactive force affirming its own power of negation.  This is the way the eternal return 'selects' the affirmative will to power.  If each concrete will to power wills itself, affirmative power ends up reinforcing itself, while negative power destroys itself.  Reactive forces, in affirming themselves and their own power of negation, end up negating themselves and transmuting themselves in a becoming active.  By contrast, active forces, in affirming themselves and their own power of affirmation, end up affirming their affinity with negation and the 'other' reactive forces.  Perhaps we can think of this affirmation of the 'opposite' either statically, as the affirmation of a necessary multi-layer hierarchy that includes the reactive, or dynamically, as an affirmation of the self-destruction of reactive forces required to become-active.  The basic message of ER is that affirmative will to power is self reinforcing; negative will to power is self defeating.

Negation limits itself, whereas affirmation increases without limit.  It sounds like we're discussing the difference between a positive or a negative feedback loop.  Normally, we think of either of these circuits as "self-reinforcing", and indeed, it's important to understand that either represents a will to power.  However, if we look more closely, we see the two types are not symmetrical.  A positive feedback loop doesn't reinforce it self so much as simply continue growing and expanding to infinity, engulfing everything it can.  A negative feedback loop, by contrast, doesn't actually reinforce itself so much as reinforces or preserves whatever equilibrium point it is set around.  In fact, a negative feedback loop tends to diminish itself and turn itself off.  In other words, a positive feedback loop genuinely reinforces itself, without needing to have any fixed concept of self; a negative feedback loop does not reinforce itself and is parasitic on some fixed concept of self that is external to its operation.  One might be tempted to object here that, surely, DNA replication constitutes a positive feedback loop of geometric growth.  Recalling the various critiques of Darwinism we've seen though, we might respond that life is actually the interaction of a positive and a negative feedback loop.  Does DNA really try to replicate its self, or does it merely spread or grow in space and time just lie a crystal does?  It's only the existence of an error correcting mechanism -- a negative feedback loop -- that introduces the concept of a self here at all.  I assert again that what's really positive and creative about life is the variation, not the replication.  This variation belongs to no one.

It may not be immediately obvious that this whole discussion is meant to answer the question of "who critiques?".  The affirmative will to power is the only true, complete, radical, and immanent critic.  And its critique operates through a self destruction of the negative within us.  In this sense, critique is always self critique, never the criticism of an other.  Finally, this critique is also joyful, in the sense that it increases our power, it removes our limits.  Its negation is in service of an active and creative will.  It tears down the fabrications and illusions that separate us from our power, it critiques these self imposed limits that made us become-reactive. Imagine Kant with a vajra.  

The eternal return transmutes the negative: it turns the heavy into something light, it makes the negative cross over to affirmation, it makes negation a power of affirming. But negation in this new form has become critique: destruction becomes active, aggression profoundly linked to affirmation. Critique is destruction as joy, the aggression of the creator. The creator of values cannot be distinguished from a destroyer, from a criminal or from a critic: a critic of established values, reactive values and baseness. (NP, 87)

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I think once we understand this connection between the concept of critique and the metaphysics of the will to power and eternal return we can easily understand the way the next three subsections contrast Nietzsche to Kant.  Subsection 3.7 simply observes that the inner logic of the plan of the Genealogy of Morals mirrors Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.  Having not read the latter I won't spend any time on this point.  Subsection 3.8 tells us that Kant's idea of critique merely intends to replace the content of one ideal with another.  He does nothing to critique the form of life that required an ideal to begin with.  Since all transcendent ideals are expressions of a negative will to power this means that Kant's notion of critique is still reactive.  He critiques pure reason only in an attempt to enshrine a perfected version of it.  He critiques our idea of God as a mystification, but then substitutes for it a mystic interiority of the subject that functions the same way.  It's a strange betrayal where Kant sets out to make a radical and total critique but arrives at the most conservative possible conclusions -- we should behave as if all our established ideas were true.  

If man is a reactive being what right has he to undertake a critique? Does the recuperation of religion stop us being religious? By turning theology into anthropology, by putting man in God's place, do we abolish the essential, that is to say, the place? All these ambiguities begin with the Kantian critique.  (NP, 88)

In subsection 3.9 we discover that Kant's notion of immanent critique was merely circular.  He wanted reason to critique itself, to discipline itself, to be the judge in its own trial.  But this requires some transcendent idea of what constitutes "reason", which of course we can only form through reason.  We need never leave the comfort of our established values.  By contrast, with his discovery of the will to power, Nietzsche is able to ask how reason is actually formed, and thus to ask whether what needs criticizing is not simply the particular contents but perhaps the whole form of reason.  

Trascendental principles are principles of conditioning and not of internal genesis. We require a genesis of reason itself, and also a genesis of the understanding and its categories: what are the forces of reason and of the understanding? What is the will which hides and expresses itself in reason? What stands behind reason, in reason itself? (NP, 91)

As we saw, understanding the connection between ER and the will to power provides for a truly immanent critique.  In becoming an active self-destruction of the negative concepts that limits us, Nietzschean critique transmutes our reactive forces into creative and "legislative" forces.  We don't critique in the name of some other pre-existing and transcendental value, but in the name of the freedom to impose a law on ourselves as we go -- the law of the Return.  The will to power's self-critique and the self destruction we saw it involved are at the same time a form of self creation.  As Zarathustra puts it, we don't go over without going under.  For Deleuze and Nietzsche, this immanent creation through critique is what defines philosophy and differentiates it from religion.  

It is not that the philosopher must add the activity of legislator to his other activities because he is in the best position to do this - as if his own subjection to wisdom qualified him to discover the best possible laws to which men in their turn ought to be subjected. The point is a completely different one: that the philosopher, as philosopher, is not a sage, that the philosopher, as philosopher, ceases to obey, that he replaces the old wisdom by command, that he destroys the old values and creates new ones, that the whole of his science is legislative in this sense. "Their 'knowing' is creating, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is - will to power" (BGE 211). (P, 92)

Finally, subsection 3.10 is a summary of the contrast between Nietzsche and Kant.  I think we've covered most of these points, but two of them stand out.  First, critique is creative, and what it creates is the Overhuman.  If we've been following along, we now can't confuse this concept with some concrete new ideal or goal for individual human beings.  The overhuman is a completely different form of the human -- precisely the form that went under itself through critique, and thereby transmuted all the negative and reactive aspects of its previous ideals.  

The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the Overman, the overcome, overtaken man. The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility. (NP, 94)

Second, there's an interesting point here about about what Nietzsche means by "irrationalism".  We're criticizing reason in the name of the will to power.  Clearly, in some sense this will is 'irrational', since it lies outside of reason.  Does this that Nietzsche criticizes reason from the perspective of a romantic, that is, on the basis of some sort of feeling or passion?  Deleuze answers that no, this is a critique of reasonable thought by some other type of thought.  Reason does not have a monopoly on thought that can only be opposed by some other faculty like feeling or sensing.  Nietzsche's critique of reason is still from within thought.

It is a serious mistake to think that irrationalism opposes anything but thought to reason - whether it be the rights of the given, of the heart, of feeling, caprice or passion. In irrationalism we are concerned only with thought, only with thinking. What is opposed to reason is thought itself; what is opposed to the reasonable being is the thinker himself. Because it is reason which receives and expresses the rights of that which dominates thought, thought reconquers its rights and becomes a legislator against reason: the dicethrow, this was the sense of the dicethrow. (NP, 93)

 

This brings up an obvious question.  What does this other 'irrational' kind of thought look like?  How does our thinking work when it is not dominated by the limits of reason?  That's really the question for the rest of this chapter.