14
Lawrence J. Hatab
What can be said about the kind of beings we are, about our “selves?” Nietzsche’s thinking on human selfhood is enormously complicated. With his philosophy of radical becoming, any talk of a “self” has to confront the ambiguities of an ungrounded phenomenon, which cannot be grasped as a “kind.” Selfhood, for Nietzsche, is always emergent within a dynamic of life forces that will disallow any impulse toward “identity.” Nietzsche therefore rejects the modern model of an individual, unified, substantive, autonomous self. Selfhood cannot involve an enduring substance or a unified subject that grounds attributes, that stands “behind” activities as a causal source (BGE 19–21). There is no substantive self behind or even distinct from performance: “There is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (GM I, 13; KSA 5, 279).
More than anything it is language that subsidizes these mistaken models of selfhood. Human experience and thinking are decentered processes, but the “grammatical habit” of using subjects and predicates, nouns, and verbs, tricks us into assigning an “I” as the source of thinking (BGE 17; KSA 5, 31). Human experience is much too fluid and complicated to be reducible to linguistic units (BGE 19), and the vaunted philosophical categories of “subject,” “ego,” and “consciousness” are nothing more than linguistic fictions that cover up the dynamics of experience and that in fact are created to protect us from the precariousness of an ungrounded process. Such a protection-project is the source of human “illness,” for Nietzsche, namely, the incapacity to accept the finitude of natural life.
Selfhood, for Nietzsche, is also not a stable unity, but an arena for an irresolvable contest of differing drives, each seeking mastery (BGE 6, 36). There is no single subject, but rather a “multiplicity of subjects, whose interplay and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness” (WP 490; KSA 11, 650). Nietzsche’s agonistic psychology does not suggest that the self is an utter chaos. He does allow for a shaping of the self, but this requires a difficult and demanding procedure of counter-cropping the drives so that a certain mastery can be achieved. This is one reason why Nietzsche thinks that the modern promotion of universal freedom is careless and even dangerous (TI Skirmishes, 41). Contrary to modern optimism about the rational pursuit of happiness, Nietzsche sees the natural and social field of play as much more precarious and taxing. So according to Nietzsche (and this is missed in many interpretations) freedom and creative self-development are not for everyone: “Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong” (BGE 29; KSA 5, 47). Simply being unconstrained is not an appropriate mark of freedom; being free should only serve the pursuit of great achievement, a pursuit that most people cannot endure (Z I, Creator).
That the majority of human beings are bound by rules and are not free to cut their own path is not regretted by Nietzsche. The “exception” and the “rule” are both important for human culture, and neither one should be universalized. Although exceptional types further the species, we should not forget the importance of the rule in preserving the species (GS 55). The exception as such can never become the rule, can never be a model for all humanity (GS 76). Absent this provision, Nietzsche’s promotion of “creative individuals” is easily misunderstood. The freedom from constraints is restricted to those who are strong enough for, and capable of, high cultural production. “My philosophy aims at an ordering of rank: not at an individualistic morality. The ideas of the herd should rule in the herd—but not reach out beyond it” (WP 287; KSA 12, 280).
Nietzsche (before Freud, and borrowing from Schopenhauer) also dismisses the centrality of consciousness and the longstanding assumption that the conscious mind defines our identity and represents our highest nature in its capacity to control instinctive drives. According to Nietzsche, consciousness is a very late development of the human organism and therefore it is not preeminently strong or effective (GS 11). In GS 354 (KSA 3, 590–93), Nietzsche says that if we consider ourselves as animals, we should be suspicious of the claim that consciousness is necessary for our operations.
The problem of consciousness (more precisely, of becoming conscious of something) confronts us only when we begin to comprehend how we could dispense with it; and now physiology and the history of animals place us at the beginning of such comprehension. . . . we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness” (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. For even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life actually takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive this may sound to older philosophers. (GS 354)
I must note here that by “consciousness,” Nietzsche could not mean simple “awareness” but rather self-consciousness, a reflective “mirror.” Accordingly, nonconsciousness would not exclusively mean “unconsciousness” but also nonreflective activity, since he includes thinking in what can operate without (self-)consciousness. In addition, consciousness is not the opposite of instinct, but rather an epiphenomenal expression of instincts; even the reflective thinking of a philosopher “is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts” (BGE 3; KSA 5, 17).
Since consciousness seems to arise in internal self-reflection, the emphasis on consciousness has been coordinated with atomic individualism, the idea that human beings are discrete individuals and that social relations are secondary to the self-relationship of consciousness. For Nietzsche, however, the notion of an atomic individual is an error (TI Skirmishes, 33; BGE 12). “Individuality” is not an eternal property, but a historical, emergent development (GS 117). In this respect, GS 354 offers the surprising notion that consciousness itself is a social and linguistic construction. Nietzsche’s argument is that consciousness is a function of language, and with language understood as communicative practice, a common apprehension of signs goes all the way down.
Consciousness is really only a net of communication (Verbindungsnetz) between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements enter our own consciousness—at least a part of them—that is the result of a “must” that for a terribly long time lorded it over man. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distress and to make himself understood; and for all of this he needed “consciousness” first of all, he needed “know” himself what distressed him, he needed to “know” how he felt, he needed to “know” what he thought. For, to say it once more: Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this—the most superficial and worst part—for only his conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness.
In brief, the development of language and the development of consciousness . . . go hand in hand. . . . The emergence of our sense impressions into our consciousness, the ability to fix them and, as it were, exhibit them externally, increased proportionately with the need to communicate them to others by means of signs. The human being inventing signs is at the same time the human being who becomes ever more keenly conscious of himself. It was only as a social animal that man acquired self-consciousness. (GS 354)2
If Nietzsche is right, then even self-consciousness, perceived as a kind of internal representation or dialogue, is a function of social relations and the commerce of common signs. Accordingly, even “self-knowledge” (a crucial ingredient in traditional philosophical methods) is in fact only a function of the internalization of sociolinguistic signs that operate by fixing experience into stable and common forms. What is truly “individual,” then, is not indicated even in self-reflection, because the instruments of reflection are constituted by the omission of what is unique in experience.
. . . given the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, “to know ourselves,” each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but “average.”
. . . Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be. (GS 354)
For Nietzsche, “individualism” is disrupted by the fact that most of what we recognize as human is a social phenomenon; at the same time, we cannot ultimately reduce human life to conscious linguistic and conceptual categories, even when such structures have been appropriated by individuals in their own self-regard, because there is an element of nonconscious experience that eludes these structures.
Before moving on with questions stemming from this analysis, I want to interject that something like Nietzsche’s account of consciousness and language can be backed up by findings in developmental psychology. The notion of “inner speech” or “private speech”—meaning self-directed verbalization—can account for how language is implicated in self-consciousness. Research shows that inner speech is the most important factor in the development of self-awareness, the capacity to become the object of one’s own attention, one’s own thoughts and behaviors.3 Such a process occurs originally in children but in adults as well (2). Fully immersed experience is not self-conscious. A kind of “distance” between the observer and the observed is required for the self-awareness of observation. Inner speech provides this kind of distance (7). It is important to stress that such a development is derived from the original social milieu of language, so that self-awareness arises from the reproduction of social mechanisms by way of self-directed language (5). The case of Helen Keller is instructive because she claimed that consciousness first existed for her only after she gained access to language (9). There is also neurophysiological evidence mapping the processes here described (8ff).
Private speech in young children (talking to oneself in task performance) has often been met with concern by parents; and Piaget had taken it to be a stage of egocentrism. But L. S. Vygotsky initiated the dismissal of this scheme by arguing that private speech is essential for the cognitive and behavioral development of the child, because here the child takes over the regulative role of the social world.4 Language begins as collaborative tasking and conversation; private speech is a redirection of this milieu toward independent functioning. Cognitive and behavioral capacities begin in a social-linguistic network, and private speech begins a process that over time leads to the internalization of these capacities that now can operate “silently,” as it were (61, 77).
In sum, mature development, individuation, and self-consciousness are the result of an internalization of the social-linguistic environment, mediated by inner or private speech. Such research lends credence to Nietzsche’s analysis, although the language-consciousness conjunction in his account raises more radical philosophical interrogation about the very nature of human selfhood and the meaning of individuation.
It should also be noted that the word “conscious” had an early meaning of sharing knowledge with another person (see the OED), hence the phrase “conscious to . . .” The same sense could apply to inner awareness as witnessing one’s own thoughts, as in the phrase “conscious to oneself” (thus borrowed from the social structure of consciousness). The word “conscious” is derived from the Latin conscientia, meaning “knowing together,” which could refer either to shared knowledge or the joining together of different thoughts in the mind or to self-awareness. Such meanings of conscientia were deployed by Descartes.5 The German Bewusstsein and Gewissen bear a relation with knowledge, and Bewusstsein was originally associated with conscientia.6
A number of questions arise in considering Nietzsche’s thesis concerning language and consciousness. How far does Nietzsche take the conjunction of self-consciousness and socially based language? Is selfhood nothing more than a linguistic-communal phenomenon? Is language nothing more than a network of common signs that averages out experience? Given Nietzsche’s endorsement of creative types, and thus creative language, would this have to be distinguishable from the language-consciousness conjunction to render creative departures from the norm genuinely possible?
The issue of consciousness, language, and selfhood is a focused version of a central theme in Nietzsche’s philosophy: that knowledge and other modes of formation run up against the limit of radical becoming; also that knowledge stems from the “fixing” effects of language and grammar. For instance:
Our usual imprecise mode of observation takes a group of phenomena as one and calls it a fact: between this fact and another fact it imagines in addition an empty space, it isolates every fact. In reality, however, all our doing and knowing is not a succession of facts and empty spaces but a continuous flux. . . . The word and the concept are the most manifest ground for our belief in this isolation of groups of actions. (WS 11; KSA 2, 546–47)
GS 354 adds the matter of selfhood and startles us by seeming to deny individual self-awareness a privileged status. What is truly “individual” is not any kind of accessible “self.” Both knowledge and self-consciousness appear to be “errors”—instigated by language—when measured against life forces that exceed formation. In GS 355, right after the section on the communal function of language, Nietzsche claims that knowledge originates in reducing the unfamiliar to the familiar, a reduction based on fear of the strangeness of experience. Yet Nietzsche often insists that “errors” such as these are necessary for human functioning and survival. Indeed, identifying such errors is not on that account an objection (BGE 4). In BGE 268 (KSA 5, 222), Nietzsche calls the communal character of words “the most powerful of all powers” because of its life-serving value. Even further, in WP 522 (KSA 12, 193–94), after outlining the prejudices of language, Nietzsche adds: “we think only in the form of language. . . . we cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language.” The linguistic order of thinking is “a scheme that we cannot throw off.” A comparable claim is given in a published work: “we have at any moment only the thought for which we have the words at hand” (D 257; KSA 3, 208).
Remarks such as these make it hard to read the “errors” in question as fitting any familiar sense of falsehood, especially if one cannot even think outside of such errors, and if the fluid excess of becoming cannot really count as a “measure” for any kind of discernible truth. Of course this is an enduring question in Nietzsche studies, which I will not address here. I do take my bearings, however, from Twilight of the Idols (Reason, 5), where Nietzsche admits that once the traditional measure of “reality” is rejected, it does not make sense to talk of an “apparent world,” of mere appearance, because there is nothing “real” in comparison. An 1881 Nachlass passage is relevant (KSA 9, 500ff.). There Nietzsche distinguishes between three degrees of “error” in relation to an eternal flux: “the crude error of the species, the subtler error of the individual, and the subtlest error of the creative moment (Augenblick).” Species-form is the crudest error because it corrals differences into a common universal. The assertion of the individual is a “more refined error” that comes later, rebelling against commonality in favor of unique forms. But then the individual learns that it itself is constantly changing and that “in the smallest twinkling of the eye (im kleinsten Augenblick) it is something other than it is in the next [moment].” The creative moment, “the infinitely small moment is the higher reality and truth, a lightning image out of the eternal flow.” The “higher reality and truth” of the creative moment is thus an “error” in a quite different sense compared to the species-error, which seems also to be the case with the error of the individual. Even the notorious fragment “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”—the supposed source of Nietzsche’s critique of truth as an erroneous superimposition of form onto flux—shows some leeway. The metaphorical transfer of fluid experience to fixed words and concepts is actually preceded by original “intuited metaphors” and “images” that are closer to the flux of experience by being singular, unique apprehensions; and such preconceptual apprehension is then associated with an artistic imagination that does not fall into the trap of fixed words and concepts (KSA 1, 875–90).
With respect to individual selfhood, in the light of GS 354, it is hard to fathom how “individuality” is thinkable. What I would want to say is that individuality here is not “graspable,” but perhaps thinkable as a negative trace, as something relative to consciousness and language in terms of what is not discernible in words and self-awareness. I cannot fully develop this idea here, but its sense might emerge in considering the next question: How is creativity thinkable in the light of GS 354 and the communal function of language?
GS 354 contains the following aside: Nietzsche says that after a long duration of the communicative practices of language, “the ultimate result is an excess of this strength and art of communication—as it were, a capacity that has gradually been accumulated and now waits for an heir who might squander it.” He then includes artists and writers as among such heirs and squanderers. This remark makes room for creative language, and the idea of squandering may fit claims Nietzsche sometimes makes about artistic creativity being a nonvoluntary compulsion arising from an overflowing surplus of energy (e.g., BGE 213, Z I, Gift). Yet the question remains: How can language be truly creative if it is seemingly bound by common forms and effects? The question turns on what Nietzsche means by creativity.
We have noted that for Nietzsche the existence of the norm is essential for the maintenance of human culture, but in another sense he insists that it is necessary for, and intrinsic to, creativity itself. The freedom of the creative type does not do away with structures and constraint. Creativity breaks the hold of existing structures in order to shape new ones (see WS 122). Creativity is a complicated relationship between openness and form. Certain “fetters” (Fesseln) are required (1) to prepare cultural overcomings of purely natural states (HAH I, 221), and (2) to provide a comprehensible shape to new cultural forms (WS 140; KSA 2, 612). Creative freedom, therefore, is not the opposite of normalization, discipline, or constraint; it is a disruption of structure that yet needs structure to both prepare and consummate departures from the norm (see GS 295 and BGE 188). For Nietzsche, creativity is a kind of “dancing in chains” (WS 140). For this reason, even a creative “self” does not have a strict identity contrasted with “normal” selves.
In WP 767 (KSA 10, 663), Nietzsche suggests that creativity is an individual interpretation of inherited schemes of language. Yet even more, and surprisingly, in WS 122 and 127, Nietzsche expresses admiration for Greek poetry’s deployment of conventions, and he questions “the modern rage for originality.” And in WP 809 (KSA 296–97), he talks of the aesthetic state as “the source of languages” and as a “superabundance of means of communication,” and “the high point of communication and transmission between living creatures.” Furthermore, “every mature art has a host of conventions as its basis—insofar as it is a language. Convention is the condition of great art, not an obstacle.” I find this perfectly right, and it should temper certain overheated accounts of Nietzschean transgression. Finally, listen to GS 173 (KSA 3, 500): “Those who know they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.”
Creative language, therefore, is not the opposite of common meanings and communication, although it will disrupt and alter ordinary familiarity, and it will likely not have a universal audience, but an audience nonetheless. At the same time, since the original fuel for creativity is not the conscious self but a dynamic of subliminal, sublinguistic drives and instincts, then the idea of a “creative individual” can be understood only in a performative sense, in the contrasting effects of innovation compared to established patterns. This is why Nietzsche calls the free spirit a “relative concept,” rather than some discrete identity (HAH 225; KSA 2, 189). Although GS 354 seems to render individuality in cognito, inaccessible to self-awareness and language, we need not polarize this rendition into an unspeakable uniqueness on the one hand and communal speech on the other. Cultural creativity must manifest itself in communicative language and its “uniqueness” is both drawn from subliminal drives and indicated in its effects relative to normalcy. Moreover, the performative and relative character of the creative individual would be consonant with Nietzsche’s insistence that there is no “doer” behind the deed, that the deed is all there is (GM I, 13).7
The idea that creativity cannot be based in individual consciousness is something expressed often in Nietzsche’s work, and I want to offer some remarks on how we can read him on this score. WP 289 (KSA 13, 310) offers the stark claim that “all perfect acts are unconscious.” And in BGE 17 (KSA 5, 31), we are told that “a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish.” Returning to a point made earlier in this chapter, the word “unconscious” cannot be coextensive with sheer unawareness. I think there are two senses of “unconscious” operating in Nietzsche’s analysis, a depth sense and a surface sense. The depth sense refers to instinctive drives and life forces that are not available to awareness; the surface sense refers to spontaneous, nonreflective activity, behavior, and cultural functions. On spontaneous, nonreflective action, consider these passages from The Wanderer and His Shadow:
Closing the eyes of one’s mind. – Even if one is accustomed to and practiced in reflecting on one’s actions, when one is actually acting (though the action be no more than writing a letter or eating and drinking) one must nonetheless close one’s inward eye. (WS 236; KSA 2, 659)
For as long as one is experiencing something one must give oneself up to the experience and close one’s eyes: that is to say, not be an observer of it while still in the midst of it. For that would disturb the absorption of the experience. (WS 297; KSA 2, 687)
Recall that Nietzsche includes even thinking among activities that can operate spontaneously, without being “mirrored” in consciousness. If Nietzsche holds that thinking is grounded in language, then we can also talk of nonreflective language as well. This would help us understand various occasions in his texts where Nietzsche talks about an immediacy in artistic language or thought processes, in other words, a direct disclosure not only without reflection but without any intercession beyond its self-presentation.8 I will mention a few instances without detailed discussion, simply to put this matter on the table for consideration.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes the immediate disclosive effects of tragic poetry on the audience, which is so direct as to not even be “symbolic” or “fictional” (see BT 7, 8, 21). The problem with Euripides was that he aligned with Socrates in bringing the critical “spectator” on stage, especially by way of his Prologues (BT 11). Modern audiences have been corrupted by such critical distance from drama’s capacity to “enrapture the genuine listener” (BT 22; KSA 1, 140–44). In certain later discussions, Nietzsche reiterates this sense of poetic immediacy. The discussion of poetic convention in WS 122 (KSA 2, 604) includes the motivation of poets to be “understood immediately,” because of the competitive, public conditions of oral performance. In WP 811 (KSA 13, 356–57), artists are described as intoxicated with an overwhelming force of extreme sensuous acuity, which produces a “contagious” compulsion to discharge images that are “immediately enacted” in bodily energies: “An image, rising up within, immediately turns into a movement of the limbs.” GS 84 likewise discusses the origin of poetry in discharges of rhythmic force that compel both body and soul toward disclosive effects. And in EH, Nietzsche tells of how Zarathustra and eternal recurrence “came to” him in August 1881, as a quasi-prophetic inspiration that “invaded” and “overtook” him, an involuntary necessity that made him feel like a mere “mouthpiece,” and where image, parable, and reality seemed indistinguishable (EH Books, TSZ, 1; KSA 6, 335–37).
A certain immediacy of experience is something that Nietzsche frequently celebrates to counter the primacy of self-consciousness in modern philosophy, and self-consciousness is the domain of reflection, of “this entirely dismal thing called reflection” (GM II, 3; KSA 5, 297). Reflection is “dismal” because it displaces what Nietzsche thinks are the healthy, instinctive, and spontaneous energies in life. In GM I, 10, noble behavior is described as spontaneous, which is one reason why nobles are less “clever” than slaves. Yet we cannot say that Nietzsche utterly dismisses reflection. Philosophy is impossible without some degree of reflection, and Nietzsche considered himself to be a philosopher. We could say that among the motivations behind his nontraditional writing styles and the elusive character of his thinking, one key element stands out: Philosophy has typically aimed for reflective criteria to govern experience and thought. Nietzsche advances the essentially ambiguous task of reflecting upon that which precedes and always eludes reflection, and which is always already driving things, even reflection itself—in a word, life.9 If this makes sense, we might hear more pointedly the perplexing opening line of the Genealogy: “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers, even to ourselves, and with good reason” (GM P, 1; KSA 5, 247). Nietzsche’s thought is sometimes described as fitting the classification “philosophy of life,” which sounds right. Yet Nietzsche seems unique in recognizing and sustaining the fundamental enigma in thinking about life. A philosopher, as a living being, is something like a dog chasing its own tail. Nietzsche’s communicative practices aim to talk us out of “selfhood,” if that names a “what” behind our always already becoming what we are (paraphrasing GS 270). In this light, another puzzling remark in EH might make more sense: “To become what one is, presupposes that one not have the faintest notion what one is” (EH Clever, 9; KSA 6, 293). Nietzsche’s diagnosis of human “illness” is based on our false ascriptions of fixed states, which only magnify our dissatisfactions with life when conditions of becoming alter our lives. The therapy for this illness involves a willingness to surrender fixations and affirm the fluidity of life.
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I will close with some reflections on the matter of language in Nietzsche’s thought and how it might apply to the question of rhetoric. I suspect that the notion of style can be connected with the limits of conscious language. In EH Books, 4 (KSA 6, 304), Nietzsche calls (good) style “the actual communication of an inner state,” which effectively enacts signs, tempo, rhythm, and gesture (which was mentioned in GS 354 as part of language) to render an inner state accessible to an audience (even if a selective one). Can “inner state” here refer to that which escapes the “common signs” of language in GS 354? If language is not to be utterly separated from prelinguistic experience, style can refer to the “sub-verbal” elements of language that even point back to how language as such emerged out of embodied forces in human experience. Such subverbal elements can be located in Nietzsche’s accounts of language in relation to gesture and music.
In HAH 216, Nietzsche claims that language originated in gestures and facial expressions, together with the automatic, immediate imitation of these phenomena in face to face experience, which is natural in adults as well as children (called “motor mimicry” in modern psychology). Such was a direct communication of shared meanings (such as pleasure and pain). From such common comprehension, Nietzsche says, a “symbolism” of gestures could arise, with verbal sounds first coupled with the gestures, and then after familiarity operable by way of the sound symbols alone. We can understand the sense of this in how much gestures and facial expressions play an important role in face to face speech.
Nietzsche occasionally discusses what can be called mimetic psychology, especially in his reflections on Greek art. An early essay, “Greek Music Drama,” mentions the audience’s sympathetic identification with the sufferings of tragic heroes (KSA 1, 528). And The Birth of Tragedy contains several relevant treatments. Apollonian and Dionysian forces are exhibited in nature herself, before the mediation of artistic works (BT 2). Forming and deforming powers are intrinsic to nature’s very course, and dreams and intoxicated states (both of which exceed conscious control) are preconditions for the more cultivated manifestation of Apollonian and Dionysian powers, particularly those of language and music. Artists are said to “imitate” such primal natural energies, which could not mean representational simulation, but rather the more performative sense of “impersonating” these energies in artistic practices (impersonation being one of the meanings of mim
sis in Greek). Indeed, nature itself urges expression in bodily gestures and movements (BT 21). Singing and dancing then exhibit an enchanted, ecstatic elevation, a quasi-divine transformation where one is not really an artist because one “has become a work of art” (BT 1; KSA 1, 25–30).
In many respects, Nietzsche associates the Dionysian with music (BT 6, 17), especially its immediate emotional force that “overwhelms” conscious individuation. The Apollonian is associated with poetic language and theatrical technologies that shape a more individuated world. But since music and language are coordinated in tragic drama (BT 21), immediate disclosive force still operates in its performances. Poetic metaphors are not “symbolic,” they possess a living power to disclose (BT 8). For Greek audiences, dramatic fiction was not a departure from reality, it produced on stage powerful scenes of “a world with the same reality and irreducibility that Olympus with its inhabitants possessed for the believing Hellene” (BT 7; KSA 1, 52–7). Tragic drama produced a Dionysian effect of mimetic identification, originally embodied in choral impersonation, where one acts “as if one had actually entered into another body, another character” (BT 8; KSA 1, 57–64).
In general terms, Nietzsche considers music to be equiprimordial with gesture as a foundation for language, particularly in terms of how a speaker’s tone accompanies gesture symbolism. Rhythm and pitch intonations, according to Nietzsche, provide an additional common field of comprehension that renders the communicative power of language possible.10 This is one reason why the Dionysian was essential for Greek tragedy in Nietzsche’s eyes, because the “universal” element behind Apollonian language could be presented through the combination of music, gesture, and dancing that embodied the poetic performance.11 We could say that Nietzsche’s answer to the question of how language could express something beyond its arbitrary phonic forms (given the differences in words across different languages) would not be in terms of universal cognitive conditions, but universal corporeal conditions of gesture and musicality. And his reasons for restricting language to a certain fictional status would follow from our tendency to separate distinct words from (1) the flux of experience and (2) the embodied forces behind verbal speech. Yet it seems that the first tendency is the more apt target because the corporeality of language in gesture and tone is said by Nietzsche to make language possible and it is not hard to intimate its indigenous function in embodied speech.
In any case, it is well known that Nietzsche rejects any realist or representational model of language, since he takes language to be a creative forming of an unstable flux and an expression that cannot function independently of metaphorical, rhetorical, and imaginative forces. The fragment “On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense” (KSA 1, 875–90) presents Nietzsche’s classic account of such forces that preclude any pretense of objective truth. Human thought cannot provide straightforward representations of things in the world, because from the start thinking is infused with rhetorical elements of language (e.g., metaphor and metonymy) that are not objective matters, even though we assume as much out of psychological need. Nietzsche’s early lecture courses on rhetoric provide an extensive and detailed analysis of ancient discourse that sets the background for his provocative critique of truth.12 We recall that the passage from WS 11 counter-posed flux to our assumption of isolated facts surrounded by empty space, an assumption grounded in the presence of words. It should be clear, however, that written words best satisfy this condition as fixed in visual space, rather than the temporal flow of oral speech. Moreover, the embodied elements of language we have considered are also best indicated in face-to-face oral speech rather than the detached objects of graphic signs. Nietzsche advances this very distinction in his rhetoric course. Against the idea that ancient rhetoric appears unnatural and ornamental, Nietzsche claims that rhetoric was the natural condition for the oral context of ancient discourse.
. . . the true prose of antiquity is an echo of public speech and is built on its laws, whereas our prose is always to be explained more from writing, and our style presents itself as something to be perceived through reading. One who reads and one who hears desire wholly different presentational forms. (21)
In WS 110 (KSA 2, 600), Nietzsche points to what is missing in written language, “the modes of expression available only to the speaker: that is to say, gestures, emphases, tones of voice, glances.” In the rhetoric course, Nietzsche also discusses the agonistic element in ancient speech, the competitive forces that combined persuasive power with outdoing other speakers in style, beauty, and flourish (37). This raises a topic too big to engage here, but the transition from orality to literacy in the Greek world was one of the prime factors in the advent of philosophy; and the absorbing power of oral speech and poetry was one of the key targets in philosophical culture critique, most prominently in Plato.13 Our discussion of language can at least provide an important angle on why Nietzsche’s emphasis on embodied, oral speech goes hand in hand with his critique of traditional philosophy, and why a defense of rhetoric against traditional complaints can emerge out of Nietzsche’s reflections.
For Nietzsche, philosophy never operates on purely cognitive grounds, as though separable from rhetorical elements of persuasion, emotional appeal, even seduction. Plato’s critique of the Sophists and rhetoric concerned both philosophical and political spheres, and much of political theory has inherited a Platonic suspicion of rhetorical forces in political practice and discourse. Nietzsche insists that a strict distinction between reason and passion is untenable, that a crossing effect shows that cognition has its passion and passion its cognition (WP 387; KSA 13, 131)—in other words, that instinctive intimations and passionate responses can have disclosive power. How can we be sure that the infamous propensity for “image over substance” in politics generates only defective results? Might there be something important in so-called noncognitive dimensions of political engagement?
In Nietzschean terms, I think we can say that rhetorical force is a necessary condition for political discourse (with rhetoric understood as the psychological, rather than logical, force of language). Plato’s attack on the Sophists went hand in hand with his critique of democracy—the undisciplined, open condition of all citizens having a say in political judgment. In democracy, political decisions have no ground other than audience persuasion, and in this respect, the Sophists can be seen as realistic educators in democratic practice. This is not the place to rehearse my work on trying to think democracy through a Nietzschean lens.14 Yet a mark of this work has been the application of a Nietzschean suspicion against moralistic complaints about democratic practice, even among democratic theorists. Nietzsche considered the Sophists to be political realists, and he claimed that “it was their honor not to indulge in any swindle of big words and virtues” (WP 429; KSA 13, 331–32). The Sophists in his eyes were thoroughly Greek in their emphasis on the powers of speech in competitive formats, at the expense of secured measures of value independent of rhetorical effect (see WP 427–28; KSA 13, 167–69, 291–93). In this respect, Plato’s opposition to the Sophists was anti-Hellenic in Nietzsche’s estimation (see TI Ancients, 2).
Platonic “idealism” opposed the Sophists’ relativism, skepticism, pragmatism, and their willingness to engage in expedient political machinations. Plato’s model of perfect virtue and justice untarnished by practical interests and power became a lasting measure for assigning many political dispositions and methods to the category of vice (e.g., expediency, ambition, aggressiveness, power plays, and rhetorical techniques to win over an audience). My contention is that much of the charge of “immorality” against democratic political practices (issued by opponents and proponents alike) is susceptible to a Nietzschean diagnosis of political “asceticism,” an aversion to the natural conditions of political life. The forces of rhetoric are a significant focus of this problem. Nietzsche’s emphasis on agonistic, embodied, passion-laden speech permits a defense of rhetoric in politics, not as a necessary evil but as suited to the context of political discourse—among natural human beings for whom language involves a complex array of affective, narrative, even instinctive forces that can never be reduced to objective description or rational inference. Even Aristotle recognized that political speech must include attention to noncognitive elements such as emotion and the personality of speakers. This does not make political speech thoughtless, but a politics without rhetoric, emotion, and personality would be lifeless and devoid of certain powers that figure in our sense of the world. Style and personality may in fact run deep and tap into less mediated intimations. Such forces can be dangerous, of course, but also noble: for every Adolph Hitler there is a Martin Luther King. The “content” of King’s speeches cannot be separated from his existential bearing and oratorical gifts. The same speech in a different voice would not be the same speech. The hope for political discourse solely on “the issues” and by way of rational persuasion—divorced from the effects of style, character, and emotion—would be naïve or suspicious from a Nietzschean standpoint.
This venture into rhetoric is meant to reinforce my concerns in discussing Nietzsche’s thoughts on selfhood, consciousness, and language. I think that Nietzsche’s apparent segregation of language from the flux of experience and unconscious instinct really suits only certain models of language based on descriptive realism, psychological faculties, and written graphics. I believe that the social, corporeal, and rhetorical features of language highlighted by Nietzsche can be located “in between” a reified picture of language on the one hand and something nonlinguistic on the other. Nietzsche’s own language is rich in styles, forces, and effects that enact, I think, the “medial” picture of language I am suggesting. Otherwise, Nietzsche’s texts themselves would be susceptible to the charge of “error.” Nietzsche’s writings are meant not only to disabuse us of philosophical fictions, but also—by way of their linguistic effects—to draw out intimations of natural life, which can be hidden by language, but not on that account entirely without a voice.
Notes and references
1 This chapter is a revised and expanded version of a paper delivered at the 2009 meeting of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society at Oxford University: “Talking Ourselves into Selfhood: Consciousness and Language in Gay Science 354,” which is published in Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind, ed. Manuel Dries (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011). With quotations from Nietzsche’s works, I have occasionally modified published translations.
2 A similar point is made in later works: BGE 268 and TI Skirmishes, 26.
3 Alain Morin, “Possible links between self-awareness and inner speech,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 12.4-5 (2005), 115–34. Page references above refer to this article.
4 Adam Winsler, Raphael M. Diaz and Ignacio Montero, “The Role of Private Speech in the Transition From Collaborative to Independent Task Performance in Young Children,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 12 (1997): 57–79. This particular point is on p. 60. Page references above refer to this article.
5 See Boris Henning, “Cartesian Conscientia,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15/3 (August 2007): 455–85.
6 See Richard E. Aquila, “The Cartesian and a Certain ‘Poetic’ Notion of Consciousness,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49/4 (Winter 1988): 561.
7 While culture-creation disrupts established forms of life, it is meant to settle into new forms of culture (rather than unhinged or indiscriminate anomalies). In this respect, we should consider Nietzsche’s recognition of “second nature,” which he calls a “new habit, a new instinct” that coalesces after a “first nature” of cultural inheritance has been altered or replaced—keeping in mind that the first nature in question was once a second nature replacing a first nature, and that this new second nature will become a first nature that will face disruption in the future after its own settlement (UM: UAH 3; KSA 1, 265–70).
8 As an aside, I wonder if the sense of linguistic immediacy can be related to Nietzsche’s peculiar concept of “necessity.” For Nietzsche, the necessity of an event does rule out alternatives, but simply from the standpoint of the “self-evidence” of the immediate event as such, with nothing other or outside it, whether that be a causal chain or a self-originating “will” or “substance.” This is why Nietzsche says that “occurrence (Geschehen) and necessary occurrence is a tautology” (WP 639; KSA 12, 535–36). Necessity is counterposed not only to free alternatives but to any sense of mechanism, causality, or law: “Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities” (GS 109; KSA 3, 467–69). Necessity does not follow from the force of law but from the absence of law (BGE 22); it cannot mean some fixed relation between successive states (which violates the primacy of radical becoming) but simply that a state is what it is rather than something else (WP 552, 631; KSA 12, 383–86, 135–36). Necessity indicates that an occurrence “cannot be otherwise” simply by force of its immediate emergence, independent of any sense of causality—whether the self-causality of freedom, the final causality of teleology, or the efficient causality of determinism—since causality always looks away from an occurrence as such and in one way or another posits the idea of alternatives (if only to displace them). Nietzsche does not deny the possibility of causal thinking, only its primal posture as “explanation.” Causality is an interpretation of experience that is useful for “designation and communication” (BGE 21–22). Necessity names the primal immediacy of events-in-becoming as such, for which in each case an “alternative” would not be “another event” but no event (see WP 567; KSA 13, 370–71).
9 For significant studies that emphasize Nietzsche’s strategies of appealing to readers’ lives rather than propositional knowledge, see Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), and Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
10 See the 1871 fragment “On Music and Words,” found translated (by Walter Kaufmann) in Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). In “The Dionysiac World View,” gesture and tone are originally instinctive, without consciousness, but not without purpose. See The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, eds. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 134.
11 See Kathleen Higgens, “Nietzsche on Music,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47/4 (Winter 1986): 663–72. Nietzsche thought that the Greeks had a capacity largely lost in modern experience, namely a “third ear” that could hear the musical background of language (BGE 8). He even talks of an element of dance in writing (TI Germans, 7).
12 See Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, edited and translated by Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
13 See my article “Writing Knowledge in the Soul: Orality, Literacy, and Plato’s Critique of Poetry,” Epoche: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 11/2 (Spring 2007): 319–32.
14 See my A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics (Chicago: Open Court, 1995).
Editions used
The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954).
Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Random House, 1966).
The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings.
Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings.
The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974).
On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche.
Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967).
The Wanderer and His Shadow, Part 2 of Human, All Too Human.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche.