7
Alan D. Schrift
Unsound instinct in all and everything, anti-nature as instinct, German décadence as philosophy – that is Kant! –
The Anti-Christian, 11
. . . in five main points of [Spinoza’s] doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and solitary thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies freedom of the will –; teleology –; the moral world-order –; the unegoistic –; and evil –;
Postcard to Franz Overbeck, 30 July 1881, KGB III: 1, 111
Error of philosophers. – The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure: posterity finds it in the stone with which he built and which can, from then on, be used to build many more times and better: in the way, that is, that the structure can be destroyed and nonetheless still has value as material.
Mixed Opinions and Maxims, 201
What Nietzsche has to offer political thought has been since the early years of the twentieth century a complicated and controversial question. As a young medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War, Nietzsche witnessed first-hand the maximal carnage now possible via the mechanization of military weapons like the French Reffye mitrailleuse, which during that war became the first rapid-firing weapon deployed as standard equipment by any army in a major conflict.1 Of what he witnessed, he wrote to his mother on 29 August 1870, that ‘With this letter comes a memory of the terribly devastated battlefield, littered with countless sorrowful remains and the strong stench of corpses’ (KGB II: 1, 138). Yet when he, less than 8 years later, remarks that present European humanity ‘requires not only wars, but the greatest and most terrible wars’ (HH 477) or that, in his final work, ‘I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something monstrous – a crisis such as the earth has never seen, a profound collision of conscience, a decision conjured up against everything up till now believed, demanded and sanctified. I am not human, I am dynamite’ (EH IV: 1),2 these remarks are taken at face value as belying an insensitivity to suffering the likes of which few other philosophers can match.3 Yet like his comments on war, his comments on politics can be both hyperbolically aggressive and subtly nuanced.
While other chapters in this volume will address Nietzsche’s comments on politics directly, in my remarks to follow, I want to approach the question of Nietzsche and political thought less directly by suggesting that Nietzsche offers a set of ideas that allow one to avoid what, since Kant, has been seen to be the necessary assumption for doing politics or even ethics. That assumption is that one must make an appeal to something or someone transcendent in order to legitimate one’s political or ethical position. While one might expect such an appeal in a conservative theocratic polity, we also find a near universal acceptance of this assumption within liberal democratic polities. As a result, Kant stands today at the origin of what to a large extent have come to be regarded in the West as the only reasonable ethical-political positions worth defending, namely, the Rawlsian and the Habermasian positions.
We know, of course, what Nietzsche thought of Kant: his vision was simply the same old Platonic-Christian transcendent ideals, now viewed through the mist of scepticism (cf. TI ‘World’). While Plato and Christianity regarded these ideals as still attainable, for Kant they were merely regulative, that is, they can continue to be appealed to though we can have neither access to them nor any knowledge of them. Nietzsche’s judgement of Kant is thus the same as his judgements of Plato and Christianity: this trio is the holy trinity of nihilism, the willers of nothingness who judge the world as it is that it ought not to be and who determine what ought to be as existing in a world beyond this one (cf. KSA 12: 9[60]). The question that remains to be asked, however, is whether a move to the transcendent is indeed necessary for a politics or an ethics? Or is a radically immanent politics possible?
To show how widely accepted this Kantian framework is, I’d like to start in what might seem a rather exorbitant conceptual space, namely, the discussions of radical evil among neo-Lacanians and their critics.4 Joan Copjec, in the introduction to a collection of essays entitled Radical Evil, suggests that in order to explain the horrors of the twentieth century, we must invoke a concept put forward by Kant in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, the concept of radical evil. By radical evil, Kant refers to that evil which is ‘a natural propensity, inextirpable by human power,’ one that ‘corrupts the ground of all maxims.’5 Why, one might ask, would someone want to retrieve this idea of a radical, metaphysical evil in our post-metaphysical age? The answer, I believe, is two-fold. First, it works to justify the importance of Lacan’s reflections on ethics in his seventh seminar, throughout which Lacan appeals to Kant to establish the ethical framework within which Lacan can reflect on ‘the ethics of psychoanalysis.’6 And second, as was the motivation behind much of the Kantian critical philosophy itself, it makes the world safe again for faith, faith in the necessity of an appeal to both the transcendent and the transcendental. These two answers, of course, are not unrelated, for as Kant could still appeal to the regulative ideas of free will, an immortal soul, and God once the limits of reason were transcendentally established, so too Lacan appeals to the Law as the transcendental guarantor that constitutes one’s desire even as it prohibits its satisfaction.
What Copjec says of Kant is equally true of Lacan: they both argue that ‘our only consciousness of the law is our consciousness of our transgression of it. Our guilt is all we know of the law.’7 Is this what postmodernity has led to? I can hear Nietzsche crying ‘Bad Air! Bad Air!’ Where Nietzsche sought in the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality to explain the origin of guilt and bad conscience in terms of the immanent relations between creditor and debtor and the this-worldly internalization of the desire to exercise the right of the master and to make suffer, Lacan makes his Kantian gesture and looks beyond the immanent productivity of desire to its transcendental prohibition in (1) the name/No of the Father or (2) the Law. Are Lacan and the Lacanians not here appealing to that very same ‘hangman’s metaphysics’ that Nietzsche associated with Christianity, that metaphysics that creates supersensible fictions (the Law, the Soul) in order to condemn human beings to ‘guilt,’ ‘bad conscience,’ and the like? Such a metaphysics was, as Nietzsche correctly diagnosed, the essence of nihilism: the willing of nothingness. And while the motivations of contemporary political theorists of a Rawlsian or Habermasian or Lacanian persuasion may not be the motivations of a hangman (though about the Lacanians’ motivations, I’m not always so sure8), their appeal to the ideology of transcendence may be no less nihilistic than these ideologies Nietzsche so thoroughly rejected in his own day.
The Lacanians’ radical evil, no less than Kant’s, is thus a thoroughly transcendental concept. But after Auschwitz, after the Holocaust, after the killing fields, after the Rwandan genocide, after 11 September, do we really need to move to the transcendental to account for radical evil? When one looks to recent political discourse in the United States, one might be persuaded that one does. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke to Congress on the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he spoke for a little over 7 minutes, mentioned the word ‘attack’ eleven times, did not mention ‘evil’ once, and concluded ‘I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, 7 December 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.’9 When, 3 months shy of 60 years later, President George W. Bush spoke to the nation on the evening of 11 September 2001, he opened by stating that today ‘our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.’ Bush spoke for a little under 4½ minutes, told us that ‘today our nation saw evil,’ mentioned ‘evil’ four times in all, and quoted from the 23rd Psalm. The following day, he spoke again very briefly to the nation, concluding his remarks by noting that ‘This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil, but good will prevail.’10 And 1 month later, in the first formal White House press conference of his administration, and the first after the September 11 attacks, the President mentioned ‘evil’ or ‘evildoers’ 12 times, recalling ‘the evil that was done to us’ and reminding us that ‘on our TV screens the other day, we saw the evil one threatening’ (the reference to the ‘evil one’ would appear to be to Osama bin Laden, but it might refer to Satan as well). Perhaps most distressing, we are told that ‘We learned a good lesson on September the 11th, that there is evil in this world,’ and that the President thinks ‘it’s essential that all moms and dads and citizens tell their children we love them and there is love in the world, but also remind them there are evil people.’11
If we want a politics that will refrain from making this transcendental move which frames thisworldly events in terms of a Manichean struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, we must look for an alternative to the Kantian paradigm that so thoroughly dominates political discourse today.12 Gilles Deleuze suggests we will find an answer in the immanentism of Spinoza. Spinoza, writes Deleuze, ‘was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is therefore the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere.’13 Deleuze is, of course, right about Spinoza, but he is not right in suggesting that Spinoza is perhaps unique in this regard, for Nietzsche too is equally engaged in a project of hunting down transcendence everywhere. After all, was Nietzsche’s attempt to conceive ‘the world seen from inside, the world determined and characterized on the basis of its “intelligible character” [as] “will to power” and nothing else’ (BGE 36) not an attempt to conceive a purely immanent metaphysic, one which located all that is in terms of the fundamental animating force of life? And is this not precisely what Nietzsche is doing when he suggests we could succeed ‘in explaining our entire life of drives as the taking shape and ramification of a basic form of the will – namely of the will to power, as my proposition has it –; supposing that we could trace all organic functions to this will to power and were able to find in it the solution to the problem of reproduction and nutrition – which is one problem – then we would have earned the right to unequivocally determine all effective force as: will to power’ (BGE 36).
We see clearly Nietzsche’s and Spinoza’s hunting down of transcendence and their shared repudiation of transcendent values in their rejection of the concept of evil in favour of a ethics grounded in the opposition between ‘good and bad.’ Deleuze, who more than anyone else has noticed points of convergence between Nietzsche and Spinoza,14 marks a sharp distinction in Spinoza between an ethics and a morality: Spinoza, he writes, shows us how ethics, which ‘is a typology of immanent modes of existence, replaces Morality, which always refers existence to transcendent values.’15 In contrast to the fictitious moral ideas of good (bonum) and evil (malum) as intrinsic values that exist in themselves, Spinoza claims that these ideas ‘indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves, nor are they anything other than modes of thinking, or notions we form because we compare things to one another’ (IV Preface).16 Rather than transcendent and universal values, Spinoza defines good as ‘what we certainly know to be useful to us’ (IVD1) and what ‘agrees with our nature’ (IVP31), while malum – which can be translated equally well as ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ – is defined as ‘what we certainly know prevents us from being masters of some good’ (IVD2) and what ‘does not agree with our nature’ (IIIP31c). Insofar as bonum and malum are here being defined naturalistically as what is advantageous or disadvantageous, it seems that malum is more appropriately translated as ‘bad,’ as Spinoza’s translator Edwin Curley does at one point, towards the end of the Preface to Part IV of the Ethics. There, shortly after Spinoza denies that the terms bonum and malum indicate anything ‘positive in things,’ he clarifies his point with an example: ‘music is good for one who is melancholy, bad for one who is mourning, and neither good nor bad to one who is deaf.’ The translator here recognizes that Spinoza cannot have meant that music would be morally evil to someone in mourning, and, as Deleuze would suggest, I think there is good reason to extend this to Spinoza’s entire discussion of malum, understanding it always as ‘bad’ in the naturalistic sense in which we would say that it is bad for someone allergic to strawberries to eat a strawberry. In so doing, we see that for Spinoza, good and bad are concepts with an objective meaning: good is what is useful to preserving our being, and increases or aids our power of acting, and bad is what is harmful to preserving our being and diminishes or restrains our power of acting (IVP8d). What is objectively bad limits what a body can do and is thus linked to affects of sadness, while what is objectively good enhances what a body can do and is productive of joyful affects. Spinoza’s theory of the affects thus turns us away from seeking a transcendental moral standard for judging what is good or evil, and returns us to immanent questions concerning modes of existence and what we are capable of doing.
Spinoza’s proximity here to Nietzsche is obvious. Nietzsche is well known for being the philosopher who sought to go ‘beyond good and evil,’ but it is equally important to remember, as Nietzsche noted explicitly at the close of the First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, that to go ‘beyond good and evil’ ‘does not mean [to go] “Beyond Good and Bad”.’ The difference between ‘Good and Evil’ and ‘Good and Bad’ is the principle topic of the Genealogy’s First Essay, and Nietzsche marks the distinction precisely as one between the immanent and natural and the transcendent and otherworldly. Where the ethical values of ‘Good and Bad’ remain grounded in what is natural, the moral values ‘Good and Evil’ are grounded in the divine: where the noble originators of determinations of ‘Good and Bad’ had sufficient confidence in their own natural instincts to establish these normative categories on their own and ground them in the immanent realities of their existence, the slavish originators of judgements of ‘Good and Evil’ lacked this confidence and they sought a transcendent justification for their judgements in the will of God. Allowing Deleuze to guide us once again, we should take note that he opens Nietzsche and Philosophy by addressing this point, recasting Nietzsche’s distinction between the natural and the divine by distinguishing between the immanent, ethical difference between noble and base that grounds evaluative judgements on one’s ‘way of being or style of life,’17 and the transcendent moral opposition between good and evil that grounds evaluative judgement on an absolute and otherworldly ideal. For this reason, Deleuze writes that the philosopher must be ‘a genealogist rather than a Kantian tribunal judge or a utilitarian mechanic.’18
Whenever Nietzsche talks about values, his appeal is to the values immanent within life, as we see, for example, in his famous analysis, in the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (16), of the psychology of bad conscience, not as the voice of God in man, but as the instinct of cruelty that turns back on itself after it can no longer discharge itself externally. When Nietzsche argues that it is the immanent necessities of social existence required by human beings’ entry into community that result in the ‘internalization of man’ that stands at the origin of the ‘soul’ and the entire inner world, his thinking, like Spinoza’s, challenges the assumption that one must ground one’s politics or ethics in something transcendent, be it the Platonic Good, the Christian God or the Kantian categorical imperative and autonomous moral self.
In his own day, Nietzsche understood himself to be witnessing the complete success of slave morality having established the transcendent set of guidelines that Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values sought to dismantle. And while the sun had set on Plato, and Nietzsche hoped to hasten its setting on Christianity, it was now Kant whose ideas were supplying the primary support for slave morality. Kant was the one whose arrival ‘caused the rejoicing . . . that went through the German scholarly world [in which] the theologian-instinct in the German scholar guessed what was now possible again . . .’
A hidden path to the old ideal stood open, the concept ‘true world’, the concept of morality as essence of the world (those two most wicked errors that there are!) were once again, thanks to a craftily clever skepticism, if not provable, then at least no longer refutable. . . . Reason, the right to reason, does not stretch that far. . . . Reality had been turned into an ‘appearance’; a completely mendacious world, that of Being, had been turned into reality. . . . The success of Kant is merely theologian-success: . . . (A 10)
This theologian-success marks the triumph of the forces of anti-nature (Widernatur) that Nietzsche seeks to isolate and exorcize throughout his works of 1888, and his hostility towards the forces of anti-nature are never far removed from his hostility towards both Kantian and Christian morality. What horrifies Nietzsche at the sight of Christian morality is that anti-nature is presented as morality itself and remains ‘posted up as law, as categorical imperative for humanity!’ (EH IV: 7). The departure from nature into the transcendent ideal is what for Nietzsche lies at the basis of the hostility towards life that he diagnoses at the core of both Christianity and Kantian idealism. In opposition to those immanent facts of life that Nietzsche takes seriously in ‘Why I Am So Clever’ – nutrition, location and climate, forms of recreation – Christianity and Kant place ‘God,’ the ‘Beyond,’ the ‘true world,’ ‘spirit’ and ‘immortal soul’ – all concepts created ‘to denigrate the body and make it sick’ (EH IV: 8).
To look at one final example of Nietzsche’s framing of his analysis in terms of immanence versus transcendence, let us turn again to The Anti-Christian, this time looking at the way he drives a wedge between the lessons of the Nazarene and the lessons of Paul. One of the central arguments in The Anti-Christian is that ‘there was only one Christian, and he died on the Cross’ (A 39). This argument depends on distinguishing between Jesus and the Christ, and this distinction is essentially that between the immanent life of Jesus of Nazareth and the transcendent hagiography surrounding the resurrected Christ. To those familiar only with Nietzsche’s general criticisms of Christianity, confronting the relatively high regard he expresses for Jesus in the pages of The Anti-Christian comes as something of a shock. Blessedness, we are told, is not promised by Jesus, but is taught by him as ‘the only reality. The result of such a situation projects itself into a new practice, in fact, evangelical practice. “Faith” does not distinguish the Christian: the Christian acts, is distinguished by a different method of action.’ And, moreover, ‘The life of the Redeemer was nothing other than this practice,’ and his ‘glad tidings’ taught ‘how one should live in order to feel “in heaven,” in order to feel “eternal”’ (A 33). While Jesus ‘died as he lived, as he taught – not in order to “redeem humanity,” but to show how one should live,’ the history of Christianity is one long misunderstanding of these teaching (A 35, 37). And at the basis of this misunderstanding is the redirection of attention from and the revaluation of the value located in the immanent life lived by Jesus towards the transcendent significance of the death of the Christ. The early followers, and most importantly Paul, thus turn attention away from Jesus’s practices and focus instead on the death on the cross and the subsequent resurrection? ‘Who killed him,’ they asked? ‘Ruling Jewry’ was the answer. ‘And why was this death necessary,’ they asked? ‘Because we have sinned’ was the answer. ‘If you transpose life’s main emphasis, not into life but into the “Beyond” – into nothingness – you completely remove life’s main emphasis’ (A 43), and this is precisely what Paul does by revaluing what was important in the immanent life and replacing it with what was the significance of the death and the transcendent values associated with it: judgement, reward and punishment, and the immortality of the soul (A 40–2).
Is it too much of a stretch to link Nietzsche’s association of Paul’s priestly revaluation of the life of Jesus and the death on the cross of the Christ with what, earlier in The Anti-Christian, he identified as the theologian-instinct, an instinct that leads him to conclude that ‘the success of Kant is merely theologian-success’ (A 10)? Perhaps it is not, especially when we recall that in Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche refers to Kant as ‘a deceitful [or disingenuous, hinterlistigen] Christian’ (TI ‘Reason’ 6). Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christian, his ‘Curse on Christianity,’ was part of a ‘Declaration of War’ that runs through many of his last works, and this declaration announces a war against both Christianity and the transcendence it champions.
That one should turn from Kant to Spinoza to pursue the question of Nietzsche and political thought should not surprise us. When Spinoza links the good with what preserves our being, he showed that he understood that to do ontology was to do ethics. And when Nietzsche thought what is as will to power, and diagnosed the value of what is in terms of a typology of will to power (strong vs. weak, healthy vs. sick, life-affirming vs. decadent), he showed he understood the very same thing. Moreover, when Spinoza linked preserving and persevering in being with the power of acting, as he did not only in the Ethics but in the Political-Theological Treatise and Political Treatise, he showed that he understood that to do ontology was to do politics as well. Nietzsche, too, recognizes this, although he is, unlike Spinoza, not that interested in affirming the mere perseverance in being. In fact, in one of only three philosophically significant references to Spinoza in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche alludes to an ‘inconsistency’ of Spinoza as a source for the overvaluation of the drive for self-preservation. The passage is important enough for understanding the connection between Nietzsche and Spinoza to be cited in its entirety:
The physiologists should stop and think before positing the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Anything that lives wants above all to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power –: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this. – In brief, here as everywhere beware of superfluous teleological principles! – such as the drive for self-preservation (for which we have Spinoza’s inconsistency to thank –). This is demanded by method after all, which must essentially be the economy of principles. (BGE 13)
What is this inconsistency of Spinoza? I would suggest that it is his conflation of the two distinct characteristics in terms of which he defines conatus as ‘the actual essence of a thing.’ Consider the following three propositions from Book III of Spinoza’s Ethics:
IIIP6: Each thing, insofar as it is in itself [quantum in se est], strives [conatur] to persevere in its being.19
IIIP7: The striving [conatus] by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.
IIIP12: The mind as far as it can, strives to imagine those things that increase or aid the body’s power of acting.
While Spinoza puts this last proposition in psychological terms (the mind imagining), this proposition is thought to make the stronger, more general claim that ‘each thing not only strives to persist in existence, but also strives to prevent any decrease in what Spinoza calls power of acting (agendi potentia) and indeed strives to do whatever will increase its power of acting.’20 And here we see what Nietzsche refers to as Spinoza’s inconsistency: he characterizes the essence of a thing (conatus) in terms of striving to persevere in existence and striving to increase its power of acting (agendi potentia). But while the physiologists Nietzsche refers to in BGE 13 have seized upon and privileged the former – the superfluous teleological principle of the drive to self-preservation – Nietzsche privileges the latter: ‘Anything that lives wants above all to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power.’
Like Spinoza, Nietzsche too links this power to act that is will to power to both ethics and psychology:
What is good? – All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.
What is bad? – All that proceeds from weakness.
What is happiness? – The feeling that power increases – that a resistance is overcome. (A 2)
And what is wrong with slave morality is precisely its intent by means of the morality of ‘good and evil’ to restrict our power to act. It is in this sense that, for Nietzsche, we are all slaves suffering under the weight of slave morality – for a slave is someone who is prevented from doing what they are capable of, who is under the authority of another who tells him what he can and cannot do. Nietzsche’s positive goal is to create a culture not unlike the society imagined by Spinoza, in which the role of the state was to facilitate individuals doing what they are capable of. Like Spinoza, Nietzsche says that we do not yet know what the body can do, but he goes beyond Spinoza in critiquing our slavish, base morality for not wanting to know what the body is capable of doing and for instead creating rules – morality – to instil in us the fear of allowing ourselves, and others, the right to do what we are capable of. In a note from early 1887 in which Nietzsche cites and comments at some length about ‘Spinoza’s psychological background,’ we find the following:
2) the naturally-selfish view point: virtue and power identical. It does not give up, it wants, it does not fight against, but for nature; it is not the destruction, but the fulfillment of the most powerful affect. Good is what advances our power: evil [böse] the opposite. Virtue follows the quest for self-preservation. ‘What we do, we do to preserve and increase our power’. ‘By virtue and power I understand the same thing’. (KSA 12: 7[4], 261)
This last cited remark is the final definition at the beginning of Book IV of the Ethics, and what facilitates this identification of virtue and power in Spinoza is his account of joy and sadness as affects which increase or decrease our power to act (IIIP11 and P11s), and which, as a corollary, bring us to a greater or lesser perfection (III Definition of the Affects 2 and 3). Ultimately, all of the other affects are simply variations on these two and, as a consequence, the fundamental Spinozist ethical directive is to maximize joy, minimize sadness, and thereby increase our power to act.
Spinoza’s metaphysics here offers us something that is, however, only implicit in Nietzsche insofar as he largely refrains from moving from the ethical to the political. Spinoza, on the other hand, can move seamlessly from the ethical-psychological directive to maximize joy, minimize sadness, and thereby increase our power to act, to a political one insofar as there is no substantial difference in Spinoza’s metaphysics between a singular and a plural subject. ‘By singular things,’ Spinoza writes in the Ethics, ‘I understand things that are finite and have a determinate existence. And if a number of individuals so concur in one action that together they are all the cause of one effect, I consider them all, to that extent, as one singular thing’ (IID7). This understanding of individual and collective, which Spinoza elaborates in his political works in terms of his concept of the multitude, departs from both the Kantian and contract-theory traditions. And it allows for the establishment of a collective political subject insofar as the call to maximize joy and minimize sadness is also a call to interact with others who will compose with us new collective or composite individuals whose power of acting will have been increased, as will the power to act of the individuals who now comprise this collective individual, and to avoid interacting with individuals who will decompose us and diminish our power to act.
When Spinoza writes that ‘no one has yet determined what the body can do’ (IIIP2s), he is talking not just about an individual human body, but about a political or collective body as well. Deleuze tells us that ‘if we are Spinozists we will not define a thing by its form, nor by its functions, nor as a substance or a subject. . . . A body can be anything: it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity.’21 Elsewhere, Deleuze writes:
A body is not defined by the form that determines it nor as a determinate substance or subject nor by the organs it possesses or by the functions it fulfills. On the plane of [immanence] or consistency, a body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude).22
Deleuze credits Spinoza for calling attention to these two dimensions of the body, and he notes that these longitudes and latitudes constitute Nature, ‘which is constantly being altered, composed and recomposed, by individuals and collectivities.’23
Nietzsche, no less than Spinoza, has an expansive notion of the subject, and although he does not develop this in an overtly political direction, he rejects the isolated, atomistic subject as one of the ‘more disastrous’ prejudices of the philosophers. This prejudice has been ‘taught best and longest’ by Christianity in the form of ‘the belief that holds the soul to be something ineradicable, eternal, indivisible, a monad, an atomon’ (BGE 12). And the modern incarnation of this prejudice is the Kantian moral subject, whose isolated autonomy gives itself the moral law. Escaping from this prejudice opens the way for ‘new conceptions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis,’ and in Beyond Good and Evil 12, Nietzsche names three: ‘mortal soul,’ ‘soul as subject-multiplicity,’ and ‘soul as social structure of drives and affects.’ It is these latter two – ‘soul as subject-multiplicity,’ and ‘soul as social structure of drives and affects’ – that allow Nietzsche to follow Spinoza in escaping the constraints of the isolated, substantive ego that dominated modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant and that continues to ground liberal democratic notions of rights. And with this new, expansive notion of the subject, Nietzsche encourages human beings to develop their multiplicities within, to cultivate their inner tensions, for in opposition to that alien ‘desideratum of former times, “peace of soul,” a Christian desideratum,’ Nietzsche argues that ‘One is only fruitful at the cost of being rich in contradictions; one only stays young on condition that the soul does not relax itself, does not desire peace’ (TI ‘Morality’ 3).
Nietzsche’s exemplar of this expansive subject is Goethe, who, it must be emphasized, is described in what follows as ‘the antipode’ to Kant:
He was able to muster history, natural science, antiquity, likewise Spinoza, and practical activity above all; he surrounded himself with clearly defined horizons; he did not break off his connections with life, he took part in it; undaunted, he took as much as was possible upon himself, above himself, within himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought against the separation of reason, sensuality, feeling and will (– preached by Kant with alarming scholasticism, the antipode to Goethe), he disciplined himself into wholeness, he created himself. (TI ‘Skirmishes’ 49)
Goethe immersed himself in life, experiencing the delight of the individual who is able to obey its own command and who thereby experiences itself as, these are Nietzsche’s words, a ‘well constructed and happy community’ (BGE 19). For Nietzsche, as for Spinoza and Deleuze, ‘our body’ – no less than the body politic – ‘is after all only a society constructed of many souls’ (BGE 19), and the healthy body, whether individual or collective, will be characterized essentially by tension and openness. This healthy body, like Goethe’s, like that of the healthy Greek state, will manifest a ‘more mysterious pathos’ than the ‘pathos of distance,’ a ‘craving in the soul for every new expansion of distance, the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, more widespread and comprehensive states’ (BGE 257). To the agon that stood at the centre of Greek culture when it was at its apex, Nietzsche adds an internal agon, manifested in the contest between competing drives and interests (see, e.g. GS 33324), which makes possible ‘the continual “self-overcoming of humanity”,’ a process that, for Nietzsche, is one and the same with ‘every enhancement so far in the type “human being”’ (BGE 257).
These new bodies will be, in Spinoza’s sense, joyful and their power to act will be increased. Is not what Spinoza names ‘joy’ what Nietzsche names ‘will to power’: not the desire to possess something – power – but the having of this power in order to act upon the world. This is why Nietzsche can speak of psychology as ‘the path to the fundamental problems’ when it is understood, as he understands it, ‘as morphology and theory of the development of the will to power’ (BGE 23). For Nietzsche no less than for Spinoza, life just is the incessant process of acting on and being acted upon, which for Spinoza is expressed in terms of actions and passions (or more technically, active affects and passive affects), while for Nietzsche these are expressed in terms of the forces of strength and the forces of weakness.
Where for Spinoza, the question of ethics asks: ‘has our power to act in the world been increased or decreased?’ Nietzsche challenges traditional morality by suggesting that one should do all that one is capable of doing, that ‘good’ is doing that which one is capable of doing, and that ‘bad’ is being prevented from doing what one is capable of doing. Moving from this ethical register to a political one, Nietzsche would appear to follow Spinoza’s claim that right is coextensive with power, that ‘it is certain that nature, considered absolutely, has the supreme right to do everything in its power.’25 And from this, Spinoza continues,
But because the universal power of the whole of nature is nothing beyond the power of all individuals together, it follows from this that each individual has a supreme right to do everything in its power, or that the right of each thing extends as far as its determinate power does.26
Such a view would appear to lead Spinoza and Nietzsche to the position that ‘might makes right,’ but I would argue that neither of them holds this position. How then do they avoid it? The first point to note is that they refuse to appeal to any transcendent law or principle that will override one’s right to do what one has the power to do. Instead, they look to factors immanent to social existence, as we see perhaps most clearly in the second chapter of Spinoza’s Political Treatise. As Edwin Curley has noted, Spinoza adopts a ‘pragmatic attitude toward politics,’ which Curly finds exemplified in the opening paragraph of the Political Treatise:
Philosophers think they perform a godly act and reach the pinnacle of wisdom when they have learned how to praise a human nature which exists nowhere, and how to assail in words the human nature which really exists. For they conceive men not as they are, but as they wish them to be. That’s why for the most part they have written satire instead of ethics, and why they have never conceived a politics which can be put to any practical application. The politics they have conceived would be considered a chimera, and could be set up only in utopia, or in the golden age of the poets, i.e., where there was no need for it at all. In all the sciences which have a practical application, theory is believed to be out of harmony with practice, but this is most true of politics.27
Having noted that one has a natural right to do what one has the power to do, Spinoza notes as well that while human beings ‘should live according to the mere dictate of reason,’ they are in fact ‘more led by blind desire, than by reason’ (TP II.5; my emphasis). And so rather than look to reason to appeal to some transcendent norm according to which we might limit our rights, Spinoza suggests we can look instead to our appetites, whereby we ‘are determined to action, or to seek our own preservation.’ But our appetites lead us to community, in part out of fear, as Hobbes had already noted, but also out of our desire to act, our desire to increase our power to act, insofar as ‘if two come together and unite their strength, they have jointly more power, and consequently more right over nature than both of them separately’ (TP II.13). This increase of power is proportional to the numbers who join into the alliance, as is the increase of the rights of the collectivity. But as the collectivity increases in power, its power, and ipso facto its rights, come to exceed those of the individual, so that ‘every individual has the less right the more the rest collectively exceed him in power’ (TP II.16). Here we have arrived at the multitude, who through its collective power has attained a new right which is called Dominion (Imperium) (TP II.17), and it is via this dominion, justified entirely in terms of the immanent relations of power operating within and among the citizens of the collective, that constraints on the individual’s right to exercise its power are legitimated.
Nietzsche, I would argue, arrives at a similar conclusion via psychology rather than politics: the truly strong find no advantage in exercising their power over the weak. While they would have such a right, by virtue of their strength, they would lack the desire, for there would be no challenge, and only what challenges one’s strength will result in the enhancement of that strength. For that reason, Nietzsche argues that the strong will seek out only ‘worthy enemies,’ enemies against whom they can test their strength. Nietzsche addresses this point explicitly in Ecce Homo when he notes that while ‘attack is one of [his] instincts, [t]o be able to be a foe, to be a foe – that demands a strong nature, at all events it is a prerequisite in every strong nature. It needs defiance, consequently it seeks resistance.’ The passage continues:
The strength of an attacker is a sort of gauge for the opposition needed; all growth reveals itself by seeking out a mightier opponent – or problem: for a philosopher who is warlike also challenges problems to a duel. The task is not to become complete master over resistance, but over what every power, skill and prowess-in-arms must mobilize against – over equal opponents . . . equality before the foe – first requirement for an honorable duel.
For this reason, Nietzsche concludes, he has been selective in what he has attacked, choosing only what has been victorious, choosing to attack alone, choosing to attack ideas that are widely held rather than the individuals who hold them, and choosing to attack only that which he respects (EH I: 7).
Elsewhere, in a famous passage from On the Genealogy of Morality (II 10), Nietzsche connects this psychological observation to politics when he notes that ‘As its power increases a community no longer takes so seriously the transgressions of the individual.’ Where the weakness of the creditor had required that all debts be repaid in some form or other, when ‘the power and self-confidence of a community grow, then its penal law always becomes milder.’ When Nietzsche writes that ‘The “creditor” has always become more humane to the degree that he has become richer; ultimately how much impairment he can endure without suffering from it even determines the measure of his wealth,’ it is not so much monetary wealth but abundance of power that is his interest: ‘A consciousness of power in society could be imagined according to which society would afford itself the noblest luxury available to it – that of letting its offender go unpunished.’ The section thus concludes that while the old model of justice demanded that all debts be paid, it will remain ‘the privilege of the most powerful’ to suspend justice, and to this ‘self-suspension of justice’ it will give a ‘beautiful name – mercy.’
Such ideas appear throughout Nietzsche’s writings, from early to late. In The Wanderer and His Shadow, he wrote that while ‘[g]etting angry and punishing are our gifts from the animal world,’ humans will advance and will ‘first come of age when they return this gift from the cradle to the animals.’ ‘Some day,’ he continues, ‘we will no longer have the heart for the logical sin that lies concealed in anger and punishment, whether practiced individually or socially’ (WS 183). And much later, while acknowledging again that the strong have the right to do what their power allows them to be capable of doing, one finds nevertheless that ‘When exceptional people handle those who are mediocre more gently than they do themselves or their peers, this is not just politeness of the heart – it is simply their duty’ (A 57), a duty that takes us very far from any notion of duty one might find in Kant.
It is with this sort of political physis, comprised of diverse and manifold bodies governed by immanent relations of power, that a politics of immanence can avoid recourse to the transcendent. This new conception of the body politic, not as an abstract idea but as an intensive living being with an infinite capacity for becoming other, moves questions of politics from those of individual rights and common goods to questions of what this body, itself comprised of other bodies, can do. Because the bodies that conjoin to form the body politic are no longer conceived primarily as the bodies of individuals who possess transcendent rights, they will be continuously capable of becoming something else, at times identifying and forming assemblages with their own bodies, at other times with the bodies of others, and at still other times with the bodies of their family, their clan, their community, their nation or their planet.28
In titling this essay ‘Spinoza vs. Kant: Have I Been Understood?’ I chose to invoke the final words of Nietzsche’s final book. Nietzsche’s alternative of ‘Dionysus versus the Crucified . . .’ was his way to address the antithesis between the values immanent to life and those of the beyond. These words are offered in answer to a question that Nietzsche repeats three times: ‘Have I been understood?’ (EH IV: 7–9). Nietzsche first answers this question by saying that what defines him is that he uncovered Christian morality to be harmful to life insofar as ‘it is the lack of what is natural, it is the completely ghastly state of affairs whereby anti-nature itself received the highest honors as morality and stayed posted up as law, as categorical imperative for humanity!’ (EH IV: 7). Nietzsche’s second answer highlights how the harmfulness to life manifests itself in the creation of a series of values that lead one to a transcendent realm.
Whoever uncovers morality has uncovered the worthlessness of all values that people believe in or have believed in; . . . The concept ‘God’ invented as counter-concept to life – everything harmful, poisonous, slanderous, the whole deadly animosity toward life, brought into a horrendous union! The concept ‘beyond’, ‘true world’, invented to devalue the only world there is – so there remains no goal, no rationality, no task for our earthly reality! The concept ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, and ultimately even ‘immortal soul’ invented to denigrate the body and make it sick – ‘holy’ – to produce a horrible superficiality toward all things in life worth taking seriously, the questions of nourishment, lodging, spiritual diet, treatment of the sick, purity, the weather! . . . (EH IV: 8)
And then there is Nietzsche’s third and final answer: ‘Have I Been Understood? – Dionysus versus the Crucified . . .’ (EH IV: 9). I would suggest that this antithesis summarizes Nietzsche’s entire philosophical project, a project that, for all its inconsistencies, remained steadfast in its opposition to any move towards transcending what he called, quite simply, ‘this world.’ ‘The god on the cross,’ Nietzsche writes in his notebooks, ‘is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction’ (KSA 13: 14[89]). Contra Heidegger, it is too late for a god to save us now. For that reason, I think political theory must rephrase Nietzsche’s antithesis in terms of another fundamental choice: Spinozist immanence versus Kantian transcendence. And confronting this choice, it seems to me, is precisely where a Nietzschean politics of immanence must be located.
Notes
1 Invented in 1866, the firing rate of the Reffye mitrailleuse was 100 rounds per minute, with an effective reach of about 2,000 yards.
2 But note how this section ends: ‘Then the concept of politics will have been completely taken up into a spiritual war, all the power arrangements of the old society will be detonated – all of them rest on the lie: there will be such wars as there have not yet been on earth. Only after me will the earth have grand politics’. While Nietzsche’s critics are quick to link ‘there will be such wars as there have not yet been on earth’ with World Wars I and II, they neglect to note that Nietzsche is talking here about a new concept of politics that will engage in a ‘spiritual war’, a Geisterkrieg. Here and in what follows, I use the translations of HH, MM, and WS by Gary Handwerk, BGE and GM by Adrian Del Caro, and TI, AC, and EH by Carol Diethe that will appear in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming). Translations from the KSA and KGB are my own.
3 A recent case in point is Derek Parfit’s treatment of Nietzsche in the second volume of On What Matters. While Parfit can be, at times, very sensitive to the nuances of Nietzsche’s prose, he has no problem taking Nietzsche’s militarism and ‘murderous phantasies’ (579) at face value, equating them with the thoughts of Himmler and Hitler (cf. esp. 575–80).
4 Several of the following paragraphs are drawn from an earlier discussion focused on Deleuze in Schrift 2006.
5 Kant 1960, p. 32.
6 See Lacan 1992. Lacan shares the view that ethics and morality are possible only within a Kantian framework, as he notes, following his mention of the categorical imperative, that ‘In truth, I believe that the achievement of a form of subjectivity that deserves the name of contemporary, that belongs to a man of our time, who is lucky enough to be born now, cannot ignore [The Critique of Practical Reason]’ (77).
7 Copjec 1996, p. xiv.
8 Deleuze regards Lacan’s École Freudienne de Paris as a ‘statutory organization’ in ways that recall Nietzsche’s account of the establishment of the Church in Deleuze 1987, p. 85.
9 Roosevelt 1941.
10 Bush 12 September 2001.
11 Bush 11 October 2001.
12 For an interesting treatment of Rawls that highlights his Manichean leanings in Laws of Peoples, see McBride 2008.
13 Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 48.
14 I have explored this point elsewhere; see Schrift 2009.
15 Deleuze 1988, p. 23.
16 Unless otherwise noted, I have used Edwin Curley’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics and cite it parenthetically using the following standard abbreviations: Roman numeral = Part; D = Definition; P = Proposition; c = corollary; d = demonstration; s = scholium. Thus IIIP35s = Ethics Part III, Proposition 35, scholium.
17 Deleuze 1983, p. 2.
18 Ibid.
19 I follow Michael Della Rocca in preferring to translate this Proposition more literally than does Curley; see Della Rocca 1996, p. 257, n. 4.
20 Della Rocca, p. 210.
21 Deleuze 1988, p. 127.
22 Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 260; cf. Deleuze 1988, pp. 127–8.
23 Deleuze 1988, p. 128.
24 That Nietzsche was intrigued by the metaphysical possibilities of viewing the self/soul as a multiplicity of competing drives, interests, or instincts, and the psychosocial implications of this metaphysical view, is evidenced by his numerous comments in the notebooks of 1885–88; see, for example, KSA 11: 40[42]; 12: 7[60], 9[98], 10[19].
25 Spinoza (nd), XVI.2 (Curley translation).
26 Ibid., XVI.4. While the argument is somewhat different, Spinoza makes the same claim in Political Treatise II.3 (Elwes translation): ‘every natural thing has by nature as much right, as it has power to exist and operate’. Subsequent citations from the Political Treatise will appear parenthetically as TP, followed by chapter and paragraph, from the Elwes translation.
27 Cited in Curly 1996, pp. 328–9.
28 In making this point in this way, I am intentionally suggesting that a politics of immanence might cultivate a non-anthropocentric attitude in which one could identify with the planet in the same way one could identify with one’s clan or nation. That is to say, taking the notion of multiple body-assemblages seriously implies to me that, for example, the differences between family, clan, nation and planet should be viewed as differences of degree rather than kind.
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