8
Gary Shapiro
The problem of those who wait. Strokes of luck [Glücksfälle] and many incalculable factors are needed for a higher human, in whom the solution to a problem sleeps, to go into action at the right time – “into explosion,” you might say. This does not usually happen, and in every corner of the earth people sit waiting, hardly knowing how much they are waiting, much less that they are waiting in vain. And every once in a while, the alarm call will come too late, the chance event that gives them “permission” to act, – just when the prime of youth and strength for action has already been depleted by sitting still. And how many people have realized in horror, just as they “jump up,” that their limbs have gone to sleep and their spirit is already too heavy! “It’s too late” – they say, having lost faith in themselves and being useless from that point on. – What if in the realm of genius, the “Raphael without hands” (taking that phrase in the broadest sense) is not the exception but, perhaps, the rule? Perhaps genius is not rare at all: what is rare is the five hundred hands that it needs to tyrannize the kairos, “the right time,” in order to seize hold of chance by the forelock! [um den Zufall am Schopf zu fassen!]
(Beyond Good and Evil, 274)1
Let us read this passage carefully, in the context of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, in order to explore his conception of time and political change. More precisely let us consider the question of timing in relation to Nietzsche’s political categories of multitude, nomad and hybridity, which modify or supersede more traditional ideas of people, nation and state; these categories take us beyond the ‘Peoples and Fatherlands’ which form the ostensible theme of the eighth chapter of Beyond Good and Evil. This reading should articulate his suggestions about the kairos, or right time, with what he says more specifically about his time, which he calls ‘the century of the multitude [Menge]!’ (BGE 256). In BGE Nietzsche is thinking about what it means to have a philosophy of futurity, that is of the unexpected, unpredictable, incalculable event. Further he provokes us to ask what it is to think in the time of the multitude, a diverse collection or assemblage of hybrid, nomadic human types who are culturally attuned to spectacle, to theatre in the widest sense. The task of those who would be vigilantly alert for opportunities of significant political change in such a world depends on their comprehending what the character of their time is, a time called ‘the century,’ and on their ability to avoid the seductions of theatre and political theatre to which the multitude is liable. To clarify this line of thinking it will be necessary to follow Nietzsche more closely than most of his readers have done in distinguishing the multitude from some of his other categories of social and political analysis, such as masses, herd or rabble.
In Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings the term kairos appears only once (according to the digitalized version of his works from de Gruyter). As the aphorism on ‘The problem of those who wait’ indicates – and as we will soon confirm – this word is not easy to translate. Its provenance is both classical and Biblical. The kairos is, roughly, the right time, significant moment, turning point or unexpected and unique hinge of opportunity. It is a ‘stroke of luck,’ a serendipitous moment, incalculable, unpredictable – it partakes of the character of the event in some of the senses given this term by thinkers like Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida and Badiou (a critical history of thought from Heidegger to Badiou could revolve around explicating some of the senses and implications of ‘event’). Since 2001 two book-length English language commentaries have appeared on Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Yet neither of them mentions this expression, and neither treats the aphorism in which it appears in any depth.2 Perhaps BGE is the least understood, the least well-read of Nietzsche’s major texts. This prelude to a philosophy of the future still has a future. The theme of kairos, the opportune moment, would seem to be central to any philosophy of futurity, of the Zu-kunft, of that which arrives, arises or emerges.
Given that futurity is precisely that which cannot be calculated or intentionally produced, in the perspective of a ‘Philosophie der Zukunft’ it would be pointless or at least distracting to engage in speculation about any specific character or content that the future might have. Nietzsche’s project, articulated most explicitly in Beyond, is to think, not the content of the future, but futurity itself, and to provoke his readers to a certain vigilance in their time and place. ‘The problem of those who wait’ is ‘our’ problem so far as we are moving deeper into the questioning indicated by the title of Beyond’s final chapter, ‘What is Noble?’ in which the aphorism on waiting appears. In other words, it is (first) a problem that concerns our understanding and evaluation of those who wait among the other types, roles and characters which we are assessing in terms of the possibility of nobility. Yet it is also the problem posed to those who wait, a problem of which they may not even be aware. The aphorism encourages us to formulate the problem of waiting, a problem which is also necessarily ours as thinkers of futurity. Some ‘wait’ completely unconsciously, waiting only in the sense that they have a set of skills, instincts, aptitudes and thoughts that could respond creatively and responsibly to the stroke of luck, the quick passage of a fortunate chance, the kairos. Some sense with varying degrees of awareness what might be possible, yet the event in the strong sense tests and transforms the limits previously given to the possible. Articulating the problem of those who wait, articulating it as a problem, is itself a form of vigilance, a watchful, self-aware, questioning waiting. Indeed, what is a problem? Is it a question? Or, as Deleuze suggests, does a philosophical problem have the form of a complex of questions that are multiply linked and associated, but which exhibit no unique internal order or hierarchy (Deleuze, pp. 157–67, 195–204). A problem, then, calls for a judgement that either reduces the problem to an ordered series of questions (like Kant’s determinate judgement) or provides some less structured, more pluralizing way of exploring the complexity (variations on Kant’s reflective judgement that go by the names of hermeneutics, genealogy, deconstruction and the like).
Whether Nietzsche’s chapter on the question of nobility answers the question or multiplies and deepens it is not obvious. Some readers, supposing that it promises a certain kind of answer, have judged the chapter and the book to be incomplete; some say that the concluding aphorisms are so scattered that ‘things fall apart’ (Acampora and Pearson, pp. 209–11). Yet to take the text at face value, to read rather literally, we should ask whether in this unique reference to kairos, Nietzsche may be encouraging us to think together the questions of futurity and nobility. Does nobility then involve a certain relation to futurity? In this case ‘the problem of those who wait’ would be central to its intent. Nobility, it must be remembered, is not only an individual character trait, but a form of social and political distinction, even when decoupled from ideas of hereditary aristocracy.
What is the right time, the kairos? How can we recognize it and be prepared for it? To paraphrase Meno’s challenge to Socrates, how will we know it when we see it? And how can we search for it when we don’t know what it is? To these we must add a temporal dimension that Plato neglected when he turned the issue into one of anamnesis: how can we recognize, catch it and respond to it at the right time? How can we be worthy of the event? The Greeks acknowledged this problem in their personification of kairos; he became a figure with locks of hair above his face, but bald in back. His appearance and passage are quick and unpredictable. Kairos must be seized by the forelock as soon as he appears, in a face to face encounter; you can’t hesitate until he has passed and the chance is lost.
The future cannot be known by prediction or prophecy, but precisely, as Derrida reminds us, it is that which is à venir, a Zu-kunft which has yet to manifest itself. Therefore it is not a future that we plan, install or force, but one assembling itself through ‘happy accidents’ and ‘incalculable circumstances.’ Beyond Good and Evil names the site of arrival, the place from which the kairos might become evident, might be seized by the forelock and possibly even tyrannized. Yet since great events slip by everybody or almost everybody, even those with the resources for greeting them, those who might have been equal to the event, are almost always too late.
What is the problem of those who wait? The phrase can be read in at least two ways. In one sense, the emphasis would be on the situation of waiting itself; in another, it would be a question of what the problem is that finds them waiting for a solution. Nietzsche’s explicit concern in the aphorism seems to be with the first: what does it mean to wait for an opportunity, a happy chance, that never comes? What of those who see it come too late, when waiting itself has exhausted their ‘best youth and power’? These are perhaps the unhappiest of those who wait, for they see the moment slipping through their hands. And what should we say of those who, having the powers to seize the kairos, remain unaware that this is their vocation, and consequently allow it to elude them? Nietzsche’s reference to this last possibility indicates that from his perspective there is a kind of objective waiting, a waiting of which one can be unaware. Such ‘Raphaels without hands’ do not know that they are capable of rising to the occasion, or that there could be an occasion that would call forth their powers.
The kairos of this aphorism should be understood as part of a system of terms including events, great events and great noon. Events, that is genuine events, as Nietzsche says both here and elsewhere, are rare and unpredictable (Shapiro 2010). Yet we should not hear Nietzsche’s frequently hyperbolic rhetoric as implying that only the rarest of types, for example the Übermensch, is capable of recognizing, yielding to, and ultimately tyrannizing the event. The events in question are much rarer, according to BGE 274, than are those who might catch and tyrannize them. Indeed, this passage should be read alongside the much quoted lines in Schopenhauer as Educator where Nietzsche says that in principle all people could look beyond themselves to discover an exemplar or educator (SE 6; cf. Cavell); this theme is explicit in the passage from Lessing’s Emilia Galotti to which Nietzsche’s phrase ‘Raphael without hands’ alludes. There the Prince of a small Italian renaissance state has become infatuated with Emilia, the daughter of a rival, who is promised to another. The painter Conti appears at the beginning of the play and shows the Prince two paintings, first of his last month’s love and then of Emilia. When the Prince heaps extravagant praise on the painting, the artist replies with this speech:
Nevertheless, this picture still left me very dissatisfied with myself. And yet, on the other hand, I am very satisfied with my dissatisfaction with myself. Ha! What a pity that we do not paint directly with our eyes! How much is lost on the long path from the eye, through the arm, into the brush! But the moment I say I know what has been lost here and how it has been lost, and why it had to be lost: I am just as proud of that, in fact prouder, than I am of what I did not allow to get lost. Because from the former I recognize more than from the latter that I am really a great artist, but that my hand isn’t always. Or do you think, Prince, that Raphael would not have been the greatest artistic genius had he unfortunately been born without hands? Is that what you think, Prince? (Lessing, pp. 7–8).
What can it mean, then, to tyrannize the kairos, to actualize the power of the five hundred hands of those who wait? Earlier in BGE Nietzsche characterizes the Stoics as spiritual tyrants who insisted on seeing nature as Stoic:
some abysmal piece of arrogance finally gives you the madhouse hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourselves – Stoicism is self-tyranny–, nature lets itself be tyrannized as well: because isn’t the Stoic a piece of nature? . . . what happened back then with the Stoics still happens today, just as soon as a philosophy starts believing in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the “creation of the world,” to the causa prima. (BGE 9)
Stoic tyranny involves the thinker forgetting or denying that she has imposed a meaning on the world; the thinker claims to discover what she has herself constructed. In his comment on the Stoics, Nietzsche admires the decisive energy of such tyranny while resisting its temptations. But is this what he means by tyrannizing the kairos?
Part of the problem of those who wait is understanding what kind of tyranny is possible with regard to the kairos. What is the relation of tyranny and time? This tyranny will not be a capture or seizure. In BGE 279 we hear that sad people are prone to grasping and clutching at their Glück, a response that Nietzsche’s worldly wisdom realizes will only drive it away. This would be an unsuccessful tyranny, as Brecht reminds us in Der Dreigroschenoper: those who chase after Glück will always find that it runs away faster than they can pursue it. Therefore Nietzsche speaks of Glücksfälle, happy accidents. What is Glück? As BGE 274 suggests, it is not a state or condition or experience that can be held, exchanged or distributed, but an emergent event, so the word itself is appropriately translated as ‘happiness,’ ‘fortune,’ or ‘luck.’ The history of the English word ‘happiness’ provides an instructive parallel. It derives ultimately from the somewhat archaic ‘hap,’ used to describe in the most general way the occurrence of any sort of event; ‘happen,’ ‘perhaps,’ ‘mishap,’ and similar words are derived from it. In recent language, events ‘happen,’ in one of the few remnants of the middle voice in English. To be happy was to experience a fortunate happening. Only in later usage does ‘happiness’ become something to be deliberately pursued, possessed, grasped or held as a treasure. One of Nietzsche’s translators has, happily, translated Glücksfälle as ‘serendipities,’ a word that owes its origin to the supposed wonderful chance discovery by European explorers of the marvellous island of Serendip (Ceylon or Sri Lanka), which should remind us of Zarathustra’s Glückselige Inseln (Z II: 2–18).
Much of Nietzsche’s thinking and questioning in ‘What is Noble?’ is apotropaic, warding off the premature embrace of the all too timely, on the one hand, and, on the other, resisting the resigned skepticism that blinds itself to that which arrives. It is not so much inconclusive as it is a complex set of warnings against premature conclusions. It is directed at keeping the five hundred hands as primed as they can be. What is nobility now, for those who wait? Among other things, it is avoiding premature, precipitate action and knowing how to avoid such temptations. In BGE 277 Nietzsche reminds us of the classic paradox that once you’ve built your ideal house you have already thought beyond it to what it should have been. We should learn not to be over-eager in anticipating the moment. We are also reminded of the necessity of masks and disguises, to protect us in our condition of vigilance from those who would interfere if they knew our vocation; so we are advised on the value of feigning stupidity through enthusiasm (288) and of the strategic necessity of writing in order to hide our thoughts (289). This advice can be read as an amplification of the aphorism that precedes and introduces 274 where Nietzsche names the kairos. The one who strives for great things will see others as obstacles, stepping stones or resting places – even when she becomes involved with them she remains solitary at a deep level (273).
The apotropaic dimension of Beyond Good and Evil gains a more specific focus by considering another form of temporality which informs the situation of those who, wittingly or not, are waiting for a kairos. This is the character of the time in which Nietzsche and his readers live. It is not a privileged moment but a stretch of time, a manifestation of modernity, or, to take the classical contrast with kairos, it is chronos (roughly duration, discussed further in what follows). To think of futurity philosophically, it is necessary to think not only time as event and kairos, but time as our time, the time in which we are waiting.
So it should be possible to articulate what Nietzsche has to say about the kairos with his analysis of his own time. Specifically, let us concentrate on the apparently definitive statement ‘this is the century of the multitude [Menge]!’ (BGE 256). Coming at the end of the chapter ‘Peoples and Fatherlands,’ this declaration asks to be taken seriously as an emphatic judgement about the age of nationalism under analysis.
‘Peoples and Fatherlands’ addresses a number of questions having to do with states, nations and the future of Europe. (Europe is understood here as a cultural rather than a strictly geographical entity, including all peoples whose cultures and polities are strongly indebted to a complex of social, artistic and political practices which arose in geographical Europe in modern times, that is roughly from the time of the scientific revolution and the establishment of independent national states in the seventeenth century). The definitive claim – ‘this is the century of the multitude [Menge]!’ – appearing as an interjection set off by dashes, could be said to be the chapter’s conclusion, implying as it does that we must think beyond peoples and fatherlands in order to understand the emerging political contours of modernity.
This thesis comes at the end of a chapter ostensibly devoted to ‘peoples and fatherlands’ – specifically Germany, France, England, the Jews and others – yet it undermines or significantly qualifies the assumption, with which a reader might have begun, that Europe consists essentially of nation-states on which its future and its politics depend. That assumption is also put into question by the repeated observation that ‘Europe wants to be one’ (256); that claim has attracted some attention, typically in connection with Nietzsche’s references to ‘the good European.’ However, it has not been sufficiently noted that Nietzsche is reporting this desire; if he endorses it, it is not obvious why he does so. He does not see the desire as leading immediately or directly to social homogeneity (which Nietzsche tends to designate with words like ‘masses [Massen]’ or ‘herd [Heerde]’) but to new forms of diversity and multiplicity, that is to the formation of a multitude. The multitude arises because Europeans have become increasingly nomadic and detached from their origins or ancestry. This must eventually weaken the power of the nation-state and its claims to legitimacy (HAH 472, 475). In the process, as Nietzsche illustrates by discussing a number of exemplary cultural figures from Napoleon to Wagner, these contemporary Europeans take on hybrid forms, creating new mixtures drawn eclectically from a variety of traditions. They develop beyond peoples and fatherlands. It is the multitude’s century, not the nation-state’s, and it is also not the century of the masses. The multitude’s roots in national identities have been significantly loosened and they have become an audience for those leaders of the near future whom Nietzsche describes as tyrants, including the most spiritual sort (242). Indeed, it is a condition of the appeal of these tyrants that they can compete for the allegiance of a multitude. This account recognizes that the politics of the era of the multitude will have a strong dimension of theatre and spectacle.
Philosophical commentators tend to neglect Nietzsche’s formulation. Consequently they miss some important suggestions about what it means to articulate a philosophy of the future and of futurity. Consider a representative critical remark at the conclusion of an otherwise insightful article on some of Nietzsche’s complex position(s) on race. Yirmiyahu Yovel says that ‘there is a marked lacuna in [Nietzsche’s] thinking – the lack of a positive philosophy of the “multitude.” Politics is not about the happy few, but about those ordinary people, the modern mass or “herd” which Nietzsche did not care about and did not make the topic of any positive philosophical reflection.’ Yovel goes on to say that this political lacuna left (and still leaves) Nietzsche open to abuse by fascists, Nazis and the like (Yovel, 132). Here Yovel like many other readers assumes that the terms ‘multitude,’ ‘mass’ and ‘herd’ are identical. Whether Nietzsche has a ‘positive philosophy’ of the multitude – and what this would involve – remains to be seen, but we must begin by reading his words. The chief elements in the makeup of the herd appear to be lack (not loss) of individuality and unthought, unquestioning submission to the herd’s shepherd or acceptance of its collective, instinctive behaviour. The terms ‘mass’ and ‘masses’ suggest great numbers and homogeneity, and one can often hear Nietzsche attempting to transvalue what he thought socialists were saying about the masses when he uses this term. The multitude of BGE, however, is composed of diverse individuals and is strongly inflected by many hybridic and nomadic strains (cf. 242, 256). Another obvious sign that Nietzsche’s thesis has been neglected or misunderstood is found in the inconsistencies in English translations. The Cambridge translation renders ‘Menge’ in BGE 256 as ‘masses,’ following the lead of the century-old Zimmern version. Masses, however, are almost always taken to be homogeneous in Nietzsche (and in many other nineteenth century writers), lacking the diversity of the Menge. Walter Kaufmann’s ‘crowd’ is somewhat better, especially because an audience can be spoken of as a crowd. Menge appears in a number of other contexts in BGE and the translations tend to be inconsistent in their renderings. So the Menge not only designates a multitude but oddly gives rise to a multitude of meanings. Deeper perhaps than the problem of linguistic translation is a continuing practice of reading Nietzsche as an exclusively aphoristic writer whose books are without structure. More recently, readers have become alert to Nietzsche’s development of systematic arguments in specific books, especially in the case of the Genealogy of Morality.3 Nietzsche insisted that his writings be approached through slow and careful reading (GM Preface). More specifically, in GM I he undertakes a discriminating, differentiating look at the terms used to name human groups or types. Nietzsche advertized GM as an expansion and clarification of BGE (cf. KSA 14.377). There Nietzsche asks us to pay attention to distinctions, even subtle nuances, in the oldest Greek and Latin terms that the masters and slaves use to describe one another. He notes the nuances of tenderness or compassion in some of the nobles’ names for the slaves, urging us to hear ‘the almost kindly nuances which the Greek nobility, for example, places in all words that it uses to distinguish itself from the more lowly people [das niedere Volk]’ (GM I.10). Nietzsche reinforces the methodological point, proposing that some learnt academy invite the submission of essays on the question of how linguistics illuminates moral concepts (GM I.17). While we can be grateful for the work of scholars like Mauss, Benveniste and Foucault who have made exemplary genealogical discoveries in this spirit, we should also apply it to the reading of BGE for which GM is said to serve as a clarification.
It seems clear that Pöbel (rabble), Heerde and Massen are always employed with a tone of contempt in BGE and elsewhere. Nietzsche is appalled by the possibility of the formation of a strong, uniform herd; disdainful of the rabble, he sees the homogeneity of the masses stifling the rise of noble individuals. There is little or no contempt when he speaks of the Menge. Accordingly, I seek to convey a more neutral tone, following Grimm in linking the term to the Latin multitudo, translating it with the English multitude (we might also think of words like ‘throng’).4 I take the dominant note here to be multiplicity, a multiplicity that does not (or does not necessarily) denote uniformity.5 Elsewhere Nietzsche explicitly distinguishes Menge and Masse in terms of the greater diversity of Menge. In Gay Science he says that in Greece ‘there must have been a multitude of diverse individuals [eine Menge verschiedenartige Individuen],’ contrasting this, later in the aphorism, with the homogeneity of the Masse (GS 149).6 In this aphorism Nietzsche makes a very clear distinction between Masse and Menge. The topic is ‘The failure of reformations’; Nietzsche asks why Luther, who he generally describes as a vulgar peasant, was able to accomplish a reformation in northern Europe when much more gifted spirits like Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato failed. He concludes that
Every time the reformation of an entire people fails and only sects raise their heads, one may conclude that the people is already very heterogeneous [vielartig] and is starting to break away from crude herd instincts and the morality of custom [Sittlichkeit der Sitte].
BGE 256 develops this thought about the multitude by examining the careers of exemplary cultural figures whose hybridity and internal multiplicity reflects both the heterogeneity of the Menge which idolizes them (cf. 269) and the European Menge’s desire to be one; but just as Greek reformations failed, so such unification is unlikely so long as the population remains diverse. In ‘Peoples and Fatherlands’ Nietzsche discusses both factors which could encourage unification (such as the slow generation of adaptable supra-national and nomadic types [242]) and the actual diversity that leads not to homogeneity but to varied forms of hybridity. These artists and political figures, whose achievements arise from mixing and synthesizing novel combinations of various cultural traditions, resemble one another in the form but not the content of their hybridity (e.g. Heine’s German-Jewish persona is distinct from Stendhal’s Franco-Italian one). The Menge, it seems, is like these hybrid cases so far as its members too tend to be of mixed but not uniform heritage.
As the context of BGE 256 suggests, the Menge is, among other things, an audience. From the beginning of the aphorism we are in the world of theatre, as Nietzsche explains that the nationalistic politics of the day is ‘a politics of dissolution [auseinanderlösende Politik]’ which necessarily can only be a politics of the theatrical interlude (‘Zwischenakts-Politik’). They are those listening to such cultural stars as Wagner, Stendhal and Heine; these and others first taught their century the concept ‘higher man.’ The chapter begins and ends with attempts to assess Wagner in terms of his presumed exemplification of German national culture; in each case the supposed identity is considerably loosened under examination. He is to be understood as a performer in his relation to his audience, the multitude or throng. Given this theatrical context, we should recall that the Menge plays a prominent role in Goethe’s Faust, where it is the subject of a dialogue that frames the play. Goethe is one of Nietzsche’s constant touchstones and is included in his list of the century’s unconscious seekers for ‘the soul of Europe, the one Europe.’ In Goethe’s ‘Prelude in the Theater’ the Menge is the audience. As the dialogue of director, poet and clown shows, the Menge is not a universal class, but rather those attending the play; there is no indication that they are a representative sample of the people at large. The director wants to please them, especially because they ‘live and let live.’ They want a surprise, and ‘even if their taste is not the very best, they have read quite a bit.’ This suggests a semi-educated but reachable audience. The director’s long description of the Menge is worth quoting because it emphasizes their variation in mood, attention and interest, as well as implicitly acknowledging that they are all likely to be comfortably situated in social and economic terms:
Do not forget for whom you write!
They come when they are bored at night,
Or gorged on roast and relish, spice and capers,
And – this is the most wretched plight –
Some come right after having read the papers.
They come to us distracted, as to a masquerade,
Propelled by nothing but curiosity;
Their dresses and their jewels, the ladies would parade,
And act without a salary. . .
One half is cold, one half is raw.
After the play, one hopes to play at cards,
Another for an orgy in a harlot’s bed (Goethe, pp. 73–5).
Later in this dialogue, the clown emphasizes other internal differences in the Menge, especially between the young and old.
While the poet speaks disdainfully of the Menge, the clown and director ridicule his interest in perfection and the judgement of posterity. To think of this as the century of the Menge then, is to see this as a time in which power is obtained through spectacle presented to a variegated audience. Now appeals to ‘peoples and fatherlands’ – national identity or traditional patriotism involving essentialist or autochthonist claims – are not likely to be effective, except insofar as these are ingredients of a successful spectacle. While Nietzsche observes that all of the exemplary hybrid cultural figures he cites as the time’s first educators with respect to the idea of higher men had severe limits (e.g. all relapsed into Christianity), they did delineate the structure of the emerging political arena.
Nietzsche’s references to the multitude in BGE, while never admiring, are rather nuanced. Consider BGE 213, where the philosopher is said to have been born and bred for a ‘higher world’ and enjoys the ‘sovereignty of his ruling gazes and downward gazes’; accordingly he feels his ‘separation from the multitude with its duties and virtues.’ Nothing derogatory is said here about the multitude, with their own duties and virtues. The philosopher is also separated from everybody else. If the philosopher were simply said to be separated from the rabble, the masses or the herd, all of whom are typically described with disdain, the separation would not be as definitive as Nietzsche wants to make it.7
That the Menge is not a universal class of all human beings, or all those within a certain territory or political unit, is evident from a discussion of their reverence for ‘great men’ (269). Here the multitude is again understood as an audience, one that often admires unwisely, but is distinguished from a more universal class. This admiration is typically naïve; in contrast ‘the psychologist’ is aware of the pitiful shortcomings of the figures generally considered to be great. The psychologist – a role Nietzsche plays when he analyses the ‘higher humans’ (as in 256) – suffers from observing their admiration: ‘Perhaps the paradox of his condition becomes so horrible that the multitude, the educated, the enthusiasts [die Menge, die Gebildeten, die Schwärmer] develop a profound admiration for the very things he has learned to regard with profound pity and contempt . . .’ Nietzsche takes this contemporary phenomenon as a clue to ‘what has happened in all great cases so far: the multitude worshiped a god, – and that ‘god’ was only a poor sacrificial animal!’ The apposition of ‘multitude, educated, enthusiasts’ indicates the relative selectivity in the concept of multitude, as opposed to herd and masses. They are those with sufficient interest and motivation, whatever their other differences, to care seriously about ‘great men.’ While such things may always have happened with the multitude and the objects of its admiration, we are now living in the very time of the multitude, their century.
One more surprising distinction is evident when Nietzsche describes women’s attitude towards the presumed great men. While the multitude adores its ‘great men’ without qualification, not everyone does.
It is easy to imagine that they [higher humans] will soon be subject to eruptions of boundless and most devoted pity from women in particular (who are clairvoyant in the world of suffering and whose desire to help and save far exceed their ability to actually do so). The multitude, the adoring multitude, above all, do not understand this pity . . .8
Recently Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Etienne Balibar and others have spoken about the multitude as a social, political and revolutionary agent. Nietzsche’s use of the concept should be distinguished from these contemporary versions, and from Spinoza’s, which is typically cited as their precedent. Spinoza’s multitude are the people at large, the many, understood as a combination of individuals that can act collectively; Balibar emphasizes the potential for affective community which enables such action.9 This conception of the multitude is much more inclusive than the theatrical one, as Nietzsche conceived it, and specifically attributes a form of agency to the multitude. However, one might think that much of the global audience which follows international music, soccer and the Olympics, film, and the spectacles of war and terrorism could be described a contemporary version of the Menge, indeed as a multi- and inter-cultural expansion of it. Like Nietzsche’s Menge it does not assume uniformity among the multitude, but preserves the strong possibility of differentiation. For Spinoza, the multitude is not as passive as the later thinker deemed the herd, the masses and the rabble. Hardt and Negri claim to follow Spinoza in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. They see the multitude as a collective agent composed of diverse individuals in a world of hybridity and nomadism. In contrast to the multitude they understand the masses as a rather dated concept, tied to the industrial economy that dominated classical Marxist thinking. While Nietzsche does not look forward to the Menge taking political power, so far as they form an audience, it is their applause or boos, favour or disfavour, that determine which would-be leaders hold power and for how long. Those who want to deploy Nietzsche’s thought in behalf of an agonistic democracy might find this combination of the political and the theatrical of mixed value.10 The multitude has some power here, but it is understood in terms of its response to competing spectacles. Perhaps the ‘tyrants of all sorts, including the most spiritual’ that Nietzsche sees emerging include those who stage media spectacles and even own or control the media; they might range from media powers, moneyed interests and politicians waging television campaigns to terrorists staging attacks like that of 11 September 2001.
Why have Nietzsche’s readers ignored the distinctive qualities of the multitude? The frequent conflation of multitude, herd and mass, assumes that Nietzsche sees Europe on the way to producing a uniform, homogeneous, heteronomous population – if it is not already there. However, his position is more complex. The multitude is formed by a mixing of races, cultures, ethnicities, and so on. This might result eventually in the formation of herds and masses, but it need not. Exemplary here is Nietzsche’s discussion of the emergence of what we think of as the Greeks from a mixing of Mongols, Semites and others (KSA 8.96; cf. Cancik). Mixing was the necessary precondition for creating the Greeks. Neither they nor any other group has a simple or pure origin. In BGE Nietzsche looks forward to the possibility of something analogous issuing from Europe’s contemporary mixing. If Europe wants to ‘become one,’ if this is the form of its desire, the ‘truth’ or upshot of this desire (as Hegel would say) is that it becomes a great mixing bowl that could generate a new ruling caste. While this thought can be and has been abused, it is quite distinct from any view about the inevitable dominance of the uniform herd. In this respect it is compatible with much recent political thought focuses on questions having to do with the movement and mixing of peoples, the formation of new cultural configurations, and the constitution of a diverse population. Nietzsche’s terms for these phenomena are nomadism, hybridity and multitude.
The multitude, like the throng Zarathustra finds in the marketplace, are enthralled with the spectacle of the moment; they are likely to be fascinated with a rope-dancer or give their ears to the fire-hound who barks and howls about political ephemera. Grosse Menschen, if there were any, would be associated with great events, in the manner of Hegel’s world-historical figures. Nietzsche approaches the situation of the multitude through the figure of the psychologist who studies ‘the more select cases,’ those often taken to be grosse Menschen. The psychologist discovers that ‘it seems to be the rule that higher people come to ruin.’ He is tormented by repeatedly uncovering the ‘eternal and all-encompassing “Too-late”’ of these higher people, anticipating what will be said just a few aphorisms later about those who see the kairos only after it has flown by. The psychologist must resist the temptation of pity – precisely the situation of Zarathustra with the higher humans. At this point he finds himself in opposition to the Menge:
The paradox of his situation may even reach the frightful point where those cases that have triggered in him great pity as well as great contempt, have triggered in the multitude, the educated, the enthusiasts, a feeling of great reverence; theirs is a reverence for “great humans” and performing animals, for whose sake we bless and esteem the fatherland, the earth, the dignity of humanity, and ourselves; men whom we ask our children to look up to and to emulate (269).
Note that Nietzsche has silently enlisted the pity of his reader for the psychologist, so that we find ourselves in (or resisting) a situation parallel to his. The misplaced reverence of the crowd prevents them from detecting genuinely great people or events. The melancholy of the psychologist threatens an equivalent oblivion regarding the future. As noted earlier, ‘the multitude, the educated, the enthusiasts’ are not the herd, masses or rabble. These noisy and exaggerated enthusiasts fail to see that their ‘stars’ are not so different from performing animals. They see the ‘great humans’ as justifying the earth, the fatherland and their own dignity.
Perhaps, Nietzsche continues, it has always been so with the multitude, adoring an imagined ‘god’ who was ‘only a poor sacrificial animal.’ The ‘great humans’ themselves are woefully unprepared for the kairos because they are ‘precipitous in their trust and distrust,’ ‘people of the moment,’ and likely to be swayed by ‘intoxicated flatterers.’ Nietzsche’s sample list of such supposed great ones – Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol – overlaps with the one provided in BGE 256. Such figures often become the target of women’s ‘limitless, utterly devoted pity.’ Here Nietzsche draws a distinction between women and the general, reverent crowd, which admires rather than pities. Perhaps the point is to introduce a revaluation of what Christianity – for Nietzsche a feminized religion – saw as the distinctive kairos, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, most of the discourse on kairos for the last two thousand years, beginning with Paul’s letters, has centred on this presumed messianic moment (the pre-Christian sense of the theme tended to reappear under the name Fortuna). Nietzsche refers to this as a ‘holy tale and camouflage.’ Perhaps Jesus, whose demands for love knew no limits, and had to be disappointed by all human love, had to become a martyr for a God he constructed as all love. Nietzsche would then be deconstructing the Christian kairos by seeing it as a misunderstanding born of enthusiasm, pity and a misunderstanding of love.
At the end of this aphorism Nietzsche reflects, asking us to acknowledge our own involvement, perhaps our pity, first for the unnamed psychologist and then for Jesus: ‘But why should we muse on [or give ourselves up to (nachhängen)] such painful things? Assuming that we are not compelled to do so.’ But are we not compelled to think about such ‘painful things’ in so far as we are becoming thinkers of futurity? Is it not the promiscuous identification of great events and false kairoi, surrounding us in the century of the multitude, that compels such musing on these painful things? Is this not a major dimension of the problem of waiting in our time – to avoid the simulacra of great events that are the daily work of the society of the theatre and the spectacle?
In ‘Peoples and Fatherlands,’ Nietzsche describes our age of democratization – that is, of the multitude, with its increasingly nomadic, cosmopolitan and hybrid population – as ‘an involuntary exercise in the breeding of tyrants – understanding that word in every sense, including the most spiritual’ (242). Is ‘our time’ then helping to breed spiritual tyrants who can recognize and tyrannize the kairos? This question calls for thought about both time and tyranny. What do we mean by time here? Kairos is typically thought in relation and in contrast to chronos, that is to a progressive, devouring time, what John Locke called ‘perpetual perishing.’ Chronos typically extends into such measures as days, years and centuries. When Nietzsche says that ‘this is the century of the multitude!’ I take him to be speaking the language of chronos, indicating a relatively extended stretch of continuous time (it is chronos which lends itself to the spatialization of time that Bergson and others subject to critique). He is not suggesting that this is a span of exactly one hundred solar calendar years, but naming an epoch that could be the context of kairos. As the Grimm Wörterbuch confirms, Jahrhundert is a translation of the Latin saeculum; the latter means something like an age or an epoch, the span of the longest human life. Thus a saeculum or Jahrhundert is finished, when the last people to have experienced that era have died.
Giorgio Agamben cites a telling definition of kairos and chronos in his study of Paul, The Time That Remains:
In general, kairos and chronos are opposed or heterogeneous, which is certainly true. But decisive here is not simply the opposition, but the relationship between them. What do we have when we have a kairos, an occasion? The most beautiful definition of kairos I have ever found is in the Corpus Hippocraticum, and it is one which in fact characterizes kairos with respect to chronos. I will quote this definition: chronos esti en ho kairos kai kairos esti en ho ou pollos chronos, “the chronos is where we have kairos and the kairos is where we have a little chronos.” Mark the extraordinary implication of the two concepts, which are literally the one within the other. The kairos—to translate it simply as “occasion” or “chance” would be trivial—is not another time: what we get when we grasp a kairos is not another time, but only a contracted and abridged chronos. The precious pearl in the ring of chance is only a small portion of chronos, a time which is left (Agamben, pp. 68–9).
Kairos is a temporal contraction, the time that ushers in the event. This is perhaps why Nietzsche is careful with his terminology in BGE 274. At first he simply refers to those who are waiting (whether they know it or not) for the right time (zur rechten Zeit). This is a first approximation to the problem of waiting, but when Nietzsche names the kairos at the end of the aphorism, the phrase ‘die rechte Zeit’ appears in apposition and in quotation marks, indicating that this is at best an approach, a translation, because the time in question is not simply a passing moment, even one that has been marked for a mundane event, like an appointment in one’s daily agenda. It is precisely that quickening and condensation, that unpredictable moment of turning, that cannot be scheduled. Perhaps at best we can clear away the obstacles that stand in the way of our vigilance. Much of ‘What is Noble?’ concerns such questions of vigilant strategy.
The philosopheme of time’s contraction has appeared earlier in BGE. We should be alert to the emergence of such contractions; yet, Nietzsche argues, our modern virtues stand in the way of acknowledging these moments. The hypercultivation of the historical sense encourages us to place all times and events on the same plane, leaving us unprepared to ‘seize chance by the forelock.’ In ‘Our Virtues’ he writes:
Perhaps our great virtue of historical sense is necessarily opposed to good taste, at least to the very best taste, and it is only poorly and haltingly, only with effort, that we are able to reproduce in ourselves the brief and lesser as well as greatest serendipities [Glücksfälle] and transfigurations of human life as they light up every now and then: these moments and marvels [Augenblicke und Wunder] when a great force stands necessarily still in front of the boundless and limitless–, the enjoyment of an abundance of subtle pleasure [Überfluss von feiner Lust] in suddenly mastering and inscribing in stone [Bändigung und Versteinerung], in settling down and establishing yourself on ground that is still shaking (224).
Taste is understood here as a temporal sense. In the long aphorism that that these words help to conclude, Nietzsche has been discussing what he sees as a distinctively modern weakness, the European historical sense which is an effect of ‘the democratic mixing [Vermengung] of classes and races.’ We moderns may claim this as a sixth sense, he says. If so, the implicit point may be that it replaces taste, a more vital and crucial sense, also sometimes said to be the sixth. Nietzsche speaks of a mixing or Vermengung here, a becoming-multitude which is itself an ‘enchanting and crazy half-barbarism’ and which leads to a weakness for the barbaric and ignoble. The century of the Menge, again, is the condition with which he contrasts the higher taste for the transformative moment. As so often, when Nietzsche thinks of seizing the moment, one of his leading counter-texts is Hegel’s world-history and his concept of the great event. Hegel sees the barbarism of the Germanic tribes as a virtue; it was their unformed and receptive nature, at the transition to the European era (variously called Christian, romantic or Germanic) that allowed them to embrace Latin Christianity and the remnants of classical culture it brought in its wake (Hegel, pp. 347–54).
In a letter to Jacob Burckhardt, Nietzsche characterized Beyond Good and Evil as saying everything that was said in Zarathustra, but doing so very differently; in Ecce Homo, he specifies the difference, beginning the section on BGE by saying ‘After the Yes-saying part of my task had been solved, the time had come for the No-saying, No-doing part. . .’ (KSB 7.254). Reading this hermeneutic advice from the perspective of ‘the problem of those who wait,’ we could see their situation as the other side of the ‘great event’ or ‘the great noon’ that are promised in Zarathustra. Elsewhere I’ve attempted to show that Nietzsche’s great event must be understood as a great event of the earth, in contrast to the nineteenth century’s default Hegelian concept of the great event as involving the state (Shapiro, forthcoming). It is a question of the world of world-history as opposed to the human-earth of mobile habitation. Similarly, Nietzsche’s futurity should be heard as the counterpart of the Hegelian ‘end of history.’ We hear one echo of these great events in BGE 32, where Nietzsche distinguishes the premoral, moral and postmoral epochs; the moral epoch first took hold with the rise of civilization ten thousand years ago, while we may now be on the verge of the postmoral period. BGE 285 notes how difficult it is to perceive great events, because their light reaches us only many years later, like that from distant stars. Nevertheless, Nietzsche maintains the possibility of a disciplined vigilance. It is the last human who can no longer imagine the kairos, and so has lost all sense of this deeper form of waiting. At best, the last men and women revere the temporary stars of the spectacle. The problem of those who wait is the problem of living in ‘the century of the Menge,’ in the age, saeculum or tranche of chronos that we can also call the epoch of theatre and spectacle. The distraction of the time places all of us in danger of falling into oblivion of the kairos. Oblivion is more than forgetting. Those who have been immersed in the river Lethe not only forget, but forget that they have forgotten. In contrast, Beyond Good and Evil enacts its Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, close to what Nietzsche sometimes calls ‘philosophy for the day after tomorrow,’ by awakening the thought of serendipity, Zufall, Glücksfall and kairos, while offering strategies for dissolving false interventions of and misplaced enthusiasms for supposed great humans and great events.
Notes
Portuguese version of some parts of this essay appears as ‘Estratégias de serendipity: Nietzsche e vigilância kairótica’, in Potências e Práticas do Acaso, ed. Maria Cristina Franco Ferraz and Jonathan Pollock (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2012). These sections are published here with permission of the editors. I am grateful to Fredrika Spindler for allowing me to read an unpublished paper on the concept of multitude.
1 Das Problem der Wartenden.—Es sind Glücksfälle dazu nöthig und vielerlei Unberechenbares, dass ein höherer Mensch, in dem die Lösung eines Problems schläft, noch zur rechten Zeit zum Handeln kommt—‘zum Ausbruch’, wie man sagen könnte. Es geschieht durchschnittlich nicht, und in allen Winkeln der Erde sitzen Wartende, die es kaum wissen, in wiefern sie warten, noch weniger aber, dass sie umsonst warten. Mitunter auch kommt der Weckruf zu spät, jener Zufall, der die ‘Erlaubniss’ zum Handeln giebt,—dann, wenn bereits die beste Jugend und Kraft zum Handeln durch Stillsitzen verbraucht ist; und wie Mancher fand, eben als er ‘aufsprang’, mit Schrecken seine Glieder eingeschlafen und seinen Geist schon zu schwer! ‘Es ist zu spät’—sagte er sich, ungläubig über sich geworden und nunmehr für immer unnütz.—Sollte, im Reiche des Genie’s, der ‘Raffael ohne Hände’, das Wort im weitesten Sinn verstanden, vielleicht nicht die Ausnahme, sondern die Regel sein?—Das Genie ist vielleicht gar nicht so selten: aber die fünfhundert Hände, die es nöthig hat, um den καιρὁσ, “die rechte Zeit”—zu tyrannisiren, um den Zufall am Schopf zu fassen! (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 274)
2 Cf. Lampert (2001) and Burnham (2007). Acampora and Pearson suggest that the narrative continuity of Nietzsche’s book breaks off at this point in the final chapter, constituting an interlude or Zwischenspiel of more personal and episodic observations before the final two aphorisms; Acampora and Pearson, pp. 204–5.
3 Nevertheless, two recent commentaries on BGE, by Lawrence Lampert and Douglas Burnham, which are valuable attempts to understand the book as a whole, give scant attention to Nietzsche’s theme of the multitude and its political significance. While both offer discussions of the herd and herd morality, neither notes the place of ‘herd’ within an array of distinguishable concepts designating various types of groups.
4 See Menge in Grimm’s Wörterbuch: http://germazope.uni-trier.de/Projects/WBB/woerterbuecher/dwb/wbgui
5 Some further linguistic evidence concerning Nietzsche’s emphasis on the diversity and multiplicity of the Menge may be found in mathematical discourse. The Menge is the sheer multiple, a set of diverse elements. While the set may have a definition (the set of all odd numbers, all engaged in productive work, all who live in Europe, etc.), they are internally diverse. The mathematician Georg Cantor was developing set theory (Mengenlehre) around the time Nietzsche was describing a world of limitless multiplicity. I find no evidence that Nietzsche knew of Cantor’s discoveries. However, he was clearly interested in analogous concepts, such as the Darwinian idea of a population, as opposed to an essentially defined species (e.g. GS 1,149).
6 Another crucial passage: ‘Statistics prove that there are laws in history. Indeed, it proves how common and disgustingly uniform the mass [Masse] is. You should have tried statistical analysis in Athens for once! The lower and more non-individual the mass [Masse] is, the statistical laws are that much stronger. If the multitude [Menge] is finer and nobler, the law goes to the devil’ (KSA 7.642; cf. KSA 4.18, 7.119, 9.462, 12.96).
7 One apparent counter-example: ‘It is a great achievement when the grossen Menge (people of all kinds who lack depth or have speedy bowels) have finally had the feeling bred into them that they cannot touch everything. . .’ (263). Here the phrase is grossen Menge, however, which suggests a more inclusive group than the Menge as such; most translators correctly choose ‘masses’.
8 In this aphorism Nietzsche sometimes speaks of ‘grosse Menschen’ and sometimes of specifically gendered ‘grosse Männer’.
9 Cf. Étienne Balibar (1989), who does not distinguish among terms such as masses and multitude and seems to use them interchangeably.
10 See Acampora (2003) and works cited there.
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