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Who is Nietzsche?
ALAIN BADIOU
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philosophical act. Or, to use his language, in his conception of the power
of philosophy. That is to say, of anti-philosophy.
In what do this act and thi s power consist?
It is by failing to place this question at the threshold of any
examination of Nietzsche that both Deleuze and Heidegger partially
missed his absolute singularity, the one that ultimately both fu lfils and
abolishes itself under the name of madness.
Deleuze begins his book, Nietzsche and Philosophy, with this
declarati on: "Nietzsche' s most general project is the introduction of the
concepts of sense and value into phi losophy." Now, I believe that the
philosophical act according to Nietzsche does not take the form either of
a project or of a program - rather, as in Sarah Kofman 's title, it could
be called an explosion. Nei ther is it a question for Nietzsche - of
introducing concepts. For the name of the philosophical event can be
nothing other than a figure, and ultimately a proper name. The proper of
the event deposes the common of the concept. To do this, it supports
itself on the opacity of the proper name. Nietzsche' s phil osophical
thought is given in a primordial network of seven names: Christ, or the
Crucified, Dionysus-Ariadne, Saint Paul, Socrates, Wagner, Zarathustra,
and finally the most obscure of all the names, the name "Nietzsche",
which recapitulates the others.
Of course, Deleuze is aware of these names, the meaning of which he
interprets. One can, as he does with virtuosity, read in these nominal
series the coding of types of force, analyse them according to the grid of
the active and the reactive. But in thi s case, the network of proper names
is brought back to the commonality of sense, and Nietzsche is absorbed
i nto the stream of interpretation. What is lost in Deleuze's strong reading
is this: it is through the opacity of the proper name that Nietzsche
constructs his own category of truth . This is indeed what assigns the
vital act to i ts nonsensical, or inval uable, dimension. Nietzsche ' s last
word is not sense, but the inevaluable.
The common name of the supreme act, the one that puts an end to
Christian enslavement, is "the reversal of all values," or the
transvaluation of all values. But the reversal of all vahws does not itself
have a value. It is subtracted from evaluation. < 'n1ai11ly, ii is life itself
against nothingness, only that, as Nietzsche will say i11 1'l1<' Twilight of
the Idols , and it is a decisive axiom:
Alain Badiou
enter into N ietzsche, one must therefore focus on the poi nt where
evaluation, values, and sense all come to falter in the trial posed by the
act. Thus where it is no longer a question of values or of sense, but of
what actively surpasses them, what philosophy has always named
"truth".
In my view thi s is what Heidegger fails to grasp when he thinks that
Nietzsche's program of thought is the institution of new values. We
know that Nietzsche anal yses the old values as a triumph of the will to
nothingness. They exist in virtue of a pri nciple that for Nietzsche is the
supreme principle, which is that man prefers to will the nothing, rather
than not to will at all. For Heidegger, Nietzsche, in reversing the old
values, in proposing the noon of affirmation over against the will to
nothingness, actually intends to overcome nihilism. Now, Heidegger will
say that by so doing, by wi lling to overcome nihilism, Nietzsche's
thought separates itself from the very essence of nihilism, which is not in
fact the wil l to nothingness. Thi s is because for Heidegger, i f nihilism is
the will to nothingness, it is then intelligible in its essence on the basis of
the figure of the subject. But in truth nihil ism is not a figure of the
subject; nihilism is the hi story of the remaining-absent of being itself, as
historiality. Nihilism is a historial figure of being. It is this that comes to
be concealed within a Nietzschean program of thought, which consists in
the overcoming of nihilism. As Heidegger will say: "The will to
overcome nihilism [which he attributes to Nietzsche] does not know
itself, because it excludes itself from the evidence of the essence of
nihilism, considered as the history of the remaining-absent and thus
prohibits itself from ever knowi ng its own doing."
ls Nietzsche real ly so ignorant of his own doing? We find ourselves
brought back to the question of the act. We must begin by asking if this
N ietzschean doing represents itself as an overcoming, in the
metaphysical form of the subject. It seems to me that there is here, on
Heidegger's part, a critique which Hegelianises Nietzsche before judging
him. Because I believe that for Nietzsche the act is not an overcoming.
The act is an event. And this event is an absolute break, whose obscure
proper name is Nietzsche.
It is to this link between an act without concept or program and a
proper name, a proper name that is his own only by chance, that one
must refer the famous title of one of the sections of Ecce Homo: "Why I
am a Desti ny." I am a destiny because, by chance, the proper name
"Nietzsche" comes to link its opacity to a break without program or
concept.
To
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We have just entered into great politics, even into very great
politics I am preparing an event which, in all likelihood, will
break history into two halves, to the point that one will need a
new calendar, with I 888 as Year One.
...
Alain Badiou
My works are rich with a decision with regard to which the brutal
demonstrations
of calculation in contemporary politics could
prove to be nothing more than mere errors of calculus.
And, in a draft letter to William II, Nietzsche writes thi s:
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'Equality o,f souls before God', this falsehood, this pretext for the
rancune o,f all the base-minded, this explosive concept which
finally became revolution, modern idea and the principle o,f the
decline o,f the entire social order - is Christian dynamite.
It is not at all for Nietzsche a question of opposing some sort of wisdom
to Christian dynamite. The fight against Christianity is a fight amongst
artillerymen, or amongst terrorists. In October 1 888, Nietzsche writes to
Overbeck:
One day my philosophy will win, because until now no one has, in
principle, prohibited anything but truth. (Ecce Homo)
But all of a sudden, since what Nietzsche decl ares is also the event itself,
he is caught, ever more manifestly, in a circle. 1 poinlcd out, above, that
Nietzsche says: "I prepare an event". But 1he declaration concerning the
preparation of an event becomes progressively more indiscernible from
the event i tself, whence an oscillation characteristic of Nietzsche
Alain Badiou
between i mminence and di stance. The declaration will shatter the world,
but that it is goi ng to shatter it is preci sel y what it declares:
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Alain Badiou
the anti-phil osophical hero is forced to decl are that he will create this
world. That he will create it, and not that he has been sei zed by its
triumphal appearance. This world is thus a program, but one that
antecedes i tself. And so one is a captive of the circle. And in the end to
break this circle one needs the disinterested fiction of an integral
creation, not only of a new world, but of the old world as well.
At th is point, nothing but madness.
Upon what does archi-politics itself come to break? Upon the
unavoidable necessity of politics. Of politics, which demands patience.
Which knows that it is pointless to announce the event. That one must
think and act with chance, and i n circumstances that one does not
choose. Of a politics which has had to renounce the idea of breaking the
history of the world in two. A politics that is content - which is already
a lot, and very difficult - with being faithfu l to a few new possibilities.
Equally, anti-phi losophy comes to break upon the permanence, upon
the resistance, of phil osophy. Philosophy, which knows that its act, as,
act of truth, does not have the power of abolishing the values of the
world. And that the labour of the negative may not be dissolved in the
'
great Dionysian affirmation.
Is this to say that Nietzsche 's force, his si ncerity, his sacri fice, are of
no use? That the idea of an archi-politics is a vain folly? 1 do not think
so.
For there is in Nietzsche an extremely precious i ndication. An
indication concerning a decisive question for any philosophy
whatsoever. The question of the relationship between sense and truth.
On this question of sense and truth there are, I think, three primordial
stances. First, there is the stance that holds the idea of a rigorous
continuity between truth and sense. I call this stance religion. There is a
stance that unilaterally establishes the su premacy of sense and attempts
to destroy the rel igious stance. Thi s is Nietzsche 's struggle. And finally
there is the philosophical stance. It is in rupture with anti-philosophy
because it both retains and develops, by means of a rational critique, the
idea of truth. But it is also in rupture with religion, because it refu ses to
identify truth with sense; it even willi ngly declares that in any truth there
is always something of the nonsensical.
But what happens hi storically is that the second stance, the anti
philosophical stance, is almost always what points the third stance, the
phi losophical stance, towards its own modernity. Anti-philosophy puts
phi losophy on guard. It shows it the ruses of sense and the dogmatic
danger if truth. It teaches it that the rupture with religion is never
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definitive. That one must take u p the task agai n. That truth must, once
again and always, be secularised.
Nietzsche was right to think that his primordial task could be named
the Antichrist. He was right to call himself the Antichrist. And in his role
as radical anti-philosopher he poin ted philosophy to the very place of its
modem task. From Nietzsche, we need to retain what he designated as
the task of philosophy: to re-establish the question of truth i n its rupture
with sense. Nietzsche puts us on guard against hermeneutics.
Therefore, 1 believe that Nietzsche is someone that one must at once
discover, find, and lose. One must discover him in his truth, discover
him in the desire of the act. One must find him, as he who provokes the
theme of truth towards a new demand, as he who forces the
philosophical stance to inven t a new figure of truth, a new rupture with
sense. And finally, of course, one must lose him, because anti
philosophy must, when all is said and done, be lost, or lost sight of, once
philosophy has established its own space.
This discovery, this find , this loss: I often feel them with regard to all
of the century's great an ti-phi losophers; with Nietzsche, with
Wittgenstein, and with Lacan. I think that all three - but Nietzsche' s
case is without doubt the most dramatic - i n the last instance sacrificed
themselves for philosophy. There is in anti-philosophy a movement of
putting itself to death, or of silencing itself, so that something imperative
may be bequeathed to philosophy. Anti-philosophy i s always what, at its
very extremes, states the new duty of philosophy, or its new possibility
in the figure of a new duty. I think of Nietzsche's madness, of
Wi ttgenstein 's strange labyrinth, of Lacan ' s final muteness. In all three
cases anti-philosophy takes the form of a legacy. It bequeathes
something beyond itself to very thing that it is fighting against.
Philosophy is always the heir to anti-philosophy.
This is why I am so touched, in one of the last notes to Brandes, by
this very Pascalian phrase of Nietzsche, which i mmediately speaks to me
of this singular and intricate relationship to the .real a111i ph ilo sophers of
the century.
1:1r'11f
/1'1/f to /iwl
me:
the
And it is true that the i,rcal ddl1111lrv '"'"".ill, 111;11 which demands of u s
a creation, i s 1101 hi d1;n1vn .111d 111 1111d11.1.1111I Nw11sd1e. The difficulty
is to know, philosopl11rnllv, li11w ' " 111.1 111111
Nietzsche:
Revenge and Praise
call
it shallow:
but
when you
lies
concealed within this praise you will find it almost too subtle and
take great pleasure in the abundance of little bold strokes and
figures. It is not man but his revenge that is so subtle, rich and
inventive he himself is hardly aware of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (Aphorism 228)
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JASON WINFREE
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111111 1 .11 y
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1 11 \ ).
Jason Winfree
13
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1 983), p. 3. Hereafter cited as N.
14
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I.
With these words we return to the begi nning of the wntmg of the
disas ter, a beginning which is no doubt properly philosophical, even if it
is already multiple, invoking the names of Deleuze and Nietzsche, but
also, as we will see, the fragment signified by the name of Blanchot.
How does the proper philosophical beginning stand in relation to eternal
return, and what is the significance of this question?
Although eternal return begins in a certain sense with the rejection of
the possibility of ever beginning, ' or of ever having begun, we cannot
overlook the fact that the heart of D(fference and Repetition, the chapter
entitled "The Image of Thought", begins with the question of begi nning.
Is the proper philosophical beginning thereby repeated, or is repetition
the only philosophical beginning? To be sure, Deleuze affirms the latter,
and that by which he begins must be understood as a repetition of the
destruction between the true and the apparent worlds announced by
Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. More precisel y, Deleuze's repetition
of Nietzsche' s beginning concerns that text entitled "How the True
World Finally Became a Fable'', wherein Nietzsche recounts the series of
beginnings that belong to the history of philosophy, each one repeating
the deterioration of Platonism and the malignancy of the world of
representation. Of course, these beginnings do not really properly begi n ,
but this i s not simply because they are instituted b y way o f repetition.
Rather, they do not do so because they fail to meet the demand that a
proper philosophical beginning be presuppositionless, as for example
Descartes would have us believe. More precisely, they fail to properly
4
Maurice BJanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 1 986), p. I . Hereafter cited as WU I. Trans. modified.
See Maurice Blanchot, L'ecriture du desastre (Gallimanl, t'l89), 7.
5 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walin Kaufmann and R.J.
Hollingdale (New York: Vin tage Books, 1968), nu. 10<>2, IO<i<>. llcrcafter cited as
WP.
Jason Winfree
15
begin because they presuppose both common sense and the good will of
thought, a sort of prephilosophical i m age that determines the conformity
of thought to a principle that at once prohibits i ts genesis. And in this
sense, these "beginnings" do not even begin i mproperly, a failure that i s
concomitant with the sterility of their repetition. "[A]s a result,"
according to Deleuze, "the conditions of a phi losophy which would be
without any kind of presuppositions appear all the more clearly: instead
of being supported by the moral Image of thought, it would take as its
point of departure a radical critique of this I mage and the 'postulates' i t
implies" (DR 132). But in what sense would this new critique condition
phi losophy? As we will see, it is a question of grounds.
In the strictest sense, critique has never done anything except
condition philosophy, del imit its possibilities and legitimate the scope of
its deployment. Unfortunately, this scope has been too narrowly
determined, and the reflexivity or the power of critique, which is
supposed to account for itself in critiquing itself, and which would
thereby have to step outside itself, has proved to be but a slave to the
rule of identity that is abstracted from insignificant facts such as
recognition. The transcendental critique that is supposed to provide the
conditions of all possible experience in fact provides only the conditions
of banal experience, even if thi s proves to be the only experience
properly speaking, namely, the experience of an epistemic continuity
that is moral to the core. For insofar as it would take its point of
departure from the familiar, cri tiq ue would li terally never do anything
other than understand itself by way of what it presupposes and knows all
too readily. To be sure, in this self-understanding, critique would submi t
itself to itself, thereby fulfilling its fu nction, but at the expense of never
ascending to the level of the more rigorous transcendental question
whose rumor echoes below its foundations and towards which it aspires.
Instead, it aspirates on i tself, its transcendentali ty not merely accounting
for the banality of experience, but itself reproducing this banality in its
very fu nction. Although critique would critique itself, it would do so
without accounting for itself in the sense that it would fail to open the
question of its ground. And that is to say, i t would critique itself
preci sely in accounting only for itself, and so would remain defective in
proportion to the degree that it would suffice, its exercise synonymous
with the work of solipsism. Critique, in short, would be nothing more
than the activity of self-identity, and so wou ld remain self-enclosed,
bearing no relation to the outside, bearing, in fact, nothing. Critique-as
conservative as the habit from which i t is drawn, a game without risk,
not even the simulacrum of thought.
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Jason W infree
17
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan, 1 965), B 429. Hereafter cited as CPR.
7 Kant writes, "The proposition 'I thi nk' , in so far as it amounts to the assertion, 'I
exist thinking', is no mere logical function, but determines the subject (which is then
at the same time object) in respect of existence, and cannot take place without inner
sense, the intuition of which presents the object not as thing in itself, but merely as
appearance. There i s here, therefore, not simply spontaneity of thought, but also
receptivity of intuition, that is, the thought of myself applied to the empirical intuition
of myself' (CPR B430).
8 In that case, the identity of the determined and the undetermined would collapse into
a sort of formless identity, a sheer indeterminacy that could just as easily be
understood in terms of an undetermined difference. From this position, Descartes'
cogito would therefore be determined only by the fiat of the Third Meditation.
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even in res isting it. For Deleuze, this constitutes nothing less than "the
di scovery of a ground behind every ground, the relation between the
grou ndless and the ungrounded, the immediate reflection of the formless
and the superior form which consti tutes the eternal retu rn" (DR 67 ,
italics mine). Behind the ground of critique, then, beneath critique as the
activity of grounding and self-identity, lies another ground, one that
consists in the relation between the groundless and the now u ngrounded
or fractured. And this relation is further determined as the coexistence of
the reflection of formlessness and a superior form. Understood in terms
of this coexistence, the ground would indeed be transformed, constituted
by what would be. excluded from it by the strict sense of critique. And
this is to say that the activity of determination not only presupposes the
indeterm inate in the formal sense that would be required in order for
determination to function at all - a claim that ultimately belongs to the
logic of origin(s) - but also that the very functioning of determination
would repeat that which it excludes, and that it would do so precisely i n
i t s activity of exclusion. The determination of the formless must
therefore be heard in the double genitive, the work of determination
always the reflection of formlessness, its welling up beneath the
"ground", its emergence constituting the very activity of determination.
Surely, it is in this sense that Deleuze insists that "to ground is to
metamorphose" (DR I 54). The conception of ground that belongs to
critique in the strict sense would therefore not only come to be through
such transformation - it would in fact be nothing more than a particular
di stribution of this becoming, albeit one that has long domi nated the
hi story of the West. It is to just this metamorphosing that the fracture
would point, but also to its double, becoming and the being of becoming.
With this we arrive again at Nietzsche's impossible beginning, the
eternal return, what Deleuze refers to as the form of formlessness (DR
55). It is the eternal return that rumbles beneath the surface.
When N ietzsche poses the question of the value of critique, this
i ntensification of the question must not only evidence the fracture that
permeates critical i nquiry from the outset, but it must also expose the
manner in which resistance to the fracture inhibits philosophical
movement. And Deleuze ' s own treatment of the question of repetition
and the failures of the rule of identi ty-its inability to account for
di fference, repetition, individuation, stupidity (betise), creation-must
be u nderstood as critique in just this sense, as opening thinking to the
power of an aggression which has i n fact always threatened to tear i t
apart. The fragmentation towards which i t i s drawn is demanded from
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the outset insofar as the metamorphosing of the ground outstrips the law
of identity. And this is to say that this transformation marks a change in
the same, and thereby forces the same outside of itself, forces the
difficulty of its non-identity. Determination is always the determination
of difference, and according to Deleuze the challenge of eternal return
arises in conjunction with the demand that this difference be repeated.
He states,
That identity not be first, that it exist as a principle but as a second
principle, as a principle become; that it revolve around the
Different: such would be the nature of a Copernican revolution
which opens up the possibility of difference having its own
concept, rather than being maintained under the domination of a
concept in general already understood as identical. Nietzsche
meant nothing more than this by eternal return (DR 4 1 ) .
Eternal recurrence and yet another Copernican revolution-whatever
else might be said concern ing this coupling, we cannot ignore the force
of Deleuze ' s insistence that the poverty of representation makes itself
felt at every turn. For the difference that lies under every determination
cannot be illuminated by the work of analogy, as if the groundless and
the ungrounded were related not only by way of something they held in
common , but also as if the identity of that by which they would be
related could be presupposed. What then would it mean for di fference to
have its own concept? We should not be surprised if we do not recognize
such a concept, nor if it turns out to be impossible.
In fact, a concept of difference in Deleuze ' s sense requires above all a
constant redistribution of the transcendental and the empirical. We have
already seen how the rule of identity is abstracted from the form of
common sense and the good will of thought, raised to the level of
principle that secures the dominance and transcendental status of its
meagre empirical ori gins. The world of representation thereby achieves a
prominence that secures a structural blindness, restricting thought to a
circulation within its vicious circle. The economy of thi s circulation
retreats m both the question of the outside and that of the fracture,
reducing the former to madness, the latter to error. The transcendental
function of representation, therefore, not only fails lo account for its own
genesis, as we noted above, bu t it fails to accounl for this fail ure, one
which accordingly both belongs to it and exceeds it. Arni it is in just this
sense that "we always discover the necessity or reversing l h e supposed
relations or divisions between the empirical and I Ill' r r:insccndental"
Jason Winfree
21
"Our problem concerns the essence of repetition," writes Deleuze. "lt is a question
of knowing why repetition cannot be explained by the form of identity in concepts or
representations; in what sense it demands a superior 'positive' principle" (DR 18).
10 Translation altered. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Presses
Universitaires de France, 1962), I 08. "Dans la critique, ii ne s' agit pas de justifier,
mais de sentir autrement: une autre sensibili te." Tomlinson translates this: "The point
of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility" (N
94).
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testifies both to the domain and the difficulty of Deleuze ' s inquiry. Stil l,
we miss the force of th is though t-movement entirely if we u nderstand it
in terms of the institution of a new set of categories, and for this reason
we must avoid fetishizing the language of transformation at all costs. It
is not a matter of establ ishing the virtual, the universal or the singular: it
is certainly not a matter of the reification of that which i s expressed in
these shifts, but rather concerns going to the heart of the space that this
langu age attempts to hold open. For aside from the fact that such an
understanding would quite literally be impossible, the understandi ng
belonging to a predetermined distribution and legiti mation of the
"proper" categories, what interests Deleuze is the structure of the shift
itself, and we are already in it in a certain sense. "It is not enough,
therefore, Lo propose a new representation of movement; representation
is already mediation. Rather, it is a question of producing movement,
making movement itself a work, without interposition ; of substituting
direct signs for mediate representations," states Deleuze (DR 8, my
i talics). Can this structure be written in such a way that it is not
smothered by its very articulation? Can writing bear the eternal return?
What is presupposed in our posing these questions in terms of capacity
or capability? "It is [i ndeed] a matter of knowing what it means to
'produce movement,' to repeat or to obtain by repetition" (DR 1 1 ) .
I n the "Preface" to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes h i s
work a s a sort o f philosophical collage. The names o f Plato and
Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, Leibniz and Hegel, Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche, to mention but a few, mark intensities within this complex,
the points at which images border one another producing the contrasts
and voicing the differentials by which the whole comes into view. And
the same can be said for the two quotations we have just cited. In the
first, Deleuze speaks directly of the question of producing movement,
while in the second he places this production in quotation marks,
suspending or interrupting)its work, at least temporari ly. The entire text
is in fact constituted by such claims and their withdrawal, statements
repeated by virtue of their suspension, always operati ng within the space
of this give and take. If we are to understand what it means to repeat, or
to obtain repetition, we must be attentive to this tension, the difference
that substitutes direct signs for mediate representations, and the
suspension of these direct signs in favor of what they would signal, this
suspension itself repeating the withdrawal of that which exceeds
representation, even at the risk of reinscription. The difference is situated
along the lines of the being of the sensible and the problem of passage,
Jason Winfree
23
or of the passage of the being of the sensible into thought, its eru ption,
interruption, and corruption within the world of representation . We must
therefore pay heed not only to the movement of Deleuze' s text, but its
very disappearance.
The being of the sensible, the object of encounter that forces thought
and that alone constitutes the proper "object" of philosophical inquiry, i s
indeed imperceptible, inaccessible t o the world o f representation. This is
because representation encounters the sensible only where it bears
directly upon the senses in an object that can also be recalled, imagined,
or conceived. In short, for representation, the sensible is that which
cannot only be sensed, but rather that which can in principle be
accounted for by faculties other than sense, for example by way of
analogy or judgment, always presupposi ng the exercise of the senses and
the other faculties in a common sense. Within representation, sensibility
does indeed grasp what is given , but it does not aspire to that by which
the given is given. Although Deleuze says for this very reason that the
whole of phenomenology is constituted as a mere epiphenomenology
(DR 52), we cannot help hearing at this point at least a distant resonance
with Heidegger. As Deleuze puts it, "It is not a sensible being but the
being of the sensible" that we are after. "It is not the given bu t that by
which the given i s given. It is therefore in a certain sense the
imperceptible [insensible]" (DR 1 40). And like Heidegger's Being and
Time, which opens with the perplexity of the Sophist, Deleuze insists
that this being moves the soul, 'perplexes' it, forces it to pose a problem
(ibid.), and that it does so only when encountered in its strangeness.
The "object" of philosophical di scourse, the being of the sensible, is
then that which i s unsaid in critique, that which critique in the strictest
sense cannot even say, that which in its very exclusion comes to the fore
as forgotten. To be sure, it is not empirically forgotten, something that at
one time must have been seen, heard, imagined or thought. What is
encountered in the heart of critique is instead a sort of transcendental
forgetting, and it is in this way that the encounter is itself raised to the
level of the transcendental. The fracture of critique is therefore not
merely the point of access to the tra nscendental, as if one could choose
to proceed further or decline to do so, but rather the very force of the
transcendental, the point of its intensification. Confronted with such an
"object," and unaware of this confrontation precisely insofar as the
"object" is imperceptible, the faculties find themselves before their
limits, forced into a transcendental exercise drawn not from the
empirical, but from that which is, strictly speaking, transcendent. In this
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Jason Winfree
25
is not even ill usory, although perh aps no less necessary. More
importantly, though, insofar as the usefulness of this fiction is
proportionate to a condemnation of and discontent with becoming,
eternal recurrence would be the approximation by which becoming
would resist itself, contesting i ts own identity. Deleuze has something
like this mind when he states, "It is not the same which returns, it is not
the similar which returns; rather, the Sarne is the returning of that which
returns, - in other words, of the Different; the similar is the return ing of
that which returns, - in other words, of the Dissimilar" (DR 300). J n
short, it is difference that returns, return ing each time in all its
difference.
Difference and Repetition sets out to account for just thi s difference,
and so too the necessity of the approximation indicated in the high-point
of Nietzsche's meditation. But if eternal return marks the deferral of
difference and thereby repeats it, could we even understand this marking
as an account of the movement of d i fference? What would be the
difference between difference and repetition, on the one hand, and the
thought of eternal return as an approximation thereof, on the other?
Might this difference be disastrous, situated at the very limit of writing?
According to Deleuze, of course, eternal recurrence is selective.
Whether it functions as a cosmological or physical doctrine, or as an
ethical test, Deleuze understands this selection in terms of an
intensification of the transcendental, as the repetition by which the
transcendental encounters the ontological. Under both aspects, selection
at once names the transcendental forgetting at the heart of critique and
the force of affirmation. What is affirmed is the repetition and
distribution of difference, or more precisely, the distribution of
difference in repetition is i tself the affirmation and being of becoming, a
formula Deleuze does not hesitate to invoke. 1 2 He means by this above
all that the return here at issue is not the return of a preformed,
presupposed identity. Instead, what returns is nothing more than
returning itself, the recurrence of becoming that is required if becoming
is to become at al l. It is for this very reason that Deleuze insists on the
selection of eternal return, indicating that such a thought would be
contradictory if the reactive returned as well as the active (N 72). We
miss this point altogether if we insist upon the fact that Nietzsche is
expl icit that everything returns, active and reactive, and that Deleuze's
interpretation fails insofar as it does not take this into account. For such
an insistence would require that we conceive of the return as the return
12
26
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Jason Winfree
27
II .
With this remark, Nietzsche calls our attention once again to the
extremities of the ontological problematic, the limit where 'change' and
essence, transformation and being, are said to belong together. In
assigning 'change' to essence, Nietzsche indicates that its necessity is
only posited once again, reduced to a conceptual necessity. But what is
the necessity of this 'once more', and what of the qualification that
accompanies it, the "only [ .. . ] once again" upon which Nietzsche insists?
How does the necessity of change stand in relation to the need to repeat
it conceptually? Could there be another sort of positing, one that would
not be conceptual, or, on the other hand, perhaps a relation to 'change'
outsid s,.of discursivity? Is this what would be indicated by the quotation
marks that Nietzsche places around this most elusive word, suspending i t
such that its movement would be effected i n its effacement and effaced
in its effect? This question is indeed situated at the limits of language.
While both Deleuze and Bl anchot insist upon the necessity of plural
speech, however, it is for Blanchot a necessity that "constitutes" the
1 3 Walter Benjamin, "Once is as Good as Never," in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 19271934, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary
Smith {Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1 999), p. 739.
28
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(200 1 )
Jason Winfree
29
importance. From the outset it indicates that the speech that would "say
differently" - and so too, then, the very speech in which we would now
find ourselves - is known to belong to the whole by hypothesis . I ndeed,
"[c]ertainly, by hypothesis." And this is to say that the manner in which
this speech would be known to belong to the whole would itself be
uncertain, since no hypothesis i s the bearer of certainty. To the extent
that it is opened within the hypothetical, though, even this uncertainty
belongs to the economy of calculation, throw ing the dice only in
accordance with the probability of a favorable return, and so offering no
relief to the different way of saying that would belong to the cruelty and
risk of eternal return. The conversation continues within this circuit, and
suggests that at the same time, by hypothesis, such a saying would mark
itself off from the whole, thereby indicating this saying as both
belonging and not belonging. Insofar as this too is u nderstood by way of
the hypothetical, though, the insufficiency of the conversation to voice
thi s difference becomes all too apparent. This inadequacy is marked as
the conversation ends, and at the same time is repeated in this phrase,
which (we will not say hypothetically) neither belongs nor does not
belong to the conversation: "Is this not what the eternal return says
(neither hypothetically nor categorically)?" writes B lanchot. The eternal
return would then say what no communication could bear, bearing itself
in thi s impossibility, in the failure of the language that would be drawn
from it and that it draws along with it, such that " ' the everything comes
again' has already ruined itself." " The exigency of return would arise in
the space of the failure of its expression, its expression noth ing but the
failure that (cannot) bear(s) it, the expression of a neuter, un pas au-de la.
Therefore, Blanchot repeats once again the exigency of repeti tion:
'"Saying it differentl y ' , to write the return, i s always al ready to affirm
detour, just as it is to affirm by repetition difference without beginning
or end" (IC 277).
What is the character of this affirmation, the affirmation of detour
that B l anchot says is affirmed just as difference is affirmed by its
repetition? If difference is affirmed by repetition, i ndeed affirmed in (all)
its difference, the affirmation of detour that would be affirmed in the
same way would necessarily be affi rmed differently. Or, to put it
otherwise, if the affirmation of difference in repetition is such that each
repetition must differ in order to bear this difference, then surely the
affirmation of detour must repeat this differentially. This differential is
1 4 Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany, N Y : State
University of New York Press, 1 992), p. 1 5 . Hereafter cited as SNB.
30
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1 1 (200 1 )
Jason W infree
31
ERIC ALLIEZ
it indirectly recalls the fact that Sloterdijk is above all a great reader of
Nietzsche, this thinker who takes you from behind and gives you a
child, as Deleuze put it, giving one the taste for speaking "by affts,
intensities, experiences, experiments ... " - and anyone will be able to
judge for himself by glancing through this work which was translated
into French a dozen years ago: Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche 's
2
Materialism;
(Minneapoli s :
E ric Alliez
33
Case" and this for reasons which go beyond the framework of said
affair. 3
So, Nietzsche or modernity's parting of the waters?
As good genealogists, we'll begin by an all too certain end.
This end i s that of Critical Theory such as it will have, de .facto,
coincided historically with the liquidation of its Nietzschean component,
the de jure prelude to the liquidation of the legacy of the Frankfurt
School by Habermas himself. I n a "Return" (how could he not?)" to Kant
4
and Fichte". For it could not be denied that Nietzsche provided the
initial impetus behind the project of an experimental philosophy - of an
Experimentum Mundi to use Bloch 's term - demanded by the
deconstruction of a Dialectic of Enlightenment (whose subtitle is not
5
without its Nietzschean ring: Philosophical Fragments ). What followed
is well known. Noting that the Dialektik der Aufkliirung "owes more to
Nietzsche than the mere strategy of a critique of ideology which turns on
itself' on account of a confused "rhetoric" which tends to associate
reason and domination, power and ratification-legitimation; seeing in the
critique of instrumental reason a negation of universal morality insofar
as it masks "imperatives whose end is to guarantee both self
conservation and domination" - which cannot but lead one back to a
Nietzschean "unbridled scepticism" (and to its Foucauldian echoes) Habermas will make it his mission to finally have done with this
Nietzschean legacy. As we know, this will involve extricating the
"universalistic foundations of law and morality" from the per.formative
contradiction which haunts a reason that denies itself with its own
instruments ... And to establish through this logic of the One the rights of
a communicative rationality transcendent to any "theory of power",
6
superior to any "aesthetic glorification" of force.
It follows that any Why we are Habermasians is declined into a
ringing Why we are not Nietzscheans. Its manifesto-value depends on the
intersection, behind the scenes, of read ings of Nazism and Stalinism
(destruction of Reason
destruction of Democracy), whilst the stage is
=
3
See my article in Le Monde des Debats : "L' Affaire Slocertlijk ou le Cas Habermas?"
4 Cf. J. Habermas, Knowledge and Huma11 /11terest (Cambridge: Policy, 1 994), Ch. 9
[Suhrkamp, 1 968].
5
M . Horkheimer, T. Adorno, The Dialectic of E11lighte11me11t (London: Verso, 1 997)
[First Edition: 1 944].
6Cf. J. Habermas, The Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1 987),
Ch. 5 [Suhrkamp, 1 985].
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
34
E ric Alliez
35
dionysiac materialism .
ALBERTO TOSCANO
1 . April 1 868
1 See the letters to Paul Deussen (May-April 1 868) and Erwin Rohde (May 3rd or 4th)
dating from this period. Friedrich Nietzsche, Briefe in Historisch-Kritische
Gesamtausgabe (Vol. JI) (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1 938).
Alberto Toscano
37
philology and Homer.' One could comfortably argue that nothing has
taken place; that the young Nietzsche, armed with a vague intuition
regarding a hotly contested area within post-Kantian philosophy, merely
fashioned a collage of quotes and fragmentary insights, never attaining
anything l ike the groundwork of a thesis , or even a problem.' Needless to
The texts examined below, save the brief fragment 011 the Origin of Language
(which appears in Crawford, see below), are to be found in the third volume of
Friedrich Nietzsche, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Beck, 1 933-1 940), under
the heading Philosophische Notizen. For the purposes of this essay I have made use of
the only available English translation, which appears as an appendix to Claudia
Crawford' s The Beginnings of Nietzsche 's Theory of Language (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1 988). This text also contains a very competent treatment of the notes on Kant and
teleology, to my knowledge also the only one in the English langu age (See Crawford,
Ch. 8). All page numbers in brackets within the text refer to Crawford ' s translations,
which I have only amended in their translations of the term Zweckmaj]ig, which she
renders as "expedient" and which I have changed to "purposive" in order to be
consistent with current translations of Kant. I have also taken into consideration the
translation and critical apparatus in the Italian edition of the Notizen, edited by
Giuliano Campioni and Federico Gerratana: Friedrich Nietzsche, Appunti Filosofici
1867- 1869 I Omero e la Filo/ogia Classica (Milano: Adelphi, 1 993).
3 Since he grasps the notebooks as the very exhibition of the impossibility of the
philosophical act and/or discourse in Nietzsche, in Jean-Luc Nancy's reading this is
ultimately the judgement passed on Nietzsche's encounter with Kant's treatment of
tel eology. We are faced with a veritable paradox i n the interpretation which is
embodied in the following two theses: I ) the 1 868 notebooks are nothing but the ill
informed pastiche of an immature student, cobbled together from some neo-Kantian
sources, whilst ignoring the work of Kant himself; 2) the 1 868 notebooks are the
dramatisation of Nietzsche's experience of the impossibility of (academic?)
philosophy, exemplary of the thinker's encounter with the ineluctable limits of his
supposed discipline. I would argue that the co-presence, the interweaving, of these
two theses is symptomatic of the deconstructive reading's myopia, its peculiar
inability to capture the individuality of the problematic deployed in Nietzsche's texts.
See Jean-Luc Nancy, 'La these de Nietzsche sur la Teleologie' in Nietzsche
Aujourd 'hui (Paris: UGE, 1 973) Vol. I [The English translation which I've used here,
'N ietzsche ' s Thesis on Teleology', appears in L.A. Rickels, ed., Looking after
Nietzsche (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1 990), pp. 49-66]. For my part, I shall try to show
that, even if, with some reservations, we might accept thesis ( I ), we can nevertheless
navigate between the Scylla of complete dismissal and the Charybdis of over
dramatisation by isolating in the early notebooks the threads of a very specific
problematic, one that will periodically resurface in Nietzsche's work. It is blindness
to this problematic (a surprising one, given Nancy's highlighting of the relationship of
the thesis to work undertaken by Nietzsche on Democritus, Schopenhauer, and
Lange) that finally allows Nancy to state: "The draft of 1 868, in effect, does not
harbour the first of Nietzsche's mature thinking; we will find nothing in i t , which
2
38
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1 1 (200 1 )
Alberto Toscano
39
concepts of indi vidual and purpose in the second half of the ni neteenth
century. What the notebooks do register in a striking manner are the
effects of two veritable events in Nietzsche 's intel lectual biography,
taking the form of two books whose ideas, in quite heterogeneous ways,
will haunt his work to the very end: Arthur Schopenahauer' s The World
as Will and Representation and Friedrich Albert Lang e ' s History of
Materialism.
With regard to the former, we are all famil iar with the narrative of the
disciple's painful sloughing off of his educator's influence. This is an
often linear narrative, beginning with Nietzsche's ultimately doomed
attempt, in the Birth of Tragedy, at transforming the Schopenhaurian
framework i nto the basis of a philosophy of a tragic affi rmation, and i s
pu nctuated b y later reflections and self-critiques in N i etzsche' s work
bearing on his relationship to the phi losopher of the wil l . The dominant
themes in this approach are those of pessimism and affirmation. As we
shall shortly see, the unfinished draft of an essay On Schopenhauer,
which immediately precedes the notes on Kant and teleology, is enough
to problematize this received stance and to belie Nietzsch e ' s own claim,
in 'Schopenhauer as Educator' ( 1 874), that he had never found any
paradoxes in the great man' s work, only minor errors.' Indeed, there is
someth ing striking in seeing to what extent the reasons for the eventual
divorce with Schopenhauer's metaphysics is contained in nuce in these
very early reflections. Of course, these are reasons that will only truly
emerge once questions regarding the being of becoming and
individuation become much more decisive for Nietzsche and override the
initial role of Schopenhauer as exemplar. For several years the
embryonic insights contained in these notes will be buried, deferred by
the focus on the philosophical life and on the poetizing, dramatic nature
of philosophy as an affi rmative art.
Within the bounds of Anglophone scholarship, there has been far less
recognition of Lange's arguably equivalent formative influence on the
character and development of Nietzsche's work. This is mainly to be
accounted for by the relative paucity of Nietzsche's explicit references to
Lange and by the fact that the nature of this influence is quite different
from that of Schopenhauer. I n deed, it is only in terms of a
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1 995), p. 1 80.
6 The only English text of note, one that is extremely persuasive in its case for
Lange's influence, is George J. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1 983).
40
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
cit .
Alberto Toscano
41
2. x = x
Schopenhauer wanted to find an equation for the x: and it revealed
itself out of his calculation that it = x .
Nietzsche, On Schopenhauer
From Schopenhauer' s appropnat10n of Kant, Nietzsche inherits the
effects of a peculiar short-circuit, the one that equates, in 23 of The
World as Will and Representation, objectification with individuation.
The consequences of this move are not to be underestimated. To begin
with, they entail a generalisation of critique's original concern with the
constitution of objects of knowledge to an approach that would
i ndiscriminately cover the matter of both possible and 'impossible'
experience. By.the l atter, I indicate preci sely the problem of the Organ ic,
which in Kant marks the disjunction between object (or the individuated)
and i ndividual (or self-individuating, and therefore 'chimerical',' entity).
As the title of Schopenhauer' s magnum opus makes clear this equation
exasperates a dichotomy that Kant negotiates with the greatest of care,
i nto a tragic confrontation between the phantasmatic tyranny of
Vorstellung and the foreclosed univocity of Wille. This confrontation
8
Pli
42
1 1 (200 1 )
elides the complex articulations between the many strata of critique into
a philosophy in which representation is built, quite seamlessly, on the
sole basis of the spatio-temporal principium individuationis. Jn
Schopenhauer unilateral expression (jrom Will to Representation) i s
postulated, i n which I deas are degrees of the objectification of Will i n
Representation. Again the problematic difference i n ki nd through which
a veritable problem of i ndividuation emerges in Kant's Critique <?f
Judgment is obscured, making the Organic yet another link in the chain
of Ideas that begi ns with the principium individuationis and passes
though the other "degrees of visibility which belong to the
objectification of the Will" ( WWR I 25). For Schopenhauer,
representation is both homogeneous and hegemonic, never encountering
in phenomenal experience anything which would problematize its
hegemony over that domain. Two further consequences result from
Schopenhauer's equation. Firstly, a drastic cut i s made between
individuality and individuation, or, to use terms more redolent of
contemporary debates, between allonomy and autonomy.' As Nuno
Nabais remarks, in the only essay which to my knowledge engages
philosophically with the question of i ndividuation in Nietzsche:
The
essential
incommunicability
between
individuality
[Individualitiit] and individuation [Individuation] constitutes one
of the central paradoxes of Schopenhaurian metaphysics and the
one that posed the greatest difficulties to the autonomous
development of the Nietzschean theory of the individual. '0
Secondly, a parallel distinction is made, in Schopenhauer, between two
types of u nity: ( I ) unity of a multiplicity; (2) unity without multiplicity.
9 See
10
Alberto Toscano
43
44
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
_!Y
Alberto Toscano
45
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
46
The first effect concerns the fact that even the very pred icate of unity ,
o r unity without multiplicity, is borrowed, b y way o f a phantasmatic
subtrac tion of multiplicity itself, from the principium individuationis.
What the groundless, transcendental will is meant to ground and hence
del imit turns out to be its very source. The supposed transcendental is
itself conditioned or traced ; "it i s continually required to borrow from
the world of appearance" [230]. The second effect, a coroll ary of the
first, is that no accou nt can be given of the genesis of the i ntellect, given
that it precedes or presupposes i tself at all times. Si nce "even before the
appearance of the will we see the principium individuationis in fu ll
effect" [23 1 ], since the world of appearance equals the system of
representation, we are left with two equally unsavoury and ill egitimate
options: ( 1 ) "the intellect must rest as a new predicate conjoined with the
th ing i n itself', or (2) "there can be no intellect because at no time could
an intellect have become" [232]. In the first case the whole edifice
collapses, given that it would follow that Will
Representation. In the
second, any basis for intelligibility disappears, as Will
Will (which
could also be written One
One). What Nietzsche comes to real ise, in
his focus on the "borders of i ndividuation", on "the dark
contradictoriness in the region where individuality ceases to be" [226], is
that the Schopenhaurian Will is unable to both delimit and generate the
=
Alberto Toscano
47
Pli
48
1 1 (200 1 )
In
his Che cosa ha delto Nietzsche (Milano: Adelphi, 1 999) Mazzino Montinari
makes the interesting remark that in Nietzsche Democritus should be read as an "anti
Schopenhaurian cipher", a claim which, as we will see, is certainly justified in the
notebooks.
13 At the early date of these notebooks, Nietzsche's critique of atomism, which is
essential to his refu tation of a transparently mechanistic materialism, is yet to make
its appearan ce, and thus will not be discussed herein. When it will appear in later
work, it will be heavily indebted both to Lange's materiale ldealismus and, more
specifically, to the work of Ruggero B oscovich. On the latter' influence on
Nietzsche's critique of atomism see Keith Ansell Pearson, 'Nietzsche's Brave New
World of Force' , Pli: The Warwick Journal r!( Philosophy 9 (2000), 6-35. See
specifically the account of Section l 2 of Bcyo11d Good and Evil and Nietzsche' s
attack on 'materialistic atomism' , p . 25ff.
Alberto Toscano
49
each Democritus must have his Protagoras . The influence of this idea on
Nietzsche can hardly be underestimated. We will retu rn to it in 5.
Rather than examine Lange's materiale Idealismus,'" I will immediately
turn to the effects of this stance on Lange 's brief treatment of
individuality and individuation in the chapter of History of Materialism
on 'Darwinism and Teleology ' , arguably the primary i nspiration for
many of Nietzsche ' s remarks on Kant and teleology.
Lange begins by invoking a question "which is of the highest interest
in the history of Materialism, - the question of the nature of the Organic
i ndividual". It was perhaps in this very sentence that the plan for
Nietzsche' s eventually aborted dissertation took root, appearing as a
point of convergence for his determination of the limits of materialism
and for his questioning regarding the 'borders of individuation ' . What
fol lows i n Lange's text is of the highest interest with regard to our
object, and could be seen to accompany the long passage by
Schopenhauer presented in 2 as a basic text for Nietzsche's thinking on
individuality:
We have seen how ancient Materialism fell into absolute
contradiction by regardi ng the atoms as the only existent, though
they cannot be the bearers of a higher unity, because without
pressure and collision no contact takes place between them. But
we also saw that precisely this contradiction of manifoldness and
unity is peculiar to all human thought, and that it only becomes
most obvious in Atom.i sm. The only salvation here, too, consists
in regarding the opposition of manifoldness and unity as a
consequence of our organisation, in supposing that in the world of
things in themselves it is resolved in some way unknown to us, or
rather does not exi st there. I n this way we escape the inmost
ground of the contradiction, which lies in the assumption of
absolu te unities, which are nowhere given to us. If we conceive all
unity as relative, if we see in un ity only the combination of our
thought, we have i ndeed not embraced the inmost nature of things,
but we have certainly made possible the consistency of the
scientific view. It fares ill indeed with the absolute unity of self-
14 For which I refer the reader to the extended di scussion of this position in Ch. V of
Stack' s Lange and Nietzsche, entitled 'Materio-Idealism'.
50
Pli 1 1
(2001 )
Friedrich A l ber! Lange, History o/Matcriali.rn1 (New York: Arno Press, 1 974).
As wd l a s into Nict1.srhr's laler rrfl cct io n s on the merely adaptive or utilitarian
11al 1 1 1 t "I 1 1 1 ; 1 1 1 ,, l " " l '1 1 1 i t y to i 1 1 d i v i d 1 1atc appearances into objects.
Alberto Toscano
51
4.
Life Force
52
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Alberto Toscano
53
position: "One must sever every theological interest from the question"
[239]. Now, as Nietzsche already realises, this theological referent is
inseparable from an anthropomorphic analogy, an analogy specifically
founded on a certain understanding of human poiesis. ln a passage which
originates in Schopenhauer and prefi gures Bergson ' s critique of
evolutionary theory, Nietzsche writes: "We are astonished then at the
cornplicated and conjecture (after human analogy) a special wisdom i n
it" [ 24 1 ] . " Once this anthropomorphic propensity t o isolate objects as
purposive in terms of a technical analogy is suspended, so is the
necessity of a reference to a higher reason which would account for
indi vidualities which cannot merely be ascribed to the effects of the
principium individuation is. In a deeply materialist vein, Nietzsche will
claim that there i s "no question, which necessarily can be solved only
through the acceptance of an i ntelligible world" [240]. In other words,
just as the Kantian necessity to think organisms as premeditated
disappears for us moderns under the influence of Darwinism, so does
that of accepting the contradictions engendered by representation and
viewing them as pointing to their resolution in a realm of supersensible
intel ligibil ity. The anthropomorphic foundations of a theological
interpretation of teleology thus give way to "a purely human standpoint:
the Empedoclean, where purposiveness appears only as an instance
among many non-purposivenesses" [239]. This Empedoclean, or
Darwinian, standpoint allows one to remove the presupposition of
intelligibility. The polemical statement, "purposiveness is chance" [239],
points once again to the denial of any analogy with the intentionality of
technical production, to the need to think the production of the purposive
in non-representational, non-intentional, and non-anthropomorphic
terms, to think "a power which unconsciously creates the purposive"
[239]. Lange's reduction of the transcendental to a question of our
organisation allows Nietzsche to acknowledge our propensity to an
anthropomorphic and consequently theological understanding of organic
teleology at the same time as it points to the possibility of thin king
otherwise. When Nietzsche writes that the "necessity of which Kant
speaks [i.e. the "necessity [ ... ] that we think organisms as premeditated"]
no longer exists in our time" [238], he is pointing to the possibility of
thinking the Organic without any reference whatsoever, not even a
problematic one, to a realm of transcendent purposes and i ntentions. The
18
For an effective summary of Bergson ' s stance, see Vladimir JankeJevitch, Henri
Be rgson (Paris: P.U.F., 1959), Ch. 5: 'La Vie ' .
54
Pli 1 1 (2001 )
Teleology:
inner purposiveness. We see a compl i calcd rnachine, which
maintains itself and cannot devise anolher slnwturc which could
construct it more simply, that means o n l y :
Alberto Toscano
55
56
Pli 1 1
(200 1 )
20
Alberto Toscano
57
58
Pli
1 1 (200 1 )
Lange, there are no absolute unities. For this very reason, purposiveness
itself, which depends on the absolute nature of a certain type of unity
(i .e. a self-maintaining one) is itself relative.21
This i s the ground of the fourth reduction, the last step which takes
the crisis of critique from purposiveness to production, from the
organi sm to life. Whilst the notes on teleology often repeat the familiar
Kantian position whereby we can only know mechanism, the position
which legitimates considering the organism as a crisis, the three
reductions outlined above lead Nietzsche ineluctably into the fourth and
fi nal reduction. This consists i n declaring that the an tithesis of
mechanism and teleology is false." Once the two modalities of
individuation which dominate these supposedly opposed realms objects of representation in mechanism, purposive indi viduals in
teleology - are reduced to forms of our propensity to individuate and
thereby put on the same plane, that of our organi sation, the Organic is
definitively demoted as the i nstance of a cri sis of critique. Together with
"force , matter, law, atom" it is nothing but a "reflected judgement", or,
as Nietzsche remarks, "final causes as well as mechanisms are human
ways of perceiving" [246]. Which returns us to the question of what in
these notes, Nietzsche will repeatedly call the method of nature.
In another colourful use of the mother and child image already
applied to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche writes: "The method of nature in the
handling of things is indifferent, she i s an impartial mother, equally hard
with organic and inorganic children" [248]. Thi s method is nothing but
production, l!fe, i ts children nothing but forms. The reduction of the
difference between organic and inorganic to a difference in the habits of
our intellect, that is, the denial of its status as a constitutive ontological
difference, paves the way for a generalisation of the problem of
individuation and a renewed concern with the pre-individual. And
specifically, with the pre-individual as infinite multiplicity. That this is
done i n terms of a distinction between life and its forms should not lead
2
Alberto Toscano
59
60
Pfi 1 1 (200 1 )
Alberto Toscano
61
23
Friedrich N ietzsche, Philosophy and Truth. Selections from Nietzsche 's Notebooks
of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. by Daniel Brazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press,
1 979), pp. 24-25.
Pli
1 1 (2001 ), 62-78.
ELIE
DURING
chap.VD, 15, and Book IV, chap.Vlll, "Of trifling propositions": "there are universal
propositions, which, though they be certainly true, yet they add no light to our
understanding; bring no i ncrease to our knowledge". What is at stake is the status of
the sophisticated but purely verbal propositions of ontology, to the extent that they
can be reduced to identical or analytically true propositions (or
language of the scholastics). Leibniz's chal leugc i11 the
showing that metaphysical statements abou t subst ances are not always frivolous
(Nouveaux Essais sur / En tende m en t lb111111i11, Book IV, chap.II, 2 and chap.VIII,
'
Elie During
63
Pli 1
64
1 (200 1 )
"We doubt whether, when mathematicians engage in a polemic, they criticize one
another for being mistaken in the results of their calculations. Rather, they criticize
one another for having produced an insignificant theorem or a problem devoid of
sense." (Gilles Dclcuzc, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1994, p 1 53).
'1 I lckut. and < luallari, <Ju 'cst-ce que la philosophie ?, Editions de Minuit, Paris,
J 'l'I I . p. HO ( 1 1 1y own translation).
.
Elie During
65
Age and truth. Young people love what is interesting and odd,
no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is
interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, final ly,
love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the
ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its
5
highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.
-
Pli 1
66
1 (200 1 )
Human:
Granted that it is the problem of hierarchy which we may call our
problem, we free spirits; only now, in the noonday of our lives, do
we understand what preparations, detours, trials, temptations,
disguises, were needed before the problem was pemlitted to rise
6
up before us.
Such is Nietzsche's problem: the highest problem of all, the problem of
hierarchy. But as it appears this general praise of hierarchy cannot be
" l/'111, foreword, 7.
E lie During
67
separated from the idea that some problems are more i nteresting or more
valuable than others: "As for me, I am not a sceptic - I still believe in
the hierarchy of men and problems . . [ . ]" (Nachlass Herbst, 3 5 [43]).
Thus the problem of hierarchy unfailingly brings us back to the hi erarchy
of problems as its precondition. Propositions have as much relevance as
their underlying problems allow them to have; but problems themselves
are not all equally relevant. This may constitute the basic tenet of a truly
anti-positivist epistemology, one that does not seperate the object of
knowledge from the "problematic" or "discursive process of instruction"
to which it belongs. This characterization is borrowed from Bachelard,
but Deleuze might as well have subscribed to it7
Nietzsche viewed his own contribution to philosophy in terms of the
destitution of old problems and the creation and promotion of new
problems. For instance, evaluating moral problems implies that one
critically examines "the reduction of problems to questions of pleasure
and displeasure," (Will to Power, 64) in other words the conditions under
which "pleasure and pain become foreground problems" ( WP 43) . It is in
th is sense, as an optical transformation imposed on traditional problems,
that one must understand Nietzch e's ambition of "changing the whole
perspective of moral problems" ( WP 4 1 ).
But let us come back to Deleuze. Difference and Repetition, as has
already been said, is entirely dependent on the N ietzschean decision of a
radical re-evaluation of truth. As often, Deleuze ' s mt1mate
reappropriation of an author' s thought seems to entitle him to total ly
dispense with any explicit reference (Deleuze has a name for this habit:
"free indirect discourse"). The same remark applies to his use of
Bergson, whose name does not appear once in "The Image of Thought"
although several passages are obviously heavily inspired by La Pensee et
le Mouvant. 8 The structural ist i mport, when one reads this chapter
closely, plays a relatively minor role in comparison with the i mportance
of the B ergsonian theme of a criticism of problems, which already
.
..
7Bachelard, Le Rationalisme applique, PUF, Paris, 1 949, p. 55. This book is in fact
quoted by Deleuze in support of his denunciation of the recognition model in
philosophy (see Difference and Repetition, note 9, p 320 ) .
8Compare for instance p. 158 of Difference and Repetition (the master' s questions to
the pupil, the problem conceived after the model of a radio-quiz or newspaper
competition) with Bergson 's description of false problems: "ready-made solutions"
kept "in the city's administrative cabinets," philosophy as a "puzzle," the pieces of
which are handed to us by society (La Pensee et le Mouvant, in Oeuvres, PUF, Paris,
1 959, p. 1 292).
.
P/i 1 1 (200 1 )
68
E lie During
69
The fact of determining what is 'true ' and what is '.false, ' the fact
of determining states of 0;tfairs in general, is fundamentally
different from the creative act of posing, giving form and
structure, overcoming, mastering, willing, that is implied by the
essence of philosophy. 16
Frivolous remarks devoid of any interest or relevance, banalities
mistaken for profundities, are our ordinary lot. They are expressions of
our inability to distinguish between ordinary points and singular ones,
fal se and real problems, in other words "our inability to constitute,
comprehend or determine a problem as such" . 1 7 Thus a new
determination is given to the Nietzschean i mperative: to consider the
point of a proposition, the aspect that makes it interesting or trifling, is
not different from evaluating its truth from the point of view of the
problem that gives it its meaning and value, but to raise oneself to the
level of problems implies that the test of true and false be applied to
problems themselves. The idea that in philosophy there is no criticism of
1 4Ibid., p. 1 40.
15Ibid., p. 1 63.
16
70
Pli 1 1 (2001 )
The second point that deserves to be discussed concerns the strategic use
Deleuze makes of scientific references in relation to the issue of
fri volity. The unexpected mention of Poincare in the passage from
Negotiations quoted earlier is interesting in many respects. It perfectly
suits Deleuze's purpose, which is to prov ide a kind of a fortiori
argument in favour of his view, because i t suggests that even in those
fields where truth would seem to be an exclusive concern, the problem of
pointlessness plays an essential role. But if Deleuze' s intention was
indeed to lay that claim, almost any mathematician other than Poincare
would have done quite as well. It is common knowledge that
mathematical research (even more clearly in the domain of "pure"
mathematics) is concerned with the interesting aspects of certain
structures rather than with the mere possibility of adding new truths to a
stock of older truths. Truth for its own sake has never been the aim of
mathematics (this was indeed one of the points u nder discussion in the
violent polemics triggered by the construction of non-Euclidean
geometries, to which Poincare contributed in a decisive way). At any
rate, Poincare' s view on the matter of pointlessness, when taken out of
its context, does not strike us as highly original. Although Deleuze, who
18
"En philosophie, [. . . ] ii n'y a pas de critique des solutions, mais seulement une
critique des problemes." (Empirisme et Subjectivite, PUF, Paris, 1 953, p. 1 1 9). And
also: "En verite, une seule espece d 'objections est valable: celle qui consiste a
montrer que la question posee par tel philosophc n'cst pas une bonne question, qu'elle
ne force pas assez la nature des choses, qu'il fallail aulrcment la poser, qu'on devait la
poser mieux ou en poser une autre" (p. 1 20).
Elie During
71
i s obviously quoti ng from memory, does not give us any bibl iographical
clue, it is quite l ikely that what he has in mind is a text from a collection
of epistemological essays entitled Science et Methode, in which Poincare
develops his views concerning what he takes to be the principles of
mathematical invention:
What is, i n fact, mathematical invention? It does not consist r n
forming new combinations out of previously known mathematical
entities. This could be achieved by anyone, but the resulting
combinations would be infin i tely numerous, and for the most part
they would be absolutely pointless [depourvu d'interet] . Inventing
implies that one does not form useless combinations, but rather
useful ones, and these constitute a very small minority. Inventing
means to discern, to choose. 1 9
It i s worthwhile noting that what i s a t stake here i s not theories per se, as
Deleuze seems to believe, but rather the underlying combinations of
mathematical forms that may lead to the construction of mathematical
theories. The rest of Poincare' s demonstration consists in prov iding
autobiographical insights into this unconscious sorting mechanism, thus
showing how the process of selection is in fact guided by an intuition of
an aesthetic kind. It will be interesting to come back to this text in
relation to Nietzsche. But what we should be concerned about at this
stage i s that Poincare' s name is generally attached to another, apparently
much more radical statement to the effect that in science one choses
certain rules or principles not because they are true, or even interesting,
bu t because they are the most convenient. In particul ar, it follows from
such an interpretation of scientific constructs (traditionally l abeled as
"conventionalist") that "experience does not tell us which geometry is
true, it tells us which i s the most convenient. " This quote from
Poincare's "Space and Geometry" finds many echoes i n Nietzsche's
conception of the role of "regulative fictions" in common scientific
practice. 20 The appeal to utility or convenience only rei nforces this
19
Poincare, Science et methode, Flammarion, Paris, 1 909, p. 48 (my own translation).
20
See for example The Gay Science, V, 344: our beliefs should be held not as ultimate
convictions but as "hypotheses, provisional points of view for experiment, or
regulative fictions." Nietzsche's standard form of "fictionalism" is in fact much closer
to the criticist tradition than he would like to believe. The comparison with Poincare
falls short of identifying Nietzsche as a proponent of instrumentalism or
conventionalism (see volume one of Rene Berthelot's debatable essay Un
72
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
E lie During
73
24 See Alistair Moles, Nietzsche 's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology, Peter Lang,
New York, 1 990, p. 281 .
25 See Paolo D'Iorio's detailed examination of Nietzsche's scientific sources in
"Cosmologie de l ' Eternel Retour," Nietzsche Studien, band 24- 1 995, Walter de
Gruyter, New York, 1 995, pp. 6 1 - 123.
26 See Klaus Spiekermann's review of Gunter Abel (among others) in "Nietzsches
Beweise fiir die ewige Wiederkehr," Nietzsche Studien, band 1 7 - 1 988, Walter de
Gruyter, New York, 1 988, pp. 496-538.
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
74
the importance of method, see HTH 1, 25 1 and 256, as well as The Antichrist 1 3
and 59.
28
(HTH I, 635).
Elie During
75
29
30
HTH I, 635
Letter to Rhode of december 9th, 1 868, quoted in Charles Murin, Nietzsche
p. 265.
76
Pli
11 (2001 )
Nietzsche does not seem to ignore the debates over non-Euclidean space: "The
categories are 'truths ' only in the sense that they are conditions of life for us: as
Euclidean space is a conditional "truth." (Between ourselves: since no one would
maintain that there is any necessity for men to exist, reason, as well as Euclidean
Elie
Du ring
77
At this point one should wonder what is lost and what is gained from
leaving the details of these issues aside in order to focus on the shift
from truth to value, from propositions to problems. Undoubtedly,
Deleuze's reformulation of the N ietzschean concern in terms of
problems, true and false, is effecti ve in the sense that it bypasses a
certain number of fri volous debates. Once the fictitious character of all
intellectual construct is acknowledged, the door lays open to generalized
scepticism and nihili sm. Every thought amounts to a falsfication, and
truth is forever at bay. But the notion of "degrees and subtleties of
gradation" between truth and falsehood can only be understood in
relation to the problems or in terpretations under which specific truths
and falsehoods happen to fall. And the sceptical stance itself shares its
essential features with the dogmatic image of truth: it holds the
impossibility of our access to truth as a problem, when it is in fact the
very will to truth that should be questi oned. Focusing on problems
preserves us from the unwelcome nihilistic consequence of lucidity. The
fact that we live by representations, N ietzsche says, is not a problem, it is
a fact. The real underlying problem is to understand what one represents
and how this is done, i n other words to reconstruct the particular "optical
device" that makes a certain life possible. In the same way, the problem
of N ietzsche ' s pragmatism is not well posed as long as one considers
knowledge in terms of its relevance for life in general. If it is true that
"perspectivism is nothing but the complex form of specificity" (WP
636), then one should ask: what life? what knowledge? The so-called
problem of pragmatism (that truth should be viewed as a useful and vital
error) is thus transformed i nto a specific query: what is the amount of
truth that one can take? Nietzsche explicitly rejects the pragmatist
cri terion according to which success, convenience, efficiency or any
kind of vi tal advantage would speak for the truth of something. Such a
creed is in fact the surest symptom of a diminished life. As Deleuze puts
it: "Now Nietzsche reproaches knowledge, not for viewing itself as its
own end, but for making of thought a mere i nstrument in the service of
l i fe." 33 The measure of vitality is the capacity to embrace new truths, to
invent new conditions and possibi lities of life, to create and state new
problems - not contradictions.
space, is a mere idiosyncracy of a certain species of animal, and one among many ... )"
(WP 5 1 5).
33 Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 1 1 4.
78
P/i 1
1 (200 1 )
34 See Nachlass Herbst, 9[48]: "If we are not sceptics then, should we say we are
critics, or 'criticists'?" The label does not suit Nietzsche any better thathat of
sceptic (even if he sometimes recommends a kind of "experimental scepticism "). It
nevertheless underlines what the Nietzschean philosophy of science owes to the
Kantian critique, under the form of a not-so-original theory of "regulative fictions"
which is reminiscent of Vaihinger' s phil osophy of als ob [as if].
Pli
TSARINA
DOYLE
1. Introduction
Much of the literature concerned with N ietzsche' s views on
epistemology and metaphysics has focu sed on his perspectivism as a
rejection of metaphysical realism and the God ' s Eye View. It has been
generally agreed that N ietzsche' s perspecti vism rejects the metaphysical
correspondence theory of truth in favour of an anti-foundationalist
conception of knowledge. It has equally been agreed, at least amongst
those commentators who wish to save Nietzsche from the clutches of
metaphysical realism and the ontological and epistemological
foundationalism that ensues from it, that the ontological doctrine of the
wiJJ to power is a thorn in Nietzsche's overall philosophical project.
Commentators argue that the doctrine of the will to power ei ther needs
to be eliminated and discounted as untrue,' or, that it is to be understood
as an example of Nietzsche' s philosophical wavering between a
metaphysical and an anti-metaphysical position. Thus the view has been
that the ontological doctrine of the wi ll to power is incompatible with
Nietzsche' s perspectival anti-foundationalist conception of knowledge.
This consideration derives from the view that, if true, the ontological
doctrine of the wiJJ to power represents a foundationalist doctrine and
thus an extra-perspectival claim to knowledge. Few commentators,
however, have attempted to read the ontological doctrine of the wiJJ to
power as an i mportant vehicle i n N ietzsche ' s overcoming of
metaphysical realism and thus as working i n tandem with his
1 See George Stack, 'Kant, Lange and Nietzsche' , in Nietzsche and Modern Gennan
Thought, ed. K. Ansell Pearson (London: Routledge, 1 991), and Maudemarie Clark,
Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 994).
80
Pli
1 1 (2001 )
'
perspecti vism. This paper will examine the manner in which it can
justi fiably be said that Nietzsche' s ontological doctrine of the will to
power represents an overcoming of metaphysical realism. I n so doing,
the paper will explore the manner in which the doctrine of the will to
power is compatible with Nietzsche ' s perspectivism to the extent that it
can be said that the former derives from the latter. This inquiry will
restrict its focus to Nietzsche' s justification of the ontological doctrine
of the will to power rather than examine the content of the ontology
itself. Thus my main concern will be with the manner in which
Nietzsche arri ves at the ontological doctrine of the will to power and not
with an analysis of his ontological theory of forces. This will involve
recognition of Nietzsche' s two main interests in proposing the doctrine
of the will to power. The first is his concern with philosophical method.
The second is his proposal of an ontological theory of forces. The
permi tted scope of the present line of inquiry permits us only to examine
the first interest. With this in mind we will embark upon our exploration
by setting up the problematic of metaphysical realism and the
requirements that Nietzsche must meet if he is to properly overcome it. It
is to thi s problematic that we now turn.
2. Metaphysical Realism
Metaphysical realism for Nietzsche assumes ei ther a cogmtIV1st or a
non-cognitivist guise. The cognitivist maintains that reality as it is in
itself i s cognitively accessible to us whilst the non-cognitivist denies this
possibility . The cognitivist metaphysical realist fails to see that the
given, as an appeal to a foundationalist conception of justification, is i n
fact a myth. Thus the cognitivist holds that the j ustification of our
epistemic claims resides in "confrontations" with the world.
Metaphysical reali s m is, in this sense, a form of criteriological reali sm.
This type of realism maintains that "the correctness of a representi R{\ or
system of representings consi sts i n its adequacy to a world (i.e., to that
2 John Richardson attempts to demonstrate the importance of the doctrine of the will
to power in relation to Nietzsche' s perspectivism. However, Richardson sees the
doctrine of the will to power as preceding and grounding Nietzsche's perspectivism.
The difficulty with such an approach, however, is that it fails to show how Nietzsche
arrived at the doctrine and in so doing, it appears as an unjustified foundationalist
thesis. See John Richardson, Nietzsche's System (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996).
Tsarina .Doyle
81
'
which it represents)". The distinguishing feature o f this type o f real i st
lies in the view that "adequacy to the world is the criterion of
correctness for our representings." ' The issue of correctness is
determi ned from "outside" our internal perspectival practices of
justification. The metaphysical realist considers the world to be radical l y
i ndependent o f theory and thus o n l y captured adequately from a n extra
perspectival God ' s Eye View. However, this account of justification
ultimately collapses with the dem i se of the viability of the God 's Eye
View. This conception of knowledge maintains that justification is extra
perspectival and extra-conceptual. This is, as John McDowell points out,
an incoherent position. McDowell states:
The idea of the Given is the i dea that the space of reasons, the
space of justification or warrants, extends more widely than the
conceptual sphere. The extra extent of the space of reasons is
supposed to allow it to incorporate non-conceptual impacts from
outside the realm of thought. But we cannot real ly understand the
relations in virtue of which a judgement is warranted except as
relations within the space of concepts: relations such as
implication or probabilification, which hold between potential
exercises of conceptual capacities. The attempt to extend the
scope of justificatory relations outside the conceptual sphere
'
cannot do what it is supposed to do:
The non-cognitivist metaphysical realist wavers between the conflicting
desires to posit a real ist constraint to our epistemic claims and to avoid
the incoherency of criteri ological realism. In response to this difficulty ,
the non-cognitivist adopts a theory-internal conception of justification in
place of the extra-perspectival conception put forth by the cognitivist
metaphysical realist. In so doing, however, the non-cognitivist is faced
with the d ilemma of how our i nternal practices of justification capture
the world. The problem is then how one avoids confinement within
one's conceptual scheme. Kant, who in Nietzsche's view is a non
cognitivist metaphysical realist, attempts to escape such confinement by
holding on to the given in the form of the thing-in-itself. In this way
1 J. F. Rosenberg, One World and Our Knowledge of It: The Problem of Realism in
Post-Kantian Perspective (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company,
1 9 80), p. 89.
4 Ibid., p. I 1 3.
5 J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 996), p. 7.
82
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
Tsarina Doyle
83
itself can only be defined negatively (that is, as non-temporal and non
spatial). This suggests that the world as i t is independently of the
conditions of our knowledge (conceptual imposition) is ontologically
indeterminate. The world is only rendered determinate and given a
positive definition when we i mpose concepts and a spatio-temporal
setti ng. In this way it can be said of the Kantian metaphysical realist that
"to a degree we create the world we live in."8 Thus the thing-in-itself is
deemed to be an indeterminate th ing that can be ontologically carved up
in multiple ways. Hilary Putnam captures this aspect of metaphysical
realism when he states:
Now, the classical metaphysical realist way of dealing with such
problems is well known. It is to say that there is a single world
(think of it as a piece of dough) which we can slice into pieces in
different ways.9
Nietzsche suggests that Kant's idealist leanings, coupled with the failure
of the thing-in-itself to provide the sought-after realist constraint, deliver
the non-cognitivist metaphysical realist i nto the hands of the radical
sceptic - whereby as knowers we are confined within our internal
practices of justification. '0 This confinement leaves open the possi bi lity
that our knowledge may differ radically from how the world is,
unbeknownst to us, in itself." I n tum th is sceptical possibility reinstates
the criteriological realists' "Myth of the Mind Apart". Rosenberg
articul ates this myth when he states
The Myth is a polymorphic one, but its central element is the
supposition that the world is a thing which is ontologically alien
8 M ichael Devitt, Realism and Truth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 997), p.
60
9 Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces Of Realism (LeSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1987),
p. 1 9 . Hereafter cited as MFR.
' Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated by Duncan Large (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1 998), 4. "How the True World Finally became a Fable",
section 3. Hereafter cited as Twilight.
1 1
This sceptical possibility is articulated by Kant himself when he says that a non
sensible intuition of the noumenal world (as the thought of the thing-in-itself) would
constitute "a field quite different from that of the senses [ ... ] a world which is thought
as it were in the spirit (or even perhaps intuited) and which would therefore be for the
understanding a far nobler, not a less noble, object of contemplation" (Critique of
Pure Reason, A250 p. 269 [my italics]).
.
84
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1 1 (200 1 )
14
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, transl ated by Walter Kaufmann, (New
York: Vintage Books, 1 968), 480 ( 1 888) [my italics]. Hereafter cited as WP.
Tsarina Doyle
85
15
86
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
Tsarina Doyle
87
Ibid.
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
88
His notion of philology as the "art of reading well" also expresse this
concern with method. This art of reading well, according to Nietzsche,
contains "the presupposition for the trad ition of culture, for the unity of
22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by M arion Faber (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 36. Hereafter cited as BCm.
23 Ibid.
24 Nietzsche, WP, 469 ( 1 888).
25 Nietzsche, HAH, I .
Tsarina Doyle
89
26
90
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
It consists in the idea that the meaningful ness and hence the
legitimacy of such notions is established only upon the
identification of something within the realm of actual experience
[. . .]."
It is important to note here that Nietzsche is n o t a foundationalist
empiricist to the extent that his perspectivism precludes the possibility of
appealing to uninterpreted self-j ustifying empirical facts. We can
however explain Nietzsche 's empiricist constraint by appealing to his
doctrine of the unity of science. Lanier Anderson captures this notion of
an empirical demand when he states that our theories are constrained by
the data of the various sciences. He states that the results of the various
sciences act "as data for any proposed account of the unity of science,
and such accounts must be evaluated as i nterpretations of these data" .'2
Thus it seems that the results of the various sciences act as some form of
empirical constraint. According to Lanier Anderson the d ata of the
various sciences are given priority over the theory of the will to power.
If some science gives rise to well-supported theories which cannot
be understood in terms of the will to power, the proper response
would not be to throw out the scientific results. On the contrary,
we would be forced to admit failure i n our attempt to unify the
sciences under Nietzsche's doctrine. We would then try to find
some other unifying principle, or, i f things seemed sufficiently
hopeless, give up the pursuit of u ltimate explanatory economy.33
By i ntroducing the notion of empirical constrain t Nietzsche disallows a
priori metaphysical speculation. It seems that we are now in a position to
explain Nietzsche's description of the will to power as "The world
viewed from inside, [my i talics] the world defined and determined
accoding to it "intelligible c aracter" - i t would be "will to powr" a'\d
,
nothing else": Al though this passage has frequently been cited i n
support of the reading of the will t o power a s a speculative metaphysical
31
91
Tsarina Doyle
out of sensuous
is neither the
of fact but the
sensations and
Nietzsche ' s doctrine of the will to power, in the context of its concern
with the methodological unity of the sciences, may, then, be described as
a second order belief. A first order belief can be articulated as "beliefs
35 Keith Ansell Pearson, 'Nietzsche ' s Brave New World of Force' , Pli 9 (2000), p.
26.
3 6 Christoph Cox, Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (London: University of
California Press, 1 999), p. 1 00 n. 43.
3 7 Nietzsche, WP, 48 1 ( 1 883-1 888).
8
3 Ibid., 500.
39 Cox, op. cit., p. 99.
92
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
about objects in the world", whilst second-order beliefs are " 'epistemic'
beliefs about those beliefs".4 Williams explains this distinction as
follows:
since any rational system of beliefs must allow for its own change
and development, and for the j ustification of the beliefs i t
contains, it i s clear that such a system cannot contain only first
order beliefs but must also contain second-order beliefs about
techniques for acquiring beliefs."
Thus second order beliefs explain how our first order beliefs "hang
together"." By opting for a coherence theory of justification of our
epistemic claims, Nietzsche avoids appeals to foundationalist self
justifying beliefs that in turn j ustify the rest of our beliefs. Nietzsche
claims
An isolated judgment is never "true," never knowledge; only i n
the connection [Zusammenhange] and relation [Beziehung] of
many judgments i s there any surety [Biirgschaft]. "
Thus the guiding principle behind the epistemological doctrine of the
will to power is to demonstrate how the resu lts of the various sciences
"hang together" as a coherent whole. Nietzsche maintains that
the results of science do acquire a perfect strictness and certainty
in their coherence to each other [in ihrem Zusammenhange mit
44
einander].
Nietzsche therefore argues for the cogency of absolute truths. Such
truths may be described as cross-perspectival truths that are true in all
human perspectives. Hales and Welshon capture this sense of absolute
perspectivist truth in the following:
40
Tsarina Doyle
93
94
Pli 1 1 (2001 )
Tsarina Doyle
95
Ibid.
Ibid., p. I 03.
Pli 1
96
1 (200 1 )
From this we can see that Nietzsche can avoid the osc ill ation between
criteriological realism and sceptical idealism by adopting a theory
dependent conception of world. This conception of world allows
Nietzsche to retain a realist constraint from within a theory-internal view
of justification and truth.
It is at this point, however, that we turn to the second objection put
forth by Cox . Cox argues that the above appeal to the notion of "world"
according to some particular theory or other succeeds in overcoming the
metaphysical realist commitment to the thing-in-itself only by embracing
ontological relativity. Cox argues that Nietzsche 's contention that the
notion of world is meaningful only under some description or other,
coupled with what he takes to be Nietzsche ' s further claim, that all
perspectives are "incongruent" in the strong sense of bei ng
"incompati ble"'0 with one another, results in the view that we most
correctly speak of "world" i n the plural rather than i n the singular.
This view proceeds from the naturalistic premise that we never
encounter "the world as it is in i tself' but always "the world as it
appears under a particular description." Because there is no
comparing "a description of the world" with "the world as it is
under no description at all," this latter notion turns out, at best, to
be superfluous. All we ever can do i s compare descriptions with
other descriptions. And because there is no One True World, there
is no description that could show itself to be the One true
Description by "corresponding to" that World. Thus there will
always be many descri ptions and no single, independent world
that they all describe. Each description, then, is actually a
prescription that constructs a world, leaving us with no World but
many worlds."
What is most trou bling about Cox 's reading is his view that the vari s
descriptions of the world are i ncompatible with one another. It i s
i mportant for our purposes that w e can overcome this reading because i t
serves to undermine our thesis in two pri ncipal ways. Firstly, it denies
the idea that the world constrains our epistemic claims. It does this by
entertaining the idea of a plurality of possible worlds and the consequent
denial that some i nterpretations are more correct or adequate than others.
5
.I
Tsarina Doyle
97
We want to retain the notion of empirical constraint here to facil itate our
claim that Nietzsche overcomes the metaphysical real ist commitment to
the thing-in-itself and the related oscillation between cri teriological
real ism and sceptical idealism. Secondly, by arguing that the various
perspectival appropriations of the world are incompatible with one
another, Cox denies the possibility of absolute perspectival truths. In so
doing, Cox ' s reading renders Nietzsche's perspectivism incompatible
with absolute truth and consequently with the ontological doctrine of the
will to power. We will address each of these queries in tum.
The lack of constrain t entailed by this reading can be seen from
Cox 's claim that each "description" of the world is in fact a
"prescri ption"." From this it seems that Cox puts forth a constitutive
reading of Nietzsche's perspectivism according to which the world is
organized in multiple i ncompatible ways. That this entails that the world
places no constraint on our perspectival truths can be further seen from
Cox 's claim that the possibility of a plurality of incompatible
interpretations "follows not from 'the world ' being too much but from i ts
being too l ittle"." However, this lack of empirical constraint emerges
from what seems to me to be Cox 's conflation of "interpretation" with
"the world". According to Cox 's reading the world is not ontologically
i ndependent of the multiplicity of interpretations. However, we can
overcome th is objection by appealing to two particular passages from
Nietzsche's writings that suggest that Nietzsche is concerned to maintain
the very ontological i ndependence that Cox denies. The first passage to
which we tum is BGE 22 where Nietzsche insists on the independence of
the world from its interpretation. Here Nietzsche considers the
physicist's notion of conformity to law as an example of bad interpretive
practice. Of this interpretation Nietzsche argues that
it is not a factual matter, not a "text," but rather no more than a
naive humanitarian concoction, a contortion of meaning that
allows you to succeed in accommodating the democratic instincts
of the modem soul ! [ . ) But, as I say, this is interpretation, not
text; and someone could come along with the opposite intention
and interpretative skill who, looking at the very same nature and
referring to the very same phenomena would read out of i t the
ruthlessly tyrannical and unrelenting assertion of power claims."
..
52
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 1 52.
54 M y italics.
53
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
98
55 See WP, 1 067 where Nietzsche maintains "the world is will to power - and
" Alan D. Schrift, NieLzsche and the Question of Interpretation (New York:
Routledge, 1 990). p. 1 65.
Tsarina Doyle
99
'exegis' ! "58 We must remind ourselves very briefly here that the fact that
Nietzsche separates the world from i ts interpretations is not problematic
for our anti-metaphysical real ist and anti-sceptical reading of Nietzsche.
The fact that our truths are indexed to perspectives does not entail the
sceptical argument that we are radically in error. Rather it has been our
contention that this sceptical scenario is dependent upon acceptance of
the indeterminacy of the theory-independent notion of the thing-i n-itself.
With this in mind we will now turn to Cox ' s rejection of the possibility
of absolute truths.
I will begin to address Cox ' s claim that Nietzsche's rejection of the
thing-in-itself entails the rejection of the possibility of absolute truth by
citing Cox's four-point summary of his argumen t:
In a general sense, the doctrine of "ontological rel ativity" holds:
( 1 ) that it makes no sense to give an absolute description of "what
there is"; (2) that it only makes sense to say "what there is"
relative to a background theory, which will have its own purposes,
pri nciples, and criteria of individuation; (3) that there ex ist a host
of such theories, many of which are equally warranted but
incompatible with one another; and thus (4) that there is no
uniquely correct "way the world is" but rather as many "ways the
world is" as there are warranted theories.'"
Here Cox seems to conflate absolute truth with truth as it is outside of all
perspectives. Thus he conflates absolute perspectival truth with the
metaphysical criteriological real ist notion of absolute ex tra-perspectival
truth. He considers contextually indexed truth or truth as it is relative to
a particular theory to entail a relativist conception of truth. However, we
can overcome this reading by re-ex amining the passage to which Cox
appeals in support of his claim regarding the incompatibility of
perspectives. In WP 568 Nietzsche argues that the multiplicity of
perspectives is "incongruent". Cox interprets this as a strong claim that
argues for the incompatibility of perspecti ves. However, it is possible to
read Nietzsche as making the weaker anti-metaphysical realist point
which claims that the multiple perspectives are non-red ucible to each
other. This would then entail the view that there is no one true extra
perspectival description of the world to which all other descriptions are
58 Nietzsche, Nietzsche Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, VIII , 3 : 1 5 [82), cited in
1 00
Pli 1 1 (2001 )
Tsarina Doyle
101
Nietzsche' s
anti-foundationalisl
and
anti-metaphysical
realist
commitments, the will to power as a way of knowing must be priori tized.
In this way, we have seen, the ontology of the will to power derives from
the epistemic doctrine of the will to power as a reflection on
philosophical method and knowledge. It is precisely in this way that
Nietzsche avoids making foundationalist claims about what the world is
like in i tself, that is, independently of our perspectival takings. Thus the
doctrine of the will to power is an absolute truth to the extent that it is
justified as a cross-perspectival truth and not through recourse to ex tra
perspectival claims to knowledge. My argument, then, has been that
Nietzsche prioritizes epistemology over ontology. In so doing, he
maintains, contrary to the criteriological realist, that justification is
properly understood as a theory-internal or perspectival matter.
Furthermore, we have witnessed Nietzsche's view that al though
justification does not involve confrontations with the world it is still
possible to put forth perspectival absolute truths. From this we have seen
that ju stification, for Nietzsche, remains a perspectival issue without
succumbing to the sceptical idealist' s problem of confinement.
In further conclusion, Nietzsche emphasizes the notion of realist
constraint by claiming that absolute truths remain open Lo the possibility
of revision and further refinement. With regard to the doctrine of the will
to power he states:
1
1 997), p. 1 49.
1 02
Pfi
1 1 (200 1 )
view Nietzsche allows for d iscovery and conceptual revision and thus
for the much sought-after real ist constraint. It further suggests that, for
Nietzsche, the will to power does not represent the end of the story. How
the story will progress is beyond the scope of our inquiry . What is
important for us is that the will to power is compatible with N ietzsche' s
perspectivism and that it plays a substantial role i n facilitating
Nietzsch e ' s need for a realist constraint that is compatible with his
overall anti-metaphysical realist commitments. I conclude by citing
Nietzsch e ' s articulation of his multi-perspectival conception of truth and
justification.
There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival
"knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about a thing
[ ... ] the more complete will be our 'concept' of the thing, our
'objecti vity'.6'
63
I t is often thought that Nietzsche simply denies that agents rational ly and
consciously determine their actions, and that they can legitimately be
held responsible, and morally evaluated, for their actions. This is perhaps
unsurprising, given that in Twilight of the Idols, for instance, he
identifies 'the error of free will' as one of 'The Four Great Errors ' . 'One
has stripped becoming of its i nnocence ' , he writes there, 'if being this or
that is traced back to will, to intentions, to responsible acts: the doctrine
of will was essentially invented for the purpose of punishment'. Such
statements can be found throughout N ietzsche's writings and are often
explained as symptoms of his ontology, which is standardly interpreted
as reducing agency, evaluation, and being to the 'becoming' of natural
forces. In this regard, appeal is often made to the section in the first
essay of On the Genealogy of Morality in which Nietzsche writes, 'A
quantum of force is just [ . . . ] a quantum of drive, will, effect - more
precisely, it is nothing other than this driving, willing, effecting itself,
and it can appear otherwise only through the seduction of language (and
the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it), which understands and
misunderstands every effecting as conditioned by an effective thing, by a
"subject'" . He continues, 'there is no "being" behind the action,
effecti ng, becoming; "the doer" is merely imagined into the action, - the
action is everything' . '
The purpose o f this paper, however, is t o suggest a n al ternative
interpretation of such statements. That is, this paper attempts to
demonstrate that the target of Ni etzsche's criticism of 'free wil l ' and
1 Tl VI 7, GM I 1 3 . Translations of Nietzsche's texts are my own, and references
employ the standard English abbreviations.
1 04
P/i
1 1 (200 1 )
I.
Thomas Bailey
1 05
chance, society from responsibility for them ' .' Indeed, the same critical
concern is crucial to all of his critical discussions of ' free wi l l ' . ' Related
to it is Nietzsche's concern with the belief that this peculiarly complete
causation of the will and the motivations upon which it acts are always
intelligible and transparent to consciousness. I n his discussion of 'The
Four Great Errors ' , for example, he is concerned with the 'il lusions and
will-o' -the-wisps' of the "'inner world"' , including the belief 'that all the
an tecedentia of an action, i ts causes, were to be sought in consciousness,
and could be discovered there if one searched for them - as "moti ves"' ."
Furthermore, Nietzsche observes that this particular notion of 'free
will' is a necessary condition of a particular form of moral evaluation.
That is, he observes that attributing a peculiarly complete causation to
agents provides a ground for holding them responsible for, and morally
evaluating, any aspect of their 'being this or that ' , as he expresses it in
his discussion in Twilight of the Idols. In The Genealogy, he describes
this in terms of the morality of the 'weak' or the 'lambs' - that is, of
those who say, '"[ . . . ] good i s everyone who does not violate, who
injures no one, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves
revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids all evil
and in general desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, just"'.
I t is these 'lambs ' , Nietzsche writes, who 'exploit this belief for
themselves and basically even maintain no belief more ardently than this
one, that the strong one is free to be weak, and the bird of prey to be a
lamb: - with this they win for themselves the right to hold the bird of
prey accountable [zurechnen] for being a bird of prey ' .'
Nietzsche also provides an accou nt of the origins and development of
this particular notion of the will and the form of evaluation of which it is
a necessary condition. It originated, he maintains, under 'the morality of
custom [die Sittlichkeit der Sittej' , a primitive period of morality which
he consistently refers to as 'Sittlichkeit' , 'Sitte ' , and 'sittlich ' . This
morality was, according to Nietzsche, crucial to the development of
post-customary morality, the form of moral evaluation which he is
concerned to reject and for which he reserves the terms 'Moral' ,
'Moralitat', and 'moralisch ' . As he writes in his discussion of 'The Four
2
Pli 1 1
1 06
(200 1 )
Great Errors' , the errors o f morality have their origins in ' the oldest and
longest-lived psychology' , a psychology that was origi nally applied not
only to human behaviour, but also to every natural event. For primitive
man, he writes,
every event was an action, every action the consequence of a will,
the world became for it a multiplicity of doers, a doer (a 'subject')
was pushed underneath every event. Man projected outside
himself his three ' inner facts' , that in which he believed most
firmly, will, spirit, I, he first derived the concept being from the
concept I, he posited ' things' as existing in his own image,
according to his concept of I as cause.6
Thomas Bailey
1 07
Nietzsche claims that these customs and this relation to nature were
undermined by the modern conception of natural events as subject to
causal necessity.' But he insists that primitive psychology, and the form
of evaluation associated with it, nonetheless persisted in metaphysical
form. lndeed, he maintains that metaphysicians recognised the
incompatibility between, on one hand, primitive psychology and
evaluation and, on the other, the modern conception of nature. But he
claims that they nonetheless continued to be convinced by primitive
psychology and evaluation, which had become embedded in grammar
and in 'reason ' . They therefore thought it necessary to posit ' free will ' as
a supra-natural, but nonetheless real, cause of events, and to posit the
related notions of a supra-natural I, spirit, and being and a supra-natural
source of moral value. As Nietzsche writes i n the chapter, "'Reason" in
Philosophy ' , in Twilight of the Idols,
Language belongs in its origin to the time of the most rudimentary
form of psychology: we come into a crude fetishism when we
bring to consciousness the basic presuppositions of the
metaphysics of language, to put it plainly: of reason. That sees
agents and actions everywhere: that believes in will as cause in
general; that believes i n 'I', i n I as being, in 1 as substance and
projects the belief in the I-substance onto all things - with this it
first creates the concept 'thing' . . . Being i s thought into, put onto,
everywhere as cause; from the conception ' l ' follows first,
derivatively, the concept 'Being' . . . At the beginning stands the
great fate of the error that the will is something that effects, that
will is an ability . . . Today we know that it is merely a word . . .
Very much later, i n a world a thousand times more enlightened,
reliability, subjective certainty in the handling of the categories of
reason came with surprise to philosophers' consciousness: they
concluded that these could not have come from the empirical, indeed the entire empirical stands in contradiction to them. From
where do they come, there.fore ? And in India as in Greece one
has made the same mi stake: 'we must have already have once
been at home in a higher world (- i nstead of in a very much lower
-
I 870's, and in W.E.H. Lecky's History of European Morals, which he had read in
translation by 1 8 8 1 .
8 See HH 1 1 1 , GS 46, and Tl VI 3.
1 08
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
one:
which would have been the truth !), w e must have been
divine, .for we have reason ! ' "
With th is, then, agents could continue to be held responsible for any
aspect of their 'being this or that' - an agent's actions could be
understood as the effects of a peculiarly complete, and now supra
natural, kind of cause, and as transparent to a supra-natural kind of
consciousness, and could be evaluated according to moral values which,
in order to maintain their appl icability to any aspect of man 's existence,
were also endowed with a supra-natural origin (in the Christian God, for
example).
Nietzsche' s objection to this metaphysical form of 'free will' and
evaluation, and to the other metaphysical notions related to it, i s the
incompatibilist one that they, like the primitive psychology and
evaluation upon which they are based, are i ncompatible with the causal
necessity of natural events. He consistently criticises the notion of 'free
wil l ' on incompatibilist grounds, and reserves some of his sharpest
rhetori c for metaphysicians and their continued positing of primitive
psychology and evaluation despite their recogmt10n of its
incompatibility with natural causal necessity."' His similarly venomous
rejection of morality is directed at those forms of evaluation which
demand that an agent radically differ from what he already is or, even,
from what he naturally could be - by demanding that the 'bird of prey'
be a 'lamb' , for example, or that man transcend his natural existence in
the name of 'a higher world ' . Demands such as these, Nietzsche
recognises, rely upon attributing to agents the peculiarly complete
causation involved in the incompatibilist notion of the will and upon
evaluating them accord ing to values grounded in something other than
their natural existence.
For Nietzsche's incompatibilist criticism of 'free will ' , see HH 39, 70, 9 1 , 99, 1 02,
1 05, 106, 1 07, 1 33, 144, 1 60, 208, and 376, AOM 33, 50, 5 1 , and 363, WS I, 1 1 , 1 2
23, 24, 28, 43, 52, 6 1 , 69, 8 1 , and 1 83, GS 99 and I IO, BGE 2 1 and 22, TI III 8, and A
14 and 1 5 . Examples of Nietzsche's remarks regarding metaphysicians can be found
at BGE 5, D P 3, TI III 6 and IX 16 and 42, and A I O, 12, and 52. Nietzsche also
rejects that fatalism which confuses causal necessity with a compulsion, command, or
constraint. For this, see AOM 9, WS 6 1 , GS 1 09, and BGE 2 1 and 22. He provides the
other standard incompatibilist criticism of 'free will ' , regarding its making action
unintclligblc. at W.S' 23.
Thomas Bailey
1 09
12
T/ IlJ 6 .
1 10
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
with his alternative account o f the will and its significance for his
ontology.
II.
13
GM II I .
Thomas Bailey
111
this Jong chain of will breaking ' . That is, although new experiences and
desires affect the willer, he is nonetheless able to remember and to act
upon what he once willed. He i s, Nietzsche wri tes, 'able to stand security
for himself as future ' . This also presupposes, Nietzsche observes, a
number of other, subsidiary abilities: 'In order to dispose of the future in
advance in this way, man must first have learned to distinguish
necessary from chance events, to think causally, to see and anticipate the
di stant as i f i t were present, to fix with certainty what is the purpose and
what the means to i t , i n general be able to calculate, compute ' . "
Nietzsche therefore offers a compatibilist account of the will - that is,
an account that does not appeal to the peculiar kind of cause or causal
agent that he rejects on incompatibilist grounds. His account is also
distinguished by its insistence on a reductive form of naturalism, its
provision of a physiological and hi storical account of the being which is
able to will, and its accounting for the agent's ability not to be
determined to actions by its desires. These three distinctive aspects of
Nietzsche' s compatibilism will be considered i n turn.
Firstly, Nietzsche consistently insists that apparently mental events,
including those concerned with willing, are in fact physiological ones,
and that mental descriptions are to be reduced to physiological ones.
This is clear not only from the first sentence of the second essay of The
Genealogy, in which he writes that 'to breed an animal that may
promise' is 'the paradoxical task that nature has set itself with regard to
man' . " He also makes the following statement in a parenthetical
discussion of the ability to forget in the third essay of The Genealogy.
I do not regard 'mental [seelisch] pain ' itself as a factual
existence, but only as an interpretation (causal interpretation) of
factual existences that have not yet been exactly formulated: thus
something that still hangs entirely in the air and is not
scientifically binding [ . . . ]. If someone cannot cope with his
'mental pai n ' , that is due, crudely put, not to his 'soul [Seele] ' ;
more likely to his stomach (crudely put, as said: which i n no way
expresses a wish also to be heard crudely, understood crudely . . . )
A strong and well -formed human digests his experiences (deeds,
misdeeds included) as he digests his meals, even if he has hard
bites to swallow. If he 'cannot cope' with an experience, then this
kind of indigestion is as physiological as the other - and in many
14
15
GM II I .
GM II ! .
112
Pli
1 1 (200 1 )
GM III 1 6.
For example, Jacob Moleschott, in his Physiologie des Stoffwechsels in Pjlanzen
und Thieren and its popular companion volume, Lehre der Nahrungsmittel, both
published in 1 850, and Ludwig Biichner, in his Kraft und Stoff, published in 1 855,
make such reductive claims. Nietzsche knew of them through F.A. Lange 's
(l1'.w liicli11' 1frs Materi11/is111us, which he read soon after it was published in 1 865.
IH
JI( a,: 1 :i .
17
Thomas Bailey
1 13
peculiar kind of cause or causal agent. But here he also describes willing
as revealing, in the affects that it gives rise to, that 'our body is only a
social structure of many souls ' . I n willi ng, he claims, 'we are at the same
time commander and obeyer, and as obeyer, we know the feelings of
constrai nt, compu lsion, pressure, resistance, motion which usually begin
immediately after the act of wil l ' . If these affects of obedience are
ignored, and only 'the affect of command' is attended to, then, Nietzsche
writes, 'the willer believes wholeheartedly that willing suffices for
action ' , that action can be attributed to "'freedom of will'" . But this
misinterpretation of willing in terms of the notion of a peculiar kind of
cause or causal agent ignores 'the feeli ngs of pleasure of the successful
executive instruments, the serviceable "under-wills" or under-souls'
which are also required to explain the ability to will. Nietzsche maintains
that a physiology of this 'social structure of many souls' and its ability to
will can be provided, and, indeed, that it is these 'relations of mastery
under which the phenomenon "life" results ' . 19
Ni etzsche returns to this 'life' i n a later section of Beyond Good and
Evil. Here he again insists on his reductive form of natural ism, expressed
here as a 'task ' : 'to translate man back into nature [ . . . ] to make man
henceforth stand before man as he today stands, hardened by the
discipline of science, before other nature ' . This requires, he maintains,
that mental descriptions such as 'honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom,
sacrifice for knowledge' be rejected as 'flattering colours and over
painti ng' that obscure the 'basic text homo natura' . But he also insists
here that 'the "spirit [ Geist]" ', a 'commanding something [ . . which]
wills to be master in and around itself and to feel itself master' , can be
accounted for in terms of 'needs and abilities [ . which] are the same as
physiologists posit for everythi ng which l i ves, grows, and multiplies
itself' . Again claiming that 'the "spirit" is more like a stomach than
anything else ' , he here describes its 'will to be master in and around
itself' in terms of its epistemological 'digestion' of the external world.
This manifests, he writes, 'a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the
old, to simplify the diverse, to overlook or push away the wholly
contradictory ' . He continues, 'Its intention in this is the incorporation of
new "experiences", the classification of new things under old divisions,
- growth, therefore ; more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of
increased force ' . A spirit may also manifest 'a suddenly erupting
decision for ignorance' and hence restrict its 'digestion' of the external
world. It may also 'let itself be deceived' or 'deceive other spirits' .
.
. .
19
BCE 1 9.
114
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
20
21
BGE 230. On spirit, knowledge, and the ability to will, see also TI VITI 6 .
BGE 1 3 , 23. See also GS 1 09, BGE 22, GM Ill 7, and A 2.
Thomas Bailey
1 15
BGE 1 8 8, GM II 8. On the relation between creditor and debtor as the rel ation
between community and individual, see GM II 3, 9 and JO, and on this re lation as the
relation between the community and the 'spirits' of nature, see HH I I I, D 23 , and
GM II 1 9, 20, 22, and 23.
23 GM II 3, D 9, GM U I . On the impersonal ity of the morality of custom, see also HH
99, AOM 89, WS 40, D 1 4 and 496, GS 46, 76, 1 1 7 , 1 43, and 328, and GM II 2, and,
on the training of the ability to will under the morality of custom, see GM II I , 2, 3, 4,
6 , 8 , and 15. On Nietzsche's distinction between 'breeding [Ziichtung]' , which alters
nature, and 'taming [Ziihmung] ' , which suppresses it, see BGE 1 8 8, GM II I , 2, 3, and
1 5 , TI VJI 2, 3, 4, and 5, and A 3.
1 16
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
Thomas Bailey
1 17
Ill.
As the first part o f this paper has demonstrated, Nietzsche rejects that
form of moral evaluation which makes, at least, unrealistic, and, at most,
impossible, demands regarding any aspect of an agent's 'being this or
that' . But that Nietzsche does not thereby reject all ethical evaluation,
and that he in fact grou nds a positive ethics upon the ability to will, is
clear from the following passage, once again from the beginning of the
second essay of The Genealogy.
The 'free' man, the possessor of a long un breakable will, also has
in this possession his measure of value: looking out from himself
upon others, he honours or he despises; and just as he necessarily
honours his equals, the strong and reliable (those who may
promise), - therefore, everyone who promises like a sovereign,
weightily, seldom, slowly, who is stingy with his trust, who
distinguishes when he trusts, who gives his word as something
that can be relied upon because he knows himself strong enough
to uphold it against accidents, even 'against fate' -: just as
necessarily he will hold his kick ready for the feeble wi ndbags
who promise but may not, and his switch for the liar who breaks
his word at the very moment he has it in his mouth. The proud
knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility
[ Verantwortlichkeit], the consciousness of this rare freedom, this
power over oneself and fate, has in him sunk down to his lowest
] 26
depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct [ . .
.
According to Nietzsche, therefore, the abil ity to will provides the being
that is able to will with a 'measure of value ' . This can be understood in
terms of Nietzsche' s physiology of 'l ife' or 'spirit', and, in particular, of
'will to power' as the tendency of certain organic beings to manifest
self-maintenance, the ability to will and to know, and conscious events.
The consciousness of this tendency, Nietzsche maintains, is an 'instinct,
the dominating instinct' of such organic beings, and he writes in the next
section of The Genealogy that this tendency, particularly in the form of
the ability to will, entails 'that one may affirm oneself' . 27 It is this
necessary self-affirmation of the being with the ability to will which is,
26
27
GM II 2.
GM II 3.
1 18
Pli 1 1 (2001 )
for Nietzsche, the ground of a form of the 'noble' ethics that he describes
in the first essay of The Genealogy and i n Beyond Good and Evil. This
"
involves characteristically noble self-affirmation. But, by 'looking out
from hi mself upon others' , the being with the abili ty to will also uses his
measure of value to distinguish and affirm those who are equally able to
0
will . ' The noble willer therefore does not merely evaluate action ' s
consequences for h i s o r others' interests, b u t also evaluates agents of
'0
actions according to his measure, the ability to will. By distinguishing
his equals in willing, he also establishes a sphere of those to whom he
has duties and regarding whom he has rights, duties and rights that are
also given content by the constant mutual measurement of the ability to
will. Thus, i n a typical passage from Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
writes,
egoism belongs to the essence of the noble soul, I mean the
immovable faith that to a being such as 'we are' other beings must
be subordinate by their nature, and sacrifice themselves to us. [ . . ]
Under circumstances which make it hesitate at first, it admits that
there are equals-in-rights with it; as soon as it is clear as to this
question of rank, it moves among these equals and equals-in
rights with the same certainty in modesty and tender reverence as
it has in i ntercourse with itself [ . ] it honours itself in them and in
the rights it concedes them, it does not doubt that the exchange of
honours and rights, as the essence of i ntercourse, l ikewise belongs
to the natural condition of things. The noble gives as it takes, out
of the passionate and sensitive instinct of requital that lies in its
ground. "
..
Nietzsche frequently refers to, but does not elaborate on, th is ' instinct of
requital ' in Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy. But, in the
Preface to The Genealogy, he refers to two sections which analyse it i n
some detail : the section of Human, A ll Too Human in which h e first
distinguishes noble from slave moral ities, and one of two successive
)
28
29
:io
31
Thomas Bailey
119
On the natural history of dwy and right. - Our duties - are the
rights of others over us. How have they acquired these rights? By
taking us to be capable of contracting and of requi ting, positing us
as similar and equal to them, and consequently entrusting us with
something, training, reproving, supporting us. We fulfil our duty that is: we justify that representation of our power according to
which everything was shown to us, we give back i n the measure
in which one gave to us. It is th erefore our pride which bids us do
our duty, - when we do something for others in return for
something they have done for us, we will the restoration of our
autocracy, - for they have intervened in our sphere of power and
would have continued to have their hand in it if we did not
practise, with 'duty ' , a requital , that is, intervene in their power. "
Thus Nietzsche holds that one's duties and rights are determined by the
power that one is 'posited' as having by oneself and by others. He also
insists here that this posited power concerns precisely the ability to will.
He writes, 'the feel ing of duty depends upon our having the same belief
in regard to the extent of our power as others have: that is, that we are
able to promise certai n things and bind ourselves to perform them
("freedom of will") ' . One's duties and rights thus correspond precisely
with one's posited ability to will, and to determine these duties and
rights 'constantly needs the refined tact of a balance', to weigh the
shifting degrees of one ' s own and others' posited ability to will.
Nietzsche includes benevolence among these duties and rights, as a
concern with maintaining a 'sphere of power' extended to i nclude the
spheres of subordinate, unequal others, but he insists that duties and
rights extend no further beyond one' s equals than this."
Nietzsche locates the origins of this 'instinct of requital' in the
relation between creditor and debtor under which the morality of custom
trained the spirit with the ability to will. It was under this relation, he
writes, that 'person first kicked out at person, here person first measured
In GM P 4, Nietzsche refers to, among other sections, HH 45 as prefiguring GM 's
analysis of the noble and the slave, D 1 1 2 on justice, and HH 96 and 99, and A OM 89,
on the morality of custom.
33 D 1 1 2.
3 4 D 1 1 2. On requital, see also HH 44, D 1 1 3, and GS 1 3.
32
Pli 1 1
1 20
(2001 )
GM II 8, 2.
GM II 2.
3 7 See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:28-30.
38 See Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:4 1 4-4 1 6, and Critique of
Practical Reason, 5:20-2 1 and 5:3 1 -32.
39 See Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:429 and 4:433-434, and
Critique of Practical Reason, 5:76-77.
35
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Thomas Bailey
121
40 A
Introduction
The area of concern of this paper is certain contemporary approaches to
the phi losophy of mind. The immediate question that arises is: why bring
Nietzsche into this? Firstl y, we believe that Nietzsche's discussion of
promising in On the Genealogy of Morality (henceforth, the Genealogy)
foreshadows the two contemporary approaches we are in terested in, but
secondly and more importantly , the Genealogy offers two theoretical
tools which are lacking from the current debate. The first is that of
genealogy itself. With its emphasis on material practices, discontinuity,
change and the resistances to such changes, genealogy makes central the
problem of the evolution of social systems. Secondly, the way in which
N ietzsche's elaboration of the institution of promising is based on a sub
intentional mechanism: mnemotechnics.
The two approaches to the philosophy of mind we will look at are
firstly, a variety of representationalism namely teleosemantics as
theorised by Daniel Dennett and Ruth Millikan and secondly a variety of
the in.ferentialist approach as offered by Robert Brandom in Making It
Explicit. The definitions of these terms will become clear in sections 2
and 3. The appropriation of some of Brandom's ideas by Tim Schroeder,
who nonetheless classes himself as a teleosemanticist, will also be
looked at. His attempt to employ a certain type of cybernetic explanation
offers an immediate and decisive demarcation point from the view that
we hold. Both of these approaches see the issue of normati vity as central
to any philosophy of language. Both see the virtues of giving a sub
intentional description of normative mechan isms as being a possible
solution to the question of how non-intrinsically intentional systems can
give rise to intentional behaviour. The amount of attention given to tne
1 23
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124
Column 1
l i near
equivalence
equilibrium
Column 2
non-linear
SUDJ!Us value
fu nctional diseauilibrium
The two most important things that need to be born in mind are that:
firstly, non-linear systems will not necessarily have a single solution
3
1 25
Thal thi s is not as neat a pattern as we may have wished is due to the fact that a first
order cybernetic system may employ either negative or positive feedback and positive
feedback first order systems are explosive - equilibrium is not a term that they call to
mind.
6 Marx ' s rejection of money as an a priori unit of equivalence is as crucial as
Nietzsche's rejection of utility.
7 Bataille's The Accursed Share must be taken as a vital precursor to this way of
thinking, but there is in sufficient space to fully develop this.
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
1 26
using the terms in the left hand column?8 I t i s necessary t o real ise that
both money and uti lity are themselves normative and normal ising
functions and thar therefore an appeal to them as explanatory terms in
the functioning of normative mechanisms would be completely circular.
We believe that it is only through the realisation that social systems
are not and could not be in equilibrium that any progress towards
understanding either the persistence of social systems or their mutation
is possible. We must elimi nate the prejudice which claims that
persistence equals equilibrium and cl arify the counter claim that ir is
only through disequilibrium that social systems function.
Section
1.
For the most obvious reason, that the alternative simply fails to accurately
characterise social systems, see Ormerod 1 994 which takes great pains to show how
neo-classical economics (which can be regarded as the paradigm instantiation of a
social science employing notions of equivalence and equilibrium as basic explanatory
categories) should indeed be regarded as the 'dismal science' if only for its failure to
make successful predictions.
1 27
freedom.
The sense in which the institution of promising leads to intentionality
in this form can be explicated as follows: the capacity to entertain and
produce promises both entails and presupposes the capacity to entertain
and produce other 'cognitive' attitudes and abilities which are
characterised as intentional owi ng to their propositional form. Thus the
ability to produce a performance which could be claimed to exemplify a
grasp of the content of the concept of promising (and thus to count as
satisfactorily having promised) entails and presupposes certain other
propositional attitudes; for example, that one 'believes that' one has
made a particular kind of promise rather than another one (e.g. that one
has promised to meet a friend at two o' clock outside the bus station,
rather than at three o' clock outside the record shop); that one 'desires
that' one should keep one ' s promises, and so on. The ability to make a
promise, then, is the abi lity to produce a proposition (in the form of a
speech act or an assertion, or in the form of producing a performance
which 'counts as' having made such an assertion - e.g., signing a
contract) the content of which is determined by the ways in which it
stands in certain relationships to other states, statuses and attitudes
which are intentional . That is to say, it is in vi rtue of the fact that a
9
The sense in which we, following Quine, use 'intention' is aboutness. What is
crucial is the necessity for sentences or ideas to fail to be about what they intended to
be about. It is this possibility of either failure or success which introduces the
inescapably normative dimension to intentionality as it used here.
1 28
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promise stands i n the 'appropri ate kind' of relation to these other states,
statuses and attitudes that determines that the promising performance
has a content at all.
For Nietzsche, the question of promising marks man out as that
which is simultaneously the subject of a moral discourse and as that
which employs a mode of di scourse which is ch aracterised by
intentional ity. At the same time, however, while these characterisations
of man are accurate (in that they designate a determinate reality of man ' s
experiences o f others and itself) they are not t o b e taken as descriptive of
an ahi storical, metaph ysically determined conception of a transcendent
subjectivity. The whole point of the genealogical proj ect is to destroy
such a conception of transcendent subjectivity by showing how that
conception is itself the product of an historically si tuated processes of
evolution, where the latter term must be taken to encompass not only
natural but also social and cultural processes (in as far as Nietzsche will
insist on attributing this emergence not only to 'natural ' processes but
also treat them as being, in an i mportant sense, products of man's own
activity - the vast 'labour of man on himself').
With this in mind, a crucial constraint on this genealogical
demystification of transcendence becomes evident. It is not permissible
for such a project to treat the conception of subjectivity with which it
deals as though i t were a merely empirical form of error, or simply an
i l lusion. In as far as this conception of subjectivity is the product of
historical processes, it is produced as real; that is, it has effects which
are real (not the least of which is making a major contribution to man ' s
status a s 'the sick animal ' , but also as the one which because of that
sickness becomes, for the first time, 'interesting'). We do entertain moral
judgements, just as we do effectively employ intentional vocabulary.
What genealogy calls for, then, is that the moral and the intentional (with
which we are primarily concerned) are explained, not just explained
away. This amounts to the commitment to not treat these categories as
primitive terms in a genealogical account (since they are in fact just what
needs to be explained), but to show how their employment arises from
the features of a set of more fundamental explanatory concepts.
Nietzsche proceeds to destroy the pretensions of transcendence i n
moral discourse b y showing how it i s dependent o n a more fundamental
normative basis (and hence shows that morals are really norms mistaken
for transcendent laws). He does thi s by showing how th e employment of
particular semantic and intentional terms (for example, the slave' s
employment of 'Good and Evil ' a s contrasted with the noble use of
1 29
..
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1 31
( Genealogy II; 3)
Nietzsche's explanatory strategy runs as follows. His point with regard
to the priority of promises in investigating the genesis of moral
1 32
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1 (200 1 )
The need to keep open the possib ility of error in acting in a normative relation to a
rule (if one is to construe that relation as nonnative) is a fundamental point of
Wittgenstein's i n the Philosophical Investigations. As he puts it there, "One would
like to say, whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that
here we cannot talk about 'right'." [Pl: 258]. The possible ways in which an account
of normative mechanisms can count as maintaining a distinction between correct and
i ncorrect performance is a subject for discussion later in the piece.
1 33
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(2001)
135
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Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
13
Whilst this discussion will undoubtedly fail to register some of the subtleties of
Dennett and Millikan's theorising, including some of the points on which their own
viewpoints diverge, it remains the case that there is considerable agreement between
them - enough for the following broad brush treatment to avoid inflicting excessive
distortion to their philosophical positions by running them together in this context.
For a discussion of the affinities and divergences between Millikan and Dennett on
these topics see Millikan 1 993 and Dennett 1 993.
1 37
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1 39
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Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
141
1 42
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1 (2001 )
1 45
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1 48
But other cases are possible [from those of external sanctions] , for
instance ones i n which the assessing response is to punish by
making other actions inappropriate - one who violates the norm is
not permitted to attend the weekly festival . I n such a case, the
normative significance of transgression is itself specified in
nonnative terms (of what is appropriate, of what the transgressor
is entitled to do). The punishment for violating one norm is an
al teration in other normative statuses. Acting i ncorrectly al ters
what other performances are correct or incorrect. (4 3)
This picture obviously allows for the possibility of interlocking systems
of external and internal sanctions (e.g. a case in which subsequent
attendance at a festival when barred from so doing as a consequence of
the application of a previous internal sanction elicits the external
sanction of being beaten with sticks) thereby "making sense of complex
webs of interdependent normative statuses" (44).
It is important to note, however, that even in the cases where an
external sanction is describable by reference to non-normative terms (as
is the case in the example of being beaten with sticks), Brandom' s
account does not call fo r a further reduction o f a l l normative
consi derations to natural ones; indeed, this is a move which he explicitly
rejects. The real point of i nvoking sanctioning behaviour, for Brandom,
is not to describe natural istically how it is that nonns come to be
conformed to but to give an account of the way in which deontic statuses
can be acknowledged implicitly in practice as part of a wider theory of
normative constraint. Ultimately, for Brandom, the point of external
sanctions is still to be construed in normative terms.
I t is by reference to the attitudes of others toward the deontic
status (attributing a commitment) that the attitude of the one
whose status is in question (acknowl edging or un dertaking a
commitment is to be understood. So all that is required to make
sense of the nonnative significance of the performance as an
undertaking of a commitment to do something. The possibility of
sanctioning failure to perfonn appropriately - that is, as one is
(thereby) taken to be commi tted to do -offers a way of construing
this fundamental practical deontic attitude [ ... ] For undertaking a
commitment can be understood as authorising, licensing, or
entitling those who attribute the commitment to sanction non
perfonnance [ . ] Thought of this way, the effect of undertaking a
commitment is not a matter of in fact eliciti ng punishment if one
. .
1 49
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Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
selected and designed by evolution for just that purpose. " Such a
reliance on representation can be seen to be nascent in teleosemantic's
overall conception of memory in terms of a cognitive faculty. Brandom,
on the other hand , is clearly and explicitly commi tted to the explanatory
priority of inference over that of representation in his normative account
of intentional conten t."
An equally vivid contrast is the way in which the two theories
approach the question of the mechanisms which in stantiate normativity.
For teleosemantics the relevant mechanisms reside at the level of the
sub-personal cognitive architecture and are again considered
naturalistically. They reside within the organism and, crucially, its
evoluti onary phylogenetic history. This defines the proper function of
these mechanisms by reference to their contribution to the fitness of the
system being considered. Brandom' s approach takes the relevant
mechanisms to be the implicit social practices of sanctioning, which he
makes no attempt to render in naturalistic terms. As was seen above,
sanctions continue to play a specifically normative role in tracking the
assessments of normative status within the context of social "deontic
scorekeeping practices". What matters for Brandom is not the
mechanistic details of sanctioning practice but the overall contribution
which sanctioning is assumed to make to providing the implicitly
normative s tructure of linguistic practice such that this can support the
inferential articulation of commitments and entitlements to commitments
which suffice to confer content on intentional performances.
Finally, the differing formulations of the decomposition of the
functional systems which are taken to be relevant by the two camps can
be noted. It was seen above that teleosemantic strategy in respect of this
issue was to decompose fu nctional roles by their teleological ly defined
function or purpose, with natural selection being invoked to naturalise
such a notion (as in the case of Milli kan ' s account of proper fu nction
17
A clear accounJ of this form of explanatory cascade from intentional systems theory
as a competence theory to sub-personal cognitive psychology as a theory of the
implementation of these representational competencies is provided in Dennett 1 987,
Ch.3. A forceful critique of the project of attempting to naturalise a representational
theory by functional analysis of intentional level competencies, backed by appeals to
a process of evolutionary design, can be found in Hendriks-Jansen 1 996 (some
features of this critique will prove to be important in the development of this piece).
18
Brandom's attempt to elaborate a theory of the explanatory priority of inference and
then to reconstruct a notion of representation as derivative from this more
fundamental basis is an absolutely crucial aspect of his overall project. It is not one,
however, which can be further discussed in this context.
151
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1 1 (200 1 )
The task facing the present section is to begin to delineate the specific
approach taken to the relationship between the intentional and the
normative in Nietzsche. This in turn has been seen to revolve around the
different ways in which it might be possible to conceptualise the
relationship between memory (understood as a site in which the
normative dimension of the intentional is particularly evident, as
Nietzsche approach to the example of promising makes clear) and the
practices of punitive mnemotechnics (understood as a site in which a
specifically social set of normative constraints come to obtain on an
intentional performance such that they give content to intentional
capacities).
Two different possible approaches to this rel ationship have been
illustrated: a teleosemantic reading and a Brandomian normative
pragmatic reading. Each reading was seen to entail a number of
theoretical approaches to the concepts which thinking about how to
formul ate this relationship brought into play. For example, the two
1 53
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1 (200 1 )
1 55
do no die, but only suffer). And there is still less reason to think that
these procedures carry sufficiently direct consequences for the
differential survival of offspring for there to be an appreciable genetic
advantage to be derived from the development of memory in response to
punitive practice, even if it were possible to i nherit such a trait. The
punitive practices which Nietzsche describes do not make it a further
condition of a man ' s death on the rack that he also die childless. The
above are entirely necessary conditions of an environmental feature
counting as a selection pressure, whether i t i s 'social' in origin or not.
Finally, even if these cultural practices could count as a selection
pressure, and if there were a mechanism of transmission for genotypic
level responses to this pressure, there is a further reason to doubt the
viability of such an appeal to evolution for Nietzsche in order to derive a
hard-ware solution to the problem of memory with which Nietzsche is
dealing: the problem of time. As has been regularly noted (see for
example Dennett' s Darwin 's Dangerous Idea), the grindingly slow pace
of the evolutionary time-scale makes it extremely unlikely that any
mutations in the genome (which might be construable as adaptations to
culturally derived selection pressures) could have spread sufficiently
through the population to make the kind of difference which Nietzsche is
concerned with i n the Genealogy.
There are, therefore, convincing grounds to reject any moves which
would seek to ground a hard-wired, organic and cognitive conception of
the faculty of memory by appeal to the effects of cultural mnemotechnics
acting as an environmental selection pressure. Equally, however, there
are a number of good reasons to suppose that such a hard-wired account
of memory is not what Nietzsche is after in his discussion of
mnemotechnics His focus is behavioural plasticity at the phenotypic,
rather than genotypic, level in which the relevant class of behaviours are
the normative structures implicit in social practices.
A first point to make in this regard is that Nietzsche would be
unlikely to offer such a direct appeal to natural selection in order to
ground the biological faculty of memory, given his ambiguous
relationship to Darwinian theori sing generally. 19 Further support for the
view that Nietzsche' s conception of memory does not run along such
reificatory lines can also be taken from the observation that such a h ard
wired and biological reading of memory would remain as much a faculty
as a more nebulously characterised psychic one, and we have already
1 9 For a discussion of Nietzsche's approach to the theory of natural selection see
Ansell-Pearson 1997: 85- 1 1 2 and references.
1 56
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1 (200 1 )
given reasons to doubt that h e would have sympathy with any such
conception of faculty psychology.
This point emerges with more clarity when we consider one of the
more forceful of Nietzsche' s contributions to hi storical and evolutionary
theorising: his insistence on the fundamental role played by functional
indeterminacy in such accounts:
[ . . . ] there is no more important propos1t1on for all kinds of
historical research [ . . . ] that the origin of the emergence of a thing
and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and
incorporation i nto a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that
anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually
[our emphasis] interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed
and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it [ . . ] for
people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a
thing, its utility, form and shape are its reason for existence.
(Genealogy II 1 2)
.
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intentional content. " Such a conception combines well with Brandom ' s
anti-naturalistic stance (though perhaps n o t with his pragmatist one) and
his insistence on the foundational status of specifical ly li ngui stic forms
of normativity and intentionality (especially since it provides the warrant
for taking the inferential articulation of assertions as being the
fu ndamental form of linguistic practice) but it is not a picture which i s
easily acceptable from a N ietzschean standpoint. This i s particularly the
case gi ven the essentially harmonious and co-operative model of social
relations which it draws upon. A version of normative pragmatics more
suited to Nietzschean tastes does emerge, however, from the potential
alterations brought to the theory by the criticisms of Brandom pursued
by Tim Schroeder.
The idea that we are 'deontic-scorekeepers' sits uneasily with the psychological
literature demonstrating that people are reliably terrible about making consistent
inferential judgements, or that people will violate the most basic of transitive
preferences.
22
It is this proviso that is absolutely necessary for Schroeder to escape the
gerrymandering problems that Brandom identifies with simple regularity theories.
161
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1 63
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Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
i n that system as a result (f its own activity. Jn just the same way,
Schroeder's account of auto-reinforcing cybernetic systems provides no
purchase on the question of how such systems, or inter-locking
assemblages of such systems, can give rise to new capacities or produce
changes in the effects which they deliver (except for the possibility of
malfunction, that i s) . The ability to accou nt for how it is that such
systems can come lo mutate was, however, cited in the introduction as
one of the fundamental criteria of adequacy against which a formulation
of social normativity should be assessed. Jn the case of Brandom this
kind of theoretical conservatism runs very deep.
The inherently conservative nature of B random ' s formulation of
sanctioning (as the locus of implici t normative constraint) can be seen i n
the fact that its prime focus is o n the subject of a sanction (i.e. the one
whose performance is being subjected to normative assessment) and in
as far as i t does concern the effects on those who apply these sanctions
(the assessors), it does so only at the level at which that system of
governing norms is maintained intact. Thus a subject of assessments is
sanctioned positively or negatively j ust to the extent to which it accords,
or does not accord, with the normative standards of those who
administer the sanctions. Notice, however, that since the application of
sanctions is something which is itself subject to normative assessment,
there must be a positive or negative reinforcement of that sanction
applying behaviour of the community of assessing sanctioners. But this
is possible just to the extent that the application of the sanction has the
effect of bringing the subject of assessment-performances into
conformity with the normative standards of the community (by correctly
applying either positive or negative reinforcement of the performances
engaged in by the subject of assessment).
Brandom is therefore led to postulate an in principle equality or
equ ivalence amongst the members of a normative community. That is to
say, although there are divergences of performance w i th respect to a
normative standard (and i t is just thi s possibility of d ivergence from the
standard which makes the system normative rather than simply causal)
and that there is, therefore, a qualitative difference in the treatment of
members of that community with respect to the extent to which they do,
or do not, accord w i th those normative standards, it is nevertheless the
same set of norms which is to be rein forced i n each case. Earlier it was
stated that the claim that Brandom is working with the framework of a
conception of normative systems i n terms of equilibrium revolves
around the view that the governor of a system (in this case, the
1 65
This is not the claim that Brandom is making the sort of mistake which McDowell
( 1 984) accuses Kripke and Wright of making in their approach to Wittgenstein - that
they make a community incorrigible as to "what is to count as right" and thereby lose
the possibility of any objective considerations settling what is right. Brandom goes to
enormous lengths to avoid making this mistake (which he describes as "allowing
q uestions of normative statuses to collapse into those of normative attitude" [ 1 994:
54] and so collapsing the status of being correct onto that of being taken as being
correct. The issue here is the more subtle one that, although Brandom is not
committed to treating a community as though it w ere authoritative about what is
correct, he is nevertheless committed to the view that the community is authoritative
about what they take to be correct (i.e. about just which forms of normative
constraints they are actually imparting in their assessing practices).
1 66
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1 69
norms, or our lack of them, but the myriad machi nes installed in every
pore of the social body to which we are answerable and which make us
mean.
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ZIZEK
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Supreme Good; i n our daily exi stence, we are un aware of this spark,
since we are kept ignorant by bei ng caught in the inertia of material
real ity. How does such a view relate to Christianity proper? ls it that
Christ had to sacrifice himself in order to pay for the sins of his father
who created such an i mperfect world? Perhaps this Gnostic Divinity, the
evil Creator of our material world, i s the clue to the relationship between
Judaism and Christianity, the "vanishing mediator" repressed by both of
them: the Mosaic figure of the severe God of the Commandments is a
fake whose mighty apparition is here to conceal the fact that we are
dealing with a confused idiot who botched up the job of creation. In a
displaced way, Christianity then acknowledges this fact; Christ dies in
order to redeem his father in the eyes of humanity. Along the same lines,
the Cathars, the Christian heresy par excellence, posited two opposed
divinities: on the one hand, the infinitely good God who, however, i s
strangely impotent, unable to CREATE anything; o n the other hand, the
Creator of our material universe who is none other than the Devil
himself (identical to the God of the Old Testament) - the visible,
tangible world in its entirety is a diabolical phenomenon, a manifestation
of Evil . The Devil is able to create, but is a sterile creator; this steri lity i s
confirmed b y the fact that the Devil succeeded i n producing a wretched
universe in which, despite all his efforts, he never contrived anything
lasting. Man is thus a split creature: as an entity of flesh and blood, he i s
a creation o f the Devil. However, the Devil was not able to create
spiritual Life, so he was su pposed to have asked the good God for help;
in his bounty, God agreed to assist the Devil, this depressingly sterile
creator, by breathing a soul into the body of lifeless clay. The Devil
succeeded in perverting this spiritual flame by causing the Fall, i.e. by
drawing the first couple into the carnal union which consummated their
position as the creatures of matter.
Why did the Church react in such a violent way to this Gnostic
narrative? Not because of the Cathar's radical Otherness (the dualist
belief in the Devil as the counter-agent to the good God; the
condemnation of every procreation and fornication, i .e. the disgust at
Life in its cycle of generation and corruption), but because these
"strange" beliefs which seemed so shocking to the Catholi c orthodoxy
"were precisely those that had the appearance of stemming logically
from orthodox contemporary doctrine. That was why they were
,,
considered so dangerous.' Was Cathar dualism not simply a consequent
development of the Catholic belief in the Devil? Was the Cathar
1 Zoe
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previous "home" out of which we were thrown into this world, what if
this very dislocation grounds man ' s ex-static opening to the world?
As Heidegger emphasizes in Sein und Zeit, the fact that there is no
Sein without Dasein does NOT mean that, if the Dasein were to
disappear, no things would remain. Entities would continue to be, but
they would not be disclosed within a horizon of meaning - there would
have been no world. This is why Heidegger speaks of Dasein and not of
man or subject: the subject i s OUTSIDE the world and then relates to it,
generating the pseudo-problems of the correspondence of our
representations to the external world, of the worl d ' s exi stence, etc.; man
is an entity INSIDE the world. Dasein, in contrast to both of them, is the
ex-static relating lo the entities within a horizon of meaning, which i s i n
advance "thrown" into the world, i n the midst of disclosed entities.
However, there still remains a "naive" question: if entities are there as
Real prior to lichtung, how do the two ultimately relate? Lichtung
somehow had to "explode" from the closure of mere entities - did not
Schelling struggle with this ultimate problem (and fa il) in his Weltalter
drafts, which aimed at deploying the emergence of logos out of the
proto-cosmic Real of divine drives? Are we to take the risk of endorsing
the philosophical potentials of modern physics, whose results seem to
point towards a gap/opening already discernible in pre-ontological
nature itself? Furthermore, what if THIS is the danger of technology:
that the world i tself, its opening, will disappear, that we will return to the
prehuman mute being of entities without lichtung'?
It is against this background that one should also approach the
relationship between Heidegger and Oriental thought. In his exchange
with Heidegger, Medard Boss proposes that, in contrast to Heidegger, i n
Indian thought, the Clearing [lichtung] i n which beings appear does not
need man [Dasein] as the "shepherd of being" - human being is merely
one of the domains of "standing in the clearing" which shines forth i n
and for itself. Man unites himself with the Clearing through h i s self
annihilation, through the ecstatic immersion into the Clearing. ' This
difference is crucial : the fact that man is the unique "shepherd of Being"
introduces the notion of the epochal historicity of the Clearing itsel f, a
motif totally lacking in Indian thought. Already in the 1 930s, Heidegger
emphasized the fundamental "derangement" [ Ver-Rueckheit] that the
emergence of Man introduces into the order of entities: the event of
Clearing i s i n itself an Ent-Eignen, a radical and thorough distortion,
'
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'
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recreate for ourselves in Virtual Reality not the old Gnostic dream of the
immaterial "astral body" come true? So what are we to make of this
seemingly convincing argument that cyberspace functions in a Gnostic
way, promising to elevate us to a level in which we will be delivered of
our bodily inertia, provided with another ethereal body? Konrad Lorenz
once made the ambiguous remark that we ourselves ("actually existing"
humanity) are the sought-after "missing link" between animal and man
- how are we to read this? Of course, the first association that imposes
itself here is the notion that "actually existing" humanity still dwells in
what M arx designated as "pre-history," and that true human history will
begin with the advent of the passage between animal and overman. Does
the cyberspace ideology not resuscitate the same notion?
These paradoxes provides the proper background for Michel
Houellebecq ' s Atomized (Les particules elementaires), the story of
radical DESUBLIMA TION, if there ever was one: in our postmodern,
"disenchanted", permissive world, sexuality is reduced to an apathetic
participation in collective orgies. Les particules, a superb example of
what some critics perspicuously baptized "Left conservatism," tells the
story of two half-brothers: Bruno, a high-school teacher, is an
undersexed hedonist, while Michel i s a brilliant but emotionally
desiccated biochemist. Abandoned by their hippie mother when they
were small, neither has ever properly recovered; all their attempts at the
pursuit of happiness, whether through marriage, the study of philosophy,
or the consumption of pornography, merely lead to loneliness and
frustration. Bruno ends up in a psychiatric asylum after confronting the
meaninglessness of permissive sexuality (the utterly depressive
descriptions of the sexual orgies between forty-somethings are among
the most excruciating readings in contemporary literature), while Michel
invents a solution: a new self-replicating gene for a post-human
desexualized entity. The novel ends with a prophetic vision: in 2040,
humanity is replaced by these humanoids who experience no passions
proper, no intense self-assertion that can lead to destructive rage.
Almost four decades ago, Michel Foucault dismissed "man" as a
figure in the sand that is now being washed away, introducing the (then)
fashionable topic of the "death of man." Although Houellebecq stages
this disappearance in much more naive and l i teral terms, as the
replacement of humanity with a new post-human species, there is a
common denominator between the two: the disappearance of sexual
difference. In his last works, Foucault envisioned the space of pleasures
liberated from Sex, and one is tempted to claim that Houellebecq ' s post
human society of clones is the realization of the Foucauldian dream of
Slavoj Zizek
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Selves who practice the "use of pleasures." Perhaps the best way to
specify the role of sexual love which is threatened here is through the
notion of reflexivity as the movement whereby that which has been used
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Maimon Cohen, Director of the Harvey Institute for Human Genetics at the Greater
Baltimore Medical Center, quoted in International Herald Tribune, June 27, 2000, p.
8.
'
See Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1 993).
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See Steven Pinker, The Language lnstincr (New York: Harper Books, 1 995).
' It is, of course, the work of Daniel Dennett which popularized this version of the
"selfless" mind - see Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York:
Little, Brown and Company, I 99 1 ) .
Slavoj Zizek
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prevent it. And what about "objectively" read ing our IQ or the genetic
ability for other intellectual capacities? How will the awareness of this
total self-objectivization affect our self-experience? The standard answer
(the knowledge of our genome will enable us to intervene into our
genome and change for the better our psychic and bodily properties) still
begs the crucial question: if the self-objectivization i s complete, who is
the "I" that intervenes into "its own" genetic code in order to change it?
Is this intervention itself not already objectivized in the totall y scanned
brain?
The "closure" anticipated by the prospect of the total scanning of the
human brain resides not only in the fu ll correlation between the scanned
neuronal activity in our brain and our subjective experience (so that a
scientist will be able to give an impulse to our brain and then predict to
what subjective experience this impulsive will give rise), but in the much
more radical notion of bypassing subjective experience as such: what
scanning will make it possible to identify DIRECTLY will be our
subjective experience, so that the scientist will not even have to ask us
what we experience - he will be able to READ IMMEDIATELY on his
screen what we experience. There i s further evidence which points in the
same direction : a couple of milliseconds before a human subject "freely"
decides in a situation of choice, scanners can detect the change in the
brain ' s chemical processes which indicates that the decision was already
taken - even when we make a free decision, our consciousness seems
just to register an anterior chemical process. The psychoanalytic
Schellingian answer to it is to locate freedom (of choice) at the
unconscious level: the true acts of freedom are choices/decisions which
we make while unaw are of it - we never decide (in the present tense);
all of a sudden, we just take note of how we have already decided. On
the other hand, one can argue that such a dystopian prospect involves the
loop of a petitio principii: it silently presupposes that the same old Self
which phenomenologically relies on the gap between "myself' and the
objects "out there" will continue to be here after the completed self
objectivization.
The paradox, of course, is that this total self-objectivization overlaps
with its opposite: what looms at the horizon of the "digital revolution" i s
nothing else than the prospect that human beings will acquire the
capacity of what Kant and other German Idealists called "intellectual
i ntuition" [intellektuelle Anschauung], the closure of the gap that
separates (passive) intuition and (active) production, i.e. the intuition
which immediately generates the object it perceives - the capacity
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hitherto reserved for the infinite divine mind. O n the one hand, i t will be
possible, through neurological implants, to switch from our "common"
reality to another compu ter-generated reality without all the clumsy
machinery of today ' s Virtual Reality (the awkward glasses, gloves ... ),
since the signals of the virtual reality will directly reach our brain,
bypassing our sensory organs:
Your neural implants will provide the simulated sensory inpu ts of
the virtual environment - and your virtual body - directly in
your brain. [ . ] A typical 'web site' will be a perceived virtual
environment, with no ex ternal hardware required. You 'go there'
9
by mentally selecting the site and then entering that world.
.
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The idea is that this cutting off of the umbilical cord that links us Lo a
single body, this shift from having (and being stuck to) a body to freely
floating between different embodiments will mark the true birth of the
human being, relegating the entire hitherto history of humanity to the
status of a confused period of transition from the animal kingdom to the
true kingdom of the mind.
Here, however, philosophical-existential enigmas emerge again, and
we are back at the Leibnizian problem of the identity of the
indiscernibles: if (the pattern of) my brain is loaded onto a different
material support, which of the two minds i s "myself'? In what does the
identity of "myself' consist, if il resides neither in the material support
(which changes all the time) nor in the formal pattern (which can be
exactly replicated)? No wonder Leibniz is one of the predominant
philosophical references of the cyberspace theorists: what reverberates
today is not only his dream of a universal computing machine, but the
uncanny resemblance between his ontological vision of monadology and
today' s emerging cyberspace community in which global harmony and
solipsism strangely coexist. That is to say, does our immersion into
cyberspace not go hand in hand with our reduction to a Leibnizean
monad which, although "without windows" open to external reality,
mirrors in itself the entire universe? Are we not more and more monads
with no direct windows onto reality, interacting alone with the PC
screen, encountering only the virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more
than ever into the global network, synchronously communicating with
the entire globe? The impasse which Leibniz tried to solve by way of
introducing the notion of "preestablished harmony" between the
monads, guaranteed by God Himself, the supreme, all-encompassing
monad, repeats itself today, in the guise of the problem of
communication: how does each of us know that s/he is in touch with the
"real other" behind the screen, not only with spectral simulacra? Therein
resides one of the key unanswered enigmas of the Wachowski brothers '
film The Matrix: why does the Matrix construct a shared virtual reality
in which all humans interact? It would have been much more economic
to have each subject interacting ONLY with the Matrix, so that all
humans encountered would have been only digital creatures. Why? The
interaction of "real" individuals through the M atrix creates its own big
Other, the space of implicit meanings, surmises, etc., which can no
longer be controlled by the M atrix - the Matrix is thus reduced to a
mere instrument/medium, to the network that only serves as a material
support for the "big Other" beyond its control.
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What, then, does the Christian tradition oppose to this Gnostic legacy?
Let us start with Gilles Deleuze's exemplary analysis of Chaplin's late
fil ms:
Between the small Jewish barber and the dictator [in The Great
Dictator] , the difference is as negligible as that between their
respective moustaches. Yet it results in two situations as infin itel y
remote, as far opposed as those of victim and executioner.
Likewise, in Monsieur Verdoux, the d ifference between the two
aspects or demeanours of the same man, the lady-assassin and the
loving husband of a paralysed wife, is so thin that all his wife's
i ntuition is required for the premonition that somehow he
'changed.' [ ... ] The burning question of Limelight i s : what is that
' nothing,' that sign of age, that small difference of triteness, on
account of which the funny clown ' s number changes i nto a
tedious spectacle? "
The same imperceptible "almost nothing," of course, also accounts for
the difference between the two Veroniques i n Kieslowski 's Double Life.
The paradigmatic case of this "almost nothing" are the old paranoiac
science-fiction fi lms from the early 1 950s about aliens occupying a
small American town: they look and act like normal Americans, we can
di stinguish them only via the reference to some minor detail. It is Ernst
Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be which brings this logic to its dialectical
climax. In one of the funniest scenes of the film, the pretentious Polish
actor who, as the part of a secret mission, has to impersonate the cruel
high Gestapo officer Erhardt, does this impersonation in an exaggerated
way, reacting to the remarks of his interlocutor about his cruel treatment
of the Poles with a loud vulgar laughter and a satisfied constatation, "So
they call me Concentration Camp Erhardt, hahaha!" We, the spectators,
take this for a ridiculous caricature - however, when, later i n the fi lm,
the REAL Erhardt appears, he reacts to his interlocutors in exactly the
" Gilles Deleuze, L 'image-mou veme11t (Paris: E<litions de Minuit, 1983), pp. 234-236.
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same way. Although the "real" Erhardt thus in a way imitates his
imitation, "plays himself," this uncanny coincidence makes all the more
palpable the absolute gap that separates him from the poor Polish
impersonator. In Hitchcock ' s Vertigo, we find a more tragic version of
the same uncanny coincidence: the low-class Judy who, under the
pressure exerted from and out of her love for Scottie, endeavours to look
and act like the high-class fatal and ethereal Madeleine, turns out to BE
Madeleine: they are the same person, since the "true" Madeleine Scottie
encountered was already a fake. However, this identity of Judy and
Judy-Madeleine, this difference between the two fakes, again renders all
the more palpable the absolute otherness of Madeleine with regard to
Jud y - the Madeleine that is given nowhere, that is present just i n the
guise of the ethereal "aura" that envelops .Judy-Madeleine. The Real is
the appearance as appearance, it not only appears WITHIN appearances,
but it is also NOTHING B UT its own appearance - it is just a certain
GRIM ACE of reality, a certain imperceptible, unfathomable, ultimately
illusory feature that accounts for the absolute difference within identity.
So, with regard to the grimace of real/reality, it is crucial to keep open
the reversibility of this formulation. In a first approach, reality is a
grimace of the real - the real, structured/distorted into the "grimace" we
call reality through the pacifying symbolic network, somehow like the
Kantian Ding-an-sich structured into what we experience as objective
reality through the transcendental network. However, at a deeper level,
the real itself is nothing but a grimace of reality: the obstacle, the "bone
in the throat" which forever d istorts our perception of reality,
introducing anamorphic stains in it, or the pure Schein of Nothing that
only "shines through" reality, since it is "in itself' thoroughly without
substance.
A homologous inversion is to be accomplished by way of the
"illusion of the real," the postmodern denunciation of every (effect of)
the Real as an illusion: what Lacan opposes to i t i s the much more
"
subversive notion of the Real of the illusion itself Consider the
fashionable argument according to which Real Socialism failed because
it endeavoured to impose onto reality an illusory utopian vi sion of
humanity, not taking into account the way real people are structured
through the force of tradition: on the contrary, Real Socialism failed
because it was - in its Stalinist version - ALL TOO "REALISTIC,"
because it underestimated the REAL of the "illusions" which continued
to determine human acti vity ("bourgeois individualism," etc.), and
" I borrowed this notion from Alenka Zupancic.
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false. On the other hand, Adorno also rejects the idealist notion that all
objective content is posited/produced by the subject - such a stance
also fetishizes subjectivity itself into a given immediacy. This is tl1e
reason why Adorno opposes the Kantian a priori of the transcendental
categories which mediate our access to reality (and thus constitute what
we experience as reality): for Adorno, the Kantian transcendental a
priori does not simply absolutize the subjective mediation - it
obliterates its own h istorical mediation. The table of Kantian
transcendental categories is not a pre-historical "pure" a priori, but a
historically "mediated" conceptual network, i.e., a network embedded in
and engendered by a determinate historical constellation. How, then, are
we to think TOGETHER the rad ical mediation of all objectivity and the
materialist "priority of the objective"? The solution is that this "priority"
is the very result of mediation brought to its end, the kernel of resistance
that we cannot experience directly, but only in the guise of the absent
point of reference on account of which every mediation ultimately
FAILS.
It is a standard argument against Adorno's "negative dialectics" to
reproach i t for its inherent inconsistency. Adorno's answer to thi s is
quite appropriate: stated as a defi nitive doctrine, as a result, "negative
dialectics" effectively IS "inconsistent" - the way to properly grasp it is
to conceive of it as the description of a process of thought (in Lacanese,
to include the position of enunciation involved in it). "Negative
dialectics" designates a position which includes its own fail ure, i .e.
which produces the truth-effect through its very failure. To put it
succintly: one tries to grasp/conceive the object of thought; one fails,
missing it, and through these very failures the place of the targeted
object is encircled, its contours become discernible. So what one is
tempted to do here is to i ntroduce the Lacanian notion of the "barred"
subject and the object as real/impossible: the Adornian distinction
between immediately accessible "positive" objectivity and the
objectivity targeted in the "priority of the objective" i s the very Lacanian
distinction between (symbolically mediated) reality and the i mpossible
Real . Furthermore, does the Adornian notion that the subject retain s its
subjectivity only i nsofar it is "incompletely" subject, insofar as some
kernel of objectivity resists its grasp, not point towards the subject as
constitutively "barred"?
There are two ways out of the deadlock where Adorno's "negative
dialectics" ends, the Habermasian one and the Lacanian one. Habermas,
who correctly perceived Adomo's inconsistency, his self-destructive
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love, that Christ, this miserable man, I S the l i ving God. Agai n, to avoid a
fatal misunderstanding, the point is not that we should "renounce
transcendence" and fully accept the limited human person as our love
object, since "this is all there is": transcendence is not abolished, but
rendered ACCESSIBLE - it shines through in this very clumsy and
'"
miserable being that I love.
Christ is thus not "man PLUS God": what becomes visible in him is
simply the divine dimension i n man "as such." So, far from being the
Highest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards wh i ch all men
strive, "divinity" is rather a kind of obstacle, a "bone in the throat" - it
is something, that unfathomable X , on account of which man cannot ever
fully become MAN, self-identical. The point i s not that, due to the
limitation of his mortal sinful nature, man cannot ever become fully
divine, but that, due to the divine spark in him, man cannot ever fully
become MAN. Christ as man=God is the unique case of full humanity
(ecce homo, as Pontius Pilatus put it to the mob demanding the lynching
of Christ). For that reason, after his death, there is no place for any God
of the Beyond: all that remains is the Holy Spirit, the community of
believers onto which the unfathomable aura of Christ passes once it i s
deprived of i t s bodil y i ncarntion. To put i t in Freudian terms, once i t can
no longer rely on the Anlehnung onto Chri st ' s body, it has the same
sense as the drive which aims at the unconditional sati sfaction and which
always has to "lean on" a particular, contingent material object which
acts as the source of i ts satisfaction.
The key distinction to be maintained here can be exemplified by the
(apparent) opposite of religion, the intense sexual experience.
Eroticization relies on the in version-i nto-self of the movement directed
at an external goal: the movement itself becomes i ts own goal. (When,
instead of simply gently shaking the hand offered to me by the beloved
person , I hold to it and repeatedl y squeeze it, my activity will be
automatically experienced as - welcome or, perhaps, intrusively
unwelcome - eroticization: what I do is change the goal-oriented
activity into an end-in-itself.) Therein resides the di fference between the
goal and the aim of a drive: say, with regard to the oral drive, its goal
may be to eliminate hunger, but its aim is the satisfaction provided by
the activity of eating (sucking, swallowing) itself. One can imagine the
two satisfactions entirely separated: when, in a hospital, I am fed
intravenously, my hunger is satisfied , but not my oral drive; when, on
" I am borrowing this formula of love as the "accessible transcendence" from Alenka
Zupancic, to whom this whole passage is deeply indebted.
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notion, namely the "mercy" of the Event of Truth (or, for Lacan, of the
act) - we cannot actively decide to accomplish an act, the act surprises
the agent itself, and "mercy" designated precisely this unexpected
occurrence of an act.
Usually, it is Judaism which is conceived as the religion of the
superego (of man ' s subordination to the jealous, mighty and severe
God), in contrast to the Christian God of Mercy and Love. However, it is
precisely through NOT demanding from us the price for our sins,
through paying this price for us Himself, that the Christian God of
Mercy establishes itself as the supreme superego agency: "I paid the
highest price for your sins, and you are thus indebted to me FOREVER."
Is this God as the superego agency, whose very Mercy generates the
indelible guilt of believers, the ultimate horizon of Christianity? Is the
Christian agape another name for Mercy?
In order to properly locate Christianity with regard to this opposition,
one should recall Hegel ' s famous dictum apropos of the Sphynx: "The
enigmas of the Ancient Egyptians were also enigmas for the Egyptians
themselves." Along the same lines, the elusive, impenetrable Dieu
obscur also has to be impenetrable to Himself, He must have a dark side,
something that is in Him more than Himself. Perhaps this accounts for
the shift from Judaism to Christianity: Judaism remains at the level of
the enigma OF God, while Christianity involves the move to the enigma
IN God Himself. The Christian logos, the divine Revelation in and
through the Word, and the enigma IN God are strictly correlative, the
two aspects of one and the same gesture. It is precisely because God is
an enigma also IN AND FOR HIMSELF, because he has an
unfathomable Otherness in Himself, that Christ had to emerge to reveal
God not only to humanity, but TO GOD HIMSELF - it is only through
Christ that God fully actualized himself as God.
What is incomprehensible within the pre-Christian horizon is the full
shattering dimension of this impenetrability of God to Himself,
discernible in Christ' s "Father, why did you forsake me?'', this Christian
version of the Freudian "Father, can ' t you see that I am burning?". This
total abandonment by God is the point at which Christ becomes FULLY
human, the point at which the radical gap that separates God from man
is transposed into God himself Here, God the Father himself stumbles
upon the limit of his omnipotence. What this means is that the Christian
notion of the link between man and God thus inverts the standard pagan
notion according to which man approaches God through spiritual
purification, through casting off the "low" material/sensual aspects of his
Slavoj Zi2:ek
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being and thus elevating himself towards God. When /, a human being,
experience myself as cut a.ff.from God, at that very moment of the utmost
abjection, I am absolutely close to God, since I find myse(f in the
position of the abandoned Christ. There is no "direct" identification with
(or approach to) the divine majesty: I identify myself with God only
through identifying myself with the unique figure of God-the-Son
abandoned by God. In short, Christianity gives a specific twist to the
story of Job, the man-believer abandoned by God - it is Christ (God)
himself who has to occupy the place of Job. Man's identity with God is
asserted only in/through God ' s radical self-abandonment, when the inner
distance of God towards himself. The only way for God to create free
people (humans) is to open up the space for them in HIS OWN
lack/void/gap: man ' s existence is the living proof of God ' s self
Iimitation. Or, to put it in more speculative-theological terms: man ' s
infinite distance from God, the fact that h e i s a sinful, evil being, marked
by the Fall, unworthy of God, has to be reflected back into God himself,
as the Evil of God the Father Himself, i .e. as his abandonment of his
Son. Man ' s abandonment of God and God' s abandonment of his Son are
strictly correlative, the two aspects of one and the same gesture.
Thi s divine self-abandonment, this impenetrability of God to himself,
thus signals God' s fundamental impeifection. And it is only within this
horizon that the properly Christian Love can emerge, a Love beyond
Mercy. Love is always love for the Other insofar as he is lacking - we
love the Other BECAUSE of his limitation, helplessness, ordinariness
even. In contrast to the pagan celebration of the Divine (or human)
Perfection, the ultimate secret of the Christian love is perhaps that it is
the loving attachment to the Other's imperfection. And THIS Christian
legacy, often obfuscated, is today more precious than ever.
JUSTIN CLEMENS
1.
Prefatory Remarks
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and their relation to the real; hence, even the recent attempted
displacement of the opposition "Being/ Appearance" by way of an
attention to "simulacra" remains thoroughly ontological. Given that an
ontology must begin by questioning appearances, its techniques and
idiolects will always require that it break with the "commonplace," even
if it then proceeds towards, or concludes with , a meta-ontol ogical
affirmation of the current, tri vial fictions of just such a fiction. Within
philosophy itself, the di spute regarding Being primarily turns on the
question of an appropriate method : that is, should one go the way of
language, literature, law, logic, mathematics, intuition, experience, or
something else? It is primaril y by recourse to mathematics - more
precisely, post-Cantorian set-theory - that Badiou aims to ground his
claim that there i s a historically inv ariant definition of philosophy that
can nevertheless confront the multiple eruption of those unprecedented,
aleatory worldly events upon which it is philosophy's task to reflect.
Given the sophistication and novelty of his thought and its current
obscurity in the Anglophone world - not to mention the available space
- my paper will restrict itself to presenting the more pronounced and
insistent motifs of Badiou ' s work. My presentation will thus emphasize
the explicitly topological slant of his mathematical ontology, which
chiefly adumbrates itself through such categories as: situation, state, site,
place, point, inhabitant, event, void, and so on.5
2. Pernicious Sophistries
But I will begin with Badiou ' s challenges to the thinkers that he terms
"contemporary sophists," among whom he includes - perhaps
surprisingly - such apparently disparate writers as Nietzsche,
Wittgenstein, Foucau lt, Derrida, and Lyotard (although Lacan, despite
declaring himself to be an "anti-philosopher," is notably exempted from
thi s charge) .6
5 This necessary restriction is already too simple. For, as Badiou points out, since the
seventeenth century it has not been possible to situate a mathematical concept simply
on one side of the opposition arithmetic/geometry, Le Nombre et /es nombre (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1 990), p. 2 1 .
6 However, this i s also too simple: the evidently related categories of the "sophist"
and "anti-philosopher" are not quite the same for Badiou, although the differences
between them are complicated and remain somewhat obscure. It also seems that the
objects of Badiou's polemics can shift categories as his own work changes. As Sam
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Indeed, it is this th ird point that will prove crucial for Badiou: on his
account, philosophy i s concerned with Truth (capitalized, singular): it
produces no truths (small t, plural) of its own. For Badiou, there are only
four discourses capable of such a production; they are poetry, love,
mathematics, and politics, and are, and will eternally remain,
philosophy 's sole conditions Each of these generic conditions is an
exercise of thought, but they think in heterogeneous ways: love is the
foundation of sexual difference and the regime of the passions; poetry
the creativeness of language; politics involves the collective,
"revolutionary" transformations of social situations; and mathematics i s
the place o f the very inscription o f Being itself. Philosophy's task is:
to envisage love only according to the truth that weaves itself on
the Two of sexuation and only on the Two, but without the
tension of pleasure-unpleasure that is sustained by the object of
love. To envisage politics as a truth of the i nfinity of collective
situations, as treating in truth of this infinite, but without the
enthusiasm and sublimity of these situations themselves. To
envisage mathematics as the truth of being-multiple i n and of the
letter, the power of literalisation, but without the intellectual
beatitude of the resolved problem. Finally, to envisage the poem
as the truth of the sensible presence deployed in rhythm and
image, but without the corporeal captation by this rhythm and
image. 1 2
Philosophy requires all and only these four i n order that i t itself can take
place [avoir lieu] : its own job is to deploy the purely logical, operational,
void category of Truth in order to gather, shelter, and verify that the
contemporaneous truths engendered by its four conditions are all
"compossible in time." 1 3 Philosophy does this by constructing a "place"
which at once enables it to pronounce on Being insofar as i ts conditions
metaphysique au Dieu du poeme," Court Traite D 'Ontologie Transitoire (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1998), p. 20.
12 Conditions, p. 1 02 .
I J Fink glosses this as ''true together, simultaneously true, all true i n the same
historical era," p. 1 1 . Hence, as he proceeds to point out, "As such, philosophy is one
discourse among others, not the final or meta-discourse which provides the Truth
about the various truths," pp. 1 1 - 1 2 . Or, as Badiou puts it, "Elle [philosophy]
configure les procedures generiques, par un accueil, un abri, edifie au regard de leur
simultaneite disparate," Conditions, p. 1 8 .
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permit, and ensures, b y way o f the Truth, that none o f the conditions'
truths are themselves i llici tly elevated to the place of Truth itself. Truth,
for Badiou, thus at once "signifies a plural state of things (there are
heterogeneous truths)" and "the unity of thought." 14 And if philosophy's
plural conditions are i ndeed genuine experiments and experiences of
thought, they do not themselves think in categories, concepts, or Ideas,
for this is the space of philosophy alone. 15 For Badiou, philosophy has
no object; it is simply a particular torsion of an active thought - an act
of philosophy - which i nvolves the grasping of new possibilities of
existence in the course of their production. 16
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But this is why B adiou ' s philosophy proclaims itself Platonic, at least
in form. 1 7 Badiou will further hold, against Heidegger and the neo
Heideggereans, that Plato does not mark the origi nary forgetful ness or
repression of Being. On the contrary, it is only with Plato that the
question of Being - which is not even, strictly speaking, a question achieves the dignity of the ldea . 1 8 Hence one of Badiou 's fundamental
(and memorable) i njunctions to contemporary philosophy is to "forget
the forgetting of forgettin g ! " 1 9 Badiou proposes that the task of
philosophy today is not central ly or primaril y to speak of Being; rather, it
must currently circulate between ontology, modern theories of the
subject (i.e. psychoanal ysis), and its own history, without ever
congealing around any one of these poles.20 Thi s third point is absolutely
crucial, insofar as it communicates with one of the non-mathematical
axioms that founds Badiou 's own project: philosophy's place has been
destinally fixed fro m i ts foundations, ever since Plato's "speculative
parricide" of Parmenides . 2' It is also necessary to mention here that
B adiou believes - as did Althusser, whom he often cites on this point
that the effects of philosophy always remain strictly intra
philosophical.
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But if Badiou 's thou ght is Platonic in form, in content, of course, things
are quite different.22 Because there is something else that B adiou must
take from the great sophists of the twentieth century: the recognition of
the irreducible multiplicity of Being, and the irremediable default, or
failure of the One. 2) The problem is this : how is i t possible to think
multiplicity when metaphysics has always held that, in Leibniz's phrase,
"what is not one being is not a being"? The problem, apparently, of the
millenia. Obviously, if any number of contemporary wri ters might be
cited in this context, the qualitative multiplicities of Bergson and his
inheritors, notably Deleuze, would certainly be amongst the most
prominent. And for almost all these thinkers, multiplicity - correctly
understood - is inaccessible to the ill-suited tools of strict logical or
mathematical analysis. I ndeed, Bergson's work always and everywhere
says nothing else: "What is duration within us? A qualitative
multiplicity, with no likeness to number; an organic evolution which is
yet not an increasing quantity; a pure heterogeneity within which there
are no distinct qualities. In a word, the moments of inner duration are not
external to one another."24 Furthermore, this antagonistic rel ation
between "mathematics" and "intuition" with regards to the problem of
the multiple will continue to govern the hosti lity between B adiou and
Deleuze: "our epistolary controversy of 1 992- 1 994 had the notion of
'multiplicity' as its principal referent. He argued that I confounded
'multiple' and 'number,' whereas I held that it was inconsistent to
maintain, in Stoic fashion, a virtual Totality, or what Deleuze called the
'chaosmos. ' With sets there is no universal set, neither One nor All."25
I n other words, with respect to multiplicity, Badiou could not
disagree with Deleuze more. Indeed, much of his own originality
22 Cf. Man (feste pour la philosophie, p. 70.
2J
"Ce qu'un philosophe moderne retient de la grande sophistique est le point suivant:
l'etre est essentiallement multiple," Manifeste pour la philosophie, p. 85.
24 H. Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the immediate Dara of
Consciousness (Kila: Kessinger, n.d.), p. 226.
25 A . Badiou, Deleuze: "La clameur de l 'Etre ", (Paris: Hachette, 1997), p. 1 1 . Cf.
also pp. 6 9 70, and Badiou, "Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque,"
and Deleuze and Guattari ' s own response in Qu 'est-ce que la philosophie?, pp. 1 431 44. On the one hand, this dispute seems irreducible (matheme vs. animal, the
destitution of the One vs. its transfiguration, ex teriority vs. intensity, etc.); on the
other hand, both positions teeter on the brink of inverting into their other. . .l will
briefly suggest below how Badiou's position on the subject i s symptomatical ly shaky
on precisely the question of the living animal ("the human") that provides its
privileged support ....
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Which means that the differences between "logic" and "mathematics" are
themselves critical to an understanding of Badiou 's work: "a philosophy is today
largely decided by the position that it takes on the relation to the two other summits of
the triangle, mathematics and logic," Court Traite D 'Onrologie Transiroire (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1 998), p. 1 20. As Badiou points out, the tendency of language
phi losophy (whether of a Wittgenstinian or Heideggerian type) is to reduce the
di fferences between the two. Badiou 's position in this regard has no doubt been
influenced by Lacan's i ncessant invocation/production of topological figures and
mathemes i n his re-elaboration of psychoanalysis, if the relative status the two
thinkers accord to mathematical formalisation is ultimately very di fferent. On the
fraught question of Lacan 's relation to mathematics, see, for instance, J-A Miller, "To
Interpret the Cause: From Freud to Lacan," in Ne wslarrer of the Freudian Field, 3, 1 2 , ( 1 989), B . Fink, Th e Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance
(Princeton: Pri nceton Un iversity Press, 1 995), D. Macey, Lacan in Contexts (London:
Verso, 1 988), and J. Dor, "The Epistemological Status of Lacan' s Mathematical
Paradigms," in D. Pettigrew and F. Raffoul (eds.), Disseminating Lacan (Albany:
State University of New York, 1 996). Badiou himself dedicates an essay, "Sujet et
infini," to a number of apparent contradictions in Lacan's "mathematics," cf.
Conditions, pp. 274-305. See also his "Complementary note on a contemporary use of
Frege" (a discussion of J-A M iller's work), in Le Nombre er /es nombres, pp. 36-44
(translated as "On a Contemporary Usage of Frege", UMBR(a) 2000, pp. 107- 1 1 5 ).
27
L 'etre er l 'evenemenr, p. 14 .
28
L 'erre et l 'evenement, p. 1 2.
29
L 'etre et l 'evenement, p. 536.
30 Topos: Ou logiques de l 'onto-logique: Une introduction pour philosophes. Tome
1 . , course-reader, p. 1 53 . And also: "The categorial concept of the universe situates
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But why mathematics at all, and, given that, why this mathematics in
particular? According to Badiou, the effectivity of mathematics as it has
been bequeathed to philosophy by Plato has historically received three
very different determinations: I ) Mathematics is conceived as the
primary pedagogical mode, and a necessary condition for thinking
according to first principles; Badiou terms this "the ontological mode of
the relation of philosophy to mathematics."3 1 2) Mathematics is
considered as a regional discipline of knowledge in general, and inserted
into a hierarchy or taxonomy of sciences which philosophy alone can
oversee. This determination i s epistemological. 3) Mathematics is
excluded from philosophical knowledge altogether: this is a critical
treatment of the relation. 32
As Badiou points out, this third mode is the Romantic philosophical
gesture par excellence, and remains dominant today. Even the apparent
enthusiasm of analytic philosophy and various positivisms for the hard
itself beyond the opposition between classical and non-classical logic. It exhibits a
consistency that leaves this opposition undecided. The decision on this point makes
us enter into the plurality of universes, into the logical spaces that its generality
subsumes," p. 1 28 . I would suggest that the mathematics of set-theory provides the
basis for Badiou 's ontology, whereas he treats category-theory as providing a logic for
subjectivity.
3 1 Conditions, p. 1 57.
32 Conditions, p. 1 58. Hegel 's hostility to mathematics i s well-known. As he puts i t in
the "Preface" to the Phenomenology, "In mathematical cognition, insight is an
activity external to the thing; it follows that the true thing is altered by it. The means
employed, construction and proof, no doubt contain true propositions, but it must
none the less be said that the content is false ...The evident character of this defective
cognition of which mathematics is proud, and on which it plumes itself before
philosophy, rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff,
and is therefore of a kind that philosophy must spurn," Phenomenology of Spirit,
trans. A.V. Miller, analysis and foreword. J.N. Findlay (Oxford: Ox ford U niversity
Press, 1 977), sections 43 & 45, p. 25 (sections 42-48 of the Preface are relevant in
this context). Paradoxically enough, the Hegelian exclusion of mathematics from
philosophy is effected by way of an identification or assimilation, cf. Conditions, pp.
1 7 1 - 1 75 . And see also Badiou' s absolutely stunning reading of Hegel in L 'etre et
l 'evenement, pp. 1 8 1 - 1 90 (reprinted in UMBR(a), pp. 27-35), which hinges on
Hegel 's discussion of quantitative and qualitative infinity in the Logic. See Hegel 's
Science of Logic, trans. AV. Miller (Atlantic Highlannds: Humanities Press
International, 1 969), esp. chapter 2, "Determinate Being," pp. 109- 1 56. As Badiou
comments: " the nominal equivalence that [Hegel] proposes between the pure
presence of the supersession in the void (good qualitative infini ty) and the qualitative
concept of quantity (good quantitative infinity) is a trick of the eye ... " ("Hegel" in
UMBR(a), p. 34).
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36 F. Hausdorff, Set Theory, trans. J.R. Aumann et al. (New York: Chelsea
Publishing, n.d.), p. 1 1 .
37 By contrast, a thinker such as Levinas - who proselytizes for the infinite as the
non-logical overflowing of all limits exemplified in the ethical experience that is the
welcome of the face - explicitly considers the idea of infinity to be essentially
theological. See E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1 969).
38 That is, "time" considered as the product of established knowledges. In his
monograph on Deleuze, Badiou will even suggest that time is "the being-not-there of
the concept," Deleuze, p. 96.
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46
Cf. P.J. Cohen, Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (New York: W.A.
Benjamin, 1 966).
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ordinal numbers are sets well-ordered by the epsilon relation. In the finite, ordinals
and cardinals coincide, but diverge in the realm of the infinite. The first infinite
ordinal is represented as co. But it is also a cardinal, because every smaller ordinal is,
by definition, not equipollent to it. As a cardinal it is called Aleph-zero. However
(co+ ! ) is equipollent to co itself, and so they share the same cardinal number (as does
every other ordinal produced arithmetically from co). Now Cantor's Theorem shows
that no set is equipollent to the number of its subsets, and so the power set of co has
larger cardinality than Alep h-zero. However, it is not necessarily a larger cardinal,
because we are not entitled to say that every set corresponds to some cardinal unless
the Axiom of Choice is at hand (which ensures cardinal comparabi lity). The
continuum hypothesis will in fact propose that the power set of aleph-zero is equal to
aleph-one (the generalised version will put the power set of aleph-n as equal to aleph
n+ I ). Cohen has proven that the continuum hypothesis and the Axiom of Choice are
independent of ZF.
57 Badiou then re-poses his terms: the "one" is the "nonexistent" result of structure;
"unicity" a predicate of the multiple thereby counted; "putting-in-one" is a (second)
counting of the initial count, i.e. its representation.
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Derrida, both subject and object are dissolved and reinstalled in the play
of d(fferance; for Badiou, the Platonic "errancy of being" can be
refigured by ex amining how the floating difference in cardinality is
decided between an infinite set and its subsets, all of which are woven
from the unlocalisable void of the empty set; hence the subject can still
be saved, if one gives up the object. But these already very complex
antagonisms ought not to hide their only apparently minor empirical
complicities: a fondness for Mallarme; a belief that philosophy founds
itself on the attempted mastery of l i mits (even if they evaluate th is
mastery differentl y); a rejection of hermeneutics; an affirmation of the
priority of trans-empirical l iteralisations as the auto-foundation of Being
(whether this is considered mathematically or poetically); an emphasis
on irreducible multiplicity, and so on.
This d!fferend returns us ineluctably to the problem posed by
Badiou 's account of generic subjectivity. As stated above, the subject is
not simply a new version of a human individual: on the contrary, Badiou
will take a great deal of care to expl ai n, say, that the "subjects of the art
genre" are works of art themselves (and not the human animals who
supposedly create them). There is nothing psychological about Badiou ' s
subject and, i n this sense, h i s philosophy is one of the most ex treme of
all anti-humanisms. On the other hand - as always - techno can
become retro in a single beat. For Badiou is then left with such
apparently fatuous, even idiotic problems as: can animals create works of
art (a la monkeys on a keyboard)? Engage in science (other than as
experimental subjects)? Fall in love (didn't the Greeks believe in cross
species Jove)? Do politics (termites and seals)? Badiou's answer is a
definite No! - if human beings are not in and of themselves subjects,
only a human animal is capable of being iced
transfixed and
transfigured - by those events that trigger the very truth-procedures
which subjects play their part in constituting.68 As far as I am concerned,
this is presently the most underworked aspect of Badiou's project, and it
reintroduces so many of the problems that his work is directed against:
what, for instance, does it mean for an "animal of the human species" to
be the only-animal-with-the-potenti al-for-truth?69 On Badiou's account,
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could a "human animal" live its entire "l ife" withou t ever becoming a
subject - for example, by solely and happily pursuing its own self
interest in the realms of opinion ?70 Unlike many other philosophers, the
acquisition of human language for Badiou is not a suffi cient condition
for or evidence of subjectivity; indeed, Badiou ' s hostility towards the
"linguistic turn" requires that he break with every such supposition
(although the role of nomination of course remains i ntegral to the event
truth nexus). But if "death" has nothing to do with truth for Badiou, he is
still left with the problem of "life" . . . about which he necessarily has very
little to say, for his philosophy then runs the risk of i nverting into its
primary adversary - vitalism.
But this difficulty also communicates with another problem for
Badiou: that of accounting for what I will summarily designate as the
d!fference of.forces. Whereas thinkers as different as Deleuze and Harold
Bloom have no difficulty in producing theories that describe, in their
own ways, the processes of domination, captivation, sovereignty, Badiou
is compelled to ignore or reduce su ch processes (th is is li nked with his
anathema towards Nietzsche). And Badiou typically does so in two
ways: 1 ) by working at such a level of abstraction that what precisely
becomes obscured are the specifici ties of events, sites, situations, as if
1 999), which turns on precisely this question (the apparent spelling mistake in the
title is deliberate). Giorgio Agamben has not hesitated to mark this point as well,
notably in an essay dedicated to Gilles Deleuze, the greatest modern philosophical
vitalist: "Alain Badiou, who is certainly one of the most interesting philosophers of
the generation immediately following Foucault and Deleuze, still conceives of the
subject on the basis of a contingent encounter with truth, leaving aside the living
being as 'the animal of the human species,' as a mere support for this encounter,"
Potentialities, p. 22 1 . And see also Agamben 's remarks in The Coming Community,
on the twentieth-century prediliction for set-theory as deriving directly from the
grammatical specificity of the proper name: "While the network of concepts
continually introduces synonymous relations, the idea is that which intervenes every
time to shatter the pretense of absoluteness in these relations, showing their
inconsistency. Whatever does not therefore mean only (in the words of Alain Badiou)
'subtracted from the authority of language, without any possible denomination,
indiscernible'; it means more exactly that which, holding itself in simple homonymy,
in pure being-called, is precisely and only for this reason unnameable: the being-in
language of the non-linguistic," p. 76. Finally - and perhaps most devastatingly for
Badiou's project - Agamben argues in Homo Sacer that Badiou's "event" (the very
foundations of Badiou's anti-statist project) is in fact the originary operation of the
State itself!
70 After all, "Rapporte a sa simple nature, !'animal humain doit etre loge a la meme
enseigne que ses compagnons biologiques," L 'ethique, p. x x .
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what mattered for philosophy was merely that events take place
(Hallward, for instance, speaks of Badiou' s '"extraordinarily vagu e'
notion of a situation"71); 2) the events that Badiou recognises are actually
uncontroversial: the French Revolution , Mal larme, the love of Abelard
and Heloise, etc.72 But, then, how could an essentially quantitative
philosophy such as Badiou 's speak compel lingly of qualitative
difference? After al l , a "relation" for Badiou is only a pure multiple with
a name-number. For Badiou, an event must be infinitely "separated" and
"weak" (annulled, cancelled, foreclosed, undecidable), and a subject
truth essentially incomparable to others, beyond relation (i.e., to which
no name-number can presently be assigned). Yet subjects, it seems, can
attempt to be faithful to two different events simu ltaneously. Badiou's
use of the verb "to force" - playing on a variety of technical
significations of the term - is not enough to resolve the difficulty. For
surely an integral aspect of the singularity of truths depends on their
relative influence within a sequence and to the cross-overs they might
make with other, previously unrelated sequences
the ur-event of
Shakespeare, as Bloom says, makes possible every subsequent writer in
English; likewise, for Badiou, Rousseau establishes the modern concept
of politics. Is there, in other words, a covert hierarchy of events, subjects
and truths, linked to their forcefulness? B adiou, for i nstance, will remark
in passing that there are "big" and "little" events, but it would be absurd
to suggest that he simply translates force into number.
Which makes one wonder: if Badiou 's work is indeed anti
constructivist, that is, it attempts to unfound the state as the ultimate
guarantor of meaning, it also recognises that every truth must come into
conflict with the situation and the state at some point, and it is precisely
the evidence of such confl ict that enables the possible activity of a truth
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might well agree with Badiou that those named take on the destiny of
thought in the Romantic era given philosophy's own suturing to its
poetic condition, but surely there are others, of at least equal interest i n
this regard: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Browning, Wallace Stevens,
Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, etc. Perhaps this is a moment
when philosophy's i n-discrimination of its others, and its own socio
historical localisation and determinations of personal taste are most
evident. For Badiou to denominate his selection a "decision" of the
ontology is, in any case, completely unsatisfactory. Finally, as David
Odell has also pointed out, the infinities of set-theory are, rigorously
considered, "an epistemological problem masquerading as an ontological
one," and that "irony is irreducible in the infinite."74 And is not irony the
Romantic trope par excellence . ?
But let me now conclude this already truncated account in the terms
of the topological theme with which I began: Badiou delineates for
phi losophy a precarious place that, confronting a situation and a state of
Being, fi nds itself al the edge of the unlocalisable "black-grey" void and
- affronted by the undecidability of events and the disparity of their
sites - faithfully attempts to ensure their heterogeneous unity in
thought. For Badiou, it is finally only by way of such a painstaking
"work of fidelity" to events that philosophy can ' t go on, must go on, will
go on ....
.
74
Personal correspondence.
I.
I n his Deleuze. The Clamor of Being, Alain B adiou describes the virtual
as the principal name of Being in Deleuze and claims that his thinking
amounts to a Platonism of the virtual. Badiou argues that in Deleuze the
virtual is presented as 'the ground of the actual' , and moreover, that that
it is its own ground as the 'being of virtual ities' . B adiou likes to speak of
the virtual as what lies 'beneath' as in ' "beneath" the simulacra of the
world' . 2 This explains why he has such problems with any talk in
1 I am grateful to Alberto Toscano for reading an earlier version of this essay and
indicating the areas in need of further clarification. Any difficulties that remain are
not simply a reflection of a personal penc hant for obfuscation on my part but have, in
my view, a more objective basis.
2 A. Badiou, Deleuze. La clameur de l 'Etre (Paris: Hachette, 1 997), p. 70; Deleuze.
The Clamor of Being, trans. L. Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000), p. 46 (abbreviated to CB followed by page reference first to the French edition,
then the English translation).
231
Deleuze of the virtual in terms of an image. Is not the ' image' the status
of the actual only? How can the virtual, conceived by Badiou as the
'power proper to the One ' , be a simulacrum? No doubt, he says, ' the
virtual can give rise to images but it is difficult to determine how an
image can be given of it or how it can itself be an image' (CB p . 78; p.
52). There is a Berkeleyean dimension to Badiou ' s point which serves to
disclose the somewhat peculiar nature of his question. In his Principles
of Human Knowledge Berkeley poses a problem with regard to soul or
spirit in terms that bear a striking simi larity to the way Badiou has posed
the problem of the virtual qua image. If spirit is One, that is, simple and
undivided, and if it is the primary 'active' being, how can an idea or
image be formed of it since i nert ideas/images cannot represent to us that
which acts?' The i ncorporeal and immateri al substance cannot be
represented, cannot itself be an idea or image, since it is their causal
ground.
Badiou is adamant that Deleuze is a classical thinker whose project is
primarily and essentially an ontological one. In Deleuze the task is to
think the real of the One: 'Deleuze's fundamental problem is most
certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed
concept of the One' (p. 20 ; p. 1 1 ) . This means that the multiple is to be
concei ved 'integrally' and in terms of the 'production of simulacra ' .
Badiou is aware that notions o f the ground [fondement] and of
foundation have been taken to task in contemporary thought and that
Deleuze's work can be construed as being at the forefront of these
developments - he does, after all, speak in Difference and Repetition of
a 'universal un-grounding' [/ 'effondement universe!] . ' Nevertheless
B adiou persists with his reading, establishing the notion of ground i n
Platonist terms by speaking of it a s the 'eternal share' o f beings (CB pp.
68-9; p . 45). It i s because Deleuze thinks the virtual in terms of this
eternal share that his thinking demands ' that Being be rigorously
determined as One' (ibid.). 'Ground', therefore, is being identified not
with the (Kantian) noumenon but with the Platonist notion of
participation. Deleuze, as we shall see, opens chapter eleven of his 1 968
book on Spinoza by addressing this very issue of participation (see also
DR p. 87; p. 62).
B adiou opposes Deleuze on account of the latter's deployment of the
two terms, the virtual and the actual, in order to think the question of
3 G. Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowlalxe (London: Fontana, 1 962), p. 77.
4 G. Deleuze, Difference et RepNition (Paris: PUF, 1 968) , p. 92 (henceforth DR);
Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Pallon (London: Athlone Press, 1 994), p. 67.
232
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
Being.' He wishes to discredit the appeal to the virtual and desires that
we speak instead of 'the univocity of the actual as a pure multiple' (my
emphasis) (CB p. 78; p. 52). The multiple of multiples has to be
affirmed, it cannot be posited in terms of the power of a One. The One,
and along with it Life, has to be sacrificed. The two 'classicisms', says
B adiou, are irreconciliable.
Badiou has, without doubt, raised a nu mber of important questions
concerning Deleuze' s project. To deal satisfactorily with the issues they
raise, however, I believe we need more preci sion. What kind of
Platonism of the virtual? Is Deleuze a thinker of the One or is he not
rather a thinker of virtual multiplicity that has gone beyond the
opposition of the one and the many? Badiou knows thi s, of course, but
persists in reading Deleuze as a thinker of the one and not the multiple. I
will argue that Deleuze' s thinking of the virtual does have a link with an
important (neo-) Platonist source and that it is legitimate to describe him
as a thi nker of the One. However, the reading I offer here of
Bergsonism's renewed thinking of the One produces a quite different
image of Deleuze' s thought. Badiou ' s curious affirmation of the
univocity of the actual (as pure multiple) shows that he has inadequately
understood the role of the virtual in Deleuze and discloses a fu ndamental
incoherence in his own thinking.
II.
Deleuze may be a classical thinker i n key respects but he also thinks the
real ity of the virtual in relation to some peculiarly modern problems.
However, while the notion of the virtual is being deployed by Deleuze to
elucidate a specifically modern conception of evolution, its character as
a problematic is of ancient descent. When we think this virtual i n terms
of the question of the One - as the One that is peculiar to a virtual
multipl icity - we encou nter all kinds of philosophical conundrums. A s
Hegel notes in h i s treatment o f the O n e in Plotinus - and it i s a
Plotinian reference we need in order to determine the nature of both
Bergson and Deleuze's encounter with Platonism - the principal
5 Although the matter cannot be treated here, l would dissent from Badiou's claim
that as an essentially ontological thinker Deleuze i s a thinker of the question of Being
where this questions belongs to Heidegger. It is not clear to me that there i s a question
of Being which needs to be considered for Deleuze, where this question also entails a
history of Being, a sending of Being, and a destiny of Being.
233
234
Pli 1 1 (2001 )
235
not surprising given the central preoccupations of his thinking (time, free
will, matter, creati vity, etc.). " In his Gi fford lectures of 1 9 1 4 on
'Personality' Bergson goes so far as to claim that modern metaphysics
(Leibniz, Spinoza) is a repetition of Plotinus but in a weaker form (M p .
I 058 ; see also remarks Bergson makes o n Plotinus and moderns like
Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer in a lecture course of 1 907 on
'Theories of the Wil l ' , M pp. 7 1 6-7). The starting-point of Plotinus'
philosophy, which is also its essence for Bergson, i s the attempt to
rediscover a unity that has become lost in time. 'The philosophy of
Plotinus', he writes, 'may be taken as the very type of the Metaphysics
which we are eventually Jed to when we look upon internal time as
pulverised into separate moments, and yet believe in the reality and the
unity of the Person' (M p. 1 056). I n other words, we are two modes of
existence, a de jure one i n which we exist outside time, and a de facto
one in which we evolve 'in' time. Considered in de jure terms we are
Ideas (eternal essences), 'pure contemplation', in contrast to the life of
the sensible world in which praxis takes place. But if the de facto
existence is a diminution or degradation of the eternal then to act or to
desire is to have need of something and thus, consequently, to be
incomplete. Evolving in time 'is to add unceasingly to what i s ' .
However, because the one mode o f existence is a distension o r dilution
of the other, in which an original unity has broken up into a multiplicity,
our actual exi stence can be l i ttle more than that of a 'dispersed
Philosophical Quarterly J O: 4 ( 1 970), pp. 6 1 1 -42, p. 63 1 . Bergson comments on the
three hypostases in the third of his Gi fford lectures of 1 9 1 4 (Melanges (Paris: PUF,
1 972) pp. I 056-60; hereafter cited as M), and a careful reading of what he has to say
therein would show, I believe, that the comparison of the 'elan ' with the third
hypostasis would have to be complicated. This is because in Bergson ' s metaphysics
unity is an an-original virtual multiplicity that can only proceed in terms of a
disseminating or d ispersed multiplicity, there can be no return to unity which is 'unity
only' . This is why Deleuze always insists that the whole is never given and that we
should be glad of this fact. In this essay I am arguing that there are, in fact, two
different figurations of the whole in Bergson and Deleuze, and while the elan is given
as a simple totality the whole of evolution as a creative process can never be given.
Deleuze's 'gladness' is over the second whole. On how it i s possible to have a unity
of multiplicity, and a One and a whole that would be not the principle but the effect of
the multiplicity, see Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans R. Howard (London: Athlone
Press, 2000), p. 1 63.
1 5 Bergson mentions one of the courses of lectures he gave on Plotinus given at the
College de France in 1 897-8 in Creative Evolution where he says he tried to
demonstrate the resemblance between Leibniz's monads and Plotinus' Intelligibles.
Deleuze also makes a link between Plotinus and Leibniz in his text The Fold.
236
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
Plato, Timaeus, trans. D. Lee (Middlesex : Penguin, 1 977), sections 7, 8, & 1 8 , pp.
5 1 -2, pp. 55-6, pp. 69-70.
1
7 On this see P. Henry, "The Place of Plotinus in the History of Thought", in The
Enneads (Middlesex: Penguin, 1 99 1 ), p. Iii: "Plotinus identifies as a matter of course
the Good of the Republic and the absolute One of the first hypothesis of the
Parmenides. This identification which, in the words of Plato, situ ates the Good
'beyond being' and which denies to the One all multiplicity - be it only virtual and
logical, a multiplicity of names, attributes, forms, or aspects - constitutes the basis
of the 'negative theology' which, in Plotinus and in his disciples, plays so great a part
in the doctrine of God and of the mystical experience".
18
Time and Free Will unfolds a distinction between a "true self' and a "superficial
self' that may initially strike one as either Plotinian or Kantian; but it is important to
grasp that for Bergson the "true self' does not reside outside time but can only
237
that he holds the opposite to be the case (there is no fall into time and
time is not an imitation of eternity) and that, while it is important to give
fu ll weight to certain aspects of Ploti nus' doctrine it also has to be
in verted (ibid.). Badiou does not comment on Bergson ' s attempted
in version of Plotinus, and there is no reason why he should other than
perhaps for the purposes of lending greater precision to his claim that
Bergsonism ultimately amounts to a Platonism of the virtual.
Let us now turn to Deleuze on Plotinus. Important references to
Plotinus can be found in D(fference and Repetition and What is
Philosophy ? (in both it is the notion of 'contemplation ' that is put i nto
effect). The most relevant treatment for our purposes is to be found i n
"
the 1 968 book o n Spinoza and expressionism. I n this work Deleuze
also speaks of Aquinas as thinker of eminence and in the context of a
discussion of how the method of analogy seeks to avoid
anthropomorphism. In Aquinas the qualities that are attributed to God do
not imply a community of form between divine substance and fi nite
creatures but only an analogy, 'a "congruence" of proportion or
proportionality' (SEP p. 46). Deleuze's contention is that Spinozism
effects an inversion of the problem:
Whenever we proceed by analogy we borrow from creatures
certain characteristics in order to attribute them to God either
equivocally or eminently. Thus God has Will, Understanding,
Goodness, Wisdom, and so on, but has them equivocally or
eminently. Analogy cannot do without equivocation or eminence,
and hence contains a subtle anthropomorphism, just as dangerous
as the na"ive variety (ibid.).
For Deleuze the significance of Spinoza's philosophy resides in its
struggle against the equi vocal, the eminent, and the analogical. He
belongs to the 'great tradition of univocity ' . This is the thesis that ' being
is predicated in the same sense of everything that is, whether infinite or
fi nite, albeit not i n the same "modality " ' (p. 63). This means that,
238
Pli 1 1
(200 1 )
Bergson often "distorts" [detoume], as he puts it, the terms of Spinoza's famous
distinction. See for example 0 p. 1 024; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion,
trans. R. A. Audra & C. Brereton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1 977), p. 58 (hereafter cited as TSMR). It is interesting to note that although Bergson
regularly gave lectures on the history of philosophy he accorded special treatment to
Spinoza by always devoting a separate lecture course to him. For insight into the
critical character of his rapport with Spinoza see 0 pp. 788-95; Creative Evolution,
trans. A. Mitchell (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1 983), pp. 347-56
(hereafter cited as CE). Both Leibniz and Spinoza are said to present a
"systematization of the new physics, constructed on the model of the ancient
metaphysics"; and in both, but especially in Spinoza, there are "flashes of intuition"
that break through the system.
239
As Karl Jaspers notes, the Plotinian One cannot, strictly speaking, be thought and is
not the 'subject' of thinking. It is what 'gives' thinking without giving anything of
itself. This One is neither the number one nor the one contrasted with the other, 'for
any attempt to think the One produces duality and multiplicity', Jaspers,
Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Lao-Tzu, Nagarjuna, ed. H. Arendt,
trans. R. Mannheim (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1 966), p. 34.
22
We should note that recent scholarship no longer favours using the term
'emanation' to describe Plotinus' doctrine on account of its Stoic connotations;
rather, the creative process is now seen in terms of 'illumination' or 'irradiation ' . See
J. Dillon, Introduction to The Enneads, Penguin edition, p. xci.
2 3 For a more recent upholding of this reading of Plotinus see Bussanich l 996, p. 60,
where he makes it clear that while there is nothing discrete about the character of the
One in Plotinus the move to univocity is not made: 'the One's properties are [not]
univocally predictable of its products: the One' s l ife is not life in the same sense or
the same degree as Intellect's'. But he also notes that the One's products cannot then
simply be said to be equivocal either. As ever, Plotinus presents his readers with an
real interpretive dilemma.
240
Pli 1 1 (2001 )
24 1
ii is
because it is the Open, and because its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise to
something new, in short, to endure' (CB p. 75; p. 49, quoting from Deleuze, Cinema
1 , 1 983, p. 20; 1 986, p. 9). Clearly, this whole that is subject lo, and the subject of,
constant change, can never be given; but this is a different virtual whole from the
whole of the simple vi1tual. The two conceptions of the whole are both articulated by
Bergson and both are at work in Bergson's Creative Evolution (see 1 983, pp. 53-5, p.
87 & p. 257 for a presentation of the firsl whole, and CE pp. I 0-1 1 for a presentation
of the second whole; the two meel in the discussion that takes place on pp. 86-7).
242
Pli
1 1 (200 1 )
i t s actual parts, which are external t o each other. But the assembling or
reassembling of a whole is never the issue for Deleuze: the actual does
not come to resemble the virtual because actualization does not proceed
by rules of resemblance or limitation. So, while it may indeed be odd for
Deleuze to describe the virtual as an image, it is equally strange to
describe the actual i n terms of a projected or produced image of the
virtual, since thi s is preci sely how the relation between the real and the
possible is to be defined, and as a way of highlighting the creative
character of the lines of differentiation that characterize an actualization:
'For, in order to be actualized, the virtual cannot proceed by elimination
or limitation, but must create its own l ines of actualization in positive
acts . . . For while the real is in the image and likeness of the possible that
it realizes, the actual, on the other hand does not resemble the virtuality
that it embodies' (B p. 1 00; p. 97). In the actual, says Deleuze, there
reigns an irreducible pluralism. This is a pluralism that fi lls him with
delight (B p, 1 08; p. 1 04).
Ill.
In order to demonstrate the nature of Deleuze ' s dual commitment to the
One and to plural ism (to the One ()f pluralism) I want to provide a fairly
close and exacting reading of the 1 956 and 1 966 essays on Bergsonism.
Before we commence the analysis of Deleuze' s texts let us consider the
following key citation from Bergson' s Creative Evolution:
While, in its contact with matter, life is comparable to an
impul sion or an impetus, regarded in itself it i s an immensity of
potentiality [ virtualite], a mutual encroachment of thousands and
thousands of tendencies which nevertheless are 'thousands and
thousands' only once regarded as outside each other, that is, when
spatialized. Contact with matter is what determines this
dissociation. Matter divides actually what was but virtually
multiple [virtuellement multiple]; and, in this sense, individuation
is in part the work of matter, in part the result of life's own
inclination (0 p. 7 1 4 ; CE p. 257; my emphasis with translation
modified).
Here we encounter the dual manner in which Bergson approaches the
real : regarded in itself life is a pure virtual and in terms of its contact
243
with matter it is a virtual with divisions. I cite this passage, however, not
simply because it is only the example we have in B ergson ' s text of the
description of l i fe in terms of a virtual multiplicity, but rather because it
signals an issue that is crucial to decide upon, even though there is a
certain undecidable element to it. The problem is this: Deleuze credits
the virtual with the power of self-differentiation. I n this passage,
however, it would seem that what is crucial for Bergson is matter:
'matter divides actually what was but virtually multiple' . Do we have a
fundamental difference here between Bergson and Deleuze's
Bergsonism? Mi ght i t mean that Deleuze has, in some sense, reified the
virtual by positing it in terms of an independent, albeit simple, power?
To respond at all adequately to these questions we must follow the
details of Deleuze' s reading with extreme care. The turns of Deleuze's
thinking in both the 1 956 essay and the 1 966 text are remarkably
nuanced and subtly unfolded.
The 1 956 essay begins by stating that conceived as a philosophy of
difference - the difference between differences in degree and
differences in kind or nature, the difference between the virtual and the
actual, the difference of Being itself qua self-differentiation Bergsonism operates on two levels: a methodological one and an
ontological one. The differences between things lies, ultimately, in their
differences of nature, and it is the task of thinking to demonstrate thi s
and to determine the differences themselves. I t i s not immediately self
evident to thinking what this difference is (the difference of nature)
simply because the natural bent of the intellect is to think in terms of
differences of degree (positing the differential relations between things
in terms of 'more' or 'Jess' ) . The task is to show that the differences of
nature are neither things nor their states but rather tendencies. This
methodological problem, which can only be resolved via the method of
intuition, turns into an ontological one when we real i ze that these
differences of nature suppose the difference ' of' Being itself.
Consideration of differences of nature leads us to thinking about the
nature of difference (BCD p. 79; p. 42). Everything is an expression of
difference but, i n turn, each thing expresses its own internal difference.
The difference 'of' Being resides in the differences of beings.
Deleuze conceives duration as that which 'd(ffersfrom itself'. He then
goes on to treat matter as the domain of repetition (it does not differ
from itself), a distinction between difference and repetition that is
complicated by Bergson in texts such as Matter and Memory and
especially Creative Evolution, and which Deleuze goes on to complicate
in this essay and also in the 1 966 text Psychic life is taken as an
244
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
245
246
Pli
1 1 (200 1 )
26
See Bergson 0 p. 585; CE p. I 06: 'There is no manifestation of life which does not
contain, in a rudimentary state - either l atent or potential - the essential characters
of the most other manifestations'.
247
248
Pli
1 1 (200 1 )
Being or of l i fe i s a t the beginning, and only a notion l ike the virtual can
make this clear.
Bergson himself is not unaware of the difficulties his thinking faces.
He insists that 'division ' is what characterizes life, it is not a mere
appearance. Matter plays the crucial role in effecting thi s division (0 p.
1 07 1 ; TSMR p. 1 1 4). Indeed, it is by studying the directionality of the
great lines of evolution, which run alongside paths that have reached a
dead end, that we are able lo formulate the conjecture and hypothesis of
a vital impetus that began by possessing the essential characteristics of
these main lines 'in a state of reciprocal implication ' , such as instinct
and intelligence ' which reach their culminating point al the extremities
of the two principal l ines of animal evolution ' ( 0 p. 1 072; TSMR p. 1 1 5 ).
Such tendencies are not to be abstractly combined into one but rather
taken as given 'in the beginning' and as interpenelrating aspects of the
'simple reality ' . The tendencies are given then not in an actual evolution
but onl y in a simple virtual. They cannot be given in any other way if we
are to take seriously the conception of a creative evolution, in which
'duration is invention or it is nothing at all' and in which hesitation and
indetermination are its positive features. Of any 'original tendency' we
might take and think about it is difficult lo speak of its actual content
simply because we cannot tell in advance what will issue from it (0 p.
1 228; TSMR p. 297). Bergson insi sts that it is impossible to forecast the
actual forms that will emerge 'by discontinuous leaps' and all along the
lines of evolution (ibid.). A more unequivocal affirmation of the
discontinuity entailed by actual ity and materi ality could not be fou nd.
Later in this book, his final text, Bergson will insist that the
materialization of tendencies only comes about through a process of
dichotomy. So although we can posit a 'undivided primitive tendency' it
is equally essential that such a tendency is not reified and viewed
independently of the actual divisions that have taken place: 'we will call
law of dichotomy that law which brings about a materialization, by a
mere splitting up, of tendencies which began by being two photographic
views, so to speak, of one and the same tendency' (0 p. 1 227; TSMR p.
296) . To neglect the different aspects of this ' image' of the vital impetus
is, Bergson argues, taking a stab at Schopenhauer, to be left with an
'empty concept' , like the 'will lo life ' , and presented with a 'barren
theory of metaphysics'. 27
27
249
1 522-8, especially pp. 1 526-7. I discuss this letter in essay four (on Bergson and
Kant) in my forthcoming Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual.
28 Bergson makes his position clear in a latter to H. Hoffding of March 1 9 1 5, in
Melanges p. 1 1 48. Translations of this letter and the one to Delattre are forthcoming
in Henri Bergson: Key Writings (London: Athlone Press, 2001 ).
29 H. Bergson, 'La Conscience et la Vie', in Oeuvres, pp. 824-5; trans. in Mind
Energy (hereafter cited as M-E) (New York: Henry Holt, 1 920), pp. 1 7- 1 8.
250
Pli 1 1 (2001 )
IV.
'To do philosophy' , Deleuze writes i n 1 956, 'is precisely to start with
difference ' (BCD p. 1 1 1 ; p. 62). This is a truly radical philosophy of
difference simply because difference is said to be there 'from the
beginning' as the very difference of Being. Moreover, in its most
primordial reality this difference entails the differences of beings. These
latter differences are internal ones because they are implicated in the
simple and positive virtual which remains in them while, at the same
time, they themselves are the givers of their own u nique differences.
It is clear that Deleuze, in addition to transforming Bergson into a
radical philosopher of difference, has ontologizcd his conception of
251
252
Pli 1 1 (2001 )
terms. Badiou is right to point out that the nominal pair of vi rtual and
actual 'exhausts the deployment of univocal Being' ( CB p. 65; p. 43).
Two names are req uired in order to 'test that the ontological univocity
designated by the pair proceeds from a single one of these names ' . But
on his reading the actual is reduced to bei n g nothing more than the
'function of its virtuality' (ibid. ) . Badiou has successfully drawn our
attention to the importance of a renewed thinking of the One in Deleuze;
what he neglects, however, is the unequivocal commitment to pluralism.
It is not that Badiou simply downplays this commitment to pluralism in
Deleuze; it is rather that he fails to comprehend it and fails precisely
because of the way i n which he has configured the virtual in Deleuze' s
thinking and transformed it into a power o f eminence (the pluralism
Deleuze seeks can only be incoherentl y established on the basis of a
univocity of the actual). We agree with Badiou : Deleuze is a thinker of
the One. But he is also a pluralist and an immanently qualified one.
There are good reasons for positively hesitating in describing Deleuze as
a Platonist of the virtual.
JOHN SELLA RS
The name 'Si mon the shoemaker' is not one immediately familiar to
specialists in ancient philosophy, let alone to students of philosophy in
general .' This may well be due, in part, to the tendency of many scholars
* My title is a variation upon Aulus Gellius's description of Epictetus as S1oicorum
maximus, the greatest of the Stoics (Noctes Atticoe 1 .2.6).
* * Abbreviations: CAG = Commenlaria in Aris101elem Graeca, 23 vols & 3 suppl.
(Berlin: Reimer, 1 882- 1 909); OCD = Oxford Classical Dictionary; OCT Oxford
Classical Texts; SSR = Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae, ed. G. Giannantoni, 4 vols
(Naples: Bibliopolis, 1 990); SVF = Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenla, ed. H. von Arnim,
4 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1 903-24).
1 Both of these passages are quoted in full in the Appendix.
2 The only ex tended treatment in English is R. F. Hock, 'Simon the Shoemaker as an
Ideal Cynic ' , Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 17 ( 1 976), 4 1 -53. This study is
exemplary but little known; C. H. Kahn, for instance, is unaware of its existence
when he discusses Simon in Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use
of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 996). R. S.
Brumbaugh's 'Simon and Socrates' , Ancient Philosophy 1 1 ( 1 99 1 ), 1 5 1 -52, although
useful, is only a shon notice primarily concerned with the recent archaeological
discoveries and does not mention Hock either. Note also R. Goulet, 'Trois
=
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
254
both past and present to den y his historical real ity al together.' Ancient
sources refer to a Simon who, it is said, was an associate of Socrates and
who ran a shoe shop on the edge of the Athenian Agora where Socrates
used to come to engage in philosophical discussions with Simon while
he worked." However, the fact that neither Plato nor Xenophon mention
Simon has often been ci ted as an argument against his very existence.'
Moreover, it is reported that the Socratic phi losopher Phaedo wrote a
dialogue entitled Simon," and thus it has been suggested that the l ater
'Simon legend' derived ultimately from a literary c haracter created by
Phaedo.'
The situation has somewhat changed since the discovery of the
remains of a shop near the Tholos on the south-west edge of the Agora,
the floor scattered with hob-nails, containing a base from a pot with
'Simon's ' (LIMONO}:) inscribed upon il.8 Archaeologists commenting
Cordonniers Philosophes ', in M . Joyal, ed., Studies in Plato and the Platonic
Tradition: Essays Presented to John Whillaker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1 997), pp. l l 925; H. Hobein, 'Li.rov (no. 6)', Paulys Realencyclopiidie, Band III A l ( 1 927), cols
1 63-73; and a handful of earlier works (up to 1 8 1 4) li sted in A. Patzer, Bibliographia
Socratica (Freiburg & Munich: Alber, 1 985), nos 327, 1 95 1 - 1 953.
' See e.g. E. Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, trans. 0. J. Reichel (London:
Longmans, Green, & Co., 1 868), p. 2 1 0: "He is probably altogether an imaginary
person"; W. D. Ross in OCD (2nd edn 1 970): "His very existence as a real personage
is not quite ce11ain"; Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, p. JO n. l 8: "I can see no
good reason to believe in his historical reality".
4 All of the ancient testimonia are now gathered together in SSR VI B 87-93 (although
see the further references in Goulet, 'Trois Cordonniers Philosophes '). I supply
translations in the Appendix.
5 See e.g. Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, p. 2 1 0 n. 5, and Ross in OCD
(2nd edn 1 970).
6 See Diogenes Laertius 2. 1 05 and Suda s. v. <t>ai.&rov (both SSR Ill A 8). Note also the
reference to Phaedo's portrait of Simon in Socraticorum Epistulae 1 3 . l ( SSR IV A
224 VI B 92, in the Appendix).
7 See e.g. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, p. I O, following U. von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, 'Phaidon von Elis', Hermes 14 ( 1 879), 1 87-93; repr. in
his Kleine Schriften IlJ (Berlin: Akademie, l 969), pp. 4 l -48.
8 See D. B. Thompson, 'The House of Simon the Shoemaker', Archaeology I 3
(I 960), 234-240; H. A. Thompson & R. E. Wycherley, The Agora of Athens: The
History, Shape, and Uses of an Ancient City Center, 'The Athenian Agora: Results of
Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens'
Volume XIV (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1 972), pp.
1 73-74 & pl. 88; J. M. Camp, The Athenian Agora: Exca vations in the Heart of
Classical Athens (London: Thames and Hudson, 1 986; rev. edn 1 992), pp. 145-47.
Note also the 'Excavations of the Athenian Agora Picture Books', esp. no. 1 2 , D. B.
=
John Sellars
255
upon this discovery have been keen to identify its owner with the Simon
mentioned in the li terary sources as a companion of Socrates,9 but
scholars primarily concerned with ancient philosophy have tended to
remain doubtful. ' 0
Simon 's reputation relies principally upon the claim made by
Diogenes Laertius that he was the first to write ' Socratic dialogues'
(:EcoKpanKo1 A.6yot)." Diogenes reports that these were also known as
'shoemaker's dialogues' (CTKUttK6t A.6yot) or simply 'shoemaker' s'
(CTK'lYrtKous) . " These, Diogenes says, were more or less notes of actual
Thompson, An Ancient Shopping Center: The Athenian Agora (Princeton: American
School of Classical Studies in Athens, rev. edn 1 993), and no. 1 7, M. L. Lang,
Socrates in the Agora (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies in Athens,
1 978).
' See the works listed in the previous note. In the light of these finds note also S.
Hornblower's revision of Ross's assessment in OCD (3rd edn 1 996): "He is never
mentioned by Plato or Xenophon, but his existence has now been confirmed by the
discovery of [ . . . ] Simon's cobbler shop". As for the silence of Plato and Xenophon,
Thompson, 'The House of Simon the Shoemaker', pp. 239-40, offers an explanation.
She dates the shoemaking activity in the Athenian workshop to c. 450-4 1 0 BC and
Simon's cup to c. 450-425 BC, suggesting c. 420-4 1 5 BC as the probable time of
Simon's death. While Socrates' pupils who knew Simon - Antisthenes, Alcibiades,
and Phaedrus - were all born c. 450 BC, Plato and Xenophon were both not born
until c. 430. If Simon died around 420 then it is unlikely that either Plato or
Xenophon would have known him personally.
10
See e.g. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, p. 1 0, and D. Clay, 'The Origins of
the Socratic Dialogue', in P. A. Vander Waerdt, ed., The Socratic Movement (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1 994), pp. 23-47, who, although apparently convinced in the
body of his text, writes in a note that the connection between these finds and the
Si mon associated with Socrates is "made at best out of a gossamer web of hope" (p.
32). A more positive assessment is made by Brumbaugh, 'Simon and Socrates' .
11
See Diogenes Laertius 2. 1 23 (= SSR VI B 87, in the Appendix). Kahn doubts the
historical reality of Simon, p. 1 0, and suggests an otherwise unknown Alexamenos of
Teos as the creator of the Socratic dialogue, p. I , citing a fragment from Aristotle's
De Poe/is (Athenaeus 505c fr. 72 Rose 3 in Ross, Fragmenta Selecta (OCT), p. 69;
see also Diogenes Laertius 3.48). However this passage does not say that Alexamenos
invented the Socratic dialogue but simply that he wrote imitative dialogues before the
Socratic dialogues and before Plato.
12
See Diogenes Laertius 2. 1 22-23 ( = SSR VI B 87, in the Appendix), simply
'crKU'tllCO' , and 2. 105 (= SSR ID A 8), 'crK U'tlKouc; Myouc;' (attributed to
Aeschines and, implicitly, Phaedo). In his Loeb edition Hicks translates crKU'tlKouc; as
'leathern' while Brumbaugh, 'Simon and Socrates' , p. 1 5 1 , offers 'the leather
dialogues' . Clay, 'The Origins of the Socratic Dialogue', p. 32, suggests 'Cobbler's
Talk' or 'Conversations at the Cobbler's Shop'. However, I suggest that simply
'shoemaker's dialogues' might be more appropriate,
=
256
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1 1 (200 1 )
14 See e.g. Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, p. 2 1 0 n. 5, and G. Grote, Plato,
and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3 vols (London: Murray, 2nd edn 1 867), vol.
3, p. 470, n. 'k'.
1 5 See again Brumbaugh, 'Simon and Socrates', pp. 1 5 1 -52.
'" See Xenophon Memorabilia 4.2. 1 : "So first of all, realising that because of his
youth Euthydemus did not yet go into the Agora if he wanted to conduct any
business, but took up his position in a saddler's shop close by, Socrates went to the
shop himself with some of his friends" {trans. Tredennick). For 'saddler's shop'
CiivtonotEtov) one might read 'any shop engaged in leather working', from which it is
only short step to 'shoemaker's workshop'. Indeed, Clay, p. 32, suggests this is a
reference to a cobbler's shop. Lang thinks it "most probable" that this is a reference to
Simon. Note also Memorabilia 3 . 1 0. l where Socrates is presented in philosophical
discussion in a painter's workshop.
17 All three are named in Socraticorum Epistulae 1 3 . I (= SSR IV A 224, in the
Appendix). For Euthydemus see Xenophon in the previous note and for Alcibiades
and shoemakers see Aelian Varia Historia 2. 1 (= SSR 1 C 33).
18
See Plato Apologia 22c-e.
John
Sellars
257
knowledge that he h imself was searching for, namely the art (tEXVlJ) of
taking care of one ' s soul (E1tt EA.Efoem 't'Tlt; \j/UXfic;).19
These few remarks constitute probably all that it is possible to say
about Simon. He is an interesting and sadly neglected associate of
Socrates but does not appear to be of any philosophical significance
himself. However, for a number of later philosophers the name 'Simon
the shoemaker' came to be associated with a certain way of life, a
specifical l y philosophical way of life. For these later philosophers,
Simon ' s way of life was considered to be exemplary of what it meant to
be a follower of Socrates."' By examining the ancient traditions
surrounding Simon, then, i t might be possible to learn something about
the nature of Socrates' philosophical project. What follows is offered as
a contribution to the project of uncovering the philosophy of the
historical Socrates , or at least how that philosophy was understood by
some of his immediate followers, in particular the Cynics." In the next
section I shall consider Simon 's role as a Cynic role model. Then, in the
following section, I shall suggest how this Cynic appropriation of Simon
might contribute to the debate surrounding what has come to be known
as 'the problem of Socrates'."
19 See ibid. 30a-b. In the Platonic dialogues the example of shoemaker (crKu1016rn;)
often appears as a example of an expert (u:xv\'tric;); see e.g. Protagoras 3 I 9d,
Gorgias 447d, Republic 333a, 397e, 443c, Theaetetus 1 46d; note also Xenophon
Memorabilia 4.2.22. That Socrates constantly used the example of a shoemaker is
stated explicitly by Callicles in Gorgias 49 1 a and Alcibiades in Symposium 22 le.
20
See for example the letter attributed to Xenophon in the Socraticorum Epistulae
( 1 8.2 = SSR VI B 9 1 , in the Appendix).
2 1 The fragments of the Cynics are also collected together in SSR, Part V. No
anthology in English exists but note the collection translated into French by L.
Paquet, Les Cyniques grecs: Fragments et temoignages, Choix, Traduction,
Introduction et Notes, A vant-propos par Marie-Odile Goulet-Caze (Paris: Le Livre de
Poche, 1 992). For a general survey of the Cynics see D. R. Dudley, A History of
Cynicism: From Diogenes to the 6th Century AD (London: Methuen, 1 937; repr.
Bristol Classical Press, 1 998). The most important recent work in English can be
found in R. B. Branham & M.-0. Goulet-Caze, eds, The Cynics: The Cynic
Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1 996).
22 This is simply the problem of trying to recover the historical Socrates from the
various ancient sources and, in particular, the problem of distinguishing between
Socratic and Platonic ideas as they are expressed by Plato's literary character
.
'Socrates'. For a brief overview and further references see my 'The Problem of
Socrates', Pli 10 {2000), 267-275.
258
Pli 1 1
(2001 )
John Sellars
259
260
Pli 1 1
(200 1 )
ph ilosoph y." The precedents are obvious: Aristotle follows the example
of Plato (with Dionysius) while Crates follows the example of Socrates
(with Simon). While Aristotle courts men of power, Socrates, Simon,
and Crates rej ect such a l ife, preferring instead to spend their time in
private, and thus uncensored, conversation. This clearly reflects the
contrasting attitudes towards external goods held by Aristotle and the
Cynics. For Aristotle the successful philosophical life requires not just
excellence (apE'tij) but also certai n external goods such as wealth and
social standing. The Cynics, on the other hand, affirm that excellence
(apE'ti]) is itself enough to ensure a good life (d:Jomovia), a life that
for them requires nothing more than the strength of a Socrates
"'
(L.wKpmtKf\<; icrxuo<;).
This debate concerning with whom the philosopher should associate
is developed in a series of letters that purport to be by a number of the
Socratic philosophers, the Socraticorum Epistulae. 3' In a correspondence
between Antisthenes and Aristippus the question of whether the
philosopher should associate with rulers is vigorously debated."
M oreover, Simon himself appears in these letters, first as a topic of
discussion, and later as a parti cipant in the correspondence,
exemplifying the Cynic position argued for by Antisthenes. Anti sthenes
opens the debate by attacking Aristippus for courting the ruler
Dionysius:
It is not right for a phi losopher to associate with tyrants and to
devote himself to Sicil ian tables. Rather, he should live in his own
country and strive for self-sufficiency (au'tapKcov).'3
29 For Aristotle see A.-H. Chroust, 'What Prompted Aristotle to Address the
Protrepticus to Themison?', Hermes 94 ( 1 966), 202-07. Hock, 'Simon the Shoemaker
as an Ideal Cynic', p. 47, suggests that Crates' decision to associate with a shoemaker
was a conscious act of protest against Aristotle's behaviour. More likely is that it was
conscious emulation of Socrates.
30 See Diogenes Laertius 6. 1 1 (= SSR V A 1 34), a phrase attributed to Antisthenes.
31 These letters are generally agreed to be spurious. Text and translation in A. J .
Malherbe, The Cynic Epistles: A S1udy Edition (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1 977).
Translations from the letters follow those in this edition (nos 1 -25 are by S. Stowers),
although occasionally modified.
32 See esp. Socraticorum Epistulae 8 & 9. Antisthenes and Aristippus were both
companions of Socrates. The former is often presented as a link between Socrates and
the Cynics; the latter was the founder of the Cyrenaic school .
33 Socraticorum Epistulae 8 (= SSR V A 206).
John Sellars
26 1
34
262
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
39
John Sellars
263
See e.g. Diogenes Laertius 6. 1 1 , 6.78. For further discussion see A. N. M. Rich,
'The Cynic Conception of avi:apKEta' , Mnemosyne 4th series 9 ( 1 956), 23-29, and
M.-0. Goulet-Caze, L 'ascese cynique: Un commentaire de Dia gene Laerce VJ 70- 71,
Histoire des doctrines de I' Antiquite classique 10 (Paris: Vrin, 1986), pp. 38-40. Note
also the text by Teles entitled On Self-Sufficiency (OEpt ffUtapKEirn;) in Hense,
Teletis Reliquiae, pp. 5-20, and O'Neil, Teles, pp. 6- 1 9.
44 For a thorough treatment of Cynic acrKT)at<; see Goulet-Caze, L 'ascese cynique.
45 Pace Rich, 'The Cynic Conception of aui:apKEta', p. 23, who characterises Cynic
avi:apKEta as "a stern renunciation of the world".
46 See Diogenes Laertius 6.23 ( SSR V B 1 74).
47 See e.g. Xenophon Memorabilia 1 .2. 14, 1 .3.5-8, 4.7. 1 .
48 This topic fascinated Foucault i n his final lectures on Socrates and the Cynics. See
T. Flynn, 'Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Lecture Course at the College de France',
in J. Bern auer & D. Rasmussen, eds, The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1 988), pp. 1 02- 1 1 8.
49 See e.g. Diogenes Laertius 6.38 ( SSR V B 33); with further references to
Diogenes and Alexander in SSR V B 3 1 -49.
=
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3. Concluding Remarks
As we have seen, the Cynics held Simon ' s quiet i ndependent life of
making shoes and engaging in private conversation with unwashed and
barefoot philosophers to be an ideal way of life. They attributed to
Simon two qualities that they thought marked out the ideal philosopher,
namely self-suffi ciency (m'.>iapKEta) and freedom of speech
(napp11cria). At the same time they held Simon to be the most authentic
fol lower of Socrates. The figure of Simon is important for the Cynics,
then, because he forms a bridge between their own philosophy and that
of Socrates. If S imon is the most authentic Socratic and his life is
marked by the qualities of self-sufficiency (auiapnta) and freedom of
speech (napp11aia), then these qualities may well have marked the l i fe
of Socrates h imself. This is the implicit argument in the Cynic literary
tradition that grew up around the name of Simon. I n short, the S i mon
tradition attempts to draw one towards the conclusion that it was in fact
Socrates who was 'the first dog'.'
I t is of course readily acknowledged that the Cynics were followers
of Socrates but this is often qualified by drawing attention to the ways i n
which they pushed Socrates' sober and sensible philosophy to an
extreme." Plato's characterisation of Diogenes as a ' Socrates gone mad '
Diogenes Laertius 2. 1 23 (= SSR VI B 87, in the Appendix).
51 I refer to Goulet-Caze's 'Who Was the First Dog? ', in Branham
50
& Goulet-Caze,
eds, The Cynics, pp. 4 1 4- 1 5, which deals the question of who should be credited as
the founder of the Cynic movement.
52 See e.g. Dudley, A History of Cyncism, p. 27.
John Sellars
265
prevailing consensu s.'' What the trad ition surrounding Simon proposes
is that the specifically Cynic qual ities of self-sufficiency (au1apnw)
and freedom of speech (rcappricria) were not extreme exaggerations of
Socrates' phil osophy but rather faithful expressions of it.'' Th is question
concerning who has the greatest claim to be called the true heir of
Socrates is one of the expl icit themes of the Socraticorum Epistulae,
with Aristippus claiming that he - and not Anti sthenes - is the genuine
steward of the Socratic teachings (A6yrov t':: mEATJ'l:TJV 1&v
LroK:panic&v)." It is within this context that Simon is brought into the
correspondence as a Cynic counter example. It is clear, then, that the
Cynic trad ition surrounding Simon was directly connected with what has
come to be known as ' the problem of S ocrates' .
In order to test the validity of thi s Cynic claim that Simon was the
most orthodox follower of Socrates it would be necessary to consider all
of the surviving sources for Socrates. Although it is not possible to do
this here we can at least note a couple of Socratic testimonia. In
Xenophon 's Memorabilia, for example, one can find a description of
Socrates' way of life that clearly displays the quality of self-sufficiency
(au1apK:Eta).'6 Here Socrates is presented as someone who has reduced
his needs to a minimum so that he needs little to satisfy them and as
someone who ate and drank only according to his needs, both common
Cynic characteristics. The quality of freedom of speech or frankness
(rcappricri.a) is also credited to Socrates in Plato's Laches and can be
seen throughout Socrates' defence speech in Plato's Apology. " Although
it would, of course, be necessary to consider a large number of texts in
some detail, hopefully one can at least see that the ancient trad ition
surrounding Simon the shoemaker forms an interesting yet neglected
strand in the ancient sources for the philosophy of Socrates.
51
See Diogenes Laertius 6.54; also Aelian Varia Historia 1 4.33 (both SSR V B 59).
For further discussion of the Socratic-Cynic genealogy see in particular two studies
by A. A. Long: 'The Socratic Tradition: Diogenes, Crates, and Hellenistic Ethics', in
Branham & Goulet-Caze, eds, The Cynics, pp. 28-46, and 'Socrates in Hellenistic
Philosophy', Classical Quarterly 38 ( 1 988), I SO-7 I . Note also the same author's
contribution to K. Algra et al., eds, The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 999), entitled 'The Socratic Legacy' .
55 Socraticorum Epistulae 9 . 1 ( SSR IV A 222).
56 See Xenophon Memorabilia 1 .3.5-8; note also the explicit references to his
ain:apKEta at 1 .2 . 1 4 and 4.7. 1 .
57 See Plato Laches l 88e- l 89a.
54
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
266
The ancient evidence for Si mon can now be found collected together in
SSR VI B 87-93." For the sake of convenience here are translati ns of all
of these 1es1imo11 ia .
87. Diogenes Laertius 2 . 1 22-24
[2. 1 22] Simon the Athenian was a shoemaker:" When Socrates came to
his workshop and began lo converse, he used to make notes of all that he
could remember. And this is why people apply the term ' shoemaker's' to
his dialogues.''" There are thirty-three which circulate in one volume:"'
On the Gods
On the Good
On the Beautiful
What is the Beautiful
On the Just; I and II
On Virtue, that it cannot be taught
5s
Further references t o Simon not in SSR can be found in a number of the Aristotelian
CAG
23.4),
David Prolegomena
(Busse,
p.
42.27-32,
CA G
1 8.2),
Philoponus /11 Analytica Posteriora (Wallies, p. 350.3 1 -33, CA G 1 3 .3), and Ps.
Alexander (= Micheal of Ephesus) /11 Sophislicos Elenclzos (Wallies, p. 40.22-27,
CA G 2.3). In De Jnterpretatione 20b35-36, 2 1 a l 4- l 5 and Sophistici Elenchi I 77b 1 41 5, Aristotle uses the example of a shoemaker when discussing predicates ( ' i f
someone is good and a shoemaker i t does not follow that h e is a good shoemaker')
and these commentators identify this as a reference to S i mon. See Goulet, pp. 1 22-23
for further discussion. Goulet also draws attention to a reference to a shoemaker
called 'Heron' in Aelius Theon Progym11asmata which, in the light of an alternative
reading i n an Armenian manuscript, may plausibly be ammended to 'Simon'. See the
new Bude edition by M. Patillon & G. Bolognesi (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1 997), p.
77.
59
For Diogenes Laerti u s I have consulted Hick ' s Loeb translation and the translation
1 999),
The list in Hick's Loeb text gives 3 1 titles. One of these is in two books and
another in three, making a total of 34 dialogues. Giannantoni's text in SSR omits two
of these titles, giving
John Sellars
267
62
63
In Hicks Loeb edition but not SSR and bracketed by Goulet-Caze, following its
268
Pli 1 1 (200 1 )
[ 1 1 ] 'Aristippus to Aeschines ' : The young Locrian men about whom you
wrote to me will be released from prison and will not die, nor will they
lose any of their money, though they came close to dying. Do not tell
Antisthenes that I have saved the friends. For he does not like to have
tyrants for friends, but he rather seeks out the barley meal sellers and
64 The bulk of this text i s omitted because it is not relevanl here. Simon's name comes
towards the end of a lengthy list of disciples of Socrates. The entire passage is
translated in J . Ferguson, Socrates: A Source Book (London: Macmillan for The Open
Uni versity Press, 1 970), pp. 322-23.
6 5 The text of this passage contains a number of disputed readings. See Hock, 'Simon
the Shoemaker as an Ideal Cynic ' , p. 44 n. 1 8 . I take the 'you' in "in order that you
might sit down and converse with me" to refer to a personificruion of Philosophy.
Fowler's Loeb translation ends with "as S ocrates did with Pericles". As Hock notes,
this must be wrong. The context suggests that El\EtVot<; (in SSR) or El\EtV(\l (in
Fowler) refers to Simon and/or Dionysius.
66 All translations of the Socraticorum Epistulae follow those in Malherbe (nos 1 -25
are by S. Stowers), occasionally modified.
John Sellars
269
tavern keepers who sell barley meal and wine honestly in Athens, and
who rent out thick tunics when the winds blow, and he courts Simon.
[ 1 3 . 1 ] 'Aristippus to Simon' : I do not ridicule you, but rather Phaedo,
when he said that you are more excellent and wiser than Prodicus of
Ceos, who said that you refuted him with regard to his Encomium to
Heracles. No, I do admire and praise you, since, though you are but a
shoemaker, you are filled with wisdom and used to pursuade Socrates
and the most handsome and noble youths to sit with you ; youths such as
Alcibiades, son of Clinias, Phaedrus the Myrrhinean, and Euthydemus,
son of Glaucon. Al so, of the men of public affairs, Epicrates,
Sacesphorus, Euryptolemus, and others. I also think that Pericles, son of
Xanthippus, was with you when he did not have to carry out the duties of
a general or there was not a war going on at the time. And now we know
what sort of person you are, for Antisthenes visits you. And you can also
practice philosophy in Syracuse, for leather thongs and straps are valued
here. [ 1 3 .2] Don ' t you know that I, who wear shoes, will constantly
make your trade i nto something to be admired? But as for that barefoot
Antisthenes, what else has he done than to make you idle and without an
income, since he persuades the youth and indeed all the Athenians to go
barefoot? See, then, how much of a friend l am, one who is content with
leisure and pleasure. And though you admit that Prodicus argues
reasonably, you do not realise the consequences for yourself. Otherwise ,
you would admi re m e and ridicule those who have long beards and staffs
for their boasting, who are dirty, louse-ridden and have long fingernails
l ike wild animals and give advice that is contrary to your craft.
1 2 (= SSR III A 1 6)
'Simon to Aristippus ' : l hear that you ridicule our wisdom in the
presence of Dionysius. I admit that l am a shoemaker and that I do work
of that nature, and in like manner I would, if it were necessary, cut straps
once more for the purpose of admonishing foolish men who think that
they are living according to the teaching of Socrates when they are living
in great luxury. Antisthenes shall be the chastiser of your foolish jests.
For you are writing him letters which make fun of our way of life . But
let what l have said to you in jest suffice. At any rate, remember hunger
and thirst, for these are worth much to those who pursue self-control.
93. Socraticorum Epistulae
Pli
1 1 (2001 ) 270-277.
,
Creatures of the N i h il
Now!
Gary Banham and Charlie Blake (eds.}, Evil Spirits: Nihilism and
the Fate of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester Un iversity Press,
2000)
JOHN APPLEBY
not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that i t does not exist' . 1
'Nihilism i s that historical process whereby the dominance o f the
"transcendent" becomes null and void, so that all being loses its
worth and meaning' . 2
ls nihilism on the upsurge? Are we about to be buried beneath a torrent
of nay sayers howling abuse at the world? The recent publication of two
books on the topic which share a third of the contributors in common
brought forth hope in the heart of this reviewer that perhaps th is was the
public announcement of a nihilist cabal which had for several years been
3
writh ing away at the heart of academia. Such hope being temporari ly
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingda!e, ed. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1 968), 585(A)
(references are to section numbers). Abbreviated hereafter to 'WtP'.
2 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 4: Nihilism, trans. by Frank A . Capuzzi , in
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes Three and Four (New York: HarperCollins,
1 99 1 ), p. 4.
3 Each book consists of a dozen papers, with four authors (Joanna Hodge, Diane
Morgan, Howard Caygill, and Daniel Conway) appearing in both volumes.
John Appleby
271
Monsters ask:
Additionally, Keith Ansell Pearson, the co-editor of Monsters, has a paper in Evil
Spirits.
4 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and
Metaphysics, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, Frank A. Capuzzi, in
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes Three and Four (New York: HarperCollins,
1 99 1 ), p. 203. Nietzsche' s claim may be found in The Will To Power, 2.
5 The exception is a paper by John Protevi: ' A Problem of Pure Matter: Fascist
Nihilism in A Thousand Plateaus' (Monsters, pp. 1 67-l 88). Protevi is careful to begin
by distinguishing Deleuze and Guattari's use of nihilism in A Thousand Plateaus
from Nietzsche's, not least because the former is linked to Nazism. Protevi's
engagement with 'nihilism now' consists of a very careful exegesis of Deleuze and
Guattari 's analysis of fascist nihilism and the currents of microfascism out of which it
still arises in the present day. However, as an added bonus, he also supplies an
astonishingly clear and concise summary of Deleuze and Guattari 's use of the concept
of the body without organs in A Thousand Plateaus, which cannot be recommended
highly enough (Monsters, pp. 1 69- 1 72).
6 Both Morgan's pieces are eminently readable accounts of highly idiosyncratic
characters read through Nietzsche: "Provoked Life': Expressing Nihilism' is a
consideration of 'Gottfried Benn - doctor for skin afflictions, venereal diseases and
272
Pli 1 1
(200 1 )
John Appleby
273
10
This opposition i s most famously brought to the fore by Deleuze in Nietzsche and
Philosophy (London: Athlone, 1 983). Beardsworth admits that 'one of the aims of
this chapter is to complicate the way i n which a Deleuzian type reading of force
locates force within its immanent determinations' (Monsters, p. 64, n. 1 ). This is a
point which will be returned to below.
11
'To breed an animal which is able to make promises - is that not precisely the
paradoxical task which nature has set herself with regard to humankind? is it not the
real problem of humankind?' (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality,
trans. by Carol Diethe, ed. by Keith Ansell Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1 994), p. 38). There is only enough space to note in passing that
Nietzsche does not appear to be saying that a// humans can make promises.
Additionally, he opposes promising to active forgetting, thereby making that too a
'specificity of the human ' . This is something which Beardsworth does not consider.
12
See Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 4, pp. 36-42.
274
Pli 1 1 (2001 )
13 Joanna Hodge, 'The Monstrous Rebirth of Nihilism ' , in Monsters , pp. 70 85 (p.
75).
14 G.W.F. Hegel , Phenomenology of Spirir, trans. by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1 977), esp. pp. 1 1 1 - 1 1 9.
1 5 Jn fact Nick Land hits the nail on the head when he claims that Nietzsche and
Philosophy is 'solely about Deleuze' . See The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges
Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (An Essay in Atheisric Religion) (London: Routledge,
1992), p. 1 55.
-
John Appleby
275
276
P/i 1 1 (200 1 )
religious hope and fear into the machi nery which makes possible
war. This second aspect of nihilism is therefore connected to a
second change in the nature of techne. Political evil may be
understood as a consequence of the fate which governs modernity
(Evil Spirits, pp. 3-4) .
What thi s appears to be saying is that the subsumption of rel igion to stale
(or, indeed the eradication of religion) means that as there i s no longer a
set of transcendent moral laws ( hopefully linked to a telos of 'just
deserts '). Evil stalks the modern world in the guise of political states
which are completely unchecked in their blood lust as, when questioned
about the nature of their actions, they simpl y appeal to the fact that if
they are investi gated thoroughly, it will be seen that they were
determined lo act as they did by way of a l inear chai n of causal forces
.18
which Banham and Blake label 'fate'
A s a n antidote to all this, they propose that philosophy needs to think
in terms of forces which are not entirely subsumable under the terms
'human ' and 'nature' . To this end, they suggest that modernity needs to
be also thought i n terms of spirits; notably demons and angels. Derrida ' s
influence can readily b e d iscerned by the number o f spectres who crop
19
up throughout the book. These labels are to be thought in very loose
18
It would be simply too tedious to trot out the obvious counter arguments, although,
given the fact that Blake in parti cular has course to refer to him, it would be
interesting to orientate such a move around Bataille's analysis of Aztec sacrifice
(Georges Bataille, ' Consumption ' , trans. by Robert Hurley, in The Accursed Share:
An Essay on General Economy, I (New York: Zone, l 99 l ), pp. 45-6 1 ). It is, h owever,
worth mentioning that Spinoza 's Ethics, one of the most brutally necessitarian
materi alist philosophical systems ever developed, carries none of the conclusions
which Banham and Blake point to (Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, trans. by Edwin Curley,
in The Collected Works of Spinoza Volume I, ed. by Edwin Curley (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, l 985), pp. 408 -6 1 7) .
1
9 N o t a l l the spectres are Derridean, however. Anthony Easthope provides a
sympathetic consideration of Freud in the light of the disjunction between Freud's
claims for psychoanalysis as a science and the spectral nature of his writings.
Unsmprisingly, the text which Easthope privileges for this pmpose is 'The Uncanny'
(trans. by James Strachey, in Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, ed. by Al bert
Dickson, Penguin Freud Library, 1 4 (London: Penguin Books, 1 990), pp. 335-376).
One of Easthope's avowed aims is to rescue Freud from Deleuze and Guatlari by
showing that he is more demonic than they make him out to be i n 'One or Several
Wolves?' (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (London : Athlone, 1 988), pp. 26-38). This he
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manages to do, but the reading of Deleuze and Guauari ' s critique of Freud which he
supplies is viciously reductionist.
2 Charlie Blake, 'The Gravity of Angels: Space, Time and the Ecstasy of
Annihilation' , Evil Spirits, pp. 52-7 1 (p. 68).
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Fodor Encapsulated
J. A. Fodor, The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and
Limits of Computa tional Psychology
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(the horse raced past the barn fell) tend not to be parsible, although they
are perfectly grammatical, as can be seen on reflection (hint: insert the
missing complementisers). Even so, only the benighted think that
linguistic competence is not modular based (contra Cowie ( 1 999),
poverty of stimulus considerati ons, inter alia, real ly do show that a
dedicated mechanism armed with universal grammar is the only idea we
have). Yet our language faculty, it would seem, makes use of
information not employed in parsi ng, i .e., it is not quite encapsulated.
More speculatively, I (Collins (2000)) have conjectured that the Theory
of Mind (ToM ) module is interfaced with the language faculty; the thesis
explains some interesting ontogenetic and pathological data and many
features of propositional content (opacity, embeddness, et al.). In
general, the language module appears to take its place within a broader
system of modules.
Fodor really does not consider this kind of modular ensemble story.
He does, however, deploy an argument that should give everyone serious
pause for thought (pp. 7 1 8). Jn a nutshell : we can understand how
peripheral modules are triggered because they are hardwired to our
sensorium, as it were. What of central modules? Presumably, they need
some module(s) to i nput the relevant representations. In simple terms, a
central module needs to know when it is time to do its thi ng . The
problem i s that, by definition, the inputting module(s) will be less
modular than the receiving module; for, however the story is told, the
inputting module(s) must sort between representations that carry
information that is and i s not proper to the receiving module.
Alternatively, the i nputting module(s) may not be less modular, bu t such
a case requires an infinite number of them. This is a splendid argument
and one 1 have pondered myself. I ' l l come to my thoughts presently;
first, however, Fodor adds a twist.
One way to stop the threatened regress of modules is to understand
the sensorium as the ultimate source of all triggers. This move, though,
is only available to the mad dog empiricist; for it amounts to the claim
that every cognitive distinction is an empirical one, i.e., all selective
sorting of representations is made on the basis of empirical features. We
on the side of the angles have long despaired of connectionist groupies
and the anti-Chomskyians for just this reason. As Fodor (p.77) points
out, there appears to be no sensory feature that tells the language
perception module that language is abroad. (Just thi n k about the
perfectly acceptable languages, ASL and varieties of home sign). More
grossly, what on earth is the perceptual feature that tells your cheater
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module that you might be being fleeced? If there were such a trigger,
cheating, for good or i l l , would, contrary to fact, be nigh impossible.
As I said, 1 take this argument very seriou sl y, and the massively
modular crowd have not so much as recognised it, still less answered it.
What, then, of my story above? Here ' s a speculation about ToM in
particular (see Collins (2000) for details). What tell s ToM that there is a
cognitive agent abroad is its face recogniser; that is, anything with a face
is, ceteris paribus, apt to trigger the attribution of mental states.
Something like this may explain why we happily attribute mental states
to animals while realising that, say, Rover really does not believe that i f
h e c a n get m e t o think that h e has not been fed, then 1 shall b e duped i n
feeding him extras. Likewise, once the child has fixated o n a grammar,
then sensory i nput will suffice to mark language from non-language. The
real problem for empiricism is that the child cannot fixate on a grammar
in the first place without already knowing the options which need to be
decided. The point in both cases is that the cognitive distinctions
(language or not; cognitive agent or not) aren 't empirical ones; rather,
given enough i nnate i nformation, all we need are cues to downstream
modules that dutifully select as default certain upstream modular
processes. I'm not certain about the soundness of this proposal, but 1
cannot see how it is obviously i ncorrect. That said, this proposal will not
work for many of the proposed central modules, such as a cheater
detector. I can happily live with this ; it has long seemed to me that a
cheater detector module was only slightly less silly than a line dancing
one.
What has any this got to do with the globality of cognition? Well,
quite a lot. The thing about modularised cognition is that it is mandatory ;
but surely, even the least of us thinks occasionall y. Fodor does not stress
this point, although 1 suspect it is behind much of his argument, for a
clear way for thinking not to be mandatory is for it to be global. As we
saw, the central modularist is obliged to ease off on encapsulation and
allow mutual cognitive penetration, but not so much so that modularity
becomes vacuous. To such an end I proposed my disciplined boxology,
yet this also can only realise mandatory processes.
Here ' s another speculation. Global cognition is (reflexively)
conscious; mandatory cognition is unconscious. What makes thinking
global is that i t is Quinean, i .e., any information is potentially relevant to
the assessment of any claim. Only consciousness can realise this kind of
isotropic thinking. Why? Because consciousness is basically off-l ine, we
deliberate for as long as we l ike and then, if at all , act. Mandatory
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impinge on these questions in the sense that we could answer all three
without having a clue as to why, say, Engli sh , but not Italian, has
obli gatory subjects, or why children never regularise auxiliaries, or why
laterali sation of linguistic competence after left-side brain damage
sometimes precludes passivisation. I should not say that an evolution
story fails a priori to shed any light here, but the logic of selection
appears to be the wrong one: we are interested in what computational
system underlies linguistic competence and how it works. I just cannot
see the difference it would make to the acceptability of answers to these
questions i f language gradually evolved or if Alpha Centurions altered
our DNA back when we mainly hunted and gathered. Unsurprisingly,
given the otiosity of evolutionary considerations, when one approaches
language with an evolvability constraint, muddled thinking ensues. This
is the real problem.
When it is asked what language is for, the answer most often returned
is 'communication' . (Incidentally, I don' t think that language is for
anything at all; nor are beliefs. We want our linguistic exchanges to be
communicative, but they are not supposed to be; ditto for beliefs vis-a
vis truth. ) An evolvability constraint tends to lead to an external ist story
about organismic-environmental interaction; it is the environment that
shapes the cognition so that it may better deal with the external demands.
Naturally, thi s leads to external ist accounts of language, such as Clark ' s
( 1 997, 1 998) trading spaces model, where language i s some kind of
environmental feature onto which we can off-load cognitive resources.
Dennett (1 995, 1 997) tells a similar tale. These stories are quite jejune,
fashioned, as they apparently are, in complete ignorance of, or di sregard
for, the findings of linguistics and psycholinguistics. No-one, and I mean
no-one, has the faintest idea how the abstract h ierarchical structure of
language may be encoded into a statistically retrievable phonetic form
(to say nothing of sign language or the developmental alacrity of the
blind). l t seems that if knowing a language is being able to retrieve
structured information from our environment, then we must already
know the s tructure. As it happens, the vast majority of the data points to
such internalism, and the rest is equivocal. I reall y am at a loss at the
presumption of theorists to know what they are talking about when they
turn to language. I would not dream of declaiming about
electromagnetism without tailoring my thoughts to what the physicists
have to say. Why do people think that they can have so much as coherent
thoughts about language without caring what the l inguists have to say?
Evolutionary theory, I am afraid to say, must shoulder much of the
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responsibi lity. Significantly, Pinker and Bloom ( 1 990), who both know
their linguistics, commend an evolutionary story but do not fall into the
bog of externalism. Such is perhaps why they judge their thesi lo be
"bori ng", for it affects not a jot the practice of linguistics. Th is is as it
should be.
Similar methodological compl aints, I think, can be made against the
imposition of an evolvabi lity constraint to any cognitive domain,
l anguage simply offers perhaps the best example. Let us, then, with
Fodor, eschew all evolvability constraints: bother being tough-minded ;
bother materialism; bother athei sm. Let us pursue the truth.
JCollins42 @ compuserve.com
References
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