Stuart pethick Affectivity and philosophy after spinoza and nietzsche making knowledge the most powe by Yassine Lahmidi

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

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Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect Stuart Pethick

© Stuart Pethick 2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-48605-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-55307-5 ISBN 978-1-137-48606-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137486066 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Note on Referencing

viii

Introduction

1 Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do 1.1 Descartes’ cogito and the power of ideas 1.2 Spinoza and the affective-imagination 1.3 Affectivity: a vacillation of joy and sadness 1.4 The body as duration 1.5 Euphoric and dysphoric bodies 1.6 Adequacy of ideas 1.7 The signs of the affective-imagination 1.8 From general to common notions 1.9 Conatus: ‘how’ things are, not ‘what’ things are

18 20 28 34 37 41 45 54 59 63

2 Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects 2.1 Interpreting the sign-language of the affects 2.2 Neither substance nor subject 2.3 Will as affect 2.4 Consciousness and other perspectives 2.5 Evoking the multiplicity of the body 2.6 Consciousness as communication 2.7 Affect as interpretation 2.8 Consciousness and responsibility 2.9 Memory, consciousness and morality

68 71 74 78 81 85 89 96 99 103

3 Will-to-Power: Redeeming the Body from the Ascetic Ideal 3.1 Philosophy as the negation of the perspectival 3.2 The joy and sadness of Plato’s idealism 3.3 The eternal return of the ‘Something’ 3.4 Amor Fati: life after the eternal return 3.5 Redemption from salvation 3.6 Wille zur Macht: philosophy as redemption

110 111 117 121 129 133 140

Contents

4 Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect 4.1 Redeeming the past 4.1.1 Descartes and philosophyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s graphophobia 4.1.2 Spinoza: interpretation as redeeming expression 4.1.3 The metaphoricity of language 4.1.4 Ephexis and the ethics of reading 4.1.5 God is in the grammar 4.2 Provoking the future 4.2.1 Ethics and redemption 4.2.2 Good and bad, good and evil 4.2.3 Neither art, nor science, but la Gaya Scienza 4.2.4 Affectivity and philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

156 161 161 168 178 187 191 198 198 208 212

Bibliography

231

Index

245

227

Acknowledgements Given that it is simply impossible to name all the influences that have helped inspire this book, family, friends and happy chance encounters can only be acknowledged insofar as the writing bears witness to the singular joys that only they made possible – joys that explain Spinoza’s cryptic remark: per realitatem et perfectionem idem intelligo. The following is thus restricted to the barely possible task of acknowledging those who have had a direct influence on the content of the book. First of all, if it were not for the inspiration of my first two philosophy teachers, namely Gordon Bartlett and William Large, this book would not have been possible. Gordon provided the confidence and encouragement to follow this unusual passion, while Will provided the provocation and constant challenge to push this passion further. If philosophy does survive as a living, engaging practice, then it will be down to such teachers. I would like to thank colleagues from Aarhus University, especially Morten Sørensen Thaning, Jon Utoft Nielsen, Patrick Cockburn and Martin Ejsing Christensen, for reading drafts of various sections of this book – and a special thanks to Martin for sacrificing countless hours of his time to read and discuss some of the most provocative works of philosophy with me, including an intense and extremely joyful axiom by axiom, proposition by proposition reading of Spinoza’s Ethics. A big thank you is also extended to Aarhus University’s Filosofisk Studenterkollokvium (Philosophical Student Colloquium) and the Philosophical Hermeneutics research group for giving me the opportunity to present and discuss many of the ideas that are presented in this book. I would also like to extend my gratitude to my doctoral supervisor, Thomas Schwarz Wenzer, for the invaluable lesson of what it is to show ephexis in interpretation, and to Aarhus University itself for its support. Last but not least, I would like to thank Hans Fink, Sverre Raffnsøe and Jim Urpeth for their engaging and challenging critiques of an earlier version of this text.

vii

Note on Referencing A Harvard style reference system has been adopted for this book, with the exception of references to Spinoza and Nietzsche, which use standards that are common when referring to their works (abbreviations of text titles followed be section numbers). All translations into English are the author’s unless the reference to a quote refers to a published translation. References to other philosophers occasionally include extra information specific to their works too; for example, references to Plato are accompanied by the Stephanus page number. For Spinoza, the following abbreviations are used when referring to the Ethics (1994): E D (directly after part number) A P D C S Post L DefAff GenDefAff

Ethics Definition Axiom Proposition Demonstration Corollary Scholium Postulate Lemma Definitions of Affects General Definition of the Affects

Abbreviations for other Spinoza works are (including translated titles and referencing information): OP TIE

TP TTP

Opera (1925) Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (followed by section number and Bruder paragraph number) – Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1985: 3–45). Tractatus Politicus (followed by section number) – Political Treatise (2002: 676–754) Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (followed by section number and Akkerman paragraph number) – Theologico-Political Treatise (2007) viii

Note on Referencing

All original citations are from Opera (1925), and all letters of correspondence are referenced by page and letter number from (2002: 755–960), alongside the volume and page number from Opera and the letter number. References to Nietzsche follow a standard form of an abbreviated title followed by the relevant section numbers coupled with a reference to the volume and page number of the Kritische Studienausgabe (1980). References to Nietzsche’s correspondence cite the division, volume and page number of Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (1975–2004). These two collected works have been used as the source for all the Nietzsche research in this book. Abbreviations to all the works cited are as follows: Abrv.

Title

English Title and Reference Information

Der Antichrist

The Antichrist (2005)

ASZ

Also sprach Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006a)

DFW

Der Fall Wagner

The Case of Wagner (2005)

Ecce Homo

Ecce Homo (2005)

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft

The Gay Science (2001a)

Götzen-Dämmerung

Twilight of the Idols (2005)

Zur Genealogie der Moral

On the Genealogy of Morality (2006b)

Die Geburt der Tragödie

The Birth of Tragedy (2000)

JGB

Jenseits von Gut und Böse

Beyond Good and Evil (2001b)

KGB

Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe

n/a (1975–2004)

KSA

Kritische Studienausgabe

n/a (1980)

Morgenröthe

Daybreak (1997b)

MM1

Menschliches, Allzumenschliches 1

Human, All Too Human 1 (1996)

MM2

Menschliches, Allzumenschliches 2

Human, All Too Human 2 (1996)

UB2

Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen Untimely Meditations 2: On the Uses and Disadvantages of 2: Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das History for Life (1997a) Leben

Note on Referencing

‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne’

On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1979: 79–97)

Abbreviations used for both Nietzsche and Spinoza: App Ep Pre

Appendix Epilogue Preface

Introduction

It is perhaps hard to imagine two more disparate figures in the entire history of philosophy than that of the ‘blessed’ Benedict de Spinoza, who sees divinity in everything as an almost serene arch-rationalist, and the ‘Anti-Christ’ Friedrich Nietzsche, who revels in the ‘death of God’ while mocking any attempt to spin the world into something ‘rational’. The manner in which they construct their work also seems completely incompatible, with Spinoza’s methodical and mathematical construction on the one hand and Nietzsche’s highly stylised aphoristic prose on the other. Spinoza’s major work, the Ethics, appears as a great monolith of a philosophical system with geometric stages and interweaving propositions, while a great deal of Nietzsche’s effort is directed at breaking down such structures and exposing the futility of all system building. Spinoza is also the great advocate of democracy as a political form of organisation, whereas Nietzsche’s elliptical aphorisms seem to favour the aristocratic ‘pathos of distance’. They were furthermore separated by two centuries and came from very different backgrounds: seventeenth century Spinoza, a lens-grinder and the descendent of a Sephardic Jewish family expelled from Portugal, was himself famously excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam at the tender age of twenty-three, while Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor with a protestant upbringing in nineteenth century Prussia, was made chair of classical philology at the University of Basel when he was only twenty-four. They thus came from very different times and shared neither a common language nor social background. 1

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

Nonetheless, on further inspection it is striking how quickly a list of uncanny similarities can be drawn up between them. Neither of them were ever anything like professional philosophers in the institutional sense; Spinoza having turned down a chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg due to concerns that it might restrict his intellectual freedom, and Nietzsche having prematurely retired from his chair of philology at the University of Basel after a short and uneasy career of just ten years. Both fell silent at the early age of forty-four: Spinoza through a consumptive death and Nietzsche through a catatonic state (although he lived for another eleven years). The receptions of both philosophers’ works have been torrid to say the least. Spinoza’s books quickly became infamous and were variously banned, vilified and denounced as being atheistic and immoral, while Nietzsche’s were gratuitously doctored, edited and appropriated for right-wing propaganda in Nazi Germany, thus condemning them to disparagement for most of the twentieth century. The very names ‘Spinoza’ and ‘Nietzsche’ have thus been tainted by a resistance that has sought to defuse their works by pigeonholing them as curiosities within the history of philosophy at best, or dangerous enough to warrant censure at worst. However, such retrospectively drawn coincidences obviously do not constitute a shared purpose, much less a genuine philosophical connection. Nonetheless, even though it has largely gone unrecognised in the subsequent literature, Spinoza and Nietzsche do connect philosophically in very important ways, as Nietzsche recognised himself in an enlightening piece of correspondence with his friend Franz Overbeck in July 1881 – a date that is noteworthy as it rests pertinently at the cusp of Nietzsche’s mature period, just before he went on to write what many consider to be his most important works, such as The Joyful Science (1882; 1887), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Genealogy of Morals (1887) and Twilight of the Idols (1888). Indeed, it is precisely during this period that Nietzsche makes his most sustained attempt to grapple with the experience of immanence, affectivity and the problems of modernity: the death of God, eternal recurrence, will-to-power and the genealogical investigations into morality are all undertaken in these important texts.

Introduction 3

Nietzsche’s correspondence directly names Spinoza as a precursor at this important juncture: I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted. I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by ‘instinct’. Not only is his overall tendency like mine – making knowledge the most powerful affect – but in five main points of his doctrine I recognise myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergences are admittedly tremendous, they are more due to the differences in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and made my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange.1 Of all the connections that Nietzsche lists here, the most important one recognises a rather nuanced aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy that he connects with his own and which has largely been overlooked, namely that they share the same overall tendency of making knowledge the most powerful affect. This is an extremely interesting approach, because rather than knowledge being considered as a way to get around affectivity in order to ground and understand the world around us, Nietzsche sees himself and Spinoza as considering knowledge as an affect and a way to augment affectivity and thus enhance our experience of the world.2 Nietzsche thus shares with Spinoza an acceptance of the immanent reality of affectivity and a refusal to dismiss it as mere fleeting passion or emotion, or reduce it

1 Nietzsche (1976: 92; KGB 3.1.111; Letter 135, Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck, 30 July 1881). 2 Curley (1988: 128–129) is rather sceptical towards Nietzsche’s interpretation of Spinoza as making knowledge the most powerful affect, citing Spinoza (E5.Pre) where he writes that the fifth chapter of the Ethics will investigate how the mind’s knowledge can pose ‘remedies for the affects’ (‘affectuum remedia’). However, a remedy is not a cure, and as it will be discussed in chapter one, the forms of knowledge articulated by Spinoza progress through a growing affective intensification rather than a suppression of affectivity.

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

to the surface effects of a more fundamental entity or process, such as consciousness, the human or God. This marks a decisive break from the classical image of philosophy as precisely the pursuit of the rational, objective or even subjective conditions of possibility that ground experience. ‘Experience’ here is not considered a thing that grounds or is grounded in any way, but rather a term that is used to cover an ineluctable aspect of what it is to live – not the intellectual ‘I think, therefore I am’ of Descartes, but as Spinoza points out with typical economy, simply that we ‘feel that a certain body is affected in many ways’. 3 This is something that we cannot escape from, however sophisticated our theories and concepts might become. Affectivity – and the body as the site of this affectivity – thus plays the pivotal role in every moment of our lives and all the activities in which we are engaged. More sophisticated questions thus build on perhaps the most basic question of all and one that we start to pose before we can even properly express it; namely, in what ways can this body affect and be affected – what can this body do? And from this, how do bodies affect each other? Such questions do not arise through mere intellectual curiosity, however, but through problems that emerge immanently in the affective relations of the body – relations that are always-already felt in multiplicities of ‘joy’ or ‘sadness’; not merely in the psychological sense of happy or miserable, but rather in the sense of transient euphoria or dysphoria – literally experience ‘carried well’ or ‘carried badly’. As Spinoza points out, we do not desire something because it is good, but rather call something good because we desire it.4 Affectivity is inseparably involved in the formation of our language, ideas, values and judgements, meaning that it is not something that masks knowledge or is just a superficial phenomenon, and nor is it something that can be eliminated or even controlled in any fundamental sense. The question of knowledge is thus the question of the composition of our affective relations – in its simplest form, how to cope with ‘sadness’ and enable the repetition of ‘joy’. This is the core of the Spinoza–Nietzsche project of making knowledge the most powerful affect.

3 4

Spinoza (1994: 116; E2.A). E3.P9S.

Introduction 5

This also means that they break away from the classical ‘moral’ or Platonic image of philosophy, which they both associate with a deeply theological approach that constructs an image of the ‘true’ nature of reality via appealing to a transcendent realm of divinity and ideas, or in a more modern version, to the transcendence of the subject or the ‘I’. Spinoza is explicit in the fact that the holy trinity of philosophy, namely Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, ‘carry little weight’ with him,5 while their belief in transcendent essences (or the fact they act as if they do) means that they confuse general ideas or particular modes of thinking with objective realities.6 They thus understand people not as they are, but how they would like them to be,7 meaning that their philosophies are imbued with a moralisation and judgement of life that disparages singular beings by negatively comparing them with imaginative generalities. As will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3, Nietzsche is also famously critical of Platonism as he considers it to be an ascetic negation of the body that favours the ideal at the cost of the multiplicity of perspectives that bodily experience involves. Briefly put, what both Spinoza and Nietzsche are critical of here is the damage caused by the transience of living experience being dictated to by ‘confused and mutilated’ ideas, to use Spinoza’s phrase, which is precisely what philosophy has tended to do with its asceticism that has decreed that life should serve knowledge, rather than knowledge serving life – a decree that is paradigmatically expressed by the famous Socratic dictum that an unexamined life is not worth living.8 What Spinoza in particular points out is that knowledge begins and ends in joy, and it is the task of philosophy to make knowledge the most powerful affect for living, transient existence. This central task connects these otherwise disparate figures, for it is clear that their styles and their approaches differ widely, meaning that any straightforward comparison of their works would almost certainly fail to see their many connections, which is perhaps why there has been relatively little interest in the Spinoza– Nietzsche relationship.9 5

Spinoza (2002: 905; Letter 56, Spinoza to Hugo Boxel, ca. September 1674). ST 1:6. 7 This is a general criticism that he levies at philosophers (see TP 1). 8 Plato (1961: 23; Apology 38a). 9 The only book-length exposition is William S. Wurzer’s (1975) comparative study Nietzsche und Spinoza, which maintains a metaphysical approach to both thinkers in 6

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

This aim of this book is to investigate this overlooked relationship by examining the orientating role of affectivity in their philosophies, how this connects the two thinkers, and last but not least, what philosophy looks like after Spinoza and Nietzsche and their attempts to make knowledge the most powerful affect. This means that the pivotal role of affectivity provides the lens through which the examination of Spinoza and Nietzsche takes place. If Spinoza and Nietzsche construct their philosophies from the standpoint of affirming that we cannot step outside affective, transient experience but only augment it from within, then what does this say of bodies, ideas and common notions in Spinoza? What does this say of willto-power and the eternal return in Nietzsche? How precisely does the orientation around affectivity connect the two thinkers? What is the significance of this for philosophy and what is its role after Spinoza and Nietzsche? These are some of the crucial issues that this book sets out to address while investigating the main themes. This book therefore takes a particular approach to the works of Spinoza and Nietzsche that does not pretend in any way to give a complete exposition of their philosophies. Rather, a change in emphasis is offered where their philosophies are examined through the lens of the role that affectivity plays within their works – a role that is backed up with close textual references in a ‘redemptive’ kind of reading that is developed in the final chapter of this book. This shift in emphasis also means that much of the metaphysical controversy surrounding them is deemphasised to a significant degree because the focus on affectivity in Spinoza and Nietzsche means that any claims they make regarding essences is to be understood as betraying a certain

terms of ‘oneness’ or unity either as substance for Spinoza or in an experience of the world for Nietzsche, the latter seeking completion (Vollkommenheit) in the will-to-power and the eternal return (1975: 168). This takes a decidedly different path to this book, which refrains from reading Spinoza as grounding all life in the metaphysical category of substance (Wurzer 1975: 171) because even if this acts as a form of explanation for Spinoza, it does so as an affective augmentation of living experience and it is here that the ‘reality’ of the thought makes itself felt – and the same goes for Nietzsche’s will-topower and eternal return. Apart from Wurzer, others have dedicated articles or short chapters to the Spinoza/Nietzsche relationship, such as Curley (1988: 126–128), Della Rocca (2008: 292–303), Schacht (2001) and Yovel (1989b: 104–135), although these are few and far between. As Stewart (2006: 236) remarks, Nietzsche’s ‘qualifications as a Spinozist have been insufficiently acknowledged, even by himself’.

Introduction 7

affective genesis.10 Through this approach, some important aspects of their philosophies are shown from a different perspective, thus providing some nuanced insights to contribute to the literature on Spinoza and Nietzsche, and also to the burgeoning literature on the ‘affective turn’ of the humanities and social sciences.11 While every chapter contributes to the major themes outlined above, on an individual level they also have a distinct purpose and role within the book. Therefore, after some short remarks regarding some of the difficulties in approaching Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s works, the book will begin with an analysis of the role of affectivity in Spinoza’s philosophy. This will involve a short exposition of an extremely influential and important figure for Spinoza, namely Rene Descartes. This is done for two main reasons. Firstly, Descartes is an extremely influential and important figure for Spinoza, and outlining Descartes’ problem and his manner of addressing it will provide some crucial background and context for Spinoza; and secondly, Descartes is in many ways the first truly modern philosopher insofar as he grapples directly with the problem of knowledge in a secular society and thus turns the focus to the human experience of our thought processes and the potency of our ideas in his cogito, meaning that he is a hugely important figure for Nietzsche too 10 Although this will obviously involve a complex discussion over the nature of metaphysics that cannot be entered into here. However, insofar as this holds, it also means that commentaries and interpretations of Spinoza and Nietzsche that consider their philosophies to be essentially metaphysical travel a different path than this book. Significantly, these include the idealist interpretations of Spinoza, and particularly the influential interpretations of Spinoza by the German idealists, and interpretations of Nietzsche that consider him to be a metaphysician or as presenting a systematic philosophical doctrine. Most significantly, this includes one of the most famous interpretations of Nietzsche, namely Heidegger’s, which, as he himself admits, betrays something of his own philosophy more than anything else (Heidegger 1961a: 9), and in that sense is a genuinely Nietzschean act of interpretation as appropriation (see GM 2.12; KSA 5.314), but one which travels a decidedly different path than this book (see Stegmaier (2009: 10) for a critique of Heidegger’s approach to Nietzsche that erases the multifaceted forms of his writing in favour of synthesising the content). As Yovel (1989b: 112) notes, Heidegger adapts Nietzsche’s idea of overcoming within immanence to his own account of Dasein, but restricts his analysis to give a ‘privileged ontic position in being’ to human beings, thus aligning himself to the Hegelian line of philosophy, meaning that Nietzsche remains closer to Spinoza. 11 Indeed, if this ‘affective turn’ has been growing in prominence since the 1990s (see La Caze and Lloyd (2011: 2)), then it is not unreasonable to suggest that Spinoza presaged this by a good three-hundred years. In fact, Spinoza’s influence has been recognised in this regard (see, for example, Seigworth and Gregg (2010)).

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

and the problem of affectivity as such. The discussion of Spinoza will then proceed by showing how he turns way from the Cartesian cogito and dualistic system by drawing attention to the imagination and bodily affective experience and how these relate to what he terms as adequate and inadequate ideas. In order to understand precisely what Spinoza means by this, an analysis of an important recent interpretation of Spinoza as an early ‘anomalous monist’ will be made to show why it is mistaken, which will in turn draw out the significance of adequation for Spinoza and how affectivity plays the crucial role. The chapter will end with a discussion of his concept of conatus and how it shifts the focus of philosophy away from the essence of things according to ‘what’ they are towards ‘how’ they are instead; that is, the sense in which something affects and is affected, whether this ‘something’ is a body, belief or idea. The second chapter will move on to Nietzsche and will begin with a discussion of the importance of Spinoza for Nietzsche’s later work in particular and how affectivity plays a crucial role in Nietzsche’s core concepts. Indeed, just as the body as an affective site is central to Spinoza’s philosophy, the ‘guide of the body’ is equally as important to Nietzsche along with its plurality of perspectives and the manner in which it ‘interprets’ or ‘translates’ experience. However, for Nietzsche this multiplicity has become obscured via a growing level of consciousness that interprets experience in a linguistic and communicative form that establishes agents and subjects behind experience who are responsible for all actions and consequences – Descartes’ cogito being a paradigmatic example for Nietzsche in its erroneous claim that ‘I’ think when in reality thinking ‘simply’ occurs. The bulk of the second chapter will therefore discuss how Nietzsche problematises the growing dominance of consciousness in modernity as it engenders a ‘becoming-moral’ that negates the body and renders the human individually blameworthy for its perceived transgressions. The third chapter will build on the earlier analysis of affectivity and consciousness by focusing on how, for Nietzsche, philosophy has exacerbated the dominance of consciousness in its attempt to address a genuine problem that has haunted humanity, namely nihilism. As dramatic as this may sound, nihilism here is meant in a quite straightforward sense as a consequence of the perspective of consciousness and the manner in which it translates the transience of

Introduction 9

experience temporally, thus resulting in the awareness that despite all our best efforts, in the end everything perishes and must come to an end. This foreboding sense of destruction has taken many historical forms according to Nietzsche, and there have been various attempts to cope with it, most of which fall under what Nietzsche terms as the ‘ascetic ideal’, namely a way of withdrawing and devaluing temporal existence in favour of a form of permanence or transcendent beyond (typically ‘God’ or ‘Man’). However, philosophy has also been guilty of this according to Nietzsche – particularly since Plato – and its repression of the body with its multiplicity of perspectives has led to an even more dominant role for consciousness and increasingly moralistic interpretations of reality. The main purpose of the third chapter is thus to develop this critique of philosophy in order to set up a discussion of a new philosophical task in the fourth chapter. However, another important aspect of Chapter 3 will be to develop an account of how Nietzsche ‘redeems’ an affirmative drive in philosophy, and in Plato in particular, that does not negate transience and the body, but rather wants to compose a way to repeat the joy experienced therein. This will involve a discussion of Nietzsche’s Wille-zurMacht or ‘will-to-power’ as his ultimate philosophical commitment to the immanence of affectivity and as providing a genealogical tool with which to ‘redeem’ the Socratic–Platonic ideal previously discussed. This section will also examine two other important themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy, namely the eternal return and amor fati. Here it will be suggested that the eternal return is posed as a kind of test that exposes the sad affects of nihilistic Socratic-Platonism while creating a sadness of its own – a sadness that Nietzsche attempts to redeem with the thought of amor fati, the love of fate. The final chapter will engage with the task of philosophy as making knowledge the most powerful affect. To this end, one of the key problem areas that Spinoza and Nietzsche highlight is what the latter calls the ‘seduction of language’ – how language dominates our way of thinking and interpreting the world and constantly brings the codes of the past to bear on the present. It will be suggested here that for both Spinoza and Nietzsche, philosophy involves an ethics of interpretation that attempts to unburden the present of the dysphoric aspects of the values, ideals and perspectives that we inherit. The first part of this chapter will therefore discuss Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s interpretative strategies and how they attempt

10 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

to ‘redeem’ the past through tracing the affective genesis of our language and ideals through our inherited texts. Philosophy’s traditional devaluation of the written word in favour of the voice (typified by Plato and Descartes) is thus reassessed by Spinoza and Nietzsche. The conclusive part of the final chapter will outline the task of philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche more concretely. Here it will be suggested that both Spinoza and Nietzsche follow the basic inspiration of philosophy as being the ‘love of knowledge’, but rather than believing that knowledge is the precondition for virtue and happiness, knowledge here is considered as building on the joy presented in experience to provide new ways to compose our affective relations in yet-to-be determined ways. It will also be suggested here that Spinoza and Nietzsche offer two different ways of achieving this. Whereas Spinoza looks to augment joy through the discovery of commonalities (hence the importance he places upon reason), for Nietzsche joy is augmented through overcoming resistance and thus appropriating the signs of experience into a joyful pathos, meaning that he has a ‘tragic’ approach to philosophy with little regard for the common. However, they are both in agreement when it comes to forging a new orientation for philosophy that dispenses with its inherently moralistic tendencies, although Nietzsche’s focus on the appropriative or translative aspect of joy means that he does allow for a distinction between good and bad translations. The book will thus end with a discussion of this and how philosophy is provided with a specific task in distinction from the arts and sciences: whereas art is evocative of a particular affective perspective through its composition and science restricts affectivity in favour of the invocation of regular and repeatable compositions regardless of perspective, the task of philosophy is to create conceptual compositions that are provocative enough to call forth new perspectives and ways of affecting and be affected; in other words, new bodies. Before the analysis begins, however, it is important to outline some of the difficulties involved in reading and interpreting Spinoza and Nietzsche, as well highlight some important interpretations that have influenced this book. To this end, some brief remarks about how Nietzsche’s works have been used in this book will come first, followed by a short discussion of some of the difficulties involved in reading Spinoza’s texts, and finally an acknowledgement of some of the influences from the commentaries that have gone into this book.

Introduction 11

Note on the use of Nietzsche’s texts While the history of Spinoza’s philology is rather straightforward, Nietzsche’s is notoriously problematic. As will be discussed below, problems in Spinoza philology relate to the widespread suppression and defamation of his works, though the integrity of the texts themselves has remained. The problems with Nietzsche’s texts are far greater given the erroneous publication at the hands of his sister of the famous non-work given the title of Der Wille zur Macht, which was pieced together from the cutting and pasting of various fragments from his notebooks and used as a kind of philosophical justification for the German Nationalist Socialists. This has been remedied to a huge extent by the Colli & Montinari critical edition and the work of commentators such as Kaufmann (1974), though great damage had already been done.12 It has therefore become standard for any work that involves Nietzsche’s texts to any significant degree to outline how they have been used. It has been suggested that there are two general approaches to Nietzsche’s work, namely ‘splitters’, who focus on either the published or the unpublished work (but usually the former), and ‘lumpers’, who treat the whole corpus as valid material to investigate under the name of Nietzsche.13 Both approaches have good reasons and can justify themselves with reasonable arguments, so it is perhaps a matter of what a commentary wants to do with Nietzsche. Certainly, if the aim is to read Nietzsche into the history of philosophy in a traditional metaphysical sense, then his private notebooks, where he experiments with many of the longstanding questions and problems of philosophy, are the place to go.14 If the emphasis is placed more on Nietzsche’s styles, ‘deconstructive’ manoeuvres, elusiveness and his anti-metaphysical attitude, then the published work is key. However, from the perspective of this book, this problem is not a major one, because it is a question of analysing the crucial role that affectivity plays in Nietzsche’s work, meaning that any material that contributes something here is of potential merit. 12 See Magnus (1986) and Stegmaier (2009) for further discussions of the problems surrounding Nietzsche philology. 13 This is Magnus’ (1986) distinction, who places Hollingdale, Alderman, Montinari, Strong and Kaufmann in the ‘splitters’ category, and Heidegger, Jaspers, Deleuze, Müller-Lauter, Danto and Schacht in the ‘lumpers’ category. 14 Magnus (1986: 83–84) also makes this point.

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

Nonetheless, his published material does constitute a series of works that can be analysed and evaluated in the context of achieving a particular aim or describing a particular problem, so they must take precedence. It might be objected that many of the notebooks include material that was planned to be published in the much fabled Der Wille-zur-Macht, a book that, as mentioned above, was eventually cobbled together and published posthumously under the auspices of his sister, and thus these notes constitute something like a work. However, this objection has been dismissed rather convincingly with strong philological evidence that suggests that Nietzsche abandoned any such book and considered the vast majority of everything that was published by his sister in Der Wille-zur-Macht as unfit for publication.15 The approach taken in this book is thus only to utilise passages from the notebooks that elucidate that which can be readily found in Nietzsche’s published works. Of these works, it is his later publications written after the abovementioned correspondence of 1881 (and particularly post Zarathustra) that are the most interesting for the purposes of this book, for it is here that affectivity comes to play the crucial role in Nietzsche’s philosophy.

The difficulties involved in reading Spinoza While Spinoza’s texts have maintained their integrity throughout their publication history, it is still important to recognise the particular challenges that await any attempt at understanding them. There is a challenge in understanding any complex philosophy, of course, but when it comes to Spinoza, special challenges arise due to his unusual style and the historical prejudices that have mounted against its perceived consequences. This means that despite the relatively small corpus left by Spinoza, his texts present many significant problems for the contemporary reader. The most obvious of these concerns the geometric method that his masterwork, the

15 Again, this is the result of Magnus’ (1986) research, who sums up: ‘In brief, 934 out of 1,067 entries in the lumpers’ favorite book [Der Wille zur Macht] appear to have been intended for no book at all; or, on the most generous construal, 270 notes may have been intended initially for further polishing, only to have been abandoned in the end’ (1986: 85).

Introduction 13

Ethics, is written in.16 Indeed, it is probably the only major work of philosophy written in the style that is associated first and foremost with Euclidean geometry,17 with its deductive approach that develops in the form of definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations, corollaries, postulates, lemmas and scholia.18 This is compounded by its austere opening chapter that sets out to prove and demonstrate a rather totalising monist ontology in around forty pages, and later passages that suggest that human actions and appetites can be treated in the same manner, ‘just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies’.19 As if this were not enough, a certain historical prejudice has mounted against Spinoza, in large part due to the fact that his works were almost universally banned and defamed for centuries after his death.20 Indeed, for a long time it was exceedingly rare that Spinoza’s name was even mentioned, lest the fatal label of ‘Spinozist’ be encouraged.21 Spinoza’s texts were the cause of much strife in European circles,22 for most theologians and philosophers that inherited them considered Spinozism as the most dangerous threat to reli16 As Bergson (1946: 133) famously pointed out: ‘that complication of machinery, that power to crush which causes the beginner, in the presence of the Ethics, to be struck with admiration and terror as though he were before a battleship of the Dreadnought class’. 17 Although as McKeon (1930a: 178–179) notes, Descartes and Hobbes both suggest the geometric method as suitable for philosophy, while the works of Alan of Lille and Nicholas of Amiens are actually geometric, and even dialectical methods have something of a mathematical rigour to them. Nonetheless, it is probably safe to say that no other geometrical work as influential as the Ethics has been written in philosophy. 18 However, as Yovel (1989a: 139) notes, the geometrical form provides a circular system that may be approached in different ways once its paths have been travelled and the thinking performed, after which the ‘question of cognitive order becomes obsolete’. This means that the geometrical system is a kind of ‘weak analogy’ rather than a strict system that must be adhered to (1989a: 141). 19 Spinoza (1994: 193; E3.Pre). 20 See Israel (2006) and Moreau (2006). 21 See Goetschel (2004: 183–184) and Bell (1984: 2–12). As Bell (1984: 1) notes, Spinoza was still being talked about ‘like a dead dog’ in 1780 according to Lessing; but more generally Spinoza was taken to represent ‘atheism, fatalism, pantheism and materialism, portrayed in a way that results in a morally abhorrent and philosophically absurd worldview’, while ‘a further line of attack was the charge of impenetrable obscurity’ (Bell 1984: 6). Yovel (1989a: 175) emphasises the extent of the attack on all sides on Spinoza by noting that he was despised by both the traditional philosophical establishment and the Cartesian revolutionaries. 22 Most famously the Spinozastreit that emerged from Jacobi writing in the 1780s that the great Lessing had admitted to him that he was in fact a Spinozist (Goetschel 2004: 12; Moreau 2006: 420).

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

gion and morality because it suggested that there is no benevolent or creator God, no moral world order, no absolute good or evil, no sin or grace and no redemption or punishment after death. Spinozism had its political enemies too, for Spinoza exacerbated his unpopularity by being the first philosopher to suggest that it was in a democracy where civil virtues could be propagated the most successfully,23 for it is only in the plurality of talents that are fostered in a society that is self-determining and unfettered to the narrow ambitions of the few that an active freedom of expression could be nurtured. As a reaction to the perceived danger of Spinozism, three general strategies were considered to limit the affect that Spinoza’s texts could have on intellectual circles and the general populace: either ban his texts altogether, construct thorough and convincing refutations of them, or offer watered down interpretations that render them safe.24 Because of the widespread underground distribution of Spinoza’s texts, banning them was ultimately futile,25 while the difficulty of Spinoza’s philosophy made it hard to refute in any thorough manner.26 It was therefore the third option of watering the philosophy down that has dominated. To this end, it is probably Hegel’s reading of Spinoza that has had the most influence, as this certainly falls within the watered down version of Spinozism,27 for 23

TTP 16.11. See Walther (2009) for a discussion of this. Walther (2009: 26) notes that the preferred strategy was, according to such authorities at the time as Johann Heinrich Heidegger, to ban Spinoza’s texts because they signal the ‘death of the church’ and were thus best suppressed unless they start to filter through and affect people, after which they needed to be ‘subdued with the truncheon of right reason’. The first German translation of a Spinoza text came out in 1744 in the form of his Ethics, which interestingly enough was accompanied with a refutation by Christian Wolff with the explicit intention of ‘publicly expounding the enemy’ (Walther 2009: 35–36), meaning that while the text had been grudgingly made public, it was clearly done so mainly in order to undermine it. As will be discussed below in reference to Spinoza’s textual interpretation, the conditions of the dissemination of Spinoza’s texts cannot be dissociated from the ways in which they have come to affect us, and are thus worthy of consideration. 25 Israel (2006: 40). 26 According to Jacobi it was even impossible to refute with reason, thus throwing the Enlightenment project into disarray (Moreau 2006: 420). 27 Hegel (1995: 256) even remarks that Spinoza’s philosophy is very simple and easy to comprehend, which it probably is after it has been reduced to a doctrine that fits within Hegel’s narrative. Puzzlingly enough, Hegel (1995: 257) then goes on to argue that to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all philosophy – but then again, given Hegel’s low opinion of beginnings, this is probably not as much of a compliment as it seems. In fact, this highlights Hegel’s rather misleading reading of 24

Introduction 15

whether it was intentional or not, he offers a simplified reading that ensures Spinoza fits nicely within his own version of the history of philosophy.28 Hegel’s critique of Spinoza centres on the claim that he presents an ‘acosmism’ insofar as he thinks all as One without any movement or becoming, while any singularity lacks any real being or existence.29 Spinoza does not help his case here by beginning his Ethics by defining substance before even discussing how thinking such definitions might even be begun. The dominant line of Spinoza’s critics could thus be summed up in the accusation that with Spinoza everything is always-already decided because nothing is actually decided – substance always-already ‘is’, while its determinations (particular, singular beings) are not. Even worse, affectivity itself is degraded in this reading as it marks passages of change when change is merely an illusion. However, what this overlooks is the fact that the Ethics expresses a movement of thought, and one that Spinoza takes to be affecting some kind of real change in the possibilities for thinking and acting (hence the final chapters on human bondage and freedom). There is literally a beginning and an end to the book of course, but it could easily be construed as consisting of a beginning which is the end, the middle which is the beginning, and the end which is the middle – at every point thinking is in media res.30 Indeed, there are many paths into the Ethics, but it is only by getting lost, returning, and arriving at a new point of departure that it can be appreciated Spinoza because here he goes on to note that Spinoza marks the beginning of philosophy because he marks the necessary negation of all that is particular. However, for Hegel (1995: 287) all that is truly real for Spinoza is the undifferentiated universal substance while all particularity is dependent upon this without any real existence, for they are the mere negation of substance. As Parkinson (1977: 156) notes, Hegel seems to generalise a phrase only found once in a piece of Spinoza’s correspondence, where, when discussing figures in particular, Spinoza writes ‘determinatio negatio est’, but this is only to say that the shape of something is determined by that which it relates to and is not a principle of its being. Most importantly, this gives no reason to suggest that shape is unreal, let alone any other aspect of singular beings. 28 Pierre Macherey (1990) suggests that Hegel actually needed to misread Spinoza in order to maintain his subjective idealism. 29 For further discussion of Hegel’s criticism and relation to Spinoza, see Yovel (1989b: 27–50). 30 The new order would then consist of: 1. a ‘phenomenological’ account of experience, 2. the conditions of adequate thinking, and 3. an ontology in light of 1 and 2. Given Hegel’s strictly ontological interpretation of Spinoza, it seems as if his reading of the Ethics ended after part one.

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

as having no distinct starting or end points at all, but rather interweaving paths. This is in stark opposition to Descartes’ Meditations, where a rigorous starting point is offered, but as with any absolute starting point, this is at the cost of surreptitiously containing the entire journey in advance; in Descartes’ case, God is always-already there in the ever-present cogito waiting to be discovered, making the movement a false one from the beginning. Spinoza’s Ethics, however, offers the ontology that this movement of thought produces at the book’s literal beginning, but it makes no sense at all as a standalone claim or theory – the beginning only makes sense at the end with the discussion of amor Dei intellectualis and the realisation that the thought of Deus sive Natura is the highest affirmation and offers the most intense affective experience possible.

Important Influences When it was stated above that the Spinoza–Nietzsche connection has largely been overlooked, there is one significant exception, and that is Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze articulated some strong resonances between Spinoza and Nietzsche, though without dedicating any specific work to doing so.31 Perhaps most importantly, Deleuze emphasises the importance of affectivity in their works,32 whilst highlighting the ‘ethological’ approach to ethics that this entails for Spinoza,33 and the symptomological approach to philosophy that this results in for Nietzsche.34 This being said, a different path than Deleuze’s is taken in this book insofar as he largely engages with Spinoza and Nietzsche in order to find new ways of addressing the question of being and the related ontological problems of philosophy. To this end, Spinoza is articulated as continuing a univocal concept of being, while the emphasis is placed on a univocal concept of ‘force’ in Nietzsche, meaning that affectivity is couched in terms of force’s differential

31 For example, Deleuze’s (1988) second book on Spinoza begins with a discussion of Nietzsche, and goes on to make connections between them in terms of their shift in focus from consciousness to the body. 32 See for example Deleuze (1983: 61–63) and (1988: 48–51). 33 Deleuze (1988: 122–130). 34 Deleuze (1983: 3).

Introduction 17

element.35 The traditional questions of philosophy that Deleuze creatively addresses via Spinoza, Nietzsche and others are bracketed in this book in favour of a more concentrated engagement with affectivity and in particular its relation to the practice of philosophy. Apart from Deleuze, other important works that contribute to the reading of Spinoza in this book include Yovel’s discussion of the orientating role of immanence, Vinciguerra’s highlighting of the importance of vestigia and Balibar’s and Negri’s remarks on the importance of potentia.36 As regards to Nietzsche, Klossowski’s focus on the body and the semiotics of ‘impulses’ or affects in place of the interpretations of consciousness, Blondel’s linking of the body and text, Kofman’s and Murphy’s emphasis on the role of metaphor in Nietzsche’s work, Nabais’ re-evaluation of the role of the thought of the eternal return, Loeb’s insight into the close link between this thought and Socrates, and Katsafanas’ description of consciousness as one particular form of awareness among many all play important roles.37

35 For a condense example of the use that Spinoza and Nietzsche are put to in order to address the question of being, see Deleuze (2004: 49–52). 36 Full details of these texts can be found in the bibliography. 37 There are many other influences of course (details of which can be found in the bibliography).

1 Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

For a supposed rationalist, there has probably never been a philosopher more interested and one who put more value in bodily experience than Spinoza. While his predecessor Descartes (and much of classical philosophy and theology) deems the body to be decidedly unreliable in its particularity and changeability, for Spinoza bodies are fascinating, ingenious and just as worthy of our attention as any of our most lofty ideas and concepts. As Spinoza famously puts it, ‘no one yet has determined what the body can do’.1 This ‘yet-to-bedetermined’ aspect of bodies is perhaps why they have been treated with such mistrust – bodies change and their senses and feelings are transient and instable, whereas our ideas and concepts are far more stable and truth as such is permanence itself. However, rather than this constant change and variability being considered as a weakness or a hindrance to life, Spinoza accepts it as the essential way in which we live and therefore something to be affirmed and appreciated: affectivity, the constant sense of transience and ‘inbetween-ness’ that relates each and every discernible experience of the world, is precisely that which allows us to build a knowledge that can compose our encounters in the world into ‘euphoric’ experiences; that is, experiences that are carried well and where the body can express itself. This opening chapter will explore this crucial role that affectivity plays in the core elements of Spinoza’s philosophy, which will also set the stage for an examination of Nietzsche’s work and how affectivity 1

Spinoza (1994: 155; E3.P2S)

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

connects the two thinkers, as well as paving the way for a discussion of how they gesture towards a different kind of philosophy that affirms the affective dimensions of knowledge. As the conclusion of this chapter will stress, the crucial move that Spinoza makes in this regard involves turning the question away from ‘what’ things are (bodies, ideas, values and so on) to ‘how’ they come about and how they affect and are affected. This is a very complex and often technical issue, but it should be borne in mind that at every stage it is a certain affective relationality that is at stake here and thus certain arrangements of ideas, images and bodily experiences. Spinoza’s philosophy is notoriously difficult to navigate however, so while some of the terminology in this chapter might seem a little opaque at times, as the book progresses these terms will be linked with broader themes that will help to shed further light on how Spinoza’s ideas ultimately lead to a new task for philosophy. As discussed in the introduction, in order to begin to get to grips with the problems that Spinoza grapples with, it is important to understand the core of Descartes’ philosophy, and specifically his cogito, which will also help to understand the key role that affectivity plays in Spinoza’s work. This means that before getting to grips with Spinoza’s texts, it is important to outline the problems and attempted solutions that he inherited from the person who for many is the inaugurator of modern philosophy. By attempting to ground our understanding without presuming or appealing – at least in the first instance – to any kind of substantial entity, such as the human as a ‘rational animal’ or a theological notion of divine creation, and instead analysing the immanent processes of human thought via his method of radical doubt, Descartes opens up a space for analysing both the fragility and constitutive efficacy of ideas, a space that Spinoza exploits to the full. After the discussion of Descartes, the focus will then switch to Spinoza and how he uses the imagination to emphasise the inescapably affective nature of living experience and thus ultimately the falsity of the Cartesian position of radical doubt. A closer inspection of Spinoza’s articulation of affectivity will then take place, followed by an examination of the relationship between affectivity and ideas to show how they are intimately linked for Spinoza. Due to this affective dimension of ideas, they can also be evaluated according to their adequacy insofar as they bear witness to thinking as a qualitatively distinct power of expression. This means that following the

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

examination of affectivity and ideas, a critique of the interpretation of Spinoza as a proto ‘anomalous monist’ – someone who suggests that all of reality is essentially physical yet dualistically explainable – will take place in order to show how ideas are not reducible to physicality for Spinoza, because thinking is an irreducible power of expression (what he terms as an ‘attribute’). However, it will also be shown how this does not result in a dualism for Spinoza, because thought takes place within the immanent realm of affective experience – and it is here that we can test the adequacy of our ideas. The attention will then switch to the important role that language plays in Spinoza’s philosophy – as it does in Nietzsche’s too – and how this links with affectivity. The crucial point here is how Spinoza distinguishes between words and ideas and how this must be borne in mind if we are to achieve something that is crucial in Spinoza’s philosophy, namely ‘common notions’. These notions allow us to progress from our inadequate or general ideas that we gather from random experience to common notions that understand the geneses of the affective relations of our experience and how these may be composed. This will be couched in terms of knowing ‘how’ things are rather than being stuck with inadequate ideas of ‘what’ things are. This discussion of the nature of language, ideas and knowledge will be crucial for the final chapter of the book on the task of philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche. Throughout the discussion of Spinoza in this chapter, the orientating role that affectivity plays in his philosophy will remain in focus. As mentioned above, however, it is important to begin with a look at Descartes before turning to Spinoza.

1.1

Descartes’ cogito and the power of ideas

That the great French philosopher Rene Descartes was a huge influence on Spinoza is abundantly clear from his correspondence, the study groups he belonged to and his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy. In the preface to this largely expositive work, he describes Descartes as ‘the brightest star of our age’ who had ‘laid the unshakeable foundations of philosophy’.2 Descartes’ focus on the immanent processes

Spinoza (2002: 117).

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

of thought divorced from the prejudices of inherited dogma provided the foundations upon which to begin rethinking the productive power of the mind, as well as its fragility at the mercy of our random encounters in the world. However, whilst Spinoza is doubtlessly influenced by the Cartesian resolve to face up to the challenges posed by a modern world without the comforts of theological dogma, Spinoza’s turn to the affective nature of experience means that he moves away decisively from Descartes’ solution, which famously involves a dualistic approach to understanding the world and maintaining a strict separation between mind and body. Briefly stated, Descartes’ deceptively simple solution to dispense with medieval dogma and uncertainty is to bracket all preconceived ideas of the world and try to find a certain thought from which to base his knowledge. He discovers that while the physical world is changeable and untrustworthy, the fact that he is thinking about this world is genuinely real, and by discovering one idea within his thought that has more reality than any other, namely the idea of God, he thereby finds a foundation for knowledge. This is not to turn away from the growing body of scientific knowledge that surrounds Descartes at the beginning of modernity – he is, in fact, far too scientific for that – but rather to argue that we cannot really understand anything by merely studying mechanistic laws (as useful as they are) unless we understand their condition of possibility, which just happens to be God. However, even though Descartes reintroduces God here, the interesting point is that God is only knowable for Descartes through an idea and not through any external authority or by merely pointing at things in the world and believing that there must be a God who created all this. Rather, Descartes analyses the processes of thought and the nature of ideas contained therein to see how they interact with and affect our experience of the world. Crucially, as important as God remains in Descartes’ philosophy, it is only known through an idea, and for Descartes ideas are clear and distinct; that is, ideas are both discernible (an idea of x, an idea of y and so on) and have a certain vivacity or force that affects us, and it is this vivacity of ideas that paves the way for Spinoza’s closer inspection of the relationship between affectivity, ideas and experience. In order to flesh this out a little further, it is necessary to take a closer look at Descartes’ idea of God and the importance of clarity and

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

distinction, which means starting with the fundamental principle of Descartes’ philosophy, namely the cogito. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes sets out with a procedure of radical doubt to place everything that he knows under suspicion. In a deliriously paranoid opening that includes visions of the mad and the seeming indistinguishability of dreams and reality, Descartes comes to the conclusion that bodily senses can be deceptive and are thus untrustworthy. Indeed, the whole of waking, living experience is dubious: As I think about this more carefully, I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep ... Suppose then that I am dreaming, and that these particulars – that my eyes are open, that I am moving my head and stretching out my hands – are not true. Perhaps, indeed, I do not even have such hands or such a body at all. 3 Descartes thus tries to find some firm ground to set out on the road to certain knowledge. He finds this with his famous formulation cogito ergo sum, with which he offers the frighteningly solipsistic claim that while he cannot claim to know what he is or whether or not any ‘thing’ really exists, he can at least be certain that he exists through his thought processes. That is to say, while he might be in error about the results of his thought (the nature of what exists), he can at least be certain that he is thinking and thus can be certain that he exists. The body is thus totally bracketed by Descartes in this fundamental first step to knowledge: the fact that he can sense that he has a body that is being affected by other bodies means very little because he could be mistaken, for it is only the first-hand experience of thinking that he has a body that allows him to affirm his existence. However, this thought alone only provides him with the surely intolerable reality of merely being aware of his bare existence and nothing else, so ‘something else’ is needed. The cogito is, nonetheless, a crucial orientating principle in terms of modernity: rather than looking to the heavens or some external authority to guide us, we turn to the thoughts, feelings and introspection of the individual.

Descartes (1996: 13; Meditations 1.20).

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

Luckily enough, Descartes does discover something that rescues the individual from intolerable solipsism with the discovery of an excessive thought that he could not possibly be the author of and which guarantees the path to knowledge about bodies and things that lie in the external world. This thought is the idea of God – a being that is ‘infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, and supremely powerful, and which created myself and everything else (if anything else there be) that exists’.4 Descartes claims that the more he considers this idea, the more he is convinced that he cannot merely have invented it. Furthermore – and crucially – the idea is ‘utterly clear and distinct’. 5 It is important to note from that this does not merely involve the formal recognition of something that really exists and which we can be certain of, as it is the excessive and forceful aspect of the idea that is critical. In order to understand this, it is necessary to expand a little more upon Descartes’ cogito. According to Descartes, it is thought that determines existence, yet Descartes discovers one thought that resists determination, and he names this thought God.6 This means that while he cannot be certain of the reality of any of the things that he thinks exist (he might have invented them or been tricked by a malicious daemon), he does have one thought (God) that he knows that he could not have invented as he cannot represent it to himself in any complete way and it remains beyond his total comprehension.7 For Descartes, this overcomes solipsism because there is one thought that he cannot be the author of, so he cannot be alone. There must be something with more reality than the thinking ‘I’ that thus caused it to come into being. Descartes claims that with the idea of God, the most real being and cause of it of all can be glimpsed. The whole force of the argument lies in this: I recognise that it would be impossible for me to exist with the kind of nature I have – that is, having within me the idea of God – were it not the case that God really existed. By ‘God’ I mean the very being the idea of whom is within me, that is, the possessor of all the

4 5 6 7

Descartes (1996: 31; Meditations 3.45). Descartes (1996: 32; Meditations 3.46). Descartes (1996: 24–36; Meditations 3). Descartes (1996: 8; Preface to the Meditations).

24 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

perfections which I cannot grasp, but can somehow reach in my thought.8 Of course, apart from its forceful nature, this argument relies on a scholastic distinction between formal and objective realities – in this case, the formal reality of something lying in the object itself and the objective reality of its idea.9 The claim is that whatever objective reality lies in the idea must also lie in its cause’s formal reality, otherwise it would be necessary to posit something in an effect that was not contained in its cause, which would be to posit the absurd idea that something can come from nothing. Therefore, whatever objective reality can be conceived in the idea of God must be contained in the formal reality of its cause – so the idea of God (infinite, perfect and so on) must have been caused by a being that is infinite, perfect and so on. Although this is an example of the cosmological argument for the existence of God, it clearly depends on the ontological argument;10 an argument that Kant convincingly dispatches into the annals of philosophical curiosities when he points out that existence cannot be predicated of a thing (to update Kant’s most insightful example, a hundred actual euros contains no more coinage than a hundred possible euros, but having a hundred euros in your wallet makes a much bigger difference to your financial situation than merely having its concept).11 As a formal logical argument then, it is clearly not very convincing – despite Descartes’ insistence that to conceive of God as not existing is as logically absurd as conceiving a mountain without a valley.12 However, this does not mean that the forceful aspect of the idea is wrong, rather that Descartes fails in his attempt to represent this force as something. Indeed, if Descartes’ formal renderings of the arguments of the idea of God are suspect, this is probably because he did not really see the necessity for the arguments at all, as he often

8 Descartes (1996: 35; Meditations 3.52; emphasis added). Note that as well as being a logical argument – in fact more importantly than it being a logical argument – Descartes attempts to show its force or power (vis) based on something external affecting his thought. 9 See Descartes (1996: 28–29; Meditations 3.41–42). 10 See Kant (1929: 508–509; KrV A606, B634). 11 Kant (1929: 505; KrV A599, B627). An objection along these lines was made to Descartes himself (Descartes 2000: 148; Meditations Objection 1.100). 12 Descartes (1996: 46; Meditations 5.67).

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

suggests that the idea of God is a kind of intuition where the force of its contents need no further justification.13 This links to his analysis of ideas as having two modalities, namely clarity and distinction, which will be important for the discussion of Spinoza below and the role of affectivity and expression in his philosophy. To stick with Descartes for the time being, ideas have a clarity and a distinctiveness and both these elements need to be taken into account. As mentioned above, Descartes thinks we are saved from delirious indeterminacy via the discovery of an idea of God that we cannot have authored, and the vital aspect of this idea is that it is ‘clear and distinct’.14 These components refer to the force of the idea or perception (clarity) and the extent to which this force can be discerned (distinctiveness). It must be noted here that clarity is primary insofar as it is possible to have a clear and indistinct idea, but impossible to have a distinct idea that is unclear. Descartes notes: When, for instance, a severe pain is felt, the perception of this pain may be very clear, and yet not always distinct, because people usually confuse the perception with the obscure judgment they form about its nature, assuming as they do that something exists in the affected part similar to the sensation of pain, even though it is only the sensation they perceive clearly. In this way perception may be clear without being distinct, and cannot be distinct without also being clear.15 We can have a clear perception, but derive a poor judgement from it. For Descartes, the answer to this is not to keep examining the

13 ‘[A]s regards God, if I were not overwhelmed by preconceived opinions, and if the images of things perceived by the senses did not besiege my thought on every side, I would certainly acknowledge him sooner and more easily than anything else’ (Descartes 1994: 47; Meditations 5.69). 14 Nadler (2006: 98) succinctly describes what Descartes means by clear and distinct as follows: ‘The clarity of an idea is a matter of its vivacity. A clear idea strikes the mind with a force that compels attention. It is strong and impressive. The distinctness of an idea, on the other hand, looks, from the definition above, to be more of a relational feature of an idea – that is, a matter of whether the idea can be distinguished from other ideas ... A distinct idea is a semantically discrete idea. It provides evident information on the properties of its object and leaves no room for doubting what does and does not belong to it’. 15 Descartes (2000: 242–243; Principles 1.46).

26 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

judgement to see what is wrong with it, but rather to try to understand the vivacity of the perception and how it is possible to be clear about anything at all. The fact that an atheist can be ‘clearly aware that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles’ is something I do not dispute. But ... since we are supposing that this individual is an atheist, he cannot be certain that he is not being deceived on matters which seem to him to be very evident.16 As long as we remain unaware of the nature of thought, then our judgements will only appear to be certain in their fragmented atomistic state. As long as we only attend to the nature of more or less discernible things, we will be blind as to the nature of seeing as such – for ‘it is the mind [or soul] which sees, not the eye’.17 In the final analysis, however, Descartes collapses the clarity/distinctiveness aspects and makes of clarity something distinct; or in other words, he reifies the affective aspect of thought and turns it into a thing: the ground of thought becomes God, a being with certain characteristics such as infinity, perfection and omnipotence who creates thinking souls. Thought becomes the mere recognition of things and states of affairs whose truth is guaranteed by the natural light of reason – a certain kind of distinguishing light created by a distinctive God. The delirium of thought that threatened in the Meditations, where the world appeared bathed in a dazzling light haunted by demons, angels and spectres of dreams and madness, is filtered through the cogito, the idea of God and various representations that trap and tame thought – every Cartesian dualism is a soothing pair of sunglasses for the soul. These dualisms can, to a large extent, be understood in the context of Descartes needing to find a compromise between the two worlds that he found himself bridging, namely the ancient world with its theological creationism, and the early throes of modernity with its move towards science and finding explanation in mechanistic laws. Descartes’ problem is thus one that has endured to some degree throughout modernity, namely, how can existence 16 17

Descartes (1986: 103; Meditations Second Replies 2.100–101). Descartes in Hass (1993: 134).

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

remain meaningful with any real sense of purpose and morality once humanity has turned away from theology for guidance and accepted scientific explanation and laws? Furthermore, how can morality and the soul be saved from the reduction of the human to the status of an animal; that is, as a particular kind of physiological and mechanical body? These are the kinds of overriding fears that perhaps force Descartes to break his resolve and return to an ancient form of theological transcendence, and are perhaps the type of fears that continue to make people search for something â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;more than thisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; that can bind our temporary and fragmented experiences together in a higher truth or reality. Nonetheless, by exposing the intensive and unstable relationship between internality and externality, the subject and the world, and mind and body through his procedure of radical doubt and turn away from theological diktat, Descartes opened up some important and uneasy questions concerning all these unstable relationships. Granted, Descartes patched over this instability by reintroducing the idea of a substantial God innate to the soul of the human, but he does not do so before articulating a problem that far exceeds his solution once it becomes apparent that while ideas certainly have a force, the idea of God is far less clear and distinct than he takes it to be. An important question remains, however, as to how the vivacious and forceful nature of our more or less distinct ideas mediate and affect our experience of the world. This is where the role of affectivity and the philosophy of Spinoza enters the equation, for trying to come to terms with the affective nature of thought and experience means precisely addressing these relationships. Descartes hinted at the way forward here by emphasising the importance of the clarity and force of ideas as well as their discernible content, and he does highlight the passions as a link between the mind and the body. However, by maintaining an absolute dualism that is merely mediated by the passions (which in turn we need to be control with the mind, something that Spinoza directly criticises),18 Descartes remained trapped in a dualistic system that only his doomed idea of God could save. By examining not only passions but also the affectivity expressed in ideas and bodily

E3DefAff.

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

experience, Spinoza offers us a way to rethink Descartes’ modern problematic via coming to terms with affectivity.

1.2 Spinoza and the affective-imagination As already mentioned, the importance of Descartes for Spinoza is abundantly clear, even if he ends up fundamentally disagreeing with many of the key Cartesian claims. This importance lies in Descartes’ approach to philosophy, for rather than merely accepting or critiquing the tenants of the dominant scholastic and Aristotelean tradition, or indeed any particular system of theology or philosophy, Descartes sought a fresh break and a new beginning in a modern world where the ancient systems of thought and explanation were becoming increasingly unsatisfactory. Descartes sought to find a way to validate thinking immanently from within itself, without appealing – at least in the first instance – to some kind of transcendent being or entity to ground it. As Spinoza himself notes in his prolegomenon to the Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, Descartes sought to doubt everything that he knew in order to put aside all prejudice, discover the foundations upon which all else should be built, uncover the cause of error and understand everything clearly and distinctly.19 All of these tenants are important to Spinoza to varying degrees, and the latter is particularly important and opens the way for Spinoza to analyse the relationship between ideas and affectivity. However, while Spinoza is doubtlessly indebted to Descartes’ approach to philosophy, he ends up a long way from anything resembling Cartesian philosophy. This is made clear in the Ethics, where the inescapably affective nature of experience is brought to the fore in his discussion of the imagination. This can be hard to discern from the book however, as it is an extremely complex work consisting of five interlinking parts with the part on affectivity playing a pivotal role in the centre of the book. Unfortunately, much of the commentary on the Ethics – and on Spinoza’s philosophy as a whole – has focused almost exclusively on the classically metaphysical opening part with Spinoza’s discussion of substance, attributes, modes and God. This being the case, it is little wonder that Spinoza’s thinking

Spinoza (2002: 121).

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

has been canonically ossified into a totalising ontology with seemingly little room for manoeuvre. However, as suggested in the introduction, there is no real starting point in the Ethics (unlike Descartes’ Meditations). Indeed, instead of starting the Ethics at the beginning of part one, the initial axioms of part two might be chosen instead where Descartes’ starting point is more directly confronted. These axioms are: 1 The essence of man does not involve necessary existence, that is, from the order of Nature it can happen equally that this or that man does exist, or that he does not exist. 2 Man thinks. 3 There are no modes of thinking, such as love, desire, or whatever is designated by the word affects of the mind, unless there is in the same individual the idea of the thing loved, desired, and the like. But there can be an idea, even though there is no other mode of thinking. 4 We feel that a certain body is affected in many ways. 5 We neither feel nor perceive any singular things, except bodies and modes of thinking.20 Leaving aside the first axiom for the moment, the second axiom counters the cogito directly in that it is not ‘I’ that is said to think, but homo. The nature of homo is not addressed here (Spinoza’s conception of the human as ‘desire’ will be discussed below), but the important point comes in the fourth and fifth axioms where it is stated that a certain body is felt as being affected in many ways, and that such feelings and perceptions are of bodies and modes of thinking. In its most simplified form, we could therefore state that there is thought and there is feeling, and this thought and feeling involves particular bodies and ideas, and the very fact that these are felt is enough to confirm their reality – there is no need to construct a rational account of the relationship between a perception and the perceived in order to be certain. This point is absolutely crucial and marks a decisive move away from the Cartesian problematic, for while Descartes claims that as long as we are thinking something then we at least exist – even if

Spinoza (1994: 116; E2.A).

30 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

the status of this ‘something’ (including the body) is in doubt – Spinoza suggests that affectivity itself in all its bodily particularity is as real as any overarching conscious awareness of ourselves as thinking. Spinoza does not deny that we have ideas of course, which for Spinoza form the basic element of mentality – an idea is a thought of ‘something’ no matter how vague this might be –21 but it is also important to note that for Spinoza an idea is a ‘sensation’ (sensatio) or something that is felt (thus linking to Descartes’ discussion of the ‘clarity’ of ideas),22 and never merely a picture or image of something.23 Affectivity thus involves ideas, meaning that we are also thinking beings, but thinking is neither primary nor strictly separable for Spinoza: there is both the feeling of this body being affected (something is happening) and an idea of this affect (what this something is), and together this is what Spinoza calls the imagination, and it is through the imagination that we experience the world. Where much of Cartesian philosophy rests on the cogito, therefore, much of Spinoza’s rests on the imagination. Unlike Descartes then, Spinoza does not start out with belief as a basic starting point for knowledge, but with imagination.24 This is a very subtle yet crucial distinction. There certainly is an idea that this body exists as an individual and that it is surrounded by other individual things, but for Spinoza these are not beliefs that need grounding in order to confirm their truth, because there is not merely a belief that ‘I’ am an individual surrounded by other individual things; ‘I’ vividly imagine these things (I do not ‘believe’ that I see an arm: I imagine it as a feeling and idea). For Spinoza, the imagination is how the world is experienced and it is not something that can be left behind.25 Spinoza does insist on a qualitative difference between the imagination and the intellect however,26 which largely has to do with a difference between corporeal experience (imagination)

E2.A. TIE.78. 23 E2.P49S. 24 Mason (2004; 2007) makes a strong case here for Spinoza’s rejection of belief as the starting point for thinking and in this sense inaugurates a radical departure from Descartes. 25 An account of this kind is offered by Gatens and Lloyd (1994: 4), who claim that in Spinoza the imagination can actually act as a corrective for some deficiencies in reason. 26 E1.P15S5. 22

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

and a mental grasp of virtuality proper to thinking (intellect). These are linked to the three kinds of knowledge that Spinoza articulates, namely knowledge from random experience (experentia vaga) – in other words, the imagination – and the two intellectual forms of knowledge that he terms rational knowledge (ratio) and intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva).27 However, as a corporeal body, the imagination cannot be dispensed with in favour of the intellect, and in fact the latter could be seen as a kind of augmentation of the former from within, rather than as an external replacement. Spinoza describes the imagination as follows: ‘the affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present to us, we shall call images of things ... and when the mind regards bodies in this way, we shall say that it imagines’.28 In other words, whenever we are affected in such a way as to have some perception of something affecting us, we are imagining (which is to say, we are always imagining). One of the difficulties in reading Spinoza is quite evident here in that he uses a vocabulary that he has inherited (as everybody must), but in completely new ways – he warns of this when he states before the passage quoted above that he is using the terms here in order ‘to retain the customary words’. It is not important if his definition of the imagination is agreed with therefore, but whether or not the process that he terms as the ‘imagination’ is convincing. With this in mind, the imagination for Spinoza can be understood as referring to the immanent experience of affects, ideas and images, and not a faculty, free or otherwise, through which images of the world are wilfully constructed. Imagination rather describes the affective play that is immanently experienced in any given moment and which always involves various feelings and perceptions of bodies and thoughts, meaning that it might be more accurate to call the basic form of our experience the ‘affective-imagination’. For example, if I see an arm reaching out towards me at night, it is not as if I merely believe that there is an arm there: I ‘imagine’ that there is an arm there and it is absolutely real insofar as it is affecting me in certain ways. The only way this situation could be placed in doubt is if I were to have other images and ideas that remove the force of the image and idea of the arm – perhaps I know that all the doors in the 27 28

E2.P40S2. Spinoza (1994: 129–130; E2.P17S).

32 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

house are locked and so I must be alone, or perhaps I switch the light on and see that what I thought was an arm was merely a shadow from the curtains blowing in the breeze. The force of the image of the arm is thus dissipated and replaced with other feelings and ideas, and the reality of the arm reaching towards me is removed. The question of whether or not these imaginings are truly ‘there’ outside of the imagination is thus a misleading one for Spinoza, because ‘the imaginations of the mind, considered in themselves contain no error, or ... the mind does not err from the fact that it imagines, but only insofar as it is considered to lack an idea which excludes the existence of those things which it imagines to be present to it’.29 With this, Spinoza replaces the Cartesian model of having a belief and then trying to find out whether or not it is true, with a philosophical approach that refrains directly within the reality of the affective-imagination. The fact that somebody imagines they have a body cannot be wrong for Spinoza, nor would it be wrong if they imagined that they were made of glass, to use Descartes’ example of what brain damaged madmen have come to think.30 The status of the ideas or images of these things are not in doubt, for their reality is affective and can only be displaced rather than dispensed with to see if it ‘really is like that’ outside of an affective relation.31 In other words, doubt does not occur in having an idea of something and wondering if it is correct, but in the relation between ideas that displace each other’s force. If only one idea was present in the imagination, then it could not be doubted for Spinoza, because doubt, ‘never arises in the soul through the thing itself which is the object of doubt. That is, if there should be only one idea in our

Spinoza (1994: 129–130; E2.P17S). See also E2.P49S. Descartes (1986: 13; Meditations 1.19). 31 Spinoza is perhaps not too far away from the phenomenology of Husserl (1973: 29) here, insofar as the latter also insists that, ‘Objects are always present for us, pregiven in simple certainty, before we engage in any act of cognition. At its beginning, every cognitive activity presupposes these objects ... This certainty of belief continues until subsequent experience or the critical activity of cognition shakes it’. In addition, Pietersma (2001: 316) notes that what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘flesh’ and claims to be nameless in the history of philosophy seems to be remarkably close to Spinoza’s concept of substance. However, while Spinoza’s philosophy could be considered as a kind of phenomenological reduction, subjectivity and consciousness are both refrained from as grounding affectivity, though the relationship between Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s use of affectivity and the phenomenological reduction could be an interesting one to investigate. 30

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

consciousness, whether true or false, there will be neither doubt nor certainty, but only a certain kind of awareness’.32 Doubt for Spinoza is not caused by an uncertain relation between a subject and an object, but in an experience of vacillating or competing ideas whose variable force confuses the imagination. One of the most remarkable aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy is thus the extent to which he identifies falsity with privation; for, ‘There is nothing positive in ideas on account of which they are called false’.33 Error is not due to a false account of reality, but ‘consists only in the privation which mutilated and confused ideas involve’.34 Error and falsity for Spinoza thus involve a badly organised, disconnected and vacillating relationship of ideas, and not a false picture of reality. Belief for Spinoza is thus not a propositional attitude that lies external to ideas themselves.35 Spinoza seems well aware of how unorthodox this is and he does attempt to tackle obvious rebuttals. 36 Briefly stated, Spinoza denies the Cartesian position that the will extends further than the intellect, because there are no grounds to claim that the will extends any further than perceiving or conceiving, for an infinity of things cannot be affirmed any more than they can be perceived or conceived. Spinoza also denies that judgement can be suspended and the objects of thought can be neutrally perused from some external position. Thus the affirmation of an idea must be internal to the idea itself for Spinoza, for it is enough for a winged horse to be perceived for it to be affirmed as such an entity, unless other ideas and perceptions are available that can displace it. The most important aspect of Spinoza’s refusal to accept that belief lies external to ideas is thus his insistence on the impossibility of getting beyond the affective relations that are always at play in experience. 37

Spinoza (2002: 22;TIE.78). Spinoza (1994: 137; E2.P33). 34 Spinoza (1994: 147; E2.P49S). 35 As Yovel (1989b: 4) puts it, for Spinoza ‘we judge as we perceive (or conceive); more precisely, we cannot have an idea without automatically affirming the existence of its object’. Bennett (1984: 165) considers this to be a serious oversight, but this is only so if a cognitivist approach is desired, and this is certainly not something that Spinoza is after (see note 37). 36 E2.P49S. More thorough elaborations of Spinoza’s defence are offered by Beavers & Rice (2001), Mason (2004) and Matheron (2001). 37 Beavers & Rice (2001: 368) note that Spinoza presents an ‘affectivism’ rather than a cognitivism when it comes to the mental, for ‘To speak of belief, or doubt, or the 33

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

A perception or an idea of something is always-already an affirmation of this something, and the only things that can distort or displace this ‘something’ are other perceptions and ideas. Another way to put this is to say that ideas have a certain intensity that is only ever experienced in a web of relations that either reinforce or dissipate each other.38 Ideas are thus challenged and replaced by more forceful ones for Spinoza, and this inevitably involves an affective dimension to mental activity. It is not, therefore, a question of whether or not the correct mental picture of a thing is being operated with, but rather one of the activity or passivity of the mental processes in operation: are we stuck with the images of things that affect us, or are there some ideas that can displace the force of these images? This is something that will be addressed further below, but for now it is important to look a little deeper into Spinoza’s discussion of affectivity and how we do not merely remain at the mercy of the force of our ideas and perceptions.

1.3 Affectivity: a vacillation of joy and sadness The doubting ego is thus a disingenuous intellectual invention from a Spinozist perspective. As already mentioned, thinking for Spinoza is always in media res and inseparable from a bodily affective play that resists arresting, though the Ethics is misleading in this regard to the extent that its ontological opening obscures this point. The rather simplistic Hegelian reading looms here, for affectivity and transience (which are intimately linked for Spinoza as all singular modes of being have an indefinite duration),39 can easily be taken to be fictive imaginings that obscure the immovable, unchanging and static Oneness of substance seemingly described in the opening

suspension of judgement is ultimately to speak of the relations of our ideas among themselves and in their affective dimensions. That Spinoza is unwilling to reduce this talk to a purely cognitive interplay is due to his emphasis upon emotion as a primary dimension of human action’ (2001: 370); or, as Foti (1982: 223) puts it, for Spinoza ‘cognition remains suffused with affectivity’. 38 Sharp (2007) develops this point in detail by noting that the fragility of the relations that encourage or damage ideas is also a political problem. Democracy is thus promoted by Spinoza because its emphasis on a shared fostering of ideas protects and encourages certain ideas that are valuable for the common good, while dissipating those that are generally harmful and only advantageous to a select few. 39 See E2.P30 and E3.P8, for example.

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

chapter. This can be rebutted on a technical level with the reminder that for Spinoza ‘substance’, which he describes as that ‘which is in itself and is conceived through itself’40 is strictly inseparable from its modes or singular, affective beings; that is, Spinoza posits no substance or ‘Being’ outside of the singular expressions of affectivity that are experienced immanently at any given moment in transient experience. Admittedly, this is complicated by Spinoza’s claim that substance is ‘prior to its affections’.41 However, it is reasonably clear that ‘prior’ does not mean a precedence in time or being, because Spinoza directs the reader to a part of the Ethics where the emphasis is placed upon whether something can be conceived through itself or through something else.42 Because singular beings (such as individual people) exist for an indeterminate duration, they cannot be conceived through themselves alone (it is impossible to conceive of an individual being abstracted from any relation), while Spinoza spends the first part of the Ethics trying to show that there ‘is’ something (substance) that can be conceived through itself alone. While the debate surrounding substance is too complex and digressional to go into here,43 the important thing is to make substance ‘turn around the modes’,44 that is, singular beings, and follow Spinoza when he explicitly writes that the power by which natural beings exist is God, or in other words, substance.45 Spinoza’s affirmation of singularity is also firmly expressed when we writes that the essence of any singular being is the ‘power or striving’ by which it maintains its being, that is, as a singular way of being,46 as will be discussed in more detail below. However, the theoretical complexities of the relationship between substance and individual beings are rendered less acute once proper focus is placed upon the pivotal role that affectivity plays in Spinoza’s philosophy, for it is clear that affectivity is not something that obscures an underlying ‘true’ reality or is regrettable and

Spinoza (1994: 85; E1.D3). E1.P1. 42 E1.D3 & D5. 43 For further discussion, see Charlton (1981), Della Rocca (2008: 33–88), Deleuze (1990: 27–98) and Woolhouse (1993). 44 This is Deleuze’s (2004: 377) phrase. 45 TP 2.2. 46 E3.P7Dem. 41

36 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

a hindrance to proper thought. It might be objected that Spinoza’s rationalist invocation to know things under a certain species of eternity (sub specie aeternitatis) is precisely to do away with the transience of the affects; but for Spinoza, affectivity involves a continual vacillation of disorganised images and ideas as they are presented in random experience, so we need to find a way to negotiate this with ideas that can organise our encounters regardless of their particular content, and it is in this sense that thinking under a ‘species’ of eternity can connect and augment, rather than replace, temporal experience. Indeed, the most expressive form of thought for Spinoza involves the most intense joy – the most intense affect.47 The temporal or durational body is thus not something that is escaped from in order to reach the heights of rational thought; rather, it is the body that is transformed during the process of thinking sub species aeternitatis.48 The importance of affectivity is made abundantly clear at the beginning of part three of the Ethics, where Spinoza criticises those who write of the affects as if they were unnatural and distracted us from our true nature. However, when Spinoza writes of the affects, he does so in a very particular manner. The first thing to note is that affectivity is not strictly identifiable with passion and should certainly not be confused with psychological or emotional states – although passion and psychological states can be included within affectivity; strictly speaking, for Spinoza passion is a passive affect and not affectivity as such.49 Affectivity has rather more to do with the experience of ‘transience’ in the very precise etymological sense of a ‘going-over’ or ‘passing away’.50 Experience is never of static images, but rather always involves durational processes of ‘going’ and ‘passing away’ that betray a productive relationality rather than a field of interacting entities, and the transformations that this involves are not just cognised but felt as either joy or sadness: or perhaps better as euphoric or dysphoric, again in a precise etymological sense of being

This is the third knowledge leading to amor Dei intellectualis, E5.P32. The more activity the body is capable of, the more aspects of eternity the mind has (E5.P39). 49 E3.D3. 50 Transience derives from the Latin trans meaning over or away, and ire meaning to go or pass. 48

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

‘carried well’ or ‘carried badly’.51 More precisely, Spinoza conceives joy and sadness as an increase or decrease in the power of activity52 because various aspects of the imagination ‘aid or restrain’ certain relations and thereby restrict or enable different possibilities: ‘By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections’.53 The basic point here is that in any given situation various affective relations are experienced amongst changing images, ideas and perceptions of the imagination, and this is impossible to avoid – a single element of experience, including any notion of an ‘I’, cannot be completely detached from the vicissitudes of experience (it is simply impossible to have any kind of experience where there is only one element in play, be it an idea, object, feeling, sense, or anything else). However, from within this affectivity there is the feeling or sense of various degrees of intensity in these activities and changes – experience does not merely consist of a random flux of phenomena that flicker in mental images as if projected on a badly lit cave wall, to use Plato’s analogy, because the imagination is not merely the mental cognisance of activity and change: affectivity is embodied and takes place across discernible, if ultimately unstable, sites. These sites are bodies that, depending on the situation, are more or less active or passive in their activities and are experienced as such. Despite being couched almost solely in terms of an arch-rationalist and metaphysician, much of Spinoza’s philosophy thus rests upon not only the imagination, but also the body and its relationship with affectivity.

1.4

The body as duration

As already discussed, the reality of the body is confirmed by the affective-imagination; or if preferred, the body confirms itself through the intensity of its transformations experienced through the imagination. The body does not need thought to confirm its 51 These terms derive from the Greek pherein ‘to carry’ and ‘eu’ meaning well and ‘dys’ meaning bad or ill. Brown and Stenner (2001: 89) also use euphoria and dysphoria to describe Spinoza’s joy and sadness, but without suggesting any etymological reasons for doing so. 52 E3.Post1. 53 Spinoza (1994: 154; E3.D3).

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

reality: it simply ‘is’ insofar as it is felt. However, care needs to be taken here to avoid concluding that Spinoza reduces all thought and experience to the corporeal. Spinoza confirms this most explicitly when he demonstrates that the object of the idea that constitutes the human mind is the body.54 This demonstration is rather convoluted however, and Spinoza himself admits that it will cause the reader some difficulties. The main point seems to rest with the simple fact that we have ideas of the affections of the body,55 and these ideas cannot be of a non-existing thing (we cannot conjure ideas out of nothing).56 Remembering that for Spinoza error comes from privation and not from having a wrong image, we might have confused and inadequate ideas of the body,57 but we nonetheless do feel and have ideas of what goes on in the body58 and thus the body and mind are united.59 As problematic as this might be (and this is discussed in more detail below), ideas are absolutely irreducible to the body as a form of expression or way of acting and affecting, yet these ideas always involve the body and express, in different form, its activities and affections; hence the strict correlation in Spinoza between what the body can do and what the mind can think.60 Despite the qualitatively unique form of affection that thinking involves, Spinoza is quite clear that there would be no thinking without a body, for we could not even imagine such a thing (even if we could, then this image would only exist insofar as it relates to a living body imagining it). Much rests, therefore, on what Spinoza means by a body. He cannot posit any positive entity that exists outside of the manner in which it is experienced within the imagination (an ‘I’ with certain beliefs about things that lie outside it), because the transience of the affective-imagination means that there can be no suggestion of a ‘dominion within a dominion’;61 that is, of a singular body or existing thing that remains unaffected by everything else. However, if we cannot get beyond the constantly changing affective

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

E2.P11–15. E2.P13Dem. E2.P11Dem. E2.P19–30. E2.P12. E2.P13S. E2.P13S. E3.Pre.

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

play of experience, then what precisely is the status of this transient and relational, yet integral body? To this end, Spinoza makes a remarkable digression in part two of the Ethics, which concerns the mind, in order to discuss the body.62 It is clear that Spinoza cannot distinguish between bodies as regards to substance (there are no bodies that remain absolutely unaffected by each other), meaning that bodies are not really distinct.63 However, while all bodies can affect each other and thus modify each other, bodies are clearly discernible and singular. This does not mean, however, that we should look beyond affectivity to see what ‘really’ lies behind the ways in which bodies affect each other to get to the true essence of a particular entity, but rather look precisely to affectivity and its sense of temporality, for it is here that bodies remain singular.64 Spinoza does not look for some kind of transcendent image to ground singular beings as ‘types’ of ‘things’, but rather looks to their durational integrity and how they interact temporally; for as he notes, all bodies agree in certain respects, that is, all bodies relate or communicate with each other to some degree and thus cannot be absolutely distinct.65 This communication meanwhile is essentially affective because, ‘All modes by which a body is affected by another body follow both from the nature of the body affected and at the same time from the nature of the affecting body’.66 Remembering that for Spinoza a body is a durational integrity, the nature of the body discussed here is a certain temporal ratio of affects and not a thing, meaning that the interactivity of bodies involves the communication of various temporal relations or patterns of affects that will be more or less potent, and can only be said to form one body insofar as integral relations are maintained in duration. The important point here is that an individual does not consist of a kind of thing, but of a certain durational integrity: bodies maintain their distinct affective tempo over an indeterminate duration. Furthermore, all bodies are composite,67 and highly composite in 62 Spinoza even goes as far as suggesting that it is impossible to understand the union of mind and body unless there is an adequate knowledge of the latter (E2.P13S). 63 E2.L1. 64 E2.L1. See also E2.L3D. 65 E2.L2. 66 Spinoza (1994: 126; E2.A1”). 67 E2.D (after L3).

40 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

the case of a human being,68 because bodies involve a constant communication of affects between countless other bodies and are not inert matter. An illustrative example has been offered to show what Spinoza might mean here.69 Consider two collections of bodies, a genuinely complex individual person made up the different parts that make up a human body (heart, kidneys and so on), and another collection of bodies that consists of two different people’s pancreases and a third person’s right thumb. The latter is not a genuinely complex individual, because ‘while the members of the former collection interact with one another in order to preserve the relations among them, the members of the latter collection have little or no tendency to be responsive to one another in such a way’.70 The former has an integral affective relationality, while the latter is much looser to the extent that it makes no real sense to call it an individual or singular being except under special circumstances. While there is some communicative relation between two people’s pancreases (they interact with their parts so as to contribute towards maintaining two people who affect each other in a given situation, thus enabling a certain level of affectivity between these complex bodies), it is only at the level of some wider communal grouping that they could be considered as forming anything like an individual – in other words they do not form a very intense and integral relation unless engaged in a practice that unites the complexities of their bodies as a whole. At some level or other, all bodies necessarily affect each other, but insofar as relatively stable and acutely interdependent patterns of communication are maintained, then a body can be affected in many ways yet preserve itself as a distinct body.71 This means that bodies can be considered in terms of affective relations and these relations are not reducible to the type of ‘thing’ that a body is. Rather, a body is called such-and-such a thing because of a certain durational integrity that is experienced amongst affective relations. The body can thus be considered as the site of affectivity but not a ground, for it is the transience and relationality of the bodily that is pivotal here, rather than some kind of static substance – the body as

68 69 70 71

E2.Post1. Della Rocca (2008: 148–149). Della Rocca (2008: 149). E2.L7S.

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

transitional or as the site of affectivity is always-already affective and durational. The body should not be considered as a mere thing that undergoes various events therefore, but as the very site of events, as ‘evental’. This is precisely Spinoza’s point in his attempt to rethink the bodily in terms of the immanence of affectivity and the body as the site of the transient and durational continuity of certain affective relations.

1.5 Euphoric and dysphoric bodies However, while an affect marks a durational or temporal passage, Spinoza explicitly notes that this should not be thought of as involving a mental comparison between states of affairs. The importance of this point cannot be overemphasised. Any given situation comprises a highly complex nexus of affective relations that are constantly modified by various affects coming in and out of play while gaining and declining in significance or intensity. These modifications are not merely mental comparisons of ‘state a’ and ‘state b’, because they involve a felt modification as to the ways in which it is possible to act – or the power to act. Various aspects of the complex affective relations of experience are immanently euphoric or dysphoric depending on a particular situation, meaning that an idea of something affecting the body and of change is not merely a mental comparison with a previous state of affairs, but rather affirms a felt transition in the body’s powers to act or relate. Spinoza demonstrates this point rather well in a letter where he uses the example of blindness to criticise the establishment of lack via abstract comparison.72 According to Spinoza, it is just as absurd to say that a blind person lacks sight as it is to say that a stone lacks sight because any given stone and any given person is everything that they can be at any particular point in duration. They can only be said to lack something if an abstract comparison is made that compares them to something that is actually incomparable, such as a particular person with a projected ‘ideal’ or ‘normal’ person, or even when we compare one person with another. If we stand a blind person next to a person who can see and say that that the blind

Spinoza (2002: 824, OP.4.126, Letter 21, Spinoza to Blyenbergh 28 January 1665).

42 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

person lacks the sight of the other, then we are merely making an abstract comparison; for what has the vision of this other person have to do with the blind person? The vision of this person only involves the blind person insofar as it affects their interaction, but the blind person cannot be said to lack the other’s vision – the blind person is everything that he or she can be at any given point in duration. However, if a person who can see loses their sight, either suddenly or over a period of time, then this is experienced as a sad affective experience because it involves a felt duration or passage of dysphoria. This passage is felt as dysphoric insofar as the body experiences a decrease in its power to affect or be affected by other bodies (in this case all interactivity via light in particular and all that this entails) and is not the mere result of a mental comparison between two different states. Of course, such mental comparisons can be affective in themselves, such as when someone feels sad because they lack what their neighbour has, but this is also an affective process that is dysphoric in the process of being imagined (such negative ideas occupy the individual’s experience and thus inhibit and even exclude more positive possibilities). This insight from Spinoza therefore has profound consequences for the manner in which we treat disabilities such as blindness, for it might be that the constant comparison that people with disabilities suffer against a model of what is thought to be ‘normal’ causes more sadness and dysphoria and is more debilitating than their so-called disabilities. Nonetheless, it must also be remembered that any process of actually losing (or gaining) an ability to affect or be affected by other bodies is embodied in an affective experience with real (which is to say, imaginary) consequences. Spinoza is therefore able to describe affectivity as involving transitions along a bidirectional axis – joy (laetitia) describes the passage from a lesser to a greater perfection, while sadness (tristitia) describes the passage from a greater to a lesser perfection.73 There should not be too much concern with the use of the word perfection (perfectionem) here, for it is not supposed to involve an abstract comparison between lesser and higher beings (between a blind person and

E3.DefAff.2&3.

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

a ‘normal’ person), but rather a passage that involves either joyful/ euphoric or sad/dysphoric affective relations in the power to act.74 Joy and sadness are thus not merely psychological conditions, though they may be expressed as such. Care is also needed here not to paint an oversimplified picture of affectivity in Spinoza where there is merely a fluctuation of feeling ‘happy and sad’, for the body is highly complex and composite and expresses a myriad of relations that undergo constant and often minute modifications. These relations often contradict each other, for one situation or object of experience may result in a simultaneous intensification of some affective relations and the depression of others, and this may even alter at different times too.75 As human bodies and minds are extremely complex,76 various aspects of them can be affected differently in the same situation, while anything whatsoever can be the accidental cause of an affect77 and can cause different affects in the same person at different times.78 Thus, we can never be entirely sure than even the most banal of situations, such as crossing a road or even getting up out of a chair, will not end up in some kind of dysphoric situation for certain aspects of the body. However, we can be aware that it is not the particular objects of experience that are the problem, but the manner in which we compose ourselves with them. To utilise a simple example offered by Spinoza himself, the sight and smell of a huge spread of food may bring joy to a hungry stomach, but the very same sight and smell may also cause disgust and nausea if too much of it is eaten. This is because the affective relations at play (or the bodies involved) actually change during the activity and are not merely dependent upon the nature of certain phenomena.79 The consumption of food increases a malnourished body’s ability to 74 Spinoza equates perfection, reality and activity insofar as activity and affectivity are inescapable, meaning that the more active and intensive affective relations become, the more ‘real’ and ‘perfect’ they are too (see E5.P40). 75 The human body and mind is extremely complex (E2.Post1; E2.P15) meaning that different aspects of the body and mind can be affected differently in the same situation, while anything can be the accidental cause of an affect (E3.P15) and can cause different affects in the same person at different times (E3.P51). 76 E2.Post1; E2.P15. 77 E3.P15. 78 E3.P51. 79 E3.P59S.

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

affect and be affected, whereas the same activity decreases this ability in an over-nourished body. It is not the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;objectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of experience that is crucial, therefore, but the understanding of how the particular situations that we find ourselves in may either aid or restrain our activities. The question thus becomes one of how to avoid being completely at the mercy of the immediacy of the affects while acknowledging the precariousness and instability of affective relations. Furthermore, we also need to work out how it might be possible to bear these well so we can maintain our bodies and increase or power to affect and be affected by other bodies. The obvious answer to this problem is that the intellect manages to control affectivity by forming ideas and concepts that overcome the singularities of the affects to form guiding generalisations and principles, but things are not so straightforward for Spinoza. As will be discussed below, thinking and corporeality do not causally interact, meaning that the mind cannot control the body simply through ideas and concepts. More importantly for now, it must be remembered that for Spinoza affects mark actual bodily transitions and affirm real changes, and are not merely mental comparisons. Affects are not perceived by a detached mind, but are felt during a modifying, durational body. This means that affects denote actual changes in the ways in which a body can undergo affective relations. Affectivity cannot, therefore, be controlled in any straightforward sense by reason, and Spinoza criticises the Stoics in this regard for what he considers their naivety in maintaining that the affects can be controlled by the intellect.80 Ideas are hugely important for Spinoza however. While it might be that affects cannot be suspended in favour of ideas, they can certainly be displaced and reorganised by the affective potency of certain relations of ideas. Spinoza thus considers ideas in terms of their adequacy in relation to this potency, which radically alters the sense of the usual philosophical distinction of truth and falsity.

80 E5.Pre. This criticism is perhaps too harsh in that it is not certain that all Stoics thought that affectivity could be entirely controlled by the intellect. Indeed, as James (2001), Kristeller (1984), Long (1996) and Perebroom (2001) point out, Spinoza is somewhat closer to stoicism than he admits.

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

1.6

Adequacy of ideas

Although the importance of affectivity and the body for Spinoza has been highlighted above, ideas are still a crucial element of his philosophy. However, Spinoza refuses to accept that ideas can control the body and our actions in any simple way; rather, ideas themselves have an affective dimension and a degree of ‘adequacy’, and it is here that they can be involved in organising our activities. Before understanding what is meant by this, it is necessary to take a closer look at precisely why for Spinoza they cannot causally interact with corporeality. As mentioned above, Spinoza considers an idea as being a concept of the mind81 and quite typically as the basic element of mentality. While other modes of thinking, such as love, can be considered as not conforming to an idea or concept, there would be no such phenomena unless there was an idea of something.82 In a description that seems little more than tautological wordplay, Spinoza writes that an adequate idea has the intrinsic denominations of a true idea, the important point being that the adequacy of an idea does not rest on the extrinsic conformities of an agreement between an idea and its object.83 Truth does not consist of an accurate representation or picture of reality, but has to do with the intensity of thinking itself when it is exercised as an irreducible form of expression as a power to act, whereupon it becomes truly affirmative. Truth and expression are intimately related therefore and do not depend on any external model or sign, even if they traverse them. Spinoza even explicitly remarks that truth ‘requires no sign’;84 in other words, we should not confuse the signs of thinking with thought itself as a power of expression.85 This leads to the core of Spinoza’s monistic response to Descartes’ dualism, for while Spinoza denies that there is a substantial difference between thought and extension, they remain irreducible as forms of expression (or powers to act), resulting in the rather problematic assertion that thought and extension cannot determine

81 82 83 84 85

E2.D3. E2.A3. E2.D4. Spinoza (2002: 11; TIE.36). See E2.P49S.

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

each other at all. This produces two seemingly irresolvable positions, namely that: 1 ‘The body cannot determine the mind to thinking, and the mind cannot determine the body to motion, rest, or to anything else’.86 2 In order for somebody to have an idea of some aspect of corporeality, the latter must exist in duration, and the former must be corporeally affected by it.87 Two obvious questions emerge from these seemingly irreconcilable positions. Firstly, given the first point, how is this not a dualism, and even a Cartesian dualism? Secondly, why is it necessary, and how is it even possible, for a person to form an idea of an external object through corporeal affection? These difficulties may be brought together under the much discussed ‘problem of the attributes’, which is undoubtedly one of the most problematic aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy. As noted by a prominent Spinoza scholar, after three hundred years of commentary it is still not clear what the relationship between attributes and substance is for Spinoza.88 It is generally agreed that Spinoza is offering some kind of parallelism where two causal orders of thought and extension (though there must be an infinity of attributes according to Spinoza, but we know of only two)89 correlate with each other but do not interact, although they are identical insofar as they are both expressions of substance. This is complicated further by Spinoza writing that by attribute he understands ‘what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence’.90 This lends itself to an idealist or subjectivist interpretation that the attributes are a subjective distinction.91 To this end, counter citations that definitively articulate the attributes as not depending upon subjectivity can be offered,92 while it makes no sense for

Spinoza (1994: 155; E3.P2). E2.P8C, E2.P11–13 & E2.P26. 88 Curley (1988: 9). 89 E1.P11. 90 Spinoza (1994: 85; E1.D4). 91 A reading most prominently offered by Wolfson (1934; 1937), and refuted by Bennett (1984: 146–147), Donagan (1973: 170–171) and Haserot (1953). 92 E1.D6; E1.P4D; E1.P10S; E1.P19D. 87

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

Spinoza to talk of there being an infinity of attributes of which we know only two, if it is the subjective intellect that is supposed to make these distinctions. However, both subjectivist and objectivist interpretations break the immanence of affectivity, which is why it is vital to focus on the role of expression here.93 In fact, Spinoza does indeed couch the relation between substance and the attributes in terms of expression from the opening of the Ethics when he writes that ‘By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence’.94 While the complexities of the rather arcane seventeenth century discussions of the relationship between substance and attributes are not a concern here, one recent and influential attempt to resolve the problem of the attributes conceives of Spinoza’s philosophy as a kind of ‘anomalous monism’ that maintains one causal order of events, but with two different orders of explanation.95 While this deviates substantially from Spinoza’s texts, it is worth considering in some length insofar as showing why it cannot be attributed to Spinoza offers a good way of demonstrating the role of expression in Spinoza’s philosophy as well as what he means by adequate and inadequate ideas. According to anomalous monism, point one above results in the absurd position that although the occurrence of a ringing bell, for example, causes some complex event in the brain that is identical with the awareness of the bell and the thought of the bell ringing, the ringing of the bell does not, however, cause an idea of it.96 To save Spinoza from this absurdity, it is necessary to insist that when stating that ‘the body cannot determine the mind to thinking’, Spinoza does not mean ‘determine’ in the usual sense of ‘cause’. There is only one causal system in operation – the physical causation between the bell and the brain – and Spinoza does not deny this, he merely denies that ‘it is possible to give a fully adequate explanation of the occurrence of the belief by appeal to the laws of nature and

As Deleuze (1990) and Kaufmann (1940) do. Spinoza (1994: 85; E1.D6). 95 This is Davidson’s (2005) approach, and the one that will be looked at in the following discussion of Spinoza’s alleged ‘anomalous monism’. 96 Davidson (2005: 306). 94

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

to the cause described in physical terms’.97 This is supposed to offer a charitable reading of Spinoza that saves him from absurdity and makes him a precursor to anomalous monism,98 which considers existence to be purely physical and hence, in principle, fully open to the natural sciences, but with the important qualification that it rejects the suggestion that ‘mental phenomena can be given purely physical explanations’.99 The source of the merit behind this reading of Spinoza is, however, ultimately that of its downfall – it is far too sensible, in every sense of the term. Existence is emphatically not merely physical for Spinoza and thought simply is not ‘stuff’.100 The question still remains, however, as to how this is not merely absurd or a dualism – the two being synonymous in the last instance, at least from a Spinozist perspective – by re-examining the example of the ringing bell to see where this reading of Spinoza falls down and why expression holds the key to understanding Spinoza on this point. To begin with it must be noted that, for Spinoza, in order to have an idea of a singular being (or mode in his language), it has to exist in duration, that is, it has to be at play in the durational affectivity of experience.101 This means that to have an idea of a particular ringing bell, that is, the affective relations that the term ‘ringing bell’ refers to, it has to exist in duration; and just as importantly, it must affect the body of the thinker in some way. This is because even though thought is not reducible to extension for Spinoza, we can only perceive singularities insofar as they are affections of the body.102 In other words, ideas do not spontaneously pop into the mind out of nothing – if a person has never been in any contact with a bell, then they can only have an idea of what a bell might be like from a description, and if they have been in contact with a bell, then they can only have an idea of what a bell is like insofar as it has affected them (coupled with whatever modifications they can imagine of it). To return to the example, suppose somebody is totally unaware that they are standing with their back to a bell, although for 97

Davidson (2005: 306). Davidson (2005: 308). 99 Davidson (2001: 214). 100 Spinoza (2002: 766; OP.4.12, Letter 4, Spinoza to Oldenburg, 10 1661). 101 E2.P8C. 102 E2.P11–13; P26. If this singular thing is a mode of extension, of course; if it is a mode of thought, then this is not the case (E2.P7S). 98

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

some reason they suddenly think of a ringing bell (perhaps they are thinking of a church wedding). Here, they are thinking of a ringing bell insofar as the idea of a bell is considered (it is an idea of ringing derived from the idea of a bell). The bell behind them then starts to ring and they turn to see what the noise is. They now have an idea of a ringing bell not only insofar as they consider the idea of a bell, but also insofar as they consider the ringing of this particular bell. As the particular bell is an actually existing body, the person can have an objective idea of the bell ringing because the idea of the bell ringing involves this particular bell and not merely the idea of a bell: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;when singular things are said to exist ... insofar also as they are said to have duration, their ideas also involve the existence through which they are said to have durationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.103 The bell that is actually ringing thus affects the body as an objectively existing singularity and thus as an objectively existing idea. There is therefore an important difference between having an idea of a bell ringing insofar as the idea of a bell is considered, and an idea of a bell ringing insofar as an actually ringing bell is considered. The former is derived through the idea of a bell, but the latter involves an encounter with a singular ringing bell in duration. Some further justification is needed here if an explanation is to be offered as to how Spinoza can say that an objective idea of something needs the existence of an actually existing being, and yet this being cannot cause its idea. The important point to note is the terminology employed by Spinoza, because an objective idea involves an existing singularity or mode, but is not caused by it tout court. Affections of the body are also experienced through images or ideas of the mind, and in order to have a particular image of a singular thing it must exist and affect the body if this singular thing is a mode of extension (such as a bell). So far, the anomalous monism interpretation is salvageable because the actual ringing bell is a necessary condition for someone to have an idea of it; but this only holds while remaining at the level of ideas that Spinoza terms as images.104 Image-ideas,

103

Spinoza (1994: 120; E2.P8). E2.P48S2. This is an important distinction that Davidson seems to pay scant regard to. Beavers and Rice (2001: 366) also highlight the crucial need to differentiate between images, ideas and words, if we are not, like Davidson, to miss the fact that the attribute of thought has its own causal order quite apart from that of extension. 104

50 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

or as Spinoza terms them, inadequate ideas, are for Spinoza necessarily a suffering of the mind rather than an action.105 As durational bodies living in a mass of interacting activity, we are constantly, if not always perceptibly to consciousness, being affecting in a great many ways.106 All these affections are associated with fluctuations of images in the mind, and insofar as the mind is suffering these images, it can only have a ‘confused and mutilated’ knowledge of bodies.107 It is important to note here that these images are not pictorial: ‘to retain the customary words, the affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present to us, we shall call images of things, though they do not reproduce the figures of things’.108 Images rather appear in the imagination as irregular signs or traces (vestigia) to be interpreted, and as long as these images are only understood through the impact on our bodies, or through abstractions reached through generalising such impact, then our minds express only a minimal level of thought. The power of thinking is only expressive for Spinoza at the level of adequate ideas, which are actions of the mind.109 Adequate ideas occur when an idea is affirmed by a reflexive thinking that can only be explained through itself. This goes some way to explain Spinoza’s cryptic remark that we do not know something to be true unless we know that we know it is true.110 Knowing something adequately does not merely involve having an accurate representation of a state of affairs for Spinoza, because he rejects the notion that ideas are dead pictures on a tablet and that truth involves a correspondence between these pictures and an external ‘reality’.111 An adequate idea for Spinoza expresses its own reality, meaning that truth is its own standard.112 ‘Own reality’ here does not mean a reality separate from the corporeal, because there is only ‘one’ reality for Spinoza;113 nevertheless, insofar as thought is a particular qualitative 105

E3.P1. E4.P4. 107 E2.P29C. 108 Spinoza (1994: 130; E2.P17S). 109 E3.P1. 110 E2.P43. 111 E2.D4. 112 E2.P43S. 113 Though as Deleuze (1988: 108–109) notes, ‘one’ is entirely inadequate at this level because this is merely a numerical distinction, whereas Spinoza’s ‘one’ reality expresses in ‘qualitatively different senses’ (2004:50). 106

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

expression it expresses this reality in a way that remains irreducible to any other attribute; it is infinite in its kind, that is, it is not limited by extension.114 It is therefore completely misleading to equate reality with physicality, because thought and extension are mutually irreducible expressions or powers to act. Thought expresses for Spinoza, it does not describe, for an adequate idea is not reducible to images or words.115 Intellectual affirmation is not even synonymous with verbal affirmation, because according to Spinoza sometimes we can only express negatively in words what is understood affirmatively.116 If an idea adequately represents an object it is because it expresses itself as thought and not because the object causes a representation in thought that is described in mental terms. Even if we discover that when we think of something a certain part of the brain functions in a particular manner and this can be shown in a scanning machine, this information (or image in Spinozist terms) will always be merely the vestigial content of thought and not thinking itself. For thinking does not correlate with a description of what is, but constitutes a way of living through the expression of a certain form of affectivity. Spinoza’s monism does not, therefore, consist of flattening out reality onto a single plane of physical causality that is dualistically explainable, but opens it up into a plurality of irreducible expressivity, but this is obscured if Spinoza is not followed in separating the ideatum from the idea to avoid confusing the images of thought with the act of thinking itself. Spinoza therefore insists that inadequate ideas are not false pictures of reality, but rather bear witness to inexpressive and generally sad or dysphoric thinking. While this is certainly an odd stance for a philosopher to take, it does make sense when the pivotal role of affectivity in Spinoza’s philosophy is borne in mind, for it is only in the intensity of affective relations that thinking can validate itself. As an inadequate idea is a passion or a passive affect where something is impinging upon thought’s expression, its defining feature is that it reduces and restricts the potency and thus the power (potentia) 114

E1.P10–11. E2.P48S2. 116 TIE.96. As Deleuze (1990: 140, tr. modified) notes, ‘An idea never has as its cause an object it represents; it rather represents an object because it expresses its own cause. An idea has, then, a content, expressive and not representative, that is to be referred solely to the power of thinking’. 115

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

of thought. The problem with inadequate ideas is not that they are incorrect mental pictures of something external to thought, nor that they lack anything in themselves; rather, in the confusion of an image of thought with the activity of thinking itself, inadequate ideas are unable to relate to other ideas to produce an intensity that can displace the force of these images. With inadequate ideas, thinking is caught up within a representative function where the images of things encountered in experience dominate the processes of thought; but Spinoza is quick to point out that this is how we all start out in life and it is not something that can be escaped from entirely.117 Spinoza thus reverses the romantic image of everybody being born free before ending up in servitude to the various traps of life, by drawing attention to the fact that when we are born we are completely at the mercy of our surroundings. If we are not aided then we will simply die, and our first ideas of the world can only be very confused and inadequate to say the least. We begin life at the mercy of random experience (experientia vaga) where we can only try to cope with the situations we find ourselves in as we have little to no active ability to negotiate them and rely almost entirely on adult supervision. As we learn how certain aspects of experience relate to each other, we can begin to form a rudimentary ability to organise our encounters in the world via general images and signs that recall various patterns of these repeatedly felt affects.118 We can learn, for example, that we should not place our hands in a fire, because it burns. The problem is, however, that the general image of ‘fire’ that we form from this is ‘suffered’ to the extent that it only recalls a debilitating or ‘sad’ past relation without any understanding of the genesis of fire and how it can be used positively in different situations.119 This is not to say, however, that such basic knowledge is not useful – quite the opposite. As Spinoza himself remarked, via this form of knowledge ‘I know almost everything that is of practical use in life’.120 In other words, in order to sustain your mere existence for as long as possible, 117

TTP.Pre.5; E4.P3. E2.P40S2. 119 E2.P40S1. 120 Spinoza (2002: 7; TIE.20). Regarding the third and most advanced form of knowledge that Spinoza identifies, he notes that ‘the things I have hitherto been able to know by this kind of knowledge have been very few’ (Spinoza 2002: 8; TIE.22). 118

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

it is often enough simply to form general ideas of bodies and situations that have harmed you and thus spend your life avoiding them. However, such an existence must be generally â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;sadâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; or at least passive for Spinoza because it is spent in fear and avoidance without understanding precisely how the things that are avoided might be related to in a more active and positive way. Here it becomes possible to start to get a sense of why Spinozaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main work is called Ethics and why he writes that democracy is the best form of government, for adequate ideas require an appropriate environment to foster them, with fear and uncertainty being the biggest enemies here. As Spinoza famously wrote in the opening passage of his Theological-Political Treatise: If men were always able to regulate their affairs with sure judgment, or if fortune always smiled upon them, they would not get caught up in any superstition. But since people are often reduced to such desperate straits that they cannot arrive at any solid judgment and as the good things of fortune for which they have a boundless desire are quite uncertain, they fluctuate wretchedly between hope and fear. This is why most people are quite ready to believe anything. When the mind is in a state of doubt, the slightest impulse can easily steer it in any direction, and all the more readily when it is hovering between hope and fear.121 Uncertain conditions and vacillations of hope and fear thus contribute to the generation of inadequate ideas, which then reinforce the affects of hope and fear in a vicious circle. Hence, for Spinoza authoritarian rule relies upon hope and fear to keep people confused and docile, while a free republic would eradicate such inadequate ideas with an active freedom that encourages the expression of thought: It may indeed be the highest secret of monarchical government and utterly essential to it, to keep men deceived, and to disguise the fear that sways them with the specious name of religion, so that they will fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance, and will not think it humiliating but supremely glorious to spill their blood and sacrifice their lives for

121

Spinoza (2007: 3; TTP Pre[1]).

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the glorification of a single man. But in a free republic, on the other hand, nothing that can be devised or attempted will be less successful.122 Again, the interesting thing here is that for Spinoza it is always a question of the affectivity at play in any given situation and not absolute truth or morality. The problem with authoritarian rule is not that it is ‘evil’ or propagates lies and inaccuracies – it instils fear and hope and thus the circulation of inadequate ideas, meaning that it results in sad affects that restrict learning and what people can actually do and experience. Inadequate ideas themselves are not errors, therefore, but are rather sad and passive as they confuse images and thinking and render the latter inexpressive. This is a complex issue of course, because as Spinoza himself notes, we rely on certain images and notions to guide our everyday experience, yet one of the central insights of Spinoza’s philosophy is that any claim as to the ‘real’ nature of any image of the imagination (or any aspect of experience, if you prefer) betrays an affective relation. Even if a strictly metaphysical reading of Spinoza is insisted upon here where it is claimed that everything is, in the end, an expression of ‘substance’ for Spinoza, it must still be noted that adequate knowledge of singular things betrays a highly affective, joyful way of being for Spinoza and not merely a ‘correct’ mental picture of what exists.

1.7

The signs of the affective-imagination

As vacillating as the imagination is, however, there is clearly a reasonably stable and discernible content to experience, and as Spinoza notes, there is no affective relation without some kind of trace (vestigium) or ‘image’ (pictorial or otherwise) in play. Experience or the imagination is thus semiotic to the extent that all affects involve relations of signs or ‘vestigia’ (traces) in Spinoza’s language, coupled with a conscious interpretation of these based on how they have been experienced. A dualism of two orders of signs might thus be introduced here, insofar as there are the vestigia of the affectiveimagination and the vestigia of their interpretation – a dualism

122

Spinoza (2007: 6; TTP Pre[7]).

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more commonly referred to as that of things and words. Spinoza denies this however, because words are ‘things’ insofar as they are strictly vestigial and betray traces of corporeal relations rather than an understanding of the genesis of such relations (which is the role of thinking and of adequate ideas, which is not to be confused with the signs of language). In order to understand precisely what Spinoza is getting at here, it is necessary to look a little deeper into the relationship between signs and words. As suspicious as Spinoza is of language, it is clear that it is vital to human life and enables us to negotiate the constantly changing and haphazard world around us and organise our experiences according to some repetitive patterns of affects that can be predicted and repeated, thus giving us a huge advantage over other beings. However, the problem with this is that such terms merely relate to the affects that happened to have been frequently encountered in particular experiences that are never exactly repeated. Generally speaking this is not a problem of course – while no two experiences of eating an apple are exactly the same (and no two apples are exactly the same), the word ‘apple’ is still useful in describing this kind of entity, body or ‘mode’, to use Spinoza’s terminology. However, when it comes to words that describe certain experiences, values, ideals, concepts and so on that we inherit and which extend beyond our experience, then language becomes problematic. This situation becomes acute once words are taken as terms that refer to something ‘real’ that underlies all experience and the affective relations that they delineate, or even that they are in some way the condition of possibility for affectivity as such. This leads to ‘confused and mutilated’ ideas,123 while calamitous situations also beckon when what is taken to be real and inalienable suddenly breaks down. Such a violent removal of such an image that has given meaning to the rest of experience can result in deep dysphoria and lack of direction (hence Nietzsche’s infamous theme of ‘the death of God’). Spinoza calls such terms ‘general notions’ (which include ‘transcendentals’ and ‘universals’), and gives the examples of ‘Being’, ‘Thing’, ‘Something’ and ‘Man’, which ‘signify ideas that are confused to the 123 The phrase ‘confused and mutilated’ (confusam et mutilatum) is one of Spinoza’s favourites when talking about inadequate thought, and he sees this as having a very real danger; see for example E2.P29C and E4.App.

56 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

highest degree’ because they predicate ‘infinitely many singulars’.124 Depending upon how someone has been affected by the relations they consider as ‘human’, for example, they may have come to form an idea of the human as ‘an animal of erect stature ... an animal capable of laughter, or a featherless biped, or a rational animal’.125 This is due to the association of ideas that is formed through the random encounters of experience and the order and relations of the affects that these have resulted in (which education and enculturation play a strong role in of course). Here, signs or vestigia (traces or marks) dominate the affective-imagination: ‘from signs ... we recollect things, and form certain ideas of them, like those through which we imagine the things’.126 [F]rom the thought of the word pomum a Roman will immediately pass to the thought of the fruit [viz. an apple], which has no similarity to that articulate sound and nothing in common with it except that the body of the same man has often been affected by these two, that is, that the man often heard the word pomum while he saw the fruit.127 For Spinoza, signs or vestigia issue-from somewhere and carry-forth into a multiplicity of possible connections – they are the marks of transience, of ‘going over’. In this sense, a word or sign is precisely a marking or vestigium whose essential nature does not rest with any linguistic meaning, as we can see from Spinoza’s follow-up passage to the one above: And in this way each of us will pass from one thought to another, as each one’s association has ordered the images of things in the body. For example, a soldier, having seen traces [vestigiis] of a horse in the sand, will immediately pass from the thought of a horse to the thought of a horseman, and from that to the thought of war, 124

Spinoza (1994: 140; E2.P40S1). Spinoza (1994: 140; E2.P40S1). This also suggests that the more a particular notion of the human is reinforced, the more prevalent it becomes as a kind of normalising force. 126 Spinoza (1994: 141; E2.P40S2). Vinciguerra (2005) provides a thorough account of the role of signs in Spinoza’s philosophy. 127 Spinoza (1994: 131; E2.P18S). 125

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

and so on. But a farmer will pass from the thought of a horse to the thought of a plow, and then to that of a field, and so on. And so each one, according as he has been accustomed to join and connect the images of things in this or that way, will pass from one thought to the other.128 Vestigia (including words) represent various passages between affects but do not say anything about affective relations themselves and certainly do not provide any kind of ground of possibility. To put this another way, affectivity is never reducible to words, though the manner in which affectivity is represented in language expresses a certain affective relationality. As Spinoza notes, we call something ‘good’ because we desire it, we do not desire something because it is ‘good’,129 while ‘each one, from his own affect, judges or evaluates, what is good and what is bad, what is better and what is worse, and finally, what is best and what is worst’.130 This is one of the most interesting and easily overlooked problems that Spinoza’s texts grapple with, namely the problem of confusing affectivity or affective relations with signs, such as when desire is confused with something that is desired (or love with something that is loved): insofar as euphoric or dysphoric affects are related to certain signs and images of the affective-imagination, they are reified as their cause. This results in all sorts of problems – in fact it might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that for Spinoza this is at the centre of the vast majority of our problems. Once certain signs are taken to be the direct cause of the affects themselves, a highly unstable situation arises because any tangible change in the chains of association that these signs are involved in will destabilise the affective relation. Any kind of threat to this sign-chain must thus be dogmatically fought against in order to protect the order, which is an extremely dangerous and deleterious threat and one that Spinoza strongly associates with organised religion.131 It is therefore important to reiterate the point that signs or traces are, in fact, essentially thoughtless and strictly corporeal for Spinoza,

128 129 130 131

Spinoza (1994: 131; E2.P18S). E3.P9S. Spinoza (1994: 175; E3.P39S). See the preface to the TTP, for example.

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

either in word form or otherwise: ‘an idea (since it is a mode of thinking) consists neither in the image of anything, nor in words. For the essence of words and images is constituted only by corporeal motions, which do not at all involve the concept of thought’.132 This is a rather counter-intuitive position of course, and a reasonable objection could be made here that if thought is divorced from language then it becomes irreconcilably mystical; but for Spinoza words simply do not express thought – we can regurgitate words without any thinking involved at all.133 We could swallow a dictionary, so to speak, and learn thousands of words, and thought might still remain inexpressive. This is an important point of contact that he shares with Nietzsche, who writes that ‘whoever thinks in words thinks as a speaker and not a thinker’.134 This is not to say that words do not bear witness to thinking, however, just as other bodily motions can (a typical example would be the composition and performance of a musical score), but thinking is only truly expressive when it affirms itself as a power of expression that is not confused with any particular sign and is manifested in the performance of expressive compositions of signs. The problem with inadequate ideas is thus not that they are mistaken, for it is perfectly possible to live with only inadequate ideas; rather, it has to do with the extent to which these ideas maintain a dysphoria of affective relations. For thinking to become active and expressive, it has to move from a representative function of involving how the body has been affected in its random experiences, to one of becoming an affective force that is able to relate ideas to each other with enough potency to intensify affective relations and displace the association of generalised signs formed through the imagination.135 Such a transformation from inadequate to adequate ideas can be achieved, Spinoza suggests, through replacing our ‘general notions’ with ‘common notions’. The latter of these are in fact crucial to his philosophy insofar as they mark a move not only

132

Spinoza (1994: 148; E2.P49S2). For further discussion of this, see Savan (1973). 134 Nietzsche (2006b: 79; GM 3.8; KSA 5.354). 135 See E5.P2. As Foti (1982: 222) puts it, ‘inadequate conceptions issue in passional involvement, whereas adequacy of thought connotes actional emotions of desire, love and joy’. 133

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between two qualitatively different forms of knowledge, but two qualitatively different ways of being.

1.8

From general to common notions

Spinoza’s qualitative differentiation between general and common notions relates directly to the discussion of inadequate and adequate ideas above. General notions are formed through the images or perceptions from random experience and particular interactions, and through signs that recollect such images, such as words,136 and thus have more to do with memory and recollection than with thinking as they involve an engagement with the content of experience in relation to that which has passed. Common notions, however, express an understanding of the geneses of the images of the imagination and are not limited to recollecting previous experiences or signs that lead the imagination to this or that image, and thus have the potency to displace the impinging images of the imagination and to recompose them. General notions and common notions might be indistinguishable however, insofar as they are both semantically communicated. The difference is not a matter of wording, but of how the singularities of experience are dealt with and the affective relationality that this involves, for while general notions attempt to cope with singularities by subsuming them under general types (thus introducing forms of transcendence), common notions trace singularities so that they may be recomposed immanently. In terms of affectivity, the main difference between general and common notions is one of passivity and activity, for the former betray a ‘suffering’ from the impingement of the images of the imagination, while the latter composes the imagination in order to intensify the affective relations of experience. General notions need to be understood, therefore, as a form of internality insofar as they compose internal relations of signs that are grounded, in the last instance, in some transcendent image that they represent. Common notions, on the other hand, express an externality of relations insofar as they are productive of the genitive sense of any given sign or image while remaining irreducible to them. Spinoza’s example of how to define a circle offers an insight

136

E2.P40S2.

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

here, because to define it as a plane curve everywhere equidistant from a central fixed point would be to produce an image of a circle rather than the conditions of a circle’s production. An adequate definition of a circle would rather note that it is ‘described by any line of which one end is fixed and the other movable’.137 Semantically speaking, these meanings could be considered equivalent because they both describe a circle as an enclosed line that is everywhere the same distance from a central point, yet the former produces an image of an already constituted circle, and the latter the production of a circle. The subtle yet important difference is that while the relations of the terms of the first definition remain internal to an image (they are subsumed in the image of the circle), in the second definition the circle is given as a certain set of relations that remain external to the terms used, thus providing the conditions of production for any image that we might come to term as a ‘circle’. This might be a very simple example, but it demonstrates a basic difference between general and common notions well, for the former allow the recognition of certain images, and the latter their conditions of sense. Common notions thus do not represent or represent something that subsumes their terms, but are evocative of a certain relationality from which a given term might gain its sense, that is, its conditions of coming into being. So, while general notions invoke simplified and generalised experiences or affective relations that are subsumed under general images, common notions or concepts do not find expression in any analysable interiority, but rather in the exteriority of the relations that they evoke, and thus cannot be strictly understood via an internal analysis of their terms. To link this back to the discussion of language and signs above, general notions are essentially indistinguishable from words insofar as the terms involved are merely invocative of other terms before finally leading back to some image, while common notions are evocative of relations that recompose the affective relations of the imagination and mark a new way of experiencing words, signs, images or vestigia (or a new way or mode of being, if preferred). The link between the two is not to be gained in merely learning new words, therefore, but of a change of affectivity; the link between general and 137 Spinoza (2002: 26; TIE 96). See Curley (1988: 110–111) for further discussion of Spinoza and definition.

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

common notions, or inadequate and adequate ideas, is to be found through the experience of joy, for it is through the discovery and experience of common, intensifying connections that the learning of composition and relationality can begin, for without this there is merely the impingement of images that limit the expressivity of the body through the representation of always-already determined entities. However, any understanding will comprise both general and common notions because experience is negotiated through both the haphazard images that are gained through personal experiences and the ideas that are formed through learning the geneses of certain aspects of what is experienced. Our understanding of people, for example, will comprise both how we have been affected by them and what we have been taught and heard about them, alongside a wider understanding of, among other things, the socio-historical and physiological geneses of the human. Spinoza notes that if your only experience of a person from a particular country is a negative one, then it is hard not to have a negative image of all their compatriots.138 This negative image can be displaced, however, by some chance positive encounters with other people from this country, or through second-hand positive accounts. However, the only properly active understanding that can displace this image is achieved through having a wider understanding of, for example, variations of cultural practices and how these lead to differences in the way people relate to each other and the things around them. This understanding does not rely on chance encounters, hearsay or the imposition of new images to displace old ones, but rather understands relations and their geneses and thus displaces the dominating force of the negative image. The key for Spinoza is thus moving from an understanding that operates in terms of the invocation of signs and images, to one that can evoke the relations that provide the former with their genitive sense, thus opening the possibility for their force to be displaced and reorganised. The main difference between Spinozaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s general and common notions (or first and second forms of knowledge) could thus be couched in terms of passivity and activity. The first form of knowledge

138

E3.P46.

62 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

involves representations or images of things that have been encountered rather haphazardly in random experience and which only represent how the body has been affected.139 This remains passive insofar as the manner in which euphoric and dysphoric relations are formed, or joy and sadness are experienced, is due to the happenstances of experience. Joy can be stumbled upon, such as when a toddler happens to put something in its mouth that is actually pleasant to have there, but there is no understanding of the commonality of affection that is taking place so that this activity can be related to other activities regardless of the objects involved and whether or not they are immediately to hand. This requires what Spinoza terms as a common notion.140 Interestingly, common notions do not develop purely through an evolving intellect for Spinoza, because the only possibility of forming them is through passively encountering a commonality and thus joyful relations; in other words, it is not only ‘learning by doing’ that is important for Spinoza, for genuine learning can only take place through joy; or in other words, through an experience that increases the body’s power to act.141 If learning is a process of discovering commonalities and making connections, then it is a process of intensifying our affective relations and increasing our ability to affect and be affected by the world. For Spinoza, we learn nothing through bad experiences as such, because sadness bears witness to a bad encounter or a disconnectedness that impinges on our power to act. While it can be learnt accidentally that ‘such and such a thing’ is a cause of sadness and should be avoided, genuine learning can only be achieved through discovering the appropriate commonalities and connections that can be made in such situations to repel and expel the sad affects; and because anything whatsoever can be the accidental cause of joy or sadness,142 merely clinging on to what has helped previously might not always be appropriate. What is needed more than anything else is thus an understanding of the genesis of affectivity.

139

E2.P40S2. E2.P37–P40. 141 See E5.P10, where Spinoza confirms that it is only insofar as we are torn by contrary affects that that the understanding is hindered. For a further discussion of this, see Deleuze (1988: 54–58). 142 E3.P15. 140

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

1.9

Conatus: ‘how’ things are, not ‘what’ things are

The above discussion on inadequate ideas/general notions and adequate ideas/common notions could thus be summed up as follows: whereas the first kind of knowledge works with representations of what things are (‘Man’, horse, dog and so on), the second kind of knowledge involves how things are; that is, the genesis of affective relations or the way in which they manifest.143 Inadequate ideas can haphazardly lead to euphoric affective relations – we might learn to avoid certain things due to past bad experiences and thus open up a space for more joyful experiences – and it is only to this extent that adequate ideas or common notions can be formed as these occur through gaining an understanding of the ‘how’ of these fortunate encounters. This is where the importance of healthy human relations comes into play, for it is with fellow human beings that people experience the greatest commonalities and most intense joy. However, if human beings have certain commonalities, this is not due to the kind of thing that they are, but due to the similarities of the affects that are enjoyed at various singular points of contact and in various situations. Indeed, Spinoza confirms his commitment to refraining from positing any sort of explanatory ground beyond affectivity when instead of thinking about the human in terms of a determinate entity, or even as a ground of possibility, he thinks of the human in terms of desire (cupiditas): ‘Desire is man’s very essence, insofar as it is conceived to be determined, from any given affection of it, to do something’.144 While this might sound rather elliptic, Spinoza clarifies this a little later when he writes that by desire he means any of our ‘strivings, impulses, appetites, and volitions, which vary as the man’s constitution varies’. In other words, whatever the human is taken to be, it is inseparable from whatever activity and affectivity its relations immanently involve, which in turn changes the sense of the term. Spinoza even anticipates Nietzsche’s articulation of the human as the 143 Spinoza’s one example in the Ethics to demonstrate the different forms of knowledge seems to bear this out, because those who know the rules to generate proportional numbers can come to the correct results through understanding the genesis of their production (though, rather enigmatically, the highest form of ‘intuitive’ knowledge can generate the answer without running through the various stages) (E2.P40S2). 144 Spinoza (1994: 188; E3.DefAff1).

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

‘indeterminate animal’145 when he follows this up with the remark that our strivings, impulses, appetites and volitions ‘are not so infrequently opposed to one another that the man is pulled in different directions and knows not where to turn’. However, the fact that it is other people – other human bodies – where our affective commonalities lie is easily apparent. As Spinoza points out, regardless of how much human affairs are mocked by satirists and reviled by theologians, ‘hominem homini Deum esse’ – ‘man is a god to man’.146 Human beings are thus not affirmed as more important than other beings because of a biological classification, but as offering more potent relations due to the immanent experience of euphoria that is generally felt in the communications between human bodies.147 Indeed, rather than a biological classification of different beings, Spinoza outlines a kind of ethology where commonalities of affects are important and not merely the affects involved in sexual reproduction: a workhorse may have more in common with an ox than a racehorse, due to their similar affective relations.148 The images and representations of random experience are thus entirely inadequate for the task of finding relational commonalities, for what is needed first and foremost is to understand that what something is cannot be separated from its affective relations: [T]he power of each thing, or the striving by which it (either alone or with others) does anything, or strives to do anything – that 145

GM 3.13; KSA 5.367. E4.P35S. 147 Spinoza even goes as far as to suggest that due to the difference in affectivity of non-human bodies, we should concentrate on reinforcing human relations and not withhold from utilising other bodies or aspects of our environment as is conducive to this process (E4.P37S1). As Houle (2001) notes, this is to the disappointment of deep ecologists (Spinoza became popular for deep ecologists since Næss’ (1977) article), who see his philosophy as otherwise offering a non-anthropocentric ethics, but what this ignores is the fact that for Spinoza it is only through the care of and active engagement with human relations that global issues can be properly addressed (de Jonge (2004) also points this out). Ultimately, a more potent understanding of the wider relations in which we live will result in greater care for these, but this can only come about through augmenting human relations. Seen in this light, Spinoza’s point does not mean that we should indiscriminately use other bodies, but rather that we should not denigrate ourselves in favour of some moral prohibition that overrides the affectivity of our relations before these even get to be understood. 148 This example and Spinoza as an ethologist is suggested by Deleuze (1988: 122–130); see also Deleuze & Parnet (2006: 44–47). 146

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

is ... the power, or striving, by which it strives to persevere in its being, is nothing but the given, or actual, essence of the thing itself’.149 The key phrase here – and perhaps the whole of Spinoza’s philosophy – is ‘potentia sive conatus, quo in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est praeter ipsius rei datam sive actualem essentiam’ – power or striving is the very essence of singular existence. However, this essence is not something that is static or something that lies behind its affects – it is ‘simply’ a way of relating, or to use Spinoza’s term, a mode. It must be accepted that grammar presents some difficulties here, for this thought still has to be phrased in terms of ‘its’ affects as if there was something issuing the affects.150 The term ‘striving’ also sounds a little awkward – for what is it that is supposed to be striving? To address this it is important to note that Spinoza equates this striving with power or potency (potentia), which is nothing else than ways of affecting and being affected, or a certain affective relationality.151 This striving to persevere should not be considered as representing a proto-Darwinist ideal of certain beings negotiating the external world in order to survive, as Spinoza’s conatus is often presented,152 but rather that perseverance is demanded insofar as affective relations involve acts and events that change the constitution of the bodies involved.153 Affectivity does not consist of beings 149

Spinoza (1994: 159; E3.P7D). More on the problem of grammar and affectivity will be discussed in Chapter 4. 151 There is some difficulty in the English translation here, because unlike Latin (or French or German for that matter) there is only one word for ‘power’. Latin has potentia for constituting potency, and potestas for constituted power. Some translators use ‘potential’ to translate potentia, but the problem with this is that it could be misconstrued as meaning not-actual, when in fact potentia ‘is’ as constituting, but is not finally constituted. According to Negri (1991: 140), in order to properly understand Spinoza’s philosophy it is vital to understand this distinction, especially as Spinoza is the philosopher who ‘poses potentia against potestas’, or productive force against the constituted. 152 See Yovel (1999), who claims that for Spinoza the conatus involves enhancing and expressing, rather than preserving (1999: 50); this is also discussed in the final chapter in relation to Nietzsche’s criticisms of conatus. 153 Spinoza’s example mentioned above of how the encounter with a large meal is related to from the perspective of a hungry body is significant here, for while this encounter is a joyful one to begin with, once the activity of eating reaches a certain point then the constitution of the body is changed to such an extent that the same food is related to in an adverse manner (E3.P59S). ‘Perseverance’ in this instance means more than a desire for food in order to survive, for it involves a joyful relation that 150

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

who withdraw in order to consider what is in their best interests, but of an immanent relationality that produces relative stabilities in the shape of determinable individuals – but there are no individuals that want to persevere outside of any affective relation. Rather than positing a reality made up of substantially different beings, with Spinoza every individual being is differing via an affective relationality or power to affect and be affected – this is the sense in which all things can be said to be – but there are huge differences in degrees of power and intensity and a constant communication and transformation of powers among singular expressions, which is precisely the case in the opening sections of Descartes’ Meditations where individual entities appear across a world of intensities, but which are tamed into an order of substantial beings (or inadequate universal ideas). For Spinoza, however, being is intensive, for to be is to affect or be affected, or in other words to express a certain intensity (a certain way or power of being). The importance of expression in Spinoza is easy to overlook, however, because despite Spinoza’s insistence on the importance of clear definitions in his geometrical method, he nowhere defines what he means by expression.154 However, from a proper consideration of the above it is clear why this is so, for expression is that which provides a sense through which anything can be at all – expression formalises while resisting formalisation. Spinoza does offer some alternative names for ‘what’ is expressed – Deus sive Natura, substantiam, natura naturans – all of which are nominal,155 and all of which offer ways of thinking expression; but these ways of thinking can only be expressive or inexpressive in the act of being thought. This is clearly a radical departure from Descartes. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, Descartes begins with the intensities of transient mental perceptions (as can be seen from the beginning of immanently alters the affective relationality at play until the same relation becomes a depressing one, leading to a reconfiguration of relations. Indeed, as Curley (1988: 107) points out, conatus has a technical use in Cartesian physics in the phrase ‘conatus ad motum’ that Spinoza might well be evoking here, which refers to the tendency for bodies to persist in a state of motion or rest unless new relations come into play. Conatus should not, therefore, strictly be identified with a desire to persevere. 154 This point is discussed by Deleuze (1990: 19; 1968: 15). 155 As Yovel (1989a: 145) notes, Spinoza ‘exploits the affective and connotative halo of select traditional terms, especially “God” and its various derivatives, in order to give the philosophy of reason its import as a substitute for religion’.

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

the Meditations), but eventually grounds this transience in a distinct being (God) that enables us to have knowledge of other distinct beings (ourselves and other finite entities). The world only appears as irreconcilably transient because of the nature of its creator, God, who is all powerful, benevolent, knowing and so on, who created creatures like us with a soul to see his creation. What God does and what we can do is due to the ‘kind of thing’ that God is and the ‘kind of thing’ that ‘Man’ is. Spinoza does away with the whole image of philosophy as that which tells us what ‘kinds of things’ there are by pointing out that whatever we posit as existing expresses some kind of activity and affective relationality and therefore expresses potentia in a particular way. It is worth reemphasising that for Spinoza it is therefore crucial that we do not confuse images of the imagination and words and signs with the act of thinking itself, and instead of trying to determine ‘what’ things are (as if there are determinate objects in the world that remain unaffected and thus definable), we determine ‘how’ things are, that is, we need to find ‘common notions’ that can understand the geneses of bodies and how these can be composed in active and joyful experiences. Every attempt to produce an image of the body with a fixed set of capabilities is doomed to failure in its artificially static and thus potentially dysphoric picture of reality; to return to the Spinoza quote that started this chapter, ‘no one has yet determined what the body can do’. With this extremely nuanced approach, Spinoza thus makes an unlikely precursor for Nietzsche’s genealogical philosophy.

2 Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

As mentioned in the introduction, Nietzsche proclaimed his joy at discovering Spinoza in a piece of correspondence from the summer of 1881, where he detailed five specific areas of strong affiliation and one overarching tendency. The force and specificity of his remarks means that it is unlikely to be a mere coincidence that after his discovery of Spinoza and their shared tendency of making knowledge the most powerful affect, Nietzsche’s use of the term ‘Affekt’ – somewhat more technical and specific than ‘Gefühl’ or ‘Leidenschaft’ – proliferates greatly. This is not to say that Nietzsche does not use these terms interchangeably at times; the point is rather that the more specific and Spinozist term ‘Affekt’ plays a much greater role in Nietzsche’s later texts and is paradigmatic of a shift in his philosophy that decisively breaks with the more metaphysically inclined Schopenhauerean inspired early works, such as The Birth of Tragedy, as well as the more ‘positivist’ stance of Human all too Human to a more ‘Spinozist’ orientation towards the immanence of affectivity. In fact, although Nietzsche uses the term ‘Affect’ (spelt with a ‘c’) occasionally before his discovery of Spinoza during 1881, this is dropped almost entirely in favour of ‘Affekt’ thereafter (as can be seen in his message to Overbeck), which then proliferates in his writings. Furthermore, Nietzsche does not actually use the word ‘Affekt’ in any published text before Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, where both morality and the will are first unambiguously couched in terms of affectivity. Even without this philological link, Nietzsche’s explicit heralding of Spinoza as a precursor and the subsequent growth in importance 68

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

that affectivity plays in his philosophy are certainly significant. Surprisingly little attention is paid to the orientating role that affectivity plays in Nietzsche’s work however, and instead it is power (Macht) and its relationship to will (Wille) that is focused on, which is understandable given the prominence that the reception has given to ‘will-to-power’ (Wille-zur-Macht) in Nietzsche’s texts.1 However, Nietzsche is clear that he considers the will to involve a certain relation of affects, for ‘the will is not only a complex of feeling and thinking; rather, it is fundamentally an affect’,2 while ‘the will to overcome an affect is, in the end, itself only the will of another, or several other, affects’.3 The importance of affectivity for Nietzsche does not end here however, because morality, another of the most important areas of analysis for Nietzsche, is ‘just a sign language of the affects’.4 Furthermore, Nietzsche is often characterised as a Lebensphilosoph, but ‘Leben’ is merely a nominal term for ‘the foundation of the affects’.5 When it comes to knowledge, Nietzsche’s perspectivism is invariably offered as his major contribution, but what is rarely paid attention to is the fact that while for Nietzsche there is only ‘a perspectival seeing’ and a ‘perspectival “knowing” ’, the more affects that are brought to a case, the fuller our ‘concepts’ and our ‘objectivity’

1 Notable exceptions include Deleuze in terms of discussing the differential feeling of power in Nietzsche, Blondel in linking the body, affects and text, and Klossowski in terms of his discussion of impulses, though none of these specifically relate affectivity in the sense being discussed here (although Poellner (2007) links the necessity of affectivity when it comes to value for Nietzsche)). Perhaps the most notable exception of all is Janaway (2007), who claims that ‘Nietzsche’s evident concern to provoke the affects of his own readers is intimately related to his genealogical project’ (2007: 12), and that his rhetoric, ‘in arousing the reader’s emotions, functions as an indispensable means towards the task of discovering the affective causal origins of one’s moral evaluations’; for further discussion of Nietzsche’s deliberately evocative style, see Blondel (1991: 39), Fink (2003: 4), Deleuze (1983: xii), Stegmaier (2006: 35) and Winchester (1994: 124)). However, Janaway (2007: 216–222) also insists that a unified self is necessary in order to ground affectivity, which is something that Nietzsche resists, as will be discussed below. 2 Nietzsche (2001: 18–19; JGB 19; KSA 5.31). 3 Nietzsche (2001: 65; JGB 117; KSA 5.93). 4 Nietzsche (2001: 77; JGB 187; KSA 5.107); see also GM Pre.6; KSA 5.253 and GD 7.1; KSA 6.98. There are also some sketches in his notebook under the title ‘Moral als Zeichensprache’ (KSA 10.257), where there same phrase is quoted again (KSA 10.261; again KSA 10.268), and as possible chapter titles for works (KSA 10.343 & 660). 5 Nietzsche (2001: 152; JGB 258; KSA 5.206).

70 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

become, which means that to eliminate the affects would be to ‘castrate the intellect’.6 Nietzsche is also famed for his notebook denial of facts in favour of interpretations;7 but again, ‘Who interprets? – our affects’.8 Perhaps most famously of all, Nietzsche is renowned for being the tragic philosopher of Dionysus in contrast to the cold and calculating Apollonian, but again the main difference between these two relates to the affects, for while the Apollonian keeps the eye excited above all else, in the Dionysian condition the whole ‘affectsystem’ is excited and intensified.9 For ‘dionysischen Menschen’ it is impossible to overlook any ‘sign of the affects’, for they penetrate every skin as they affect and constantly transform themselves, while music itself is a total excitation and affective discharge – a residue of Dionysian histrionics.10 The purpose of this chapter is thus to show how Nietzsche’s Spinozist-inspired later works attempt to highlight the determining role that affectivity plays in the interpretative processes of experience. The core of this chapter will therefore be dedicated to the complex relationship that Nietzsche develops between affectivity, interpretation and the perspectival, and in particular how a growing level of consciousness in human history has led to the repression of the multiplicity of perspectives at play in bodily experience in favour of the monocular perspective of consciousness. In order to accomplish this, the chapter will begin by highlighting how affectivity underpins an array of Nietzsche’s core concepts and critiques, particularly that of the will and his critique of the subject as a ‘sign-language of the affects’. The focus will then shift to how Nietzsche couches the relationship between the will and affectivity before examining his problematisation of the dominating role that consciousness plays in negating other bodily perspectives. It will also be shown here how Spinoza’s contemporary, Gottfried Leibniz, plays an important influence in this critique and why, perhaps despite some of Nietzsche’s

6 Nietzsche (2006b: 87; GM 3.12; KSA 5.365). A pertinent example of this oversight can be witnessed in Clark’s (1990) renowned account of Nietzsche on epistemology and perspectivism, which does not consider affectivity as playing any significant role at all. Janaway (2007: 206) also notes this general omission in the commentaries. 7 KSA 12.315. 8 KSA 12.161. 9 GD 9.10; KSA 6.117. 10 GD 9.10; KSA 6.118.

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

remarks that seem to suggest the contrary, consciousness is not a form of falsification for Nietzsche, but a falsification of the plurality of perspectives that are at play in any given moment. Consciousness for Nietzsche is thus one form of interpretation among many, but it is affectivity that plays the decisive role. A discussion of Nietzsche’s description of consciousness will also consider why he considers it to be a social and linguistic form of interpretation and therefore not a deeply personal form of experience at all, meaning that the judgements of consciousness are the judgements of an inherited past of norms and a common, inherited language. The practical consequence of the growing domination of consciousness is, therefore, that of a moral one that judges human action according to the will of an autonomous agent, something which Nietzsche considers to be problematic because of the inherent blame and guilt that is associated with a supposed ‘unaffected’ subject that transcends the vicissitudes of transient, living experience – a ‘dominion within a dominion’, to use Spinoza’s critical phrase. The moral aspect of consciousness will therefore be discussed in relation to the important role that the past and memory play in the ‘becoming-moral’ of homo natura and how Nietzsche attempts to trace the genealogy of this becoming via its affective genesis. This genealogical approach will become crucial towards the end of this book and the discussion of philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche. Throughout this chapter, the role of affectivity will be highlighted as having a significant influence on all the above-mentioned aspects and themes of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

2.1

Interpreting the sign-language of the affects

As outlined above, affectivity plays just as crucial a role in key aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy as it does in Spinoza’s, and both philosophies can be read as refraining within the immanence of affectivity without attempting to ground it. However, this also means that it is exceedingly difficult to articulate precisely what is meant by affectivity, for it involves the constituting feeling of transition or change rather than the constitution of some ‘thing’. Indeed, it is even more obvious in Nietzsche than it is in Spinoza that anything posited underneath, above or beyond affectivity is to be read as a sign-language of the affects and not something ‘other than’ affectivity: Nietzsche

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certainly follows Spinoza’s insistence here on refusing to establish a comforting ‘dominion within a dominion’ beyond affectivity. This does not merely mean that everything apart from affectivity is bracketed, but rather that the consideration of any phenomenon, whether this be in terms of an object, idea, image or value, always involves some kind of affective relationality even if it is projected as transcending affectivity.11 As discussed in relation to Spinoza, affectivity also confirms the reality of the body for Nietzsche, or rather the body confirms its reality through the affects. Nietzsche echoes Spinoza’s anti-Cartesian turn to the body by suggesting that philosophy might even be the misunderstanding of the body.12 In his notebooks, Nietzsche often refers to the need to adhere to the ‘guide of the body’ (Leitfaden des Leibes),13 which reveals the human to be a bodily multiplicity rather than a simple unity, meaning that ‘the body is a far more astounding thought than the old “soul” ’14 and provides a richer basis for analysis.15 Most explicitly, Nietzsche notes that it is essential to start from the body because it is a far richer phenomenon and more clearly observed –16 much more so than consciousness.17 The body as an affective multiplicity is thus a crucial guide for Nietzsche, and not consciousness. However, affects also describe various moods or attitudes that again betray some kind of transitional relationality (or pathos), although this should not be strictly identified with psychological emotional states in the sense of happiness or despondency – Nietzsche is critical of utilitarianism for precisely this reason.18 Precisely in line with Spinoza, affectivity involves the felt passages of transient existence – of ‘going over’ or ‘passing away’ – and Nietzsche’s philosophy thus attempts to negotiate, augment and rearticulate the vestigia or sign-language of affectivity rather than 11 This is also why all interpretation is in some sense ‘moral’ for Nietzsche insofar as it always betrays an affective movement towards and away from certain aspects of experience (see Nietzsche’s criticism of philosophers for denying this in JGB 5; KSA 5.18, for example). Thinking is thus the shadows of our feelings (FW 179; KSA 3.502). 12 FW Pre2; KSA 3.348. 13 See in particular KSA 11.282; 11.565; 11.578 & 12.106. 14 KSA 11.565. 15 KSA 12.106. 16 KSA 11.365. 17 KSA 12.205–206. 18 See JGB 190; KSA 5.111, for example.

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

grounding it in an unaffected permanent reality such as a ‘subject’ posited beyond affectivity itself. Nietzsche articulates the key to augmenting or rearticulating affectivity in his message to Overbeck mentioned in the introduction, for here he remarks that he shares with Spinoza the overall tendency of making knowledge the most powerful affect. Note that knowledge itself is still considered in terms of affectivity and not as something that can provide access to what affectivity is and thus how to manage it from without. This marks quite a radical departure for philosophy insofar as affectivity has been classically considered as that which blocks or distorts knowledge, while philosophy has been considered as precisely that which overcomes affectivity.19 This is the most important factor as to why Nietzsche identifies Spinoza as his precursor at the cusp of his later period and no longer Schopenhauer.20 For Schopenhauer, to see purely objectively and therefore correctly there must be ‘complete silence of the will’ because every ‘affect or passion clouds and falsifies knowledge’,21 whereas for Spinoza the fact that philosophers mistrust or even ‘deride, bewail, berate’ affectivity means that they ‘conceive men not as they are, but as they would like them to be’, thus providing an ‘ideal’ and inadequate knowledge.22 Nietzsche goes even further in directly countering Schopenhauer’s classical take on affectivity as distorting knowledge when, as mentioned above, he writes that there is no knowledge or objectivity at all without affectivity, and to remove affectivity would be to ‘castrate’ the intellect.23 In fact, in this passage ‘objectivity’ is nothing other than having multifarious affective relations that provide as many perspectives as possible,

19 For a discussion of the traditional antipathy of philosophy towards affectivity, see Solomon (1983), who elsewhere also notes the recent change in attitude of philosophy towards affectivity (2007). 20 However, Schopenhauer remained important for Nietzsche, because as he noted as late as 1887, his predecessor poses the question of the value of existence, though his answer remains stuck in Christian and ascetic moral perspectives (FW 357; KSA 3.600) meaning that his philosophy is ultimately a romantic pessimism in the vein of Wagner’s music (FW 370; KSA 3.622). As an aside, if Brann’s (1972: 196) reading is at all accurate and there is more Spinozism than Kantianism in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, then the influence of Spinoza may first have occurred obliquely through Schopenhauer in any case. 21 Schopenhauer (1977: 442; English translation quoted from Janaway (2007: 202)). 22 Spinoza (2002: 68; TP 1.1) 23 This point is discussed very clearly by Janaway (2007: 213–222).

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thus filling out our ‘concepts’.24 This insistence that affectivity is not counter to the intellect but constitutive of it is crucial in order to avoid a crude hedonism or aestheticism where knowledge is eschewed in favour of ‘feeling’. Nietzsche confirms this point when he notes that yielding to the impulse of the moment is of little value and even deleterious insofar as the blind accommodation of an affect, either compassionate or hostile (remembering that for Nietzsche all affects are useful and a source of strength in different circumstances)25 is the cause of the greatest of evils.26 Nietzsche concurs with Spinoza here in noting that greatness of character involves not only having various affects, but in having them under control, which does not suppose a non-affective subject, but of a certain relation of affects.27 This also means that this approach is not anti-philosophical because the role of conceptuality in thinking remains paramount – the task is not to devalue knowledge, but rather make it the most powerful affect. The question thus becomes one of the sense in which affectivity can be said to constitute rather than counter conceptuality, knowledge and thinking in general, and this begins by examining the entity that, following Descartes, portends to transcend affectivity and play the determining role in knowledge creation, namely the subject.

2.2

Neither substance nor subject

Just as Spinoza before him, Nietzsche disregards any absolute starting point for thought – the so-called ‘facts of consciousness’ – because living experience is always in media res, and so is the act of thinking.28 Indeed, Nietzsche dismisses the Cartesian cogito because if we genuinely examine our experience as Descartes contends that we do, then we find that a thought comes when ‘it’ wants to, not when an ‘I’ decides that it should come, meaning that both this ‘it’ and ‘I’ is a cause for suspicion insofar as there is no unthinking phenomenon

24 This passage and the fact that ‘objectivity’ and ‘concepts’ are placed in inverted commas will be discussed in the following chapter. 25 KSA12.531–532. 26 KSA 13.153. 27 Nietzsche provides a further hint when he notes that this involves having the greatest multiplicity of drives that conflict while under control, offering the example of Shakespeare (KSA 11.289). 28 See FW 355; KSA 3.593; and KSA 13.458.

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

that precedes a thought (that is, an ‘I’) from which thinking might be said to issue from and appear as something other than itself (an ‘it’ for an ‘I’).29 Rather, thinking occurs and always-already betrays a relationality and a directedness from and to various phenomena that are becoming significant (in a note, Nietzsche even remarks that thinking itself, just as morality discussed above, might in the end be a sign language of the affects).30 In this sense, Nietzsche considers thinking as a certain relation of drives insofar as it is experienced as a relational directedness:31 not from a neutral ‘I’ to an object, but as an affective play where all the terms change as these relations alter; as Nietzsche succinctly remarks, between two thoughts, all kinds of affects play their games.32 Affectivity here involves the sense of transition as the terms or focal points of this directedness are both produced and changed as they enter into various relations, meaning that affectivity involves the feeling of transience both in the sense of ‘going over’ to something and this something ‘passing away’ in the movement itself. As discussed in relation to Spinoza, there is never an awareness or idea of one single thing where thought is permanently transfixed and unmoving, but rather an experience of fluctuating ideas that follow one another, and this fluctuation of ideas and awareness is not a neutral flickering of images, but felt in a vacillating affectivity. In other words, there can be a certain joy involved in the goingover that is experienced in certain drives, and a certain sadness in the passing away of that which the drive has been directed towards. However, this affective play is neither identifiable with nor caused by the terms of this ‘relatedness’, for affectivity is experienced entirely immanently and thus bears witness to nothing other than the transition itself. A reason or phenomenon can always be posited as the cause of an affect, but such an explanation reaffirms or negates the affect through uniting it with other appealing relations rather than providing an unaffected phenomenon as a cause; as Spinoza notes, something is called good because it is desired, it is not desired 29

JGB 16–17; KSA 5.29–31. KSA 12.16. 31 See JGB 36; KSA 5.54, for example. 32 KSA 13.53–54. Just after this remark, Nietzsche confirms that thinking as epistemologists conceive it is an arbitrary fiction that presumes that there is some ‘thing’ that thinks. 30

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because it is good – or as Nietzsche puts it, ultimately desire is loved, not what is desired.33 Affectivity is thus relational as it betrays a transition or feeling of going-over, but this relationality is entirely without positive terms insofar as these are constantly passing-away. The ‘death of God’ is paramount for Nietzsche here, for even God Almighty – the ultimate form of transcendence and provider of all meaning – was ‘doomed’ to pass away in the affective fluctuations of history. Nonetheless, the question remains that if affectivity is relational, and the terms of this relationality are not positive, what exactly do affects relate? Nietzsche cannot and does not offer an answer as to what this is ‘is’, and this will doubtlessly frustrate those who conceive of philosophy as precisely the search for such answers. Nietzsche does not articulate any concept of substance or subject to fill in here, and conducts his philosophy precisely by refraining within the immanence of affectivity and shifting the focus of his questioning in line with Spinoza from what x is to how the articulation of x has come about. The key here is Nietzsche’s articulation of affective relationality in terms of metaphor, and more specifically, Übersetzung, that is, ‘translation’ (which, like the German, also has a sense of transference or transposition, from the Latin trans ‘across’ and latus ‘carried’).34 As discussed in the previous chapter, the so-called ‘problem of the attributes’ remains one of the most difficult issues when interpreting Spinoza. Spinoza contends that what he calls attributes are expressions of ‘substance’s’ essence, and while these are multiple, we know

E3.P9S. JGB 175; KSA 5.103. Emden (2005: 65–123), Murphy (2001) and Schrift (1985) all use the term Übertragung here to capture the sense of the metaphorical transference and carrying-over of language and perception that pervades Nietzsche’s work (though Emden (2005: 91–99) sometimes refers to translation too), which is a sense of metaphor that, as Murphy (2001: 143) notes, is only possible in the context of the death of God and the dissolution of its ontological anchoring (2001: 143). However, Nietzsche does not specifically use the substantive Übertragung in his published works, and seldom in verb form either, where as Übersetzung and übersetzen are used more frequently, and particularly in crucial passages that relate it to the processes of the will (JGB 19; KSA 5.33), sublimation (FW 357; KSA 3.597, GM 2.7; KSA 5.303 and GM 3.27; KSA 5.409), transfiguration (EH 3.10; KSA 6.314) and consciousness (FW 354; KSA 3.593), as well as to the important tasks of translating humanity back into nature (JGB 230; KSA 5.169) and the noble act of naming (FW 83; KSA 3.438). This latter relation is important insofar as the act of naming as an act of transference or translation is where Nietzsche takes a different direction than Spinoza, as will be discussed in Chapter 4. 34

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

of only two, namely thought and extension. As already explained, the key to this lies in thinking the attributes as irreducible forms of expression, which is to say that the expressivity of thinking cannot be reduced to the corporeal, even though these are not two different ‘kinds of things’. Indeed, it is the confusion of thinking with corporeal images that reduces its expression and renders it inadequate, mutilated and generally dysphoric. Spinoza refrains from grounding thought and the corporeal in one form of expression or the other, for the affective relations through which these are experienced are only ever felt in an immanent relation. Spinoza thus leaves his ‘parallelism’ of the attributes largely unarticulated, which is little wonder seeing as it cannot be articulated due to language being strictly corporeal for Spinoza and not identifiable with thinking itself. Nietzsche, meanwhile, does articulate affective relationality here, though for related reasons to Spinoza he refrains from giving a detailed account. Nietzsche does not follow Spinoza in arguing for two irreducible yet immanent forms of expression, namely thought and extension, but rather maintains a vocabulary of a multiplicity of translative perspectives that traverse the living body. This is not to say that Nietzsche reduces affectivity to the corporeal; rather, the experience of the body confirms a plurality of perspectives at play in an immanent relation. As mentioned above, this relation is characterised by Nietzsche as metaphorical in terms of a carrying-over or Über-setzung. That is to say, affectivity involves the feeling of transience, of going-over and passing-away, but this going-over is metaphorical to the extent that it is carried-over in a relation that betrays a euphoric or dysphoric affectivity – it is not only carried but also translated ‘well’ or ‘badly’. Nietzsche makes a significant move away from Spinoza here insofar as the relation between thinking and the corporeal is the radically unstable one of metaphor rather than of a ‘simple’ parallelism of irreducible expression. As will be discussed below, the important point here is that this metaphorical transference remains entirely immanent for Nietzsche with a coherency that betrays a bodily site of affectivity. This is similar to Spinoza of course, except that Nietzsche adopts a vocabulary of the will, the perspectival and drives in order to articulate the relative stability, coherency and directedness of experience. It is important to remember that these terms are nominal to the extent that they are the metaphorical products of certain affective relations

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

themselves. There is an obvious problem when speaking about affectivity therefore, insofar as words cannot be taken as merely describing affectivity, because they are inseparable from some kind of affective play – a description of the affects is itself an affective expression. In a sense, the problem of the relation between language and affectivity is similar to that of the relation between time and transience, for just as words do not describe what affects are but show them in a particular expressive movement, time does not measure transience but expresses a certain affective relation (such as a will-to-regularise transience). As previously discussed regarding Spinoza, although transience cannot be arrested (it is impossible not to be affected), the fact that bodies can be discerned and time can be conceptualised shows that relatively stable affective relations are experienced within affectivity itself. However, affectivity ‘respects no borders’, so to speak, and extends further than any self-reflecting subjectivity, even if this may be included within affectivity itself as an active set of relations involving a particular perspective. It is rather affective or felt relationality that is important here, which is why the ‘will’ is important to Nietzsche – not primarily as a metaphysical tool of explanation, but as a way of expressing the directedness of complex affective relations.

2.3 Will as affect The importance of this constant sense of transient movement is clearly described by Nietzsche in a dense passage concerning the will: Let us say: in every act of willing there is, to begin with, a plurality of feelings, namely: the feeling of the state away from which, the feeling of the state towards which, and the feeling of this ‘away from’ and ‘towards’ themselves. But this is accompanied by a feeling of the muscles that comes into play through a sort of habit as soon as we ‘will,’ even without our putting ‘arms and legs’ into motion. Just as feeling – and indeed many feelings – must be recognised as ingredients of the will, thought must be as well. In every act of will there is a commandeering thought, – and we really should not believe this thought can be divorced

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

from the ‘willing,’ as if some will would then be left over! Third, the will is not just a complex of feeling and thinking; rather, it is fundamentally an affect: and specifically the affect of the command.35 In every act of willing, therefore, there is a plurality of thoughts and feelings, including the feeling of a state that is being moved towards, the feeling of a state that is being moved from, and the feeling of this to and fro itself. It is important to note here that Nietzsche, just like Spinoza, does not consider these feelings as consisting merely of a comparison between states of affairs, but of the movement and transition itself. Nietzsche confirms this in a rather Spinozist note where he writes that to feel stronger, or in other words, to feel joy, does presuppose some sort of comparison, but only with oneself in the process of the growth and without knowing the extent to which the comparison is being made.36 The will thus describes a certain complex relation between affects experienced immanently as a nexus of thinking (of something) and feelings (of transitions) that involve significant relations where the will is directed towards a commanding ‘something for it’, 37 which means that the will is always perspectival.38 That is to say, as a certain plurality of affects involved in complex relations, the ‘will’ involves a multitude of transitions that on a conscious level might only be experienced as involving simple actions; as Nietzsche remarks, the regularly repeated correlation of the feeling of muscles moving alongside the feeling of this movement to and from something can easily be reduced to the thought of an ‘I’ that wills the movement, thus reducing the complexity of the action considerably.39 In any ‘will’ a host of complex affects relate to each other and ‘are’ something for each other (bodies become significant for each other insofar as their relations alter each other), meaning that there is an affective ‘significance’ here that Nietzsche terms elsewhere as 35

Nietzsche (2001: 18–19; JGB 19; KSA 5.32). KSA 13.110. 37 As Stegmaier (2006: 29) puts it, ‘a living being is not something, but means something – but for each other such being ... means something different, and always something new’. 38 GM 2.12; 5.313. 39 JGB 19; KSA 5.31. 36

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

‘perspective’, which should not be confused with a view on how things appear, because it involves particular ways of valuing and acting.40 The will (a complex relation of affects) therefore always involves a perspectival play of affects, and as the will is never strictly separable from this play, it changes with these perspectives and remains a simple unitary thing only as a word.41 However, insofar as the will is directed and purposive and involves perspectives and significant aspects, it expresses a certain drive (Trieb) as a more or less coherent yet mutating affective play that develops along a certain communicative series of affects, resulting in a determinable and commanding ‘will-to-x’ rather than a mere chaotic flux of feelings.42 The will is thus experienced as an affect itself insofar as it succeeds in ‘going over’ or overcoming its obstacles, and as such can form part of more complex wills and drives.43 Although this might sound rather opaque (and it must be admitted that Nietzsche does not offer a systematic description of these terms), the immanence of affectivity is not breached here because the will, perspectives and drives do not explain affectivity or ground the affects in any way; rather, each term describes variously complex relations of affects that can be experienced in relatively stable ways. When Nietzsche writes, for example, that we may assume that ‘our world of desires and passions is the only thing ‘given’ as real, that we cannot get down or up to any ‘reality’ except the reality of our drives’,44 he is not positing a metaphysical drive or will that lurks behind us and pushes us unknowingly, but to certain complex affective relations that are experienced at various degrees of stability and coherency. As situations constantly change as various groups of affects communicate and alter their relations, they result in different forms of awareness, perceptions and perspectives that change the ways in

40 See KSA 13.370. As Richardson (1996: 37) puts it, ‘Value lies in the way the world is ‘polarized’ for each will and not in any theories or beliefs about value. It lies in how things ‘matter’ to the will and so depends on that deep receptiveness of will that Nietzsche calls ‘affect’ [Affekt] or ‘feeling’ [Gefühl]. A perspective on the world always involves an ‘experiencing’ of it’. 41 JGB 19; KSA 5.32. 42 See KSA 12.25, for example. 43 JGB 19; KSA 5.32. 44 Nietzsche (2001: 35; JGB 36; KSA 5.54).

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

which a given situation is experienced. However, insofar as there is a degree of consistency and regularity too, certain of these affects can be said to relate to each other in such a way as to form a progressive movement or organisation that is to some extent traceable, stable and predictable. This stability is only relative to a field of affects precisely because no entity is presumed to exist outside or underneath affectivity to provide the latter with a stable form.

2.4

Consciousness and other perspectives

It is extremely important to note that none of this presupposes consciousness, but rather includes consciousness as a particular perspective that is experienced in a relational plurality of perspectives traversing a living, situated body. Consciousness actually poses an obstacle to thinking this plurality, insofar as its perspectival form involves an abstraction from other perspectives as a kind of onlooker that can result in it being taken as an autonomous unity rather than as a fragment of the body. Nonetheless, the idea that consciousness is some kind of problematic obstacle to negotiate doubtlessly sounds odd here, given that it seems to provide the very possibility of thinking in the first place. Indeed, it could be argued that consciousness is for modern post-Cartesian thought what God was for ancient theologians, namely that which grounds all possible knowledge. In order to question the apparent primacy of consciousness, therefore, it is necessary to question whether or not thinking begins or is strictly correlated with consciousness. If so, then thinking only has value insofar as it is semantically articulable within consciousness and thus subject to the grammatical and logical form that this entails, while the body only has value insofar as it is clearly and distinctly perceived and negotiated by consciousness. If, on the other hand, consciousness is a product of the body, then thinking itself is granted a mere epiphenomenal value in relation to its underlying physical determination, while whatever we think of the body can only be a physical process consciously perceived as a thoughtful reflection. Consciousness thus seems to play the pivotal role, but does this necessarily have to be the case? If consciousness is not strictly identified with thinking, then the body and thought can be re-evaluated in terms of expressivity and affectivity beyond the mediation of consciousness, and the possibility is opened up of an

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‘extra-conscious’ thought that is just as important as the unknown of the body.45 This possibility is articulated by Spinoza and developed further by Nietzsche, who both suggest that thought and the body, unfettered by a grounding orientation around consciousness, promise forms of expressivity that cannot be known in advance – as the Spinoza quote that started this book points out, no one has yet determined what the body can do. For Spinoza, consciousness involves an interpretation of various activities as they affect the body,46 but of itself it provides nothing of the genesis of these events, which is provided by thought.47 Consciousness thus provides an awareness of affectivity and the transitions involved between affects, but it gives no insight at all into the genesis of this affectivity. Indeed, Spinoza suggests that consciousness is misleading to the extent that it involves mistaking effects for causes, the illusion of freedom of the will (‘I’ am aware of doing this so ‘I’ must have caused it), and the positing of final ends where there are none (because the objects of consciousness are taken as having particular purposes, all objects are presumed to have a purpose).48 Consciousness alone is thus a kind of passive form of relating for Spinoza, where experience is randomly encountered and associations formed through generalising this random experience,49 an account which comes remarkably close to that of Nietzsche’s. Spinoza does not elaborate much further on consciousness however, though it seems that it is intimately related to the imagination and the immediate environment of experience and is something to be overcome or at least augmented in order to be able to organise affective relations in an active manner.50 A more sophisticated account

45 This is precisely Deleuze’s (1988: 18–19) point concerning Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s re-evaluation of thought, the body and consciousness. 46 This resonates strongly with Nietzsche’s positions; see KSA 13.460, for example, where ‘inner experience’ is couched in terms of a translation of experience into a language that the individual can understand. 47 E3.P2S. 48 E3.P2S. 49 As Yovel (1989a: 164) notes, ‘What in direct awareness I feel to be my ‘innermost self’ is but a distorted idea of my body affected by external causes ... True self-knowledge starts with overcoming the illusion of pure subjectivity’. 50 Nadler (2008) discusses the rather thin description of consciousness in Spinoza in more detail, and concludes that it provides more than a phenomenological account

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

is developed by his contemporary Leibniz, however, who perhaps did the most to question the originary status of consciousness after it had been given an inalienable starting point by Descartes. It is also Leibniz who provides one of the most significant inspirations for Nietzsche’s own re-evaluation of consciousness, and in particular the former’s conception of petit perceptions or ‘minute perceptions’ is clearly a major influence on the latter’s perspectivism. Perhaps the most illuminating point made by Leibniz here is his discussion of what constitutes a volition.51 If thinking is merely conscious, then split between two possible courses of action we could merely make a list of pros and cons and choose between them in a purely rational manner, and passions would merely be that which infects consciousness and confuses our reasoning; but Leibniz provides a much more nuanced way of thinking this situation. It is not merely that a conscious ‘I’ thinks about doing this or that before reaching a reasonable decision unless side-tracked by passions, because this ‘I’ consists of a myriad of conflicting and competing drives that bend inclinations this way or that. Consider the example of deciding whether to work into the evening or go out with some friends.52 A straightforward list of pros and cons could be consciously drawn up: your work deadline is looming, it is an interesting task, you do not want to be tired tomorrow, you should save the money and so on, yet you have not seen your friends for a while, you enjoy their company, it might put you in a better frame of mind to tackle your work and so on. What all these conscious thoughts and perceptions involve, according to Leibniz, is a whole host of unconscious minute perceptions that combat each other and emerge in simplified conscious perceptions, but which constantly move and inflect us in this or that direction. The rustling of the papers at the desk, the anticipation of the next step in the task, the chinking of the glasses at the bar, the hazy background noise of barroom chatter, and so on. All these unconscious minute perceptions swarm around and inflect us in different directions, pulling us this way or because it points towards an intimate relationship to the body, so that ‘Spinoza’s great contribution to the study of consciousness would thus be his belief that the key to understanding the nature of consciousness lies in the investigation of the body’ (2008: 597). 51 Leibniz (1981: 192–193). 52 This example is taken from Smith (2007), who takes his lead from Deleuze’s (1993: 70) discussion.

84 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

that: the two options are thus not two separable objects of consciousness, but different orientations that alter how conscious thought can even begin to make sense of what to do; as Nietzsche notes in a very Leibnizian remark, ‘Everything that enters consciousness is already incredibly complex: we only have an appearance of unity’.53 This is why we are in a constant state of disquiet or unease (Unruhe or inquiétude) for Leibniz (who follows up on Locke’s idea here), for these minute perceptions feed into unconscious drives and inclinations that are always pulling us around and emerging into whatever our rather simplified conscious perceptions of the world might be.54 Minute perceptions thus involve a certain je ne sais quoi that is only vivid in aggregate form, as Leibniz remarks,55 but which involves a whole ambience of perceptions and drives. We might only consciously hear the roar of the ocean, Leibniz suggests, but this itself consists of a mass of unconscious minute perceptions of an uncountable number of tiny droplets of water sliding and crashing into each other, while the strongest force in the world would be unable to break a rope if the least force did not break it imperceptibly.56 As Leibniz famously puts it, because of minute perceptions, the present is burdened with the past, but big with the future;57 as will be discussed in chapter four, this is also a thought of major importance for Nietzsche. Ultimately, consciousness is always-already the middle of a process of unconscious perceptions, drives and thoughts therefore, and never the beginning.58 How an unconscious thinking can be confirmed within consciousness is a difficult problem to address, and Leibniz is armed with a metaphysics that can explain his petit perceptions and historical reconstruction, even if his analyses do not necessarily rely on it (as can be witnessed by the examples he gives above). However, if we 53 KSA 12.205. Blondel (1991: 209) also notes the strong connections between Leibniz and Nietzsche when it comes to the relation between perception and consciousness, but also suggests that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is ‘a Spinozism from which all thought of the substance unifying the different modes is excluded’ (1991: 242). 54 Leibniz (1981: 164–166). 55 Leibniz (1981: 55). 56 Leibniz (1981: 54). 57 Leibniz (1981: 55). 58 The distinction for Leibniz (1998: 260) thus lies between perception and apperception rather than consciousness and unconsciousness, indicating a much closer connection and a sense that apperception emerges from an expansive perceptivity.

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

wish to avoid appealing to any form of transcendence (such as a logos, a theology, a transcendental structure of experience and so on), then there seems to be no orienting point of reference through which any such analysis can take place. Refraining with the immanence of affectivity provides a peculiar problem therefore, namely how an account of the unconscious can be accorded any other status than that of a poetic speculation that merely satisfies or titillates the affective-imagination. The key to addressing this problem, as already intimated above, lies in questioning the apparent unity of the experiencing â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. To this end, Spinoza and Nietzsche offer two differing strategies to evoke the multiplicity of the body within thought â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Spinoza a more rational account that appeals to reason (though is no less affective for that), and Nietzsche a more direct attempt to intervene in the experience of the body.

2.5

Evoking the multiplicity of the body

To recap from the previous chapter, Spinoza considers the body to be highly composite and relational. While this might be taken rather straightforwardly to mean that the body is made of lots of different components and organs that make up the larger body, Spinoza insists that bodies are not distinguished in respect of substance, but in maintaining durational integrity. This means that anything that affects the body will thus affect the duration of any or all of its relations and result in differing experiences or affective-imaginings. While this seems to lead to a physiological grounding of affectivity that depends on the physical conditions of the body, it is the immanent displacement of affectivity through the expressivity of thinking that interests Spinoza as a corollary of, or even regardless of, bodily interaction. The key here for Spinoza is the relation between thinking and the imagination, for if it is through the latter that the world is experienced, it is through the former that the force of the images of the imagination can be displaced. Spinoza offers a very basic insight here, for when the body is affected by another body, the manner in which it affects the body can only be altered by the intervention of another body, or of an idea that displaces its affective force.59 As already

E2.P17.

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

discussed, for Spinoza whenever there is a perception of something affecting, we can say that we are imagining. Because the reality of the perception is manifest in its affectivity, the most pressing issue does not concern whether or not correct mental pictures of external bodies are in play, but the activity or passivity of the mental processes in operation; in other words, do the images of the affecting things dominate, or are there some ideas at hand that can displace the force of these images? The body always remains the site of such affectivity however, for even if the affect is displaced through the processes of thinking, it is immanently experienced as an affective transformation and the body itself is thus transformed, even if it may physically appear consistent. This does not mean that bodily interaction no longer matters, because it is the manner in which this interaction forms relations with ideas that can displace and rearrange affective relations that is at issue. All this is achieved immanently – it is not that a universally true idea replaces a particular false belief, but that a potent idea displaces the force of an image, and for Spinoza the most potent ideas are those that trace the geneses of such images so that they can be related to and activated as a transformational force, rather than as a reified object or thing to be negotiated. Like Leibniz, Spinoza has an overarching metaphysics to tie all this together, but this metaphysics contains the important insight that its potency lies not in its truth as representative, but in its truth insofar as it forms a powerful expression of thought that affects the imagination and experience of the world.60 Spinoza never reneges on his affirmation of immanence; his metaphysics is not projected as a static image of reality, but as an affective force that alters thinking and feeling, which is to say, experience or affectivity, thereby showing and emphasising the multiplicity of the body and its transformational possibilities. Nietzsche, while taking a radically different approach to Spinoza, nonetheless works towards the same end, namely evoking the plurality of the body as the site of affectivity as opposed to the apparent unity of consciousness. Like Spinoza, the body for Nietzsche is the site – not the ground – of affectivity, meaning that while it should take ‘methodological precedence’, we should avoid coming to any ‘final 60 To this end, Spinoza’s take on truth could even be read as concurring with the most provocative of Nietzsche’s statements on the matter, such as the idea that truth is linked with an increase in the feeling of power (KSA 11.92).

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

conclusions’ about it.61 Nietzsche thus does not offer anything like a straightforward ‘theory’ of the body, but rather opts for a more directly performative intervention into the experience of the body through the evocativeness of his texts. Nonetheless, the exposition of the body in Spinoza above seems more or less congruent with much of what Nietzsche has to say, though Nietzsche focuses much more on questioning that which represses the plurality of the body, namely consciousness. As discussed above, to this end it is Leibniz who provides the greatest inspiration for Nietzsche as Leibnizian ‘inquiétude’ bears witness to a competing array of drives whose multiplicity is absorbed within the unity of consciousness; however, it is not entirely absorbed for the vacillations and changing thoughts and feelings in any one given instance betray more than a singular conscious ‘I’ surveying the situation. This is evident with the simultaneous appearance of two seemingly opposed affects when an event or situation tears consciousness in seemingly irreconcilable directions. The logic of a simple unity falters here, for in such situations it is possible to feel or consider the same event or object as both seductive and repulsive, good and bad, and so on. Nietzsche thus regards the belief in opposite values as one of the most significant philosophical prejudices that lies at the basis of logic, meaning that rather than uncovering a genuine order of things, it rather betrays a need for a certain way of living to maintain itself and cope with the vacillation of the affects.62 It could be argued, of course, that ambiguous situations could be resolved with the help of further information, such as a given situation being good insofar as it involves x and bad insofar as it involves y; but it is the living, immanent simultaneity of affectivity that renders such formalisations dubious, because the opposing affects are inseparable in their experience. This is why Nietzsche links logic to a moral desire for the existence of stable identities and opposite values as an imperative or a ‘regulative article of belief’, rather than a criterion for truth.63 Whether this is the case or not, the plurality of affectivity nonetheless betrays a transformational and transient multiplicity that exceeds the unity of consciousness – a unity that 61 62 63

KSA 12.206. JGB 2–3; KSA 5.16–18. KSA 12.389; KSA 12.266.

88 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

Leibniz places in doubt by drawing attention to minute perceptions and which Spinoza also problematises by couching the human being in terms of desire where our ‘strivings, impulses, appetites, and volitions ... are not infrequently so opposed to one another’ that we are ‘pulled in different directions and [know] not where to turn’.64 However, it is Leibniz’s insights that Nietzsche considers to be innovative here because he shows consciousness to be an aspect of experience rather than forming the possibility of experience as such.65 Because of this, Nietzsche suggests that as a particular aspect of experience and not its ground, all thinking, feeling, willing, remembering and acting cannot depend upon consciousness in any essential way.66 Indeed, within affectivity itself there are many more forms of awareness and different perspectives in play than consciousness alone.67 As Nietzsche puts it, ‘The problem of consciousness (or rather, of becoming conscious of something) first confronts us when we begin to realise just how much we can do without it’.68 Although Nietzsche does not acknowledge it here, he remains strictly Spinozist when he denies that thinking is merely conscious thought, the latter rather relating to a particular communicative form of thinking. If it is possible to be aware that consciousness is not necessary to think, feel, or act and that there is a host of bodily perspectives and affective relations that remain elusive or vague to consciousness, then the question becomes one of trying to identify precisely the aspects of affectivity that consciousness relates to. To this end, Nietzsche suggests that what characterises consciousness above all is its communicability in terms of language.69

Spinoza (1994: 188; E3.DefAff1). FW 357; KSA 3.597. 66 FW 354; KSA 3.590. 67 Both Spinoza (E3.P2S) and Nietzsche remark upon how much can be achieved without conscious awareness, and some remarkable cases of somnambulism seems to bear this out, such as the case of someone who got out of bed, got dressed, drove 23 km and murdered his mother-in-law while still remaining asleep (Broughton et al. 1994: 255; the article also mentions many other complex acts achieved without conscious awareness). On a more general level, the little amount of activity that is actually consciously thought through on an everyday basis can also be considered here (such as brushing teeth, tying shoelaces, negotiating busy streets and so on). 68 Nietzsche (2001a: 211; FW 354; KSA 3.590). 69 FW 354; KSA 3.590–593. 65

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

2.6

Consciousness as communication

Nietzsche thus contends that to be conscious of something is to be able to express it in meaningful sentences, even if these are not explicitly rendered at all times. Consciousness here is thus not taken to mean awareness as such, for there are a multiplicity of different forms of awareness taking place simultaneously at any one time (obvious examples being sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste, but even these are only general terms that cover a whole host of tinier forms of awareness), with consciousness counting amongst them.70 Consciousness thus fulfils an important social need to communicate affective states in a quick and stable manner, and thus the level of consciousness a body has increases with the extent to which it needs to communicate. Exactly in line with Spinoza, Nietzsche maintains that consciousness, sign production and language form communicable generalities from singular affective experiences, rather than forming the ground of this affectivity: ‘the world of which we can become conscious is merely a surface and sign world, a world turned into generalities and thereby debased to its lowest common denominator’.71 The interesting perspective that Nietzsche provides on consciousness is the suggestion that rather than it being the innermost kernel of individual existence, consciousness is rather the most general and social aspect, and not any fundamental beginning or ground.72 This suggestion is perhaps not too surprising given that Nietzsche’s refrain within the immanence of affectivity means that he will not ground thinking in consciousness – as he puts it, a thought comes when ‘it’ wants to, not when ‘I’ want it to come (and even this ‘it’ is saying too much).73 However, that consciousness involves a move from the singular (affects) to the gregarious (semantics) can be experienced – though importantly the latter is still at play in affective 70 Katsafanas (2005: 5) also suggests, with reference to the passages being referred to here, that Nietzsche does not strictly identify awareness with conscious awareness, though the distinctive thing about consciousness is its conceptually articulated content. Katsafanas (2005: 24) also insists that for Nietzsche all mental states can be both conceptual and non-conceptual, and this reading of Nietzsche is extremely pertinent to the discussion here. 71 Nietzsche (2001a: 213; FW 354; KSA 3.593). 72 FW 11; KSA 3.382. 73 JGB 16–17; KSA 5.29–31.

90 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

relations. This is why Nietzsche suggests that consciousness is the most general and social aspect of one’s existence and not its innermost kernel, for as soon as the attempt is made to communicate an affective relation via the use of words, it is not this affective relation that is communicated and retained but the words being used and the manner of their use, and this must be understandable amongst various interlocutors. The point here is not merely that language reduces singularities to generalities, but that an affective relation cannot be precisely transferred in a word that only relays a general sense. Nietzsche’s most explicit discussion of this describes language as a ‘process of abbreviation’, where words are ‘acoustical signs for concepts’, which in turn are image signs for often recurring groups of sensations.74 Words are here considered as the abbreviations of signs of the affective-imagination, or signs that abbreviate and group together more complex, diverse signs. Language thus has an intimate genesis with consciousness because it develops along with a need to communicate and must necessarily be reductive in order to function at all. Having the same language does not guarantee understanding, however, because this will have more to do with having common experiences to call upon, hence the phrase ‘you had to have been there’ is used when it becomes apparent that it is impossible to reconstruct the experience through describing it, even if you share the same mother-tongue.75 The problem is thus the relationship between signs and the process of their abbreviation and interpretation, and not one of the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ of the signs themselves.76 However, it should also be noted that ‘extra-consciousness’ or the ‘extra-linguistic’ is not merely senselessness that is waiting to be made conscious and given meaning by being put into words, because it is felt immanently in affectivity and is thus always-already being interpreted or translated by the body. If this is denied and experience is said to be essentially grounded in consciousness, then according to Nietzsche at least, it can only be so in terms of semantically structured phenomena,

74 JGB 268; KSA 221. A discussion of the metaphoricity of this transfer between signs will be discussed in Chapter 4. 75 See GD 9.26; KSA 6.128. 76 See KSA 12.17, for example.

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

which is tantamount to saying that experience is consciousness of itself, and we are in the realm of pure idealism.77 This is not to suggest that consciousness and extra-consciousness are isolated realms within experience, for they have an inter-affectivity that is immanently expressed.78 A good example is Nietzsche’s repeated conviction, from his very first book to late works such as The Case of Wagner, that language simply cannot adequately convey the experience of music.79 Nonetheless, it must also be accepted that the conscious understanding of music, the piece that is being played, the situation it is being played in and so on, also affects how the music is experienced.80 Of course, the acceptance of the impossibility of describing the experience of music only makes sense from within conscious thought itself, but extra-consciousness is manifest to the extent that this impossibility is felt as well as conceptually understood. A piece of music is not only judged to be good by a conscious consideration of its merits, but is also felt affectively and thus across the body and from a plurality of perspectives – otherwise dancing, which involves the whole body and a plurality of affects and perspectives, would surely be an impossible phenomenon, which is doubtlessly one of the reasons why Nietzsche finds it so interesting.81 To take another example, a feeling of anxiety not only occurs within the consciousness of an uncertain upcoming event, but all over the body, from the way in which food is digested, to a lightness of the legs, shaking hands, fast speech, awkward laughter, erratic movement and so on; indeed, what is described as ‘anxiety’ can involve such a huge reorientation of affective relations that it could even be said to change the very experience of the world, and it is thus little wonder that attempts to placate an anxious person with reassuring reasons not to be anxious sometimes only have a very limited impact, for it is the relation between various bodily perspectives,

77 As Derrida (1982: 16) notes, the privileging of consciousness in philosophy is the privileging of self-presence. 78 ‘Extra-conscious’ does not directly translate a term that Nietzsche uses; nonetheless, it seems more appropriate than unconscious or subconscious because these terms both seem subjugated to consciousness in some way. 79 See, for example, GT 6; KSA 1.48, DFW 10; KSA 6.35 and KSA 12.493. 80 Conscious understanding should not be understood here as that which is present in the mind, but that which is already understood going into the experience. 81 See GD 9.11; KSA 6.117, for example.

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

both conscious and extra-conscious, that is involved in such experiences, and not merely the former. If this is allowed, then the problem rests with the relation between these seemingly irreducible aspects of experience. This clearly links to the discussion of attributes in Spinoza above, namely that attributes are not substantially different yet they are irreducible to each other: thought and the corporeal are thus suggested as irreducible yet interrelated forms of affectivity, but this interrelation is metaphorical and thus non-sequitur rather than parallel for Nietzsche.82 The first issue therefore is whether the awareness of an event is both conscious and extra-conscious, or if it is felt extra-consciously and then transformed into a conscious experience. This is significant, because if the former holds then extra-conscious affectivity is immediately experienced alongside conscious affectivity, if not then it is through the mediation of consciousness that the extra-conscious is accessed. Although Nietzsche’s texts are ambiguous on this point,83 the latter option suggests an unacceptably dualistic two-tier system of experience. Granted, it would still allow for both the extra-conscious and conscious to be experienced simultaneously, but if consciousness is reduced to a mere reflective capacity or epiphenomenon of the body or the extra-conscious, then it is interminably trapped within itself and there would be nothing to say about the extra-conscious other than it is productive of whatever words and thoughts are consciously strewn together. In other words, how conscious thinking relates to the extra-conscious could only be speculated upon within conscious thought, which in turn would only be the epiphenomenal product of the extra-conscious, and so on. However, if extra-consciousness does not precede consciousness but is rather simultaneous with it, then it is this coherence – the body as the site of affectivity – that provides the access to thinking the relation; as Nietzsche remarks in a note, if anything provides us with a unity, it is the body.84 Thus, the conscious feeling of happiness can be considered not only as 82 As Blondel (1991: 205) notes, Spinoza’s monism of correspondence is replaced by the metaphorical relation between the ideal and the body, or as Deleuze (1983: 39) puts it, consciousness in relation to a self that is not itself conscious. 83 As will be discussed in Chapter 4, early unpublished texts such as WL suggest a physical ground metaphorically transferred into images and words, but Nietzsche’s published work, and particularly his later work, reject this over-simplified image. 84 KSA 11.434.

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

an epiphenomenon of underlying physical processes, but also as the active expression of the conscious interpretation of extra-conscious affects. Nietzsche seems to suggest something along these lines in a note where joy (Lust) is related to a ‘feeling of power’, while happiness (Glück) is related to a consciousness of this feeling.85 This means that the consciousness of happiness is related to certain conditions beyond conscious control (for the body is invested in and affected by its present relations), but not reducible to them. From this perspective it could readily be admitted that a perception is conceptual all the down,86 but if life is something more than a series of sentences waiting to be spoken, then it must also be admitted that there are perceptions that are non-conceptual all the way up too. In any given moment then, there is both consciousness of a situation and an extra-conscious awareness of it too, unified in an affective relationality. The relationship between a moment and a perspective is much easier to grasp in German, as Augenblick translates literally as a blink or glance of the eye. However, a moment does not refer directly to a perspective, for it is the plurality of the perspectival in any given moment that is vital here. If it were merely the case that any given moment consisted of a perception-sign being translated to an abbreviation of the sign (words, images), which was then translated to a concept (or grammatical sentence or structure) before finally resulting in a perspective or conscious perception, then we really would be caught in an interminable loop of the solipsistic ego, and all thinking could only occur within the dubious immanence of a consciousness that is forever isolated in its own semiotic world.87 As will be discussed below, while it is clear for Nietzsche 85

KSA 13.254. This is McDowell’s (1996) famous claim against the ‘myth of the given’, which criticises the idea that we have access to unmediated experiential content. 87 As Kofman (1993: 26) notes, there is a reciprocal, metaphorical relation for Nietzsche here where expressivity plays the key role: ‘By means of this reciprocal (yet not equivalent) metaphorical expression of the body by consciousness and of consciousness by the body, Nietzsche deletes the opposition between the soul and the body and establishes between the two an original relationship of symbolic expressivity. The body and consciousness are two systems of signs which signify each other reciprocally, the language of one expressing the writing of the other in ‘abridged’ form, and at the same time deforming it’. As Gray (2005: 57) notices, this expressive relation is the basis of Nietzsche’s influence on expressionist literature: ‘The mimetic object of such speech is not the logos, not the conceptual realm of ideation, but the sub-conceptual, psychological domain of primordial emotions’. 86

94 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

that there is some kind of transference going on in the sense of a ‘metaphorical’ carrying-over, there is an excessive intensity in this transference that means that there are a multiplicity of perspectives at play. In other words, a sign does not completely carry over into a word or image, and a word or image does not completely carry over into a concept or grammatical structure, because if they did then the former would merely be sentences always-already waiting to be spoken. Rather, each provide a perspective within the living moment, where signs, words, images, concepts, sentences and so on are involved in a multitude of affective relations that are experienced immanently.88 This admittedly difficult thought avoids any kind of layered or tiered approach where physical sense impressions become conscious conceptual thought, or the idea of consciousness representing a sub-conscious that lurks below it. What it rather suggests is a multiplicity of perspectives operating at any one given moment across the mobile unity of the body, which, as discussed with reference to Spinoza above, is precisely a multiplicity and not a static or determinate ‘thing’. The body, moment and perspective are multiple, but it is the autocracy of consciousness that obscures this through its semantic form presenting an autonomous realm of sense, despite being only a fragment of the body.89 This is not to say that consciousness or conceptual thought are barred from certain areas of experience.90 Rather, the point is that whatever consciousness is ‘of’ exceeds its capacity to capture it, and this is not merely known through conceptual or conscious thought, but ‘known’ immanently through the multiplicity of affects experienced in an Augenblick. The body here is thus considered as a transitional site of affectivity that is traversed by consciousness, but not unified by

88 As Strong (1985: 177) puts it, Nietzsche’s perspectivism ‘does not consist in asserting, with becoming pluralism, that I ‘should’ have or support a number of different points of view. It asserts, rather, that ‘I’ am a number of different ways of knowing and that there is no such entity as a permanent or privileged self’. 89 See FW 11; KSA 3.382. 90 As Katsafanas (2005: 17) emphasises, this is an important point to avoid Nietzsche being accused of falling for the myth of the given: ‘While Nietzsche does think that conceptualized perceptual content is selective, leaving out various nonconceptual elements, his theory actually does not require that there be elements of experience which cannot be conceptualized’, however, ‘the content of unconscious experience could be conceptualized in an indefinitely large number of mutually incompatible ways, and none of these ways would be the ‘right’ or ‘best’ way’.

Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects

it. The body is multiple as are bodily perspectives, and it is rather consciousness that is affirmed as dominating whenever the value of thought is considered in terms of identity and precision. Nietzsche’s critique of philosophy is thus obvious here, since these ideals have indeed become its touchstones, yet there is no experience that is not plural and transitory. This highlights just how much the perspective of consciousness dominates here, for as Nietzsche notes, clarity and precision are its prejudices.91 From this perspective it might look as if language and indeed consciousness are merely falsifications of what is experienced, and although Nietzsche seems to suggest this at times, this is ultimately untenable because it would suggest that one form of affectivity falsifies a ‘true’ or ‘real’ form of affectivity. Although Nietzsche maintains the language of falsification throughout his works,92 this has to refer to the relationship that consciousness has with other forms of awareness that Nietzsche points out as existing alongside it, and not to consciousness itself. A couple of passages in Human all too Human bear this out, for while we cannot describe ourselves entirely through conscious states and by using words,93 this is certainly a very important aspect of our lives. The problem is that we have become accustomed to excluding all extra-conscious aspects.94 Consciousness does not, therefore, falsify a true form of experience, but the semantic and grammatical structures of consciousness provide an erroneous ground of experience that ‘falsifies’ the immanent play of affectivity.95 There is no suggestion here of ‘real’ corporeal sense impressions becoming consciously reflected upon by a falsifying mental faculty, for such a dualism presents an untenable form of transcendence itself. Granted, Nietzsche does characterise consciousness as epiphenomenal at times, such as when he calls it ‘basically superfluous’,96 91

KSA 12.210. Nietzsche still explicitly describes all becoming-conscious (Bewusstwerden) as a process of falsification (Fälschung) in the fifth book of FW added in 1887 (FW 354; KSA 3.593), while he calls consciousness the poorest and most error-prone organ in GM 2.16; KSA 5.322. 93 M 115; KSA 3.10. 94 M 129; KSA 3.119. 95 Nietzsche makes this clear in a note, where he links the conscious falsification of experiences to their reduction rather than as presenting and erroneous image of reality (KSA 11.578). 96 FW 354; KSA 3.590. 92

Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

but this must also be rejected if consciousness is meant as an apparition of some underlying fundamental process. Indeed, the alleged superfluity of consciousness mentioned by Nietzsche is due to the fact that it is unnecessary for action rather than because it serves no purpose, which again links the ‘epiphenomenal’ nature of consciousness to its erroneousness as an autonomous unity. Thus, consciousness does not so much falsify by presenting fictive representations of a real underlying process, but by presenting itself as an autonomous unity in place of the body – as Nietzsche puts it, it is the erroneous perspective of a parte ad totum.97 It is the relationality of the body that coheres perspectives and ‘grammaticises’ or produces sense, but the perspective of consciousness can come to dominate with its particular form of linguistic grammar. Nietzsche thus notes that there are many more languages than we might think,98 suggesting that is it is not ‘linguisticality’ that Nietzsche finds problematic, but the reduction of this to common, conscious language (Nietzsche even talks on a number of occasions about the importance of thinking about a ‘logic of feelings’).99 Ultimately, what Nietzsche’s critique attempts to problematise when it comes to consciousness is the autonomy of the apperceiving ‘I’. However, little would be gained here by merely invoking a hidden subconscious or unconscious that is thinly represented by consciousness, for the only way this could be articulated would be via a theoretical account from within consciousness itself. This is why affectivity plays such a key role, because it is through affectivity that the autonomy of consciousness can be rendered problematic.

2.7

Affect as interpretation

Nietzsche’s approach is rather interesting here, for rather than merely speculating a subconscious or unconscious operating underneath consciousness, he offers a perspective of affectivity or experience that is both conscious and ‘extra-conscious’. Being in a situation never merely involves a conscious ‘being there’, but an embodied ‘being there’ that involves a plurality of affective relations, perceptions 97 98 99

KSA 12.534. KSA 10.262. See M 18; KSA 3.31, GM 2.7; KSA 5.304, and GM 3.17; KSA 5.382.

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and perspectives. The crucial and perhaps difficult point centres on consciousness not adding anything particular to what is thought, felt and done, but rather altering the way in which these are experienced (as already discussed, if there is any form of activity that consciousness allows, it is the enablement of a particular form of communication). This may sound rather counterintuitive, because consciousness seems to allow the possibility of contemplation and reflection, thus allowing a whole host of thoughts, feelings and actions that would be impossible without it. Nonetheless, as a form of awareness, consciousness registers effects rather than issuing causes where thinking is ‘translated back’ into a grammatical structure and social perspective.100 However, while Nietzsche considers the perspective of consciousness to be over-estimated,101 this has little to do with its passivity, for this depends upon the particular circumstances it is involved in. Rather, Nietzsche attempts to highlight the interpretative nature of consciousness, which when overlooked results in illusions of consciousness as an issuer of activity rather than an interpretative and perspectival aspect of activity. Consciousness as interpretation is meant in a particular sense here however. It is not that consciousness simply interprets the physical processes of the body, but that it is a particular form of interpretation that traverses the body.102 Interpretation here is meant in a rather broad sense as the basic activity of affective relations. Interpretation occurs in affective relations as an affect ‘interprets’ the vestigia, or traces of other affects in an affective ‘play’ of transitions, or in Spinozistic terms, remodifications, and which Nietzsche characterises as a ‘basic biological function’.103 This is also why interpretation can be taken as being – as Nietzsche frequently does – metaphorical, in the precise sense of a translation or ‘carrying-over’ from one singular and unique affect to another:

100 FW 354; KSA 3.592. Kofman (1993: 139) also notes that for Nietzsche, ‘The conscious text is a simplified text and is unaware that it is an interpretation’. 101 FW 11; KSA 3.383. 102 Similarly, Kofman (1993: 193) considers consciousness to be a ‘symbolism of the body’ for Nietzsche, and that ‘Everything which appears to consciousness is interpretation’. 103 KSA 12.140.

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the whole history of a ‘thing’, an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random.104 This dense citation from an equally dense section of GM is paradigmatic of Nietzsche’s bracketing of the nature of a ‘thing’ in favour of analysing the genesis of the associated relations, which are invariably characterised by Nietzsche as involving some kind of transference and carrying over, regardless of the phenomena under analysis. In this section of the GM alone, this transference is couched in terms of interpretations (Interpretationen), adaptations (Zurechtmachungen) and transformations (Verwandlungen), none of which necessarily betray a connection of causes. A post-modern reading of Nietzsche threatens here insofar as linear causality and explanation are replaced with an emphasis upon metaphorical transferences without any possibility of grounding the phenomena of experience in positive terms.105 However, in the same passage Nietzsche notes that the phenomena of such transferences are reorganised (umgebildet), redirected (umgerichte) and confiscated or monopolised (‘in Beschlag genommen’), meaning that they betray an affective relationality that is not merely arbitrary.106 The important point here is that interpretation is not merely the act of an interpreting subject, because such a phenomenon as the ‘subject’ is always-already part of a sign-chain or Zeichen-Kette

104

Nietzsche (2006b: 51; GM 2.12; KSA 5.314). Jovanovski (2001: 429) articulates the post-modern reading of Nietzsche as consisting of two parts, both of which are countered in this book through considering the orientating role of affectivity: ‘(i) Nietzsche’s relativism represents the end of the Western philosophical tradition, and (ii) by exposing the merely rhetorical foundations of received truths and hierarchies, Nietzsche leaps over the fence of objective intellectual thought’. 106 Murphy (2001: 62) considers the phrase ‘in Beschlag genommen’ as the best description of Nietzsche’s understanding of interpretation as identity formation, for it suggests a ‘violent seizing on something, as the violent transport of a thing from one place or setting into another’. Nietzsche’s discussion of the will to power here in relation to interpretation, and in JGB 22; KSA 5.37, bear this out, although the danger of a metaphysics of power lurks here if the affective relationality of the will is not borne in mind. 105

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of ever new interpretations and adaptations.107 There are, for example, a mass of metaphorical transferences occurring between the light reflecting around an environment, the eyes, the electrochemical impulses in neurons, the visual cortex, the brain, and the speaking of a sentence. This is perhaps not too controversial, except that whereas the processes feeding into the perception of an object would typically be taken as passive, and the interpretation of these processes as forming the active role of the interpreting subject, from a Nietzschean perspective all ‘parts’ of this process (though as an event these ‘parts’ cannot be separated absolutely) are interpretative, metaphorical and variously passive and active depending on the orientation of the transpositions involved. The dilation of the pupil can correspond with a change in light conditions or the spotting of an object of interest, for example; but both occur as a variously active and passive response to changing conditions without any conscious awareness or control by a separable ‘subject’. Nietzsche backs this up in a remark in his notebooks where he points out that consciousness is only a useful selection of perceptions that are all ‘imbued with value judgements’ insofar as they involve an affective response of pleasantness or unpleasantness (such as the perception of a colour, which carry a certain value for Nietzsche).108

2.8 Consciousness and responsibility If there is a major difference between consciousness and extraconsciousness, therefore, it is not that one is active and the other passive, but that the former can be held responsible while the latter cannot.109 It would seem ridiculous to level any culpability at anybody for the fact that their pupils dilate, yet common sense to hold them responsible for taking illegal drugs, which may involve pupil dilation.

107 It is to this extent that Stegmaier (2006: 22) can write that Nietzsche conceives as signs as the ‘only accessible ‘Surface’ (‘Oberfläche’) of all Geschehen (becoming or happening)’, which also follows Spinoza’s commitment to the reality of the vestigia of the affective-imagination. 108 KSA 12.108. 109 This point is discussed in detail by Klossowski (1997: 38), who even suggests that the notions of consciousness and unconsciousness are derived from what is responsible or irresponsible, and always presume the unity of the person or ego.

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Of all the affective relations that are involved in any activity, it is only the extent to which someone is conscious of this activity – or should be conscious of it – that they can be held responsible. Furthermore, it is not merely that consciousness is held responsible – consciousness holds responsible. Remembering that consciousness for Nietzsche has a social and linguistic genesis and refers to semantically structured or ‘structurable’ experience, it is thereby tantamount to a running social commentary where actions are always predicated of an agent. This audience is more of a jury however, insofar as consciousness is informed both by societal mores and a grammatical organisation that holds agents responsible for activities; and if consciousness is a mobile jury, than the conscience, as a high-level of self-consciousness, is judge and executioner. Nietzsche remarks several times how the will to judge is always-already a will to punish,110 and it is to this extent that Nietzsche can call the growing consciousness of modern people a ‘disease’ as judgement and condemnation become more and more ingrained.111 However, seeing as consciousness never exists without relating to extra-consciousness in a living body, nobody can be made fully responsible for their existence or their actions.112 Responsibility can thus only ever be partial insofar as there is a consciousness of what is undertaken alongside a negation of other affective relations.113 A growing level of accepting responsibility thus correlates with a growing level of consciousness (as witnessed through the development of a child) where thinking becomes increasingly normative in orientation as experience is translated into the grammar of consciousness.114 Nietzsche characterises this in the figure of the ‘sovereign individual’ (‘das souveraine Individuum’), who is a relatively late historical development and armed with a conscience – a highly developed form of consciousness that is aware of its responsibility.115 This late

110 See for example KSA 9.477, 4.87, 10.62 and 10.383, as well as MM 2.33; KSA 2.395, M:13; KSA 3.36, ASZ 2.7; KSA 4.128 and GM 3.14; KSA 5.369. 111 FW 354; KSA 3.593; see also KSA 13.327. 112 See GD 5.6; KSA 6.86. 113 See M 129; KSA 3.119. 114 See FW 354; KSA 3.593. 115 Nietzsche maintains a strict connection between a high level of consciousness (or conscience) and responsibility, for the consciousness of responsibility and the conscience are equated by Nietzsche. See GM 2.2; KSA 5.294.

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development provides a new interpretation of experience where customs are challenged in favour of taking responsibility for actions that are now considered as being freely chosen, while the consciousness of this freedom provides a source of great pleasure.116 The sovereign individual is an odd figure however, insofar as it counters much of what Nietzsche has to say about freedom of the will, autonomy and individuality, leading to disagreement over whether Nietzsche is being ironic in describing this figure, or actually promoting it as an admirable disposition.117 There seems no doubt, however, that the consciousness of taking responsibility for one’s actions can be a source of pleasure, regardless of the status of such responsibility.118 It is also important to remember that the ‘mastery over the affects’ enjoyed by the sovereign individual is the mastery of certain affects over others – of a certain feeling of moving away from and going towards something alongside the consciousness of undertaking this activity.119 However, as Nietzsche notes elsewhere, the conscious awareness of an activity does not mean that it is being freely willed by consciousness itself.120 Indeed, Nietzsche goes as far as to suggest that even though we might laugh at someone who says that they ‘will’ the sun to rise just as it does, we seemingly do the same thing whenever we say ‘I will’.121 In other words, any action might well involve a conscious awareness of it, but this is not to say that consciousness causes the activity. Nonetheless, there is, as Nietzsche notes in a highly Spinozist manner, a certain pleasure involved in conceiving and translating oneself as the cause of an activity,122 even if it must also involve a certain amount of obedience.123 116

GM 2.2; KSA 5.293. Bailey (2001), Gemes (2009: 37), Janaway (2007: 116–120; 2009: 61), May (2009: 104), Owen (2009: 206), Poellner (2009: 156), Richardson (2009: 128), Ridley (2009: 182) and Strong (2006: 101) all provide positive readings of Nietzsche’s take on the sovereign individual, while a more suspicious reading is offered by Acampora (2006), Hatab (2005) and Leiter (2010). 118 See JGB 19; KSA 5.31. 119 As already noted, for Nietzsche the will to overcome an affect is only the will of one or more other affects (JGB 117; KSA 5.93). May (2009: 62) also notes that ‘Nietzsche is not even pursuing the question whether there is or is not free will. Rather he is at his usual genealogical business: flushing out an underlying affective state’. 120 JGB 19; KSA 5.31. 121 M 124; KSA 3.116. A similar point is made in FW 127; KSA 3.482. 122 See E3.P30, where Spinoza discusses the joy in conceiving oneself as a cause of joy. 123 JGB 19; KSA 5.31. 117

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There are thus drives that succeed and those that recede alongside a consciousness of this, but it is the affective joy felt in the succeeding ‘will-to-x’ that generally overwhelms the depleting feelings of the incorporated drives and thus become the most prominent for consciousness and leads to a conscious identification with the dominating, succeeding drives.124 Such a joyful feeling of commanding cannot be wrong, nor can the joy in taking responsibility for such an act. The point is rather that insofar as this will is conceived of as a ‘mastery over the affects’125 rather than as a result of the will of ‘one or several affects’,126 then a normative orientation begins to emerge where modal clauses such as ‘should’ and ‘ought’ no longer relate to a relationality of drives, but to activity ‘as such’. In other words, the affectivity of the will – or the immanent affectivity of transience, of ‘going-over’ – is confused in its correlation with the particular content that it is moving from or towards, such as when Cornaro recommended a scant diet for a long and happy life, when it was rather his slow metabolism (a particularly slow tempo of bodily relations) that meant that he would both live longer and be unable to eat much.127 Responsibility and freedom of the will thus identify the affectivity of the will with its content, and the identification of the most prominent drive with a simple, unified perspective that is variously termed the subject, self or soul; but how does consciousness manage to do this? If consciousness is only an aspect of affectivity, how does it manage to unify the whole in terms of itself?128 The short answer is, it does not because it cannot. However, it would also be rather dubious to say that consciousness only appears to usurp the body, for this would imply some form of underlying reality that becomes falsified in the conscious experience of the body. Rather, it is the entire body as the site of affectivity that presents consciousness as awareness as such – the perspective, so to speak – and not merely a perspective in relation to many. The highly conscious person or ‘sovereign individual’ does not so much live in a falsified picture of 124

See JGB 19; KSA 5.31. GM 2.3; KSA 5.297. 126 JGB 117; KSA 5.93. 127 GD 6.1; KSA 6.88. 128 This seems to be Janaway’s (2007: 220–222) criticism, which can be responded to by focusing on the body (as will be discussed below). 125

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reality, but as a falsified body, that is, as a body where the affective play of relations has become monocular through the perspective of consciousness:129 a body that reprimands and arrests itself or a body that has become moral. However, such a body betrays its affective relations and drives in such a way as to allow a genealogical tracing, for morality is a sign of a successful drive and thus of a particular interpretative sign-chain, and is thus a particular ‘sign-language of the affects’.130 Tracing the genealogy of the sovereign moral body is thus a way of uncovering other perspectives and breaking down the unity and dictatorship of consciousness, and this is one of Nietzsche’s major tasks.

2.9

Memory, consciousness and morality

With this in mind, it is therefore no accident that Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality focuses not so much on morality itself as tracing the body’s moral becoming, because for Nietzsche just as Spinoza, it is the body that is the site of affectivity and offers itself for a genealogical tracing. Again, it must be emphasised here that ‘the body’ does not refer to some kind of physiological ground, but the immanently experienced durational, transitional and mnemonic site of affectivity. Thus stated, however, the body also seems to render any genealogy impossible, for any analysis of the past will only be possible to the extent that it is understood within an immanent ‘present frame’ of experience that cannot be transcended. However, Nietzsche presents a way out of this impasse that is also implicitly offered by Spinoza, and which refrains within the immanence of affectivity while affirming the plurality of the body, for it is the body as a multiplicity that provides the channels through which a genealogy of the past can be undertaken. However, the major obstacle to this multiplicity that both Spinoza and Nietzsche seek to problematise once again concerns the seemingly impregnable unity of consciousness, or the autocracy of the ‘I’. 129 As Klossowski (1997: 27) notes, consciousness comes to dominate the body for Nietzsche, which becomes merely the ‘instrument’ of consciousness and the homonym of the ‘person’. This obscures the body as the cohering self, while all ‘evil and suffering’ results from the conflict between the ‘body’s multiplicity’ and the ‘interpretative stubbornness of meaning’ (1997: 32–33). 130 JGB 187; KSA 5.107.

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To address this, Nietzsche begins the second essay of his GM with the rather unusual suggestion that nature has set itself a paradoxical task in breeding an animal with the right to make promises, namely, the human being, and that this is the real problem regarding the latter. A number of questions already pose themselves here, but perhaps the most obvious one is why the ability to make promises should be paradoxical, and why this is the real problem concerning the human rather than the more usual suspects of intentionality, rational thought and language. Some sense can be made of this however if the importance of affectivity is maintained; indeed, if it is not then these questions and the entire genealogical project of Nietzsche’s will remain rather odd and largely difficult to approach. It is the immanence of affective experience that makes the act of promising a paradoxical issue because it involves the ability to repeat an action in a not-yet ‘outside’ of present experience. This recalls Nietzsche’s discussion of the human and the herd animal in the second Untimely Meditations, where Nietzsche describes the scene of a man feeling superior to all the other animals, yet feeling thoroughly miserable at the same time.131 In jealousy, a man might approach an animal, Nietzsche suggests, and ask why it is so happy, but just as the animal would answer that it was because it always forgot what it was going to say, it would immediately forget what it was going to say and continue chewing the cud, leaving the man in wonderment. The animal does not know what is meant by yesterday or today, while its ‘every moment appears wholly as what it is’ before it dies and is extinguished forever. The human, conversely, lives historically and remembers the past, and has to ‘brace against the great and ever greater pressure of this past’. In other words, the human’s experience of the present moment is burdened with a relation to what has been to the extent that a moment is infected with the consciousness of what has been and thus what could or even ought to be. No other bodily perspective can provide this orientation to the past, for the ‘history’ of these perspectives’ geneses are immanently embodied and thus ‘forgotten’; or to put it another way, while extra-consciousness embodies the past while forgetting it, consciousness remembers the past through coding it (the human nearly always remembers what it

131

UB 2.1; KSA 1.248.

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was going to say). If the past burdens the present it thus burdens the body, for the body is the present – it is pure presence – meaning that the past, via consciousness, literally causes sick bodies; the human is thus the sick yet interesting animal.132 The body cannot be completely repressed, however, for as Nietzsche points out, while it is possible to live without a memory, it would be impossible to act or even to live in any real sense without the ability to forget.133 The very feeling of transience is of going over and passing away, and while the present moment might be, at least in some sense, an embodiment or incarnation of all that has been, if it is not felt as a movement towards something else then it would be simply impossible to live or act. This is of no great concern however, because as long as there is a body involved then there is always some level of extra-consciousness and therefore ‘forgetting’ going on, thus allowing a reduction of what enters consciousness and the quietness and space needed for the development of new thoughts and ideas.134 Nonetheless, the extent to which humans can remember and be conscious of themselves in terms of a historical past and act upon it is of no small significance, for it means the development of various abilities that extend outside of the immanent play of affective relations that constitute any given moment, such as, as Nietzsche himself points out, the ability to distinguish between necessary and chance events, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they existed in the present, to decide upon goals and means and be able to generally calculate; thus the human itself becomes ‘calculable’, ‘regular’ and ‘necessary’.135 However, as discussed above, this development of consciousness involves the entire living body and not merely the growing dominance of consciousness over a passive bodily organism. Nietzsche thus invokes a ‘prehistoric labour’ of humanity of tens of thousands of years where the vestigia of affective relations become codified through repeated and repeatable markings of the flesh into signs that organise customs, and thus very slowly over thousands of years, bodily perspectives become altered until they orient the present moment

132 133 134 135

GM 3.20; KSA 5.387 & AC 14; KSA 6.180. See UB 2.1; KSA 1.248 and GM 2.1; KSA 5.291. GM 2.1; KSA 5.291. GM 2.1; KSA 5.292.

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in particular terms.136 Nietzsche calls this period the ‘morality of mores’ (Sittlichkeit der Sitte).137 Nietzsche even goes as far as to suggest that during the last few thousand years of recorded history, little has occurred in comparison to the monumental changes that must have taken place to allow the possibility of a historical consciousness in the first place.138 While such a reading of ‘pre-history’ is necessarily speculative and thus might be dismissed out of hand, as long as it is maintained that consciousness only ever exists in an immanent relation to extra-consciousness traversing a living body, then it is the relation between these perspectives that needs to be analysed, rather than consciousness or extra-consciousness alone. Furthermore, it is the transitional relationship between the embodiment of the past (repeated series of affects) and its conscious memory (a codification of the past in terms of regular semantic structures) that marks the peculiar genesis of the human; or more simply put, the interesting thing about the human is the genesis of a body becoming moral – a becoming-moral that betrays a non-moral affective genesis. As Nietzsche notes, ‘the formation of moral values is itself the work of non-moral affects’;139 or, as he points out elsewhere, a moral judgement of an act is itself an act, and thus has a prehistory that extends further than morality itself.140 As discussed above, this means that rather than consciousness being considered as a starting point and issuer of activity, its relation to extra-consciousness is examined to see how this involves a growing feeling of responsibility for these activities. Indeed, this growing responsibility for oneself is paradigmatic of the enlightened, modern individual, but whereas philosophers have tended to take this modern ‘result’ of the long Sittlichkeit der Sitte (namely, the ‘sovereign individual’) as a starting point, Nietzsche understands the importance of thinking historically in terms of tracing the genesis of the becoming of this late development. Nietzsche consistently accuses philosophers of confusing first and last things, and specifically for taking the human being from a (particular) contemporary 136

GM 2.3; KSA 5.294. GM 2.2; KSA 5.293. See also M 9, 14 & 16; KSA 3.21, 3.26 & 3.49. 138 MM 1.1; KSA 2.23 and M 18; KSA 3.31. 139 KSA 12.276. Nietzsche’s notebooks are littered with similar remarks, evidencing this as a recurrent theme behind his considerations of morality. 140 FW 335; KSA 3.560. 137

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perspective and projecting it throughout all time and history as what it is to be human.141 The modern perspective is orientated around a highly developed self-consciousness that is often taken as essential, ‘transcendental’, and has perhaps even ‘instinctive’ (an instinct that Nietzsche calls having a conscience).142 This is clear if we consider how all mature human beings are held accountable before the law, an accountability that is only excused where extraneous circumstances mean that extra-conscious bodily perspectives erode the sovereignty of consciousness; a typical example being a ‘crime of passion’ where bodily affects are said to temporarily erode the judgement of the conscious mind. Responsibility is thus assumed as default in all cases and as a ‘natural’ state of affairs that is only unfortunately taken away by physiological abnormalities (not even ignorance before the law is acceptable in the vast majority of cases). Perhaps more interestingly, penal systems are organised to a great extent according to the extent to which criminals show remorse for their crimes and thereby evidence a conscience, though Nietzsche credits Spinoza here for his insight that for thousands of years criminals have not felt the sting of conscience (morsus conscientiae) at all, but rather that, with their punishment, something had gone unexpectedly wrong.143 The ‘sovereign individual’ is thus taken to be the natural or optimum state of the human condition, thereby masking over its unstable genesis. This is not to suggest that conscious choice and responsibility are illusory however, as these terms are highly influential in modern society and it may well be the case that many modern human beings have developed this conscious perspective to such a degree that they can properly be called ‘sovereign individuals’ insofar as they are genuinely willing to take responsibility for their actions. Nonetheless, such a state cannot be presumed from the beginning as being a natural one, nor can it be presumed to provide anything other than a conditional state that always depends on a certain relation to extra-consciousness. When Nietzsche criticises the idea of the subject, for example, subjectivity is not suggested as

141 See MM 1.2; KSA 2.24 and GD 3.4; KSA 6.76. Nietzsche even criticises philosophy for being ‘essentially unhistorical’ (GM 1.2; KSA 5.258). 142 GM 2.2–3; KSA 5.293–7. 143 GM 2.15; KSA 5.320–321.

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being illusory or non-existent, because it clearly plays a dominant role in how we orientate ourselves in modernity. Rather, it is the extent to which subjectivity is taken to be autonomous and the only active perspective in operation that is false, as it falsifies the multiplicity of the body. Nietzsche’s critique of the subject in his GM is paradigmatic of this.144 Here Nietzsche suggests that just as there is no lightning lurking behind its flash, it would be erroneous to posit a subject lurking behind an action. While we might say that ‘the lightning flashes’, there is no lightning separable from the flash and it is only the ‘seduction of language’ that construes an action as belonging to a subject. This alone will probably not convince many people however,145 for there seems to be far more going on in the idea of subjectivity than can be reduced to a grammatical constraint. It is not merely that a person has to say ‘I am talking’ because grammar dictates this and thus erroneously believes in the autonomy of the ‘I’, for there is a genuine consciousness of talking going on that allows such a sentence to be spoken in the first place. To deny this would be to deny the perspective of consciousness, which could only occur by theoretically denying its affectivity and thereby emptying it of its reality. However, if care is taken with Nietzsche’s reference to subjectivity as a neutral or ‘indifferent substratum’, then the text need not be read this way, for it is this idea of subjectivity that Nietzsche is critiquing. It is the idea of a subject somehow lurking behind an action or disconnected from the body through which the action takes place that is problematic here, because consciousness or subjectivity is only ever experienced in relation to an extra-consciousness that traverses a living body.146 As discussed above, as consciousness is expressed through language, when its perspective is developed to a high degree then its grammar does indeed seem to organise reality, but this is not because of its structure and rules. Rather, it is because the perspective of consciousness has become dominant that the world is 144

GM 1.13; KSA 5.278. Critics here include Bittner (2001: 40) and Janaway (2007: 216–222). 146 Pippin (2006: 138) also notes that Nietzsche is critiquing the separation of subject from deed, and uses a vocabulary of expression where there still is a genuine activity, while guilt and responsibility are feelings that Nietzsche, inspired by Spinoza, takes to be the sadness of disappointment when an activity goes unexpectedly wrong (2006: 143). 145

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actually perceived, experienced and thought linguistically – but this does not mean that it is autonomous from extra-consciousness, nor that subjectivity is autonomous from the acting body. Nietzsche’s linking of the problem of subjectivity to morality in this section also makes sense here when he suggests that it is morality that needs the subject as a neutral substratum lurking behind an action. However, it is not that subjectivity is merely needed and projected into reality for moral purposes, but that the body actually becomes more moral the more the perspective of consciousness, and thus subjectivity, dominates, translates and codes experience; and the greater degree that this perspective is reinforced (to the detriment of other extraconsciousness perspectives) the more subjective, conscious and conscientious bodies become. With this in mind, it would foolish to state that we should or even could straightforwardly rid ourselves of the subject or subjectivity, for it is more than just the result of an error of grammar – it rather forms a particular ‘grammaticised’ perspective where activities and affective relations are translated in a certain way. The challenge thus becomes one of rethinking the relationship between conscious and extra-conscious perspectives that give rise to various levels of subjectivity, and how this organises and reorients the body and affectivity. However, to think or discuss subjectivity alone, outside of any relation to extra-consciousness, would be to falsify experience and the body. Nietzsche thus suggests different ways to reconsider the subject, such as a subjective-multiplicity and a ‘social structure of the drives and affects’.147 Without this emphasis on the immanent plurality of perspectives and without some sense of the variable geneses of their relations, we risk reinforcing a warped image of the human alongside a growing dysphoria in the negation of the body. As the next chapter will discuss, post-Platonic philosophy for Nietzsche has precisely exacerbated this negation in its attempt to cure the nihilistic tendencies of conscious thought via the ‘ascetic ideal’.

147

JGB 12; KSA 5.26–27.

3 Will-to-Power: Redeeming the Body from the Ascetic Ideal

Now that the crucial role that affectivity plays in Nietzsche’s philosophy has been outlined alongside how he uses this to trace the negation of the multi-perspectival character of bodily experience, this chapter will focus more closely on Nietzsche’s critique of philosophy in exacerbating this issue. The philosophy that Nietzsche is most concerned with here is Platonism (or perhaps more precisely, a Socratic Platonism) and, by extension, Christianity as ‘Plato for the masses’. The chapter will thus begin with a discussion of how philosophy has negated the affective and perspectival nature of experience in order to try to cope with something that Nietzsche accepts as a perennial and genuine problem that finds expression in human history in various ways, namely nihilism. In its most basic sense, nihilism arises for Nietzsche because consciousness translates affective experience from the feeling of transience outlined in the previous two chapters to that of temporality; that is, the conscious awareness of life’s finitude and the foreboding sense that all of life’s efforts are ultimately ‘in vain’. Plato is targeted in particular here as exacerbating the inherent nihilism of consciousness by attempting to negate the bodily in favour of ascetic ideals, although as the subsequent section will suggest, through his ‘redemptive’ reading of Plato Nietzsche also traces an affirmative willing of eternity that positively addresses this issue. After this analysis of Plato, the chapter will then move on to a discussion of one of Nietzsche’s most enigmatic thoughts, namely the ‘eternal return’ – which will be articulated as a kind of test that 110

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exposes the sad affects of nihilistic Socratic-Platonism while creating a sadness of its own – and subsequently to an examination of how another of Nietzsche’s esoteric motifs, amor fati, provides a vision of how the dysphoria of the eternal return can be overcome through an affirmation of the temporal. The final section of the chapter will take a closer look at the meaning of philosophical redemption for Nietzsche and how it differs from religious salvation, as well as how his infamous ‘will-to-power’ can be understood as his attempt at achieving this and overcoming the nihilism of philosophy. This will set up the discussion in the final chapter of a new philosophical task following Spinoza and Nietzsche. However, the chapter will begin by examining the important and problematic role that Nietzsche identifies philosophy as having played in negating the perspectival nature of experience.

3.1

Philosophy as the negation of the perspectival

Nietzsche’s most sustained criticism of philosophy is precisely that it has suppressed the multi-perspectival character of experience in favour of some underlying form of transcendence, which in modernity has typically been consciousness and the subject. According to Nietzsche, it is precisely this plurality that has been negated by the ‘prejudices of philosophers’ at least since Plato denied the ‘basic condition of all life’, namely the perspectival.1 It is this denial of perspective that is the ultimate consequence of breaking with the immanence of affectivity and orientating thought around some kind of transcendence, whether this is in a theological form (being, logos, god) or a modern variety (cogito, subject, transcendental ego), for in each case it is the perspectival that is denied.2 In the case of theological transcendence, an absolute truth or ground is posited that merely has to be intuited or recognised, while modern transcendence reduces the plurality of the perspectival to consciousness and subjectivity. Indeed, for Nietzsche this modern form of transcendence descends directly from ancient theology as its most recent reincarnation – Kant being Nietzsche’s favourite example of the 1

JGB Pre; KSA 5.12. As Strong (1985: 167) notes, ‘a self that had a “transcendent” perspective would also have to be a self that did not change’, and it is precisely this that Nietzsche resists. 2

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theological ‘blood’ running through the ‘veins’ of modern philosophy.3 Nietzsche makes it clear in the third essay of his GM that the point is not that this is metaphysically wrong or in error, which as discussed in relation to Spinoza would not be particularly important, but that it is ultimately a harmful moral reduction whose asceticism results in potentially dysphoric affective relations.4 It is thus no accident that his most explicit articulation of the perspectival occurs in precisely this chapter on ascetic ideals, for a ‘pure will-less, painless and timeless subject of knowledge’, ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’ and ‘knowledge in itself’ all demand the unthinkable, namely the non-existence of the active, interpreting affects in which seeing is always ‘seeing something’.5 As Nietzsche famously writes: There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’.6 This infamous passage has been the subject of many divergent interpretations, and this is not surprising given its peculiarity.7 It sounds rather un-Nietzschean for two reasons; firstly it seems rather dogmatic, ‘There is only ...’, and it seems to posit the possibility of

See AC 8–12; KSA 6.174–179. As Nietzsche remarks elsewhere, from the optics of value both noble values and Christian values are ways of seeing and thus immune to reasons and refutations (a disease of the eye cannot be refuted, as he acerbically puts it) (DFW Ep; KSA 6.51). 5 GM 3.12; KSA 5.365. 6 Nietzsche (2006b: 87; GM 3.12; KSA 5.365). 7 To give a brief overview of some of the various interpretations offered of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, for Anderson (1998) it is a Kantian-inspired commitment to the subjective construction of experience, for Blondel (1991: 242) it is a Spinozism without a unifying substance, for Cox (1999: 109–168) it expresses an ontological position that challenges both idealism and realism, for Danto (2005: 59) it affirms the impossibility of perspectives to talk about the same thing, and thus different perspectives must try to impose themselves, for Davey (1990) it is a deleterious relativism that fatally undermines Nietzsche’s philosophy, for Janaway (2007: 204) it marks the specificity of knowing, for Leiter (1994) it articulates the incompleteness of knowledge and the need for a plurality of perspectives, for Nehamas (1985: 66–67) it affirms the interpretative nature of existence, for Poellner (1995: 288–292) it is a relativism that is ill at ease with other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, for Reginster (2006: 84) it establishes transcendental conditions of possibility and for Strong (1985) it expresses the multiplicity of perspectives at play in any given ‘subjective’ viewpoint. 4

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reaching an objective concept of a phenomenon if enough perspectives are amassed upon it, meaning that there is something outside of the perspective that we can principally know if we study it hard enough. However, the key here is to focus on the composition and provocativeness of the text and not only the meaning of the terms. ‘Knowing’, ‘concept’ and ‘objectivity’ are all placed in inverted commas and lifted from the passage, whereas perspectival and affects are not. There is only a perspectival seeing insofar as the immanence of affectivity and the moment cannot be breached – which, as will be discussed below, is also fundamental for Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’. The formulation of this passage demonstrates precisely such an impossibility, (‘There is only ...’), while the isolated terms of knowing, concept and objectivity are names that describe certain affective relations that deny they are so – they portend to stand alone or outside the case they describe. The more affects there are in play, the more relations are in play too, and to know something and to have a concept of something objectively is precisely to relate to something ‘as’ something, that is, as seeing-something. This is also why Nietzsche’s original German sentence ‘Es giebt nur ein perspektivisches Sehen’ is translated better as ‘there is only a perspectival seeing’ rather than ‘there is only a perspective seeing’, for the former brings out both the adjectival form of perspektivisches and the fact that it always involves a multiplicity of perspectives – there is no singular perspective without any relation to other perspectives. Seeing-something thus involves a multiplicity of perspectives, which is why Nietzsche follows the passage above by stating that to eliminate the will and dispense with affects, even if this were possible, would be to castrate the intellect and thus eliminate knowledge, concepts and objectivity altogether insofar as these are ways of relating and seeing-something and not merely ‘immaculate’ ways of knowing and seeing. The question thus remains as to why philosophy has denied the perspectival and placed all value in the austere perspective of cold, rational thought. According to Nietzsche, while the denial of the perspectival takes many forms within philosophy, it is invariably orientated around the question of truth. This is the first ‘prejudice’ that Nietzsche identifies with philosophers: an unquestioning deference to truth. Nietzsche thus asks a series of questions concerning the value of truth – what in us really wants the truth, and why not

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value ‘untruth’ instead?8 This is an extremely counterintuitive question of course because it seems so natural to presume that truth has more value than falsity. Nonetheless, Nietzsche perseveres with this question in order to get at precisely what truth is supposed to provide, to which he contends that truth, above all, provides a certain fixity and focus amidst all the flux of perspectives and affects, thus providing a sense of timelessness against the transience of affectivity.9 Whether truth be ‘out there’, ‘in here’ or in some dialectical relation in between, they all provide a way to overcome the fleeting and the transitory, which is something that horrifies consciousness as it is starkly aware of its inevitable demise. However, this comforting device is barred by Spinoza and Nietzsche as they refuse to break the immanence of affectivity and accept that transience cannot be arrested and thus resists any ultimate grounding. Still, although Nietzsche often seems to be purely critical of philosophers and others for attempting to breach this immanence and positing some kind of permanence in the form of a transcendent ground, Nietzsche traces two differing senses in which such a task is undertaken, namely a drive to overcome the transience of affectivity via an affirmative willing of eternity, and another that expresses a nihilistic willing of nothingness. For while the conscious awareness of transience can involve depressive affects that cast a shadow and a will-to-nothingness over existence (whatever we do – all is in vain), transience also threatens to take away the intensities and joys of affectivity as ‘all good things must come to an end’; the happiest and the most miserable are thus equally threatened by transience, the former insofar as the intensity of affectivity can be taken away, and the latter insofar as affectivity as such is something insufferable. This finds expression mostly acutely in the various forms of religion for Nietzsche, who repeatedly claims that while the Greek gods were created through an affirmative overcoming of transience where

8 JGB 1; KSA 5.15. Nietzsche elsewhere remarks that his ‘sense of truth’ is limited to experimental questioning (FW 51; KSA 3.415) and to scepticism (AC 54; KSA 6.236); or, as Blondel (1991: 28) sums up, ‘Nietzsche considers truth to be metaphorical: beneath the networks of concept and grammar, the metaphor follows what Nietzsche calls the Leitfaden des Leibes’. 9 JGB 2; KSA 5.16 – hence the whole question of asceticism is linked to truth and fixed ideas for Nietzsche (see GM 2.3; KSA 5.294).

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beauty could be repeated eternally,10 the Christian God thoroughly defames and bemoans it.11 Thus, this awareness of transience where affectivity is translated temporally via consciousness and memory becomes the basic problem of the human and informs much of the philosophical drive for certainty, eternity and truth.12 It might be surprising, however, to talk about the problem of the ‘human’ at all in relation to Nietzsche, for just as Spinoza rejected the universal notion of ‘Man’, Nietzsche aims to avoid positing some kind of being that affectivity ‘happens to’. However, discussions of the ‘human’ in Nietzsche’s texts are invariably posed in terms of changing affective relations rather than as a determinate being or thing.13 In this very precise sense, the ‘human’ can be articulated as a kind of condition (but not precondition) of affective relations. The dominant trend in modern philosophy that insists upon the transcendence of consciousness (which here includes language and intentionality) need not be denied here, but rather redescribed in terms of forming certain perspectives and affective relations. Rather than travelling the absurd path of denying either the reality or the efficaciousness of consciousness, therefore, it is the extent to which it can be shown to be always found in relation to extra-consciousness that can destabilise its apparent transcendence while emphasising its affective role. As already discussed, Nietzsche goes about this by treating consciousness to a genealogical analysis in order to recover its sociality and historical becoming while attempting to destabilise its spiritual valorisation by suggesting that it may, after all, be a sign of distress involving dysphoric translations of experience, rather than a sign of virtuous superiority.14 The important point here is how the growing dominance of the perspective of consciousness reinterprets affectivity from the feeling of transience to that of temporality, or how affectivity becomes temporality for consciousness. This is a ‘world-changing’ event that marks the

FW 339; KSA 3.568 and GD 10.4; KSA 6.159. See AC 18; KSA 6.185, for example. 12 These are some of the central problems of ASZ and GM, particularly the second essay of the latter. 13 Indeed, just as Spinoza couches the human in terms of ‘desire’ and ‘vacillation’, ‘indeterminacy’ and its associated ‘sickness’ is a constant theme for Nietzsche when describing the human; see GM 3.13; KSA 5.365 in particular. 14 FW 333 & 354; KSA 3.558 & 590. 11

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move from pre-history to the historical being of the human, because whereas extra-consciousness embodies the relations of affectivity while forgetting them (the body is always ‘present’), consciousness remembers affectivity through encoding it in language.15 The extra-conscious traces and signs of affectivity become transferred into abbreviated signs (words) that can be recorded, communicated and remembered. This is why memory plays such an important role in the ‘problem of the human’ for Nietzsche, because it forms the ability to overcome the forgetful embodiment of affectivity and thus allows a sense of temporality to form where a relation to the past and the future can develop.16 Consciousness thus involves a temporal awareness of transience via a grammatical form that has a past, present and future tense, and thereby of the inevitability of passing away and thus the horror of senselessness. If the human is more undetermined (unfestgestellter) than any other animal,17 or is the sick yet interesting animal,18 it is because it is accompanied by this constant awareness of its transitory nature and its inevitable demise, resulting in a need to find ways to cope with and ‘find a home’ within this transience by creating a relation to something fixed, permanent or timeless. This is why Nietzsche suggests that the human is more of an artist than it knows, for this creative need, although often obscured by the belief that we are merely trying to recognise what is, becomes vital to a conscious being where embodied affectivity becomes an indeterminate temporality.19 For Nietzsche, such human affective relations are extremely precarious and allow for all kinds of deleterious situations where instinctive activities – those that have unconsciously involved euphoric relations – are dangerously strayed from.20 A strange situation thus occurs with the awareness that no matter how joyful an experience may be, no matter how euphoric the joy, it will pass. From the perspective of a consciousness that translates singular experiences into identifiable and repeatable codes, such transience is 15 16

Klossowski (1997: 15–54) discusses this relationship in detail. Nietzsche’s most important discussion of memory occurs in the second essay of

GM. 17 18 19 20

GM 3.13; KSA 5.367. GM 3.20; KSA 5.387 & AC 14; KSA 6.180. See JGB 192; KSA 5.113, and relatedly, FW 301; KSA 3.539. AC 14; KSA 6.180.

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horrific insofar as it is destructive of the very sense it creates. The human lives under a shadow cast over its existence in the ever-threatening feeling that all great efforts in life are ultimately doomed to pass away.21 That human life is dogged by a nihilistic feeling that all is in vain (Umsonst) is a common theme in Nietzsche, perhaps most explicitly phrased in On the Genealogy of Morality: ‘behind every great human destiny sounded the even louder refrain “in vain!” ’,22 which is also why abstinence from life and the ‘ascetic ideal’ is supposed to remedy this ‘suicidal nihilism’ by providing a meaning for this suffering, although at the price of more suffering and inwardness.23 Thus, it is precisely this condition that births nihilism, and not religiosity, Platonism or Christianity, which are rather remedies that inadvertently exacerbate the situation. Indeed, if it is the mnemonic reinforcement of extra-conscious affective relations that characterise the pre-history of humanity, then it is nihilism – the conscious awareness of transience – that characterises its historical development. Nietzsche’s ultimate criticism of Platonism is not, therefore, that it has caused nihilism, but that it has incalculably exacerbated a preexisting nihilistic state. Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s reading of Plato is even more nuanced than that, for he also traces an affirmative drive to overcome transience in his philosophy, and the manner in which Nietzsche ‘redeems’ this trace is paradigmatic for the task that he sets for philosophy.

3.2 The joy and sadness of Plato’s idealism Looking past the dominant Christian attempt to cope with nihilism by negating the earthly in favour of God, Nietzsche articulates two crucial pre-Christian ways in which this was undertaken by our 21 Although Havas (1998: 116–117) suggests that this is no longer a problem in modernity and that it is rather the ascetic ‘fantasy’ of the will to truth that is now the issue because it appears to institute a break with the past and thus prevents a questioning of the value of truth. However, such ascetic ideals are only palliative and their demise exacerbates the problem of temporality for Nietzsche, as will be discussed throughout the remainder of this book. 22 Nietzsche (2006b: 120; GM 3.28; KSA 5.411). 23 An elaboration of the link between a sense of all being in vain and the genesis of nihilism can be found in the Lenzer Heide fragment, written just as Nietzsche went on to compose GM (KSA 12.211–217).

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Greek ancestors, namely the tragic on the one hand and the Platonic/ Socratic on the other. The ‘tragic’ should not be interpreted as a negative or pessimistic worldview however, as Nietzsche takes pains to point out, as it rather involves not just accepting but affirming transience and inevitable destruction.24 The Socratic attitude, however, seeks to overcome this situation by positing some permanent and eternal beyond to which we should dedicate our fleeting lives to understanding, thus achieving a degree of fixity and assuredness amongst the living vacillations of affects.25 However, it is not simply a case of the tragic translation of existence being ‘good’ and the Socratic translation ‘bad’, for the latter’s anti-tragic ‘will-to-truth’ can either have affirmative or nihilistic tendencies, as can be seen in the works of Plato: while his denial of the perspectival expresses a kind of enjoyment in its overcoming and interpreting of the world,26 it also expresses a powerful and seductive nihilism. Nietzsche’s ambivalent relationship with Plato thus mirrors his ambivalent relationship with philosophy in general, for there is an intensely affirmative and seductively nihilistic will at play in both insofar as what philosophers demand ‘first and last’ is ‘to overcome their time and to become timeless’.27 The overcoming of transience is a genuine problem for Nietzsche, therefore, although he is concerned with the manner in which Plato and much of philosophy has gone about addressing it. For Nietzsche, a certain aspect of Plato’s philosophy bears witness to a joyful affective genesis that strives to overcome the temporal and achieve eternity. Nietzsche draws attention to this by noting that Plato explicitly affirms that there would be no philosophy without the beautiful youths of Athens who send the philosopher’s soul into an ‘erotic frenzy’,28 for it is beauty that encourages reproduction.29 Even the cold, intellectual process of dialectics is, in the guise of the affirmative Plato, an ‘erotic competition’ and a new form of the Greek agon.30 Philosophy for Plato thus overcomes death, change and 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

See EH 3.9; KSA 6.312, GD 3.6; KSA 6.79 and GD 9.24; KSA 6.127 in particular. See ‘The Problem of Socrates’ in Nietzsche (2005: 162–166; GD 2; KSA 6.67–73). JGB 14: KSA 5.28. DFW Pre; KSA 6.11. GD 9.23; KSA 6.126. GD 9.22: KSA 6.126. GD 9.23; KSA 6.126.

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degeneration via an affirmative translation, intensification and eternalisation of eros.31 Nietzsche can thus describe the affirmative Plato as ‘the most beautiful growth of antiquity’32 a ‘great philosopher’33 and noble in the sense of being a ‘whole type’.34 This latter point is crucial, for the affirmative Plato is not limited to a narrow, disembodied will-to-truth, but rather sublimates the entirety of bodily desire into the highest form of affirmation. Nietzsche’s nihilistic Plato, meanwhile, is an altogether different beast. This Plato is ‘boring’ and one of the first ‘decadents of styles’, while his dialogues exhibit a ‘smug and childish’ form of dialectics. 35 Crucially, this Plato is a Christian before his time by holding the concept of ‘good’ above all others, and is thus thoroughly ‘overmoralised’ and the ‘great slanderer of life’. For Nietzsche, this contradiction is often couched in term of Plato the artist on the one hand who beautifies temporality through its sublimation as Idea,36 versus Plato the anti-artist and moralist on the other, slandering temporality in favour of an absolute.37 Despite their seeming incompatibility, Plato’s works therefore express both an affirmative and a nihilistic will-to-truth for Nietzsche. These contradictory aspects of Plato correlate to the qualitatively different ways in which they translate experience. The affirmative will-to-truth expresses Plato’s ‘wholeness’ as a propagator of noble ideas in a spiritual sublimation of eros into the agon of dialectics, while the nihilistic Plato is invariably linked by Nietzsche to both Socrates and ‘Platonism’ or the Platonic-Christian tradition that followed and dominated Europe, where Christianity is merely ‘Plato for the masses’.38 On more than one occasion, Nietzsche questions whether Socrates perhaps was, as many of his fellow Athenians came to believe, a corrupter of the youth who actually did corrupt 31 Nietzsche suggests that Plato’s idealism might even be the result of an overabundant health that needed to have caution with its over-powerful senses, and that we today are perhaps not healthy enough to need Plato’s idealism (FW 372; KSA 3.624). 32 JGB Pre; KSA 5.12. 33 GM 3.17; KSA 5.350. 34 JGB 190; KSA 5.111 and JGB 204; KSA 5.131. 35 GD 10.2; KSA 6.155. 36 KSA 12.253. 37 GM 3.25; KSA 5.402. In a note, Nietzsche also remarks that philosophy since Plato has been dominated by morality, suggesting that the latter Plato has dominated. 38 JGB Pre; KSA 5.12.

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the great Plato.39 Whether this is the case or not, there is something of Plato’s morality that simply does not belong to his philosophy according to Nietzsche, specifically the equating of knowledge with virtue and ‘the good’.40 With this image, people are only supposed to do themselves harm through a lack of knowledge, meaning that dialectics is not only a sublimated form of eros, but a process through which one comes to know what is ‘good’ and ‘for the best’. The pursuit of knowledge no longer serves as an intensification of life (as the most powerful affect); rather, life itself is taken to serve knowledge (an unexamined life is not worth living).41 Transience, plurality, multiplicity and so on are merely obstacles to be straddled in order to know and to be good – the striving for which is posited as our natural tendency (this supposition is vital for Socratic morality, otherwise the dialectical process would be exposed as being very cruel indeed). Even if Socrates saw an irony in all this, Plato was perhaps more ‘innocent’ and ‘lacked Socrates’ plebeian craftiness’, meaning that he took it seriously and engaged with ‘the greatest strength that any philosopher has had at their disposal’ to prove that reason and instinct tend toward one goal, namely the ‘good’ or ‘God’.42 The affirmative drive to overcome temporality is hereby transferred into the drive to conform to an absolute form of transcendence that renders the immanent, living realm of affectivity shadowy and substandard. For Nietzsche, Plato thus expresses both an affirmative and a nihilistic drive to overcome transience, and it is insofar as Plato expresses a certain moral bent that the latter holds. The affirmative Platonic world of truth, which the wise live in and are – ‘I, Plato, am the truth’ – becomes the unattainable world of truth promised to the wise and the virtuous (the Platonic-Christian world).43 The perspectival plurality of affectivity becomes something to be chastised, tamed and reduced – one must become conscientious. This is a thorough moralisation and a becoming moral of the body and, particularly in its Christian incarnation, a thorough defamation and negation of the body and its transience and multiplicity.44 Nietzsche thus 39 40 41 42 43 44

JGB Pre & 190–191; KSA 5.12 & 5.111–113. JGB 190: KSA 5.12. Plato (1961: 23; Apology 38a). Nietzsche (2001b: 81; JGB 191; KSA 5.112). GD 4; KSA 6.80. See GD 9.47; KSA 6.148, and AC 21, 51 & 56; KSA 6.188, 6.231 & 6.239.

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articulates a strong link between memory, the burden of the past, the will-to-truth that strives to overcome this burdensome awareness of transience, the despising of the body, and nihilism or the will-to-nothingness. Together these feed into a will to overcome the transience of affectivity through grasping the timeless in spite of perspective, something that the body’s multiplicity hinders. Why this ends up exacerbating nihilism according to Nietzsche is well known: Christian morality undermines itself.45 The burden of history and the failed attempts to once and for all reach the eternal ‘truth’ collapses in the growing sense that this is impossible, and because value has been equated with truth, human beings are once again trapped in the vicissitudes of temporality, which is an even worse condition to be in after millennia of defamation at the hands of Christianity. However, it must be remembered that nihilism is not the invention of Platonism or Christianity, but rather the exacerbation of a general nihilistic tendency that human relations have in the consciousness of transience – they are thus pharmakons rather than cures. Nietzsche meanwhile looks for a way to redeem the genitive senses at play in Plato’s attempt to overcome transience in order to unburden the present from Plato’s moralism and transcendent ideals. An important aspect of this task is to expose such ideals to the multiplicity of perspectives at play in a living moment to show how they result in a dysphoric translation (a bad carrying) of transience that ultimately negates the transitory. Such exposure is achieved by Nietzsche in the thought of the eternal return: a thought that exposes the affects and forces a confrontation with transient existence.

3.3

The eternal return of the ‘Something’

When considering Nietzsche’s writings on temporality, it is important that the strict relation between affectivity and transience is borne in mind so as to avoid reading a ‘theory of time’ into them that grounds experience. That Nietzsche does not offer a theory of time divorced from affective experience is a complicated matter however, and this is no more evident than in one of his most enigmatic thoughts, namely the eternal return (die ewige Wiederkunft,

GM 3.27; KSA 5.410. See also KSA 12.125.

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sometimes ewige Wiederkehr).46 In its most basic formulation, the eternal return means that everything that ever occurs, right down to the very tiniest of details, will occur again and again, ad infinitum. This is not a particularly new idea (there are echoes here of the ancient figure of Ouroboros), and it can be traced back at least to Ancient Egypt and Greece.47 It also appears to do precisely the opposite of what was suggested above by seemingly grounding affectivity and experience and providing an explanatory device for all existing beings. All temporal experience is hereby to be understood as that which already has and will recur interminably. Worse still, Nietzsche seems to offer what appear to be objective proofs for the doctrine that centre on the claim that because energy is limited and time infinite, every possible combination of finite events must be reached and repeated ad infinitum. This seems to concur with nineteenth century science and the laws of thermodynamics,48 which is not without significance because elsewhere Nietzsche praises science for its ability to overcome deleterious religious dogma.49 It is therefore not surprising at all that Nietzsche would be interested in scientific evidence that reinforced this idea and would jot them down in his notebooks. In the Lenzer Heide fragment, for example, Nietzsche suggests that it is ‘the most scientific of all possible hypotheses’.50 Seeing as time is eternal, Nietzsche continues, any goal would have been reached by now, if existence had one. Elsewhere, Nietzsche notes that given that there is a limited and constant amount of force operating in the universe, and again, that time is eternal, then all possible forms must recur ad infinitum.51 However, if Nietzsche does mean this as a scientific theory, then it is certainly not mechanistic, because he also notes here that a mechanistic worldview would have

46 Although both phrases are used by Nietzsche, there seems to be no technical distinction in play. As an aside, while it is common to use the phrase ‘eternal return of the same’ when referring to this idea of Nietzsche’s, the KSA has thirty-eight entries of ‘ewige Wiederkunft’ and six entries of ‘ewige Wiederkehr’, but only one once – and in a notebook –is this actually followed by ‘des Gleichen’ (KSA 9.494). While Nietzsche often invokes the same returning, by using the term ‘eternal return of the same’ the importance of the movement of the return is all too easily obscured. 47 Nietzsche also suggests this (EH 3.9; KSA 6.313). 48 See Small (2001; 2006) and Ulfers & Cohen (2008). 49 This will be discussed in the final chapter. 50 KSA 12.213. 51 KSA 13.376. This claim is famously refuted by Simmel (1991: 172–173).

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to posit a final state of things, whereas eternal recurrence certainly does not. Nonetheless, the fact remains that when stated as any kind of theory of time, the eternal return subjects the immanence of affectivity to the most crushing form of transcendence imaginable. However, the telling factor remains that when it comes to his published works, the eternal return is only articulated as a question or test and never as a scientific doctrine. Rather than grounding experience, therefore, the eternal return only really makes sense as an affective and disconcerting question or test.52 The test is, would you rejoice from hearing such a thought, or would it fill you with dread? This is how it is formulated in the two most infamous passages where Nietzsche explicitly asks how we would react if a demon whispered it into our ear one night, and also where he implicitly invokes this test when Zarathustra challenges the dwarf that burdens his journey with the idea that every detail of their current conversation will return eternally.53 However, it is easy to gloss over the particular context of these articulations and the manner in which they are expressed, and extract their content to construct a general framework for the eternal return that we can apply in all circumstances, thus reducing the eternal return to Nietzsche’s ‘theory of time’; but this would be to miss the point altogether. First of all, it is important to note that Nietzsche’s first and most famous articulation of the test of the eternal return comes immediately after a discussion of the death of Socrates.54 In this passage, Nietzsche admits an admiration for Socrates, but suggests that he betrayed himself in death by asking Crito to offer Aesclepius, the god of healing, a rooster. Nietzsche takes this as an admission from Socrates that life is in fact a disease that is cured by death, hence the offering of gratitude to the god of healing.55 In the famous subsequent 52 There is widespread agreement that the eternal return is articulated in terms of a test or experience, without needing any objective ‘proof’ even if Nietzsche attempts to articulate some; see for example Clark (1990: 247–254), Nehamas (1980), Reginster (2006: 201–227), Soll (1998) and Wood (1988: 46). 53 FW 341; ASZ 2.2.2; KSA 4.199. 54 FW 340–341; KSA 3.569–570. 55 Nietzsche repeats this in GD 2.1; KSA 6.67. Nietzsche is of course referring to Plato’s depiction of Socrates’ death in Phaedo. Loeb (2010: 36–37) suggests that Nietzsche is indicating that it is Socrates’ daimon that whispers the thought of the eternal return to Socrates, thus making Socrates exclaim that life is a curse. The thought of the eternal

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passage regarding the test of the eternal return, Nietzsche asks how we would react if a daemon whispered into our ears that life as we have lived it would return again and again interminably. It is difficult not to relate this daemon to Socrates’ daimon, thus relating the test directly to Socrates’ suspicion towards life and heralding of death; but what if the life that you believe to be escaping from returns eternally? With this challenge, Nietzsche returns to a theme that already began in his first published book, namely the death of tragedy (and tragic-thought) at the hands of the Socratic (and in the context of tragedy, the Socratic Euripides). In this early work, Nietzsche notes that Socrates’ daimon appears to him when his intellect starts to fail in order to dissuade him of his conscious knowledge.56 The whispering of the daemon in The Joyful Science thus poses a direct challenge to Socratic thought precisely where rationality begins to falter, for equating temporal life with a sickness that needs to be overcome might render the dying Socrates as a new ideal57 – but what if life returns again at every moment? What if transience cannot be escaped from? ‘Incipit tragoedia’, begins the following aphorism, before announcing the going-under (Untergang) of Zarathustra, which Nietzsche immediately went on to expand upon in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The second and equally well-known articulation of the eternal return appears in the subsequent and above-mentioned Thus Spoke Zarathustra and involves a confrontation between Zarathustra and a dwarf, or more precisely a creature who is half dwarf and half mole. Again, there seems to be a strong link to the Socratic here, which is consistently portrayed by Nietzsche as a symptom of decadence and disintegration where rationality is posed against instinct in order to tame it.58 Nietzsche suggests that Socrates belonged to the ‘lowest

return should thus be considered under the dual axis of life and death, and the two roads that separate the moment in ASZ represent precisely these two divergent paths. This is certainly an interesting interpretation, and as will be discussed below, the relation between the thought of the eternal return and what Nietzsche takes to be the Socratic attitude towards life as being a kind of sickness unto death is of great importance. 56 GT 13; KSA 1.90. 57 GT 13; KSA 1.91. 58 For an archetypal example, see KSA 6.310. Loeb (2010: 47) argues that the passages in FW and ASZ strongly relate to each other and should be read together, particularly because the imagery of the aphorism in FW is invoked again in ASZ, such as the whispering of the protagonists and the spider crawling in the moonlight.

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people’ of ‘stunted development’,59 while everything about him was ‘hidden’ and ‘underground’;60 in other words, half dwarf and half mole. Perhaps most importantly, it is Zarathustra who must rid himself of the dwarf because he is the one who transposed good and evil into the workings of the world and who made the most calamitous error, namely morality, meaning that he must be the first one to realise this error and overcome it.61 Thus Spoke Zarathustra therefore expresses the journey of morality’s self-overcoming and it is in this sense in particular that it is one of Nietzsche’s most important, if enigmatic, works. A necessary part of this journey is the inevitable confrontation with the Socratic to expose its inner tensions, because as discussed above, this lies at the heart of Christian and modern morality. The articulation of the eternal return in Zarathustra is thus an integral part of Zarathustra’s redemptive journey in the self-overcoming of morality and of Western nihilism in general (hence the importance of the ‘overman’ in the book), and this is easy overlooked if passages are isolated and attempts are made to draw out general theoretical points. Zarathustra begins the story of his vision by describing how he was attempting to climb up a mountain path despite the best attempts of his archenemy, the spirit of gravity, to hinder and foil his ascension.62 Not only this, but the half-mole, half-dwarf spirit of gravity proceeded to mock Zarathustra by claiming that despite his momentous efforts he will only be able to return to himself, like a stone thrown in the air – temporality will grind him down, just as it does everything else, which relates precisely to the discussion of consciousness above.63 Then the dwarf fell silent, and even this silence felt heavy to Zarathustra. Finally, through an act of courage, Zarathustra decides that only he or the dwarf may continue – one of them has to go. That it is an act of courage that makes Zarathustra face the dwarf is of no small significance, for it expresses a will to continue

GD 2.3; KSA 6.68. GD 2.4; KSA 6.69. 61 EH 4.3; KSA 6.367. 62 ASZ 3.2.1; KSA 4.197. Zarathustra is thus literally attempting to overcome the mountain ahead of him. 63 See Fink’s (2003: 75) discussion of this inevitably ‘falling stone’ in terms of the depressing thought that all meaning will be destroyed, and all striving and willing will come to nothing in the end. 60

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even without any certain knowledge of the future (which the spirit of gravity seems to have). Furthermore, during the whole work Zarathustra is constantly faced with characters who insist the world is as it must be and the human condition is how it is and nothing can change it, so the best we can do is alleviate it (typical examples include the saint and the soothsayer).64 However, in describing the courage that he has to face the dwarf, Zarathustra insists that the human is the most courageous animal, and because it is courage that plays such a pivotal role in overcoming limits and creating the possibility for something new, Zarathustra must feel justified in his conviction that no such boundaries can be permanently erected by a so-called human ‘condition’.65 This courage, Zarathustra explains, is one that kills even death, because it says ‘Was that life? Well then! Once more!’ This is the strength that Zarathustra thinks will be too much for the dwarf, just as the demon’s whisperings that he will have to live his life again in The Joyful Science would perhaps prove too much for the dying Socrates. Although invariably overlooked, it is important to note who Zarathustra regales with his story of his confrontation with the dwarf, namely a group of seamen whom Zarathustra admires for being brave ‘seekers’ and ‘experimenters’ who would rather ‘guess’ than ‘deduce’ (interestingly enough, Nietzsche cites this very passage elsewhere to describe the kind of readers his work as a whole is looking for).66 Zarathustra is not just telling this story to anybody – and certainly not to a group of wise men or philosophers – but to people who Zarathustra clearly feels to be suitably open to the pathos of what he has to tell, for these sailors ‘refuse to grope along a thread with cowardly hands’, as Zarathustra puts it in a mocking aside to dialectics, and are thus not solely or even particularly interested in the logical soundness of the deductive reasoning, but rather have a curious and experimental nature that means they are likely to be willing to place themselves wholly in the moment. Zarathustra has a harder time trying to tempt the dwarf into such a position. The only way he can do so is to appeal to that which

See ASZ Pre 2 & 2.19; KSA 4.12 & 172, for example. The idea that the human is the bravest animal plays an important role for Nietzsche (see GM 3.13; KSA 5.367). 66 EH 3.3; KSA 6.303–304. 65

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is most likely to affect and arouse the dwarf, namely an intellectual challenge. After this succeeds, Zarathustra implores the dwarf to look at the gateway called the ‘moment’ and asks him whether its divergent paths will not continue to eternally contradict each other, to which the dwarf answers, rather enigmatically, that all straight lines are false, all truth is curved, and time is a circle. Zarathustra is not impressed by this answer, and suggests to the heavy dwarf that he is making things too light for himself and beseeches him once again to ‘see the moment’.67 Zarathustra is not interested in arguing the dwarf’s point, but rather wants the dwarf to refrain within the immanence of the moment and see its multiplicity of perspectives. From here, Zarathustra tries to get the dwarf to see the interconnectedness of all things that draws everything along with it, rather than attempting to remain outside the temporal in order to judge ‘time’ as being circular. From inside the moment the temporal cannot be known in this objective fashion, but only ‘felt’ as an affective play that draws together ‘everything’; that is, everything that is ‘seen’ as anything at all.68 The moment or Augenblick thus draws together the perspectival seeing-something that cannot be escaped from, and it is this that returns at every moment, even if we remain unconvinced that the particular something of the seeing returns eternally too.69 If the thought of the eternal return is too much for the Socratic dwarf, it is because he is unwilling to refrain within the immanence of the multiple, interconnected, yet contradictory perspectives of the moment where seeing is always-again seeing-something, and would rather rest upon a transcendent image of what time ‘is’ and thus the hopelessness and falsity of all temporal existence: the moment is both too much and not enough. When Zarathustra could no longer bear carrying the dwarf, he did not negate or harm him, but seduced him into a thought that could translate (carry-over) the weight of the dwarf into Zarathustra’s own way of carrying transience. Zarathustra’s

67 The importance of Zarathustra’s beseeching of the dwarf to enter into the living moment, and the dwarf’s refusal, is famously emphasised by Heidegger (see (1961a: 311–312), for example). 68 As Fink (2003: 32) notes, Nietzsche follows Heraclitus’ remark that ‘Aion Pais esti Paizon, petteuon; paidos he besileie/Eternity is a child at play, playing draughts: the kingdom is a child’s’. 69 According to Deleuze (1994: 49–50 & 369–374), it is not the identical, same or similar that returns, but precisely difference (see also Wood (1988: 52)).

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suspicions were correct – the dwarf could not bear it; that is, could not carry-over or translate the demand that Zarathustra raised, and the Socratic attempt to overcome transience is exposed as an attempt to negate it and to be cured of living affectivity altogether – and Aesclepius gets his rooster. However, the thought of the eternal return is not presented here as particularly emancipating either. As the title of the aphorism of the demon whisperings in The Joyful Science puts it, it might even be the ‘heaviest weight’. The vision that immediately succeeds that of the confrontation with the dwarf thus points some way forward and out of this impasse for Zarathustra. It consists of a shepherd who has a heavy black snake crawling into his gullet via his mouth. As hard as Zarathustra tries to tug, the snake does not budge.70 The shepherd eventually heeds Zarathustra’s advice to bite down on the snake, and he succeeds in doing this before spitting its head far into the distance and bursting into laughter. This laughter was not that of a human being and had never been heard before, Zarathustra remarks, and is a laughter that Zarathustra now yearns after.71 Whatever the snake might be taken to represent, it is clear that the shepherd has overcome something heavy and incapacitating and has been transformed through this experience – perhaps even in an übermenschliche manner. Given that this vision immediately succeeds the confrontation with the dwarf, it seems reasonable to suggest that the shepherd overcomes the ‘heaviest weight’ of the nihilistic thought of the eternal return itself.72 Indeed, in Beyond Good and Evil, the book Nietzsche wrote immediately after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes that if the gods philosophise, then they must do so while laughing in an übermenschliche and new way at the cost of all

70 Zarathustra’s effort is described as being in vain – ‘umsonst!’ – a term he associates closely with nihilism (see GM 3.28; KSA 5.411 and KSA 12.213). 71 That the shepherd laughs is important, because as will be discussed below, laughter redeems for Nietzsche. 72 Heidegger (1961a: 442–443) suggests that the snake represents nihilism and the bite the thought of the eternal return that cuts through it. The important point of agreement here is the overcoming of nihilism that the thought of the eternal return certainly plays a part in, but it should also be noted that Nietzsche calls the thought of the eternal return ‘the most extreme form of nihilism’ (KSA 12.213). This gives some credence to the suggestion that the thought of the eternal return could also be a form of nihilism to overcome, and not just the means of overcoming nihilism.

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serious things73 – and they do not come any more serious and heavy than the thought of the eternal return. By biting the snake’s head off and stopping it from crawling through his entrails to swallow its own tail, the shepherd broke the figure of Ouroboros. The heaviest weight was lifted, and the eternal return became light and even an object of laughter. This is something that Zarathustra yearns after, for the heavy and burdensome thought of the eternal return continually plagues him, and in a later section a snake crawling down a throat is invoked once again – this time Zarathustra’s throat – in the very thought that all, even the ‘smallest people’ must return; a thought that causes him great nausea.74 Zarathustra realises that his overcoming of temporality, even if it largely expresses a will to eternalise his joy, still contains a will to escape temporality insofar as it must always involve the most questionable, degrading aspects of life that repulse Zarathustra; he realises that there is no absolute escape from sad affects – there is no mountain quite tall enough to distance himself from that which lies below, even after he frees himself of the dwarf on his back. In this way, Zarathustra is still a little too close to the dwarf, who has not strayed very far from his shoulder.

3.4

Amor Fati: life after the eternal return

Because the eternal return is considered as one of Nietzsche’s most central thoughts, the idea that it has a nihilistic side to it is doubtlessly controversial.75 Nonetheless, there are good reasons not to dismiss such a suggestion out of hand. The two most important passages concerning the eternal return discussed above are implicitly (ASZ) and explicitly (FW) articulated as tests aimed at what Nietzsche considers the Socratic attitude of life being a condition that death heals. The eternal return is also described by Nietzsche as the ground conception of ASZ,76 and as mentioned above, Zarathustra is the figure who brought morality, good and evil into the world and thus 73

JGB 294; KSA 5.236. ASZ 3.13; KSA 4.274. 75 Nabais (2006: 132) insists that the eternal return disappeared from his post-1886 texts because ‘Nietzsche had abandoned his supreme idea to the fate of nihilism itself, that same nihilism which the idea was meant to eradicate and beyond which Nietzsche will now move’. 76 EH 3.23; KSA 6.335. 74

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embodies a nihilistic overcoming of temporality that is nonetheless striving to overcome itself – the eternal return being an important step along the way. Furthermore, Nietzsche also suggests that the eternal return is the most extreme form of nihilism and a thought that the strongest would not even think of.77 Nietzsche does not elaborate any further on the eternal return in any of his published works after ASZ, and when it is mentioned it is usually only to note Zarathustra or occasionally himself as its author. GM, for example, which Nietzsche suggests is the touchstone of that which belongs to him,78 does not mention the eternal return at all. This does not mean that the relationship between transience, temporality and eternity is no longer an issue for Nietzsche after ASZ – quite the opposite – but it is a relation where futurity plays the decisive role.79 This is no more evident than in the book Nietzsche writes immediately after ASZ, namely Beyond Good and Evil, whose subtitle, though just as important, is often overlooked: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. This work, which Nietzsche explains in correspondence as saying everything that his ASZ says, but very differently,80 mentions neither of the two thoughts that are central to ASZ, namely the overman and the eternal return, a fact that suggests just how much the particular concepts, ideas and metaphors that Nietzsche introduces into his works play particular roles in their contexts and that it is how they find their expression there that demands attention. Nonetheless, a relationship between the temporal and eternity is briefly articulated, and it bears some resonance with the thought of the eternal return in ASZ, though its aspect is redirected towards that of the future. Nietzsche writes that whoever has attempted to consider pessimism thoroughly enough may also have chanced upon the opposite ideal, which Nietzsche characterises as being embodied in the most ‘high-spirited, living and world affirming’ person who

77 KSA 12.213 & 217. Conversely, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche calls this thought the highest formula of affirmation attainable (EH 3.23; KSA 6.335). However, as will be discussed below, for Nietzsche it is a case of redeeming the affective euphoria that is invested in such an idea, and this is perhaps the motivation behind his amor fati. 78 DFW Ep; KSA 6.52. 79 This is already evident in ASZ (see ASZ 2.14; KSA 4.155 in particular), and is even more evident in GM where he characterises the human as the ‘eternal futurist’ (GM 3.12; KSA 5.567). 80 KGB 3.3.254; Letter 754, Nietzsche to Jacob Burckhardt, 22.09.1886.

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has not only come to terms with what is, but wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity.81 There is no suggestion here that what occurs must return; rather a disposition is articulated that wants all that occurs to reoccur. This is the attitude that Nietzsche sometimes describes as amor fati. My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that you do not want anything to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not for all eternity. Not just to tolerate necessity, still less to conceal it – all idealism is hypocrisy towards necessity – but to love it ....82 This is clearly formulated as an affirmative response to the unstated test of the eternal return, which is invoked once again as a kind of attitudinal test. Whether or not what is seen reoccurs eternally is secondary to whether seeing affirms or negates the plurality of contradictory perspectives at play in a living moment: regardless of what one has seen, does one still want to see? This is why the settings of the two formulations are important, for the suddenness of the daemon’s appearance that catches the listener unguarded and vulnerable in the darkness of the night and Zarathustra’s repeated beseeching for the dwarf to ‘see the moment’ both attempt to uncover the affects at play in the moment and pose the question: is the inevitability of the recurring moment, with its multiplicity of affective relations and plurality of contradictory perspectives, lamentable or joyous? In such a situation, the affects are exposed,83 and the suddenness of the demand and the reaction exposes the way in which the question has already been answered in one’s life, hence the Socratic attitude’s inability to ‘see the moment’ exposes its negating and dysphoric existence that is unable to bear-well or ‘translate’ the temporal. This point is key for Nietzsche, because as discussed above, it is not the attempt to 81 JGB 56; KSA 5.75. The importance that Nietzsche places on heavy thoughts becoming light is reaffirmed in the following aphorism, where he writes that perhaps the most serious and heavy concepts such as ‘God’ and ‘sin’ will one day seem like child’s toys to an old man – and perhaps this old man will still be child enough, even an eternal child, to want to find new toys. 82 Nietzsche (2005: 99; EH 2.10; KSA 6.297) (ellipses in original). 83 Clark (1990: 251) Janaway (2007: 255–256), Magnus (1978: 111–154), Nehamas (1980: 340 & 1985: 151) and Shapiro (1989: 89) all offer interpretations along the lines that the eternal return exposes an affective or ‘psychological’ state before there is any chance to rationalise the idea.

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overcome temporality that is problematic, but the sense in which this overcoming is attempted. The Socratic-Platonic attempt to overcome temporality is through a rationalisation that represses its ineluctable perspectival plurality and this is the most important respect in which he is an opponent of Platonism; not insofar as Nietzsche merely tables an alternative to truth and is thus still concerned with offering the best account of what ‘is’.84 Conversely, Nietzsche hints that Spinoza could ‘see the moment’ precisely because the multiplicity of affects and plurality of perspectives are sublimated into a logicised sensibility where every aspect of every moment is enjoyed as being necessary and expressive of his very essence, even if this ‘logical’ bent is not ultimately to Nietzsche’s taste.85 It is therefore ultimately a matter of exposing and redeeming the affective, genitive senses of projected truths and ideals rather than simply refuting them, for only this can unburden the weight that they place on the present. Nietzsche demonstrates this within his own philosophy, for if the thought of the eternal return is the product of nihilistic dysphoria, then it is redeemed in the thought of amor fati.86

84 Berry (2005) rejects Kantian and metaphysical readings of perspectivism by linking it to Nietzsche’s scepticism and insistence on ephexis in interpretation (which will be discussed below), and therefore to a general challenge to dogmatic positions rather than forming its own dogma. Schrift (1998: 361) also criticises readings that suggest perspectivism as an ontological theory, suggesting that it is a hermeneutical and epistemological position that is linked to genealogy and interpretation. It is far from certain whether Nietzsche’s perspectivism is an epistemological position however and not linked more closely with affective relations as suggested above – indeed a note by Nietzsche seems to confirm this by suggesting replacing epistemology with a perspectival doctrine of the affects (KSA 12.342). Strong (1985) also challenges the reading of perspectivism as an epistemological theory, claiming that it has more to do with destabilising the simple unity of the self and of self-appointed privileged positions. 85 KSA 12.214. 86 Arendt (1998: 16) notes that the thought of the eternal return itself is the ‘only redemption from the all-devouring Past’ as it proclaims the ‘Innocence of all Becoming’ (see also Lingis (1998: 170)), which seems to be precisely the case if the eternal return is affirmed and even overcome through the thought of amor fati. Stambaugh (1998: 388) suggests however that the thought of the innocence of becoming is ‘singularly unrelated’ to the rest of Nietzsche’s philosophy, because his ideas of the will-to-power offers a ‘teleological interpretation of the occurrence of the world’ while the eternal return is ‘basically mechanistic’ (1998: 400). However, both the eternal return and the will-topower do offer the possibility of redeeming and rendering innocent, as discussed here and further below in relation to will-to-power.

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3.5

Redemption from salvation

Given the relative prominence that it is has, perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the above-mentioned role played by redemption (Erlösung), which is perhaps due to the fact that this term seems to fit awkwardly with his critique of religion.87 Redemption is, however, an important philosophical task for Nietzsche, albeit in a very precise sense that becomes clear once the important role of affectivity is taken into consideration. Crucially, a clear distinction needs to be made between two different forms of redemption that Nietzsche discusses, namely a religious and particularly Christian form of redemption where humanity is said to require redemption from the body,88 and a form of redemption that redeems the past (and thus the body) in order to unburden the present and open up new possibilities for the future; and it is this latter version that Nietzsche claims as a task for the philosopher, as he acerbically hints in Zarathustra: ‘In irons of false values and words of delusion! Oh that someone would yet redeem them from their redeemer!’89 To make this distinction clearer, two different terms will be used to mark this crucial difference: the former version will be called ‘salvation’ in the sense of ‘saving’ (from the Latin ‘salvare’), while the word ‘redemption’ itself will be maintained for the latter form as it literally means ‘taking back’ (from the Latin ‘re-‘ ‘back’ and ‘emere’ ‘to take’). Redemption as ‘taking back’ fits in quite nicely with Nietzsche’s articulation because it involves taking back something of the past in order to open up a new way of relating to the present. Nietzsche’s discussion of redemption as ‘salvation’ resonates strongly with his discussion of Platonism and ascetic ideals as palliative care, for they offer a way to ‘save’ humanity from nihilism by giving the transience of existence a meaning and purpose.90 However, just as the ascetic ideal, all forms of salvation ultimately exacerbate nihilism because they involve the attempt to refrain from affectivity and from willing in general, and are thus synonymous with

Notable exceptions include Anderson (2005), Comay (1990) and Sadler (1995). See for example Nietzsche’s discussion of redemption in the major religions (GM 3.17; KSA 5.377). 89 Nietzsche (2006: 70; ASZ 2.4; KSA 4.117). 90 GM 3.28; KSA 5.411. 88

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nothingness.91 As discussed above, Nietzsche also criticises Schopenhauer for precisely this idea of salvation as being saved from the will.92 Nietzsche therefore makes the opposite suggestion: the will is not something that we need to be saved from – it is rather that which redeems.93 To understand this, the importance of redemption’s link to temporality needs to be borne in mind, for it is the past that is redeemed – what has been – and is thus only required by a conscious body that experiences a sense of temporality; hence it is the human as a ‘sick animal’ that requires redemption. As discussed in chapter two, this is because the past needs to be forgotten in order to live and act in the present, but the perspective of consciousness involves a memory that relates present experience in terms of a coded past (language), thus hindering the processes of forgetting. This means that rather than the human needing redemption from the body (as in the Christian version of salvation), it is the body that needs to redeem itself from its fragmentation at the hands of consciousness. To get a better sense of what Nietzsche is getting at here, his reading of the Gospels is interesting because he discusses redemption in the form of what he calls the ‘psychological type of the redeemer’,94 thereby distancing the discussion from any historical person that might otherwise be invoked.95 Just as with the Socratic attitude, Nietzsche suggests that the genesis of the redeemer type results from a kind of ‘anarchy of the instincts’ where there is a growing distrust of the temporal due to its inconsistent vacillations of suffering and excitement, meaning that some kind of palliative care is needed.96 Once again, the important point here is that Nietzsche attempts to trace an affective genesis for the redeemer type, for just as with the Socratic attitude, the attitude of the redeemer type occurs during a particular set of relations that Nietzsche takes as involving a shock to the body where activities that previously involved euphoria suddenly became dysphoric. Both the Socratic attitude and the psychological

AC 7; KSA 6.173 – see also GM 3.1; KSA 5.339 and AC 43; KSA 6.217. GM 3.6; KSA 5.346 & GD 9.21–22; KSA 6.125–126. 93 ASZ 2.20; KSA 4.179. 94 Nietzsche discusses this psychological type in AC 28–37; KSA 6.198–209. 95 AC 34; KSA 6.206. As Murphy (2001: 141) notes, for Nietzsche, grounding a signchain such as the redeemer type in an actual person is one of the fatal mistakes of Christian doctrine that literally gives it ‘substance’ in a metaphysical sense. 96 AC 30; KSA 6.200. 92

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type of the redeemer are thus symptomatic of decadence for Nietzsche, for they are signs of a breakdown and corruption of the affects; that is, of a way of life or system of affective relations that no longer ‘instinctively’ know how to act and to relate. Nietzsche thus suggests that both philosophical dialectics and salvation are symptomatic of decadence and a need for some strong organising principles after a body has lost the surety of its instincts and its overall coherency.97 It is important to bear in mind that while Nietzsche is critical of these two approaches to the problem, the need itself is still considered to be real,98 and Nietzsche’s philosophy could be considered as a concerted attempt to offer a different approach to dealing with it.99 Indeed, there is a strong and positive resonance between Nietzsche’s articulation of redeeming the past and amor fati, and his discussion of the ‘redeemer type’ that he himself ‘redeems’ from the Gospels and which he claims has been systematically misunderstood by Christian doctrine.100 Indeed, according to Nietzsche the redeemer type even seems to refrain within the immanence of affectivity due to an acceptance of ‘inner realities’ alone while everything else is understood as signs and opportunities for allegories (or metaphors).101 Much depends here on what is meant by ‘inner realities’ of course, but Nietzsche is clear that this does not refer to an inner cognition of an external state, for in the same passage he is

97 For Nietzsche’s take on the decadence of dialectics, see GD 2; KSA 6.67 and EH 1.1; KSA 6.265. 98 Nietzsche writes that he himself is both a decadent and its opposite, meaning that he has a feeling for the problem and for the affective relations at play here, and can thus ‘reverse perspectives’ (EH 1.1–2; KSA 6.264–267). In a note Nietzsche also writes that he is the first perfect (or complete) nihilist who has lived through it and left it behind (KSA 13.190), while also writing that he has reached the highest form of affirmation attainable (EH 3.23; KSA 6.335). 99 Sadler (1995: 121) suggests that, ‘Nietzsche does not think that Christianity was wrong. Where he differs from Christianity is in his conception of the nature of redemption, and the means of its attainment’. While this is doubtlessly a credible reading, redemption is not a transcendental requirement for Nietzsche, as it is only required by a ‘dyspeptic’, highly conscious and ‘fragmented’ body – it is not required by his noble barbarian, redeemer type or child, for example. 100 AC 37; KSA 6.208–209. As Murphy (2001: 139) suggests, this is ‘the anti-Hegelian theme, par excellence. To say that the history of Christianity is a reversal of what its founder stood for is to deny that Western civilization is the unfolding of the spirit of Christianity’. 101 AC 34; KSA 6.206. For further discussion of Nietzsche’s reading of the redeemer type in terms of metaphors, see Murphy (2001: 111–126).

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critical of Christian dogma for the personalisation of God and for interpreting the ‘kingdom of heaven’ and ‘kingdom of God’ as referring to real entities rather than betraying certain felt experiences. The ‘son of God’, for example, is taken by Nietzsche as consisting of the signs of ‘son’ and ‘father’, which express the entry into a feeling of the overall transfiguration of experience as blessed (the son), and the feeling itself (the father).102 Even more pertinently, the ‘son of man’ is not to be understood as a concrete, historical person, but as a ‘psychological symbol redeemed from the concept of time’ and as an ‘eternal factuality’ that overcomes the vicissitudes of the temporal.103 The redeemer type therefore resists grounding the experience of ‘life’ in any ultimate formulation and thus stands outside of all religion.104 This means that to negate or contradict is impossible, while dialectics is shunned alongside the whole idea of guilt, punishment and reward, for blessedness is not promised or conditional but the only reality, while the rest consists of signs that speak of it.105 Nietzsche thus insists that this Christian does not have a faith but a way of acting and of living,106 but there was only ever one such Christian, and he died on the cross.107 Again, it should be remembered that Nietzsche is discussing the psychology of the redeemer type and not any historical person, and this type certainly resonates strongly with Nietzsche’s articulation of philosophical redemption. The problem that Nietzsche has with it, to put in bluntly, is that it is too childish,108 or at least it is for modern experience with two millennia of culture behind it, for culture is not even known to this redeemer type.109 While it is only in the modern world that the redeemer type can be understood after centuries of misunderstanding at the hands of Christian dogma,110 and while it might even be possible to still live this ‘genuine, original 102

AC 34; KSA 6.207. AC 34; KSA 6.206. 104 AC 32; KSA 6.204. 105 AC 32; KSA 6.204 and AC33; KSA 6.205; as Stegmaier (2006: 34) puts it, for Nietzsche the redeemer type expresses an idiosyncrasy where ‘living can be neutralized into a non-violent living in signs’. 106 AC 33; KSA 6.205–206. 107 AC 39; KSA 6.211. 108 AC 32; KSA 6.203. 109 AC 32; KSA 6.204. 110 AC 36; KSA 6.208. 103

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Christianity’,111 the fact that this is a way of living that has nothing to do with mere phenomena of consciousness (such as whether or not something is true),112 means that highly conscientious modern individuals will largely remain alien to it. The redeemer type might well be noble,113 but just as with the guilt-free noble barbarians discussed in GM who marauded around the ancient world and whose killing and maiming only served to reinforce their own sense of superiority and worth, it would be foolish to think that it is possible to merely revert to their naïve affectivity, though there might always exist a few ‘lucky exceptions’114 who experience something similar (even though it is extremely rare that they are not adversely affected by the morality of others).115 Put simply, the redeemer type is not somebody who redeems others (the fateful misinterpretation of the Christian church), but rather, like the noble barbarian but in a strictly peaceful sense, expresses an idiosyncratic life that needs no redemption;116 the redeemer is literally an ‘idiot’.117 The redeemer type is incapable of redeeming others but nonetheless embodies a tumultuous past redeemed through sublimating the violence of the above-mentioned ancient nobility into a mastery through love, expressed through the refusal to hold others responsible or guilty for their actions in any way whatsoever, even when the direct infliction of suffering is experienced.118 The redeemer type is thus entirely free of vengefulness and ressentiment (resentment) and is thus purged of reactionary slave morality where the strong are presented as ‘evil’ for following their instincts, while the meek are presented as ‘good’ for either abstaining from acting or from being simply unable to act at all (this will be developed in more detail in the following chapter). The redeemer type is thus oblivious to guilt and responsibility and therefore the thirst for seeking 111

AC 39; KSA 6.211. AC 39; KSA 6.211–612. 113 AC 37; KSA 6.209. 114 GD 9.14; KSA 6.120; see also GM 1.12; KSA 5.278, GM 3.14; KSA 5.367, and AC 4; KSA 6.171. 115 Pascal being Nietzsche’s favourite example of a ‘free spirit’ corrupted by Christian morality (see JGB 46 & 62; KSA 5.66 & 83, EH 2.3; KSA 6.285, AC 5; KSA 6.171 and in the strongest terms in a note (KSA 13.27)). 116 AC 35; KSA 6.207. 117 AC 29: KSA 6.200. 118 AC 35; KSA 6.207–208. 112

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revenge and retribution,119 and this for Nietzsche is precisely how the past is redeemed:120 That nobody is made responsible anymore, that no way of being may be traced back to a causa prima, that the world is not a unity either as a sensorium or as ‘spirit,’ only this is the great liberation – in this way only, the innocence of becoming is restored ... The concept of ‘God’ was up to now the greatest objection against existence ... We deny God, and in denying God we deny responsibility: only thus do we redeem the world.121 The clue as to why the redeemer type is not actually a redeemer is hinted at here however, because while avoiding the identification of responsible individuals is vital to the process of redemption, the preemptory ‘great liberation’ involves dispensing with the belief in the world as a unity, whether this be as ‘sensorium’, ‘Geist’ or ‘God’. As his affirmative comments on Goethe’s redemptive qualities show, this does not mean dispensing with a notion of affirming the whole or of striving for coherency;122 but what it does insist on is dispensing with the kind of divine illumination that seems to be expressed by the redeemer type. Seeing no distance at all between human and God, or in God as an absolute unity,123 the redeemer type cannot oppose but only grieve over the blindness of any judgement that contradicts this vision, for it ‘sees the light’.124 In Nietzsche’s terms, by seeing everything as a sign of the blessedness of God, the redeemer type is unable

119 Even the will-to-punish for Nietzsche seems to stem from a thirst to avenge the past, for to punish somebody is to ultimately punish them for everything that has been (GD 5.6; KSA 6.86) (Nietzsche’s distaste for punishing is also based on the damage that it does to the punishers (FW 321; KSA 3.551)). In one passage Nietzsche even defines morality as the ‘idiosyncrasy of decadence’ with the motive of ‘revenging oneself against life’ (EH 4.7; KSA 6.371). It is to this extent that a morality armed with the concept of sin is the ‘degradation of the imagination’ and renders life and the innocence of chance guilty (AC 25; KSA 6.194) – but this is also the means of power for the priest, for the idea that God forgives those who repent actually means that God forgives those who submit to the priest (AC 26; KSA 6.194). However, for Nietzsche it is precisely from this kind of salvation that redemption is needed (ASZ 2.4; KSA 4.117). 120 See in particular ASZ 2.20; KSA 4.177 and KSA 13.422–426. 121 Nietzsche (1997: 36–37; GD 6.8; KSA 6.96–97) (ellipses in original). 122 See GD 9.49; KSA 6.151–152. 123 AC 33; KSA 6.205 & AC 41; KSA 6.215. 124 AC 32; KSA 6.204–205.

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to appropriate and transform dysphoric ideals, for all signs of the imagination are immediately grounded in the absolute unity of God, and there is thus no room for creative and redeeming metaphors in the sense of Über-setzungen. This childlike characteristic shares with the noble barbarians of GM an affirmativeness and nobility, but this simplicity means that both types are unable to redeem a body that is fragmented by consciousness. Their affirmation is one of a blissful simplicity concerning an experience of the world, and not one that can even understand the horror of such a thought as the eternal return.125 Nietzsche thus promotes neither a return to the savageries of the noble barbarians, nor the childlike naivety of the redeemer type. Nietzsche’s philosophy does not promote some kind of Zen-like affirmative meditation,126 therefore, but the re-evaluation of inherited values, judgements and concepts in order that their genitive senses may be redeemed and rebirthed via evocative concepts that can unburden the present from the past and evoke new ways of relating to the future.127 The redeemer type and the noble barbarian cannot do this; while they are innocent insofar as they do not levy responsibility, they cannot make innocent. This is the extent to which Nietzsche can write that it is through our children that we might be redeemed for being the children of our fathers.128 The child, just like the noble barbarian, expresses a genuine forgetting of the past rather than a forgiving of it, and is thus liberated from the reactive judgements of consciousness.129 However, an adult cannot merely revert to a childlike state without becoming infantile, and so must redeem the 125

KSA 12.217. As Blondel remarks (1991: 126), care must be taken not to misinterpret Nietzsche as suggesting an ‘obscurantist promotion of unthought, ‘lived experience’’, by remembering that ‘any access to the body, all physiology, must pass through philology: ‘Zeichensprache der Affekte’’. 127 As Klossowski (1997: 6) notes, ‘For Nietzsche, to make an assessment of Western culture always amounts to questioning it in the following manner: what can still be created from the acquisitions of our knowledge, our practices, our customs, our habits?’ 128 See ASZ 2.14; KSA 4.153 and KSA 10.463. Nietzsche maintains an almost consecrated status for the pregnant condition, both physically and ‘ideally’ in terms of the creative state that births new ideas, concepts, artworks and so on (see M 552; KSA 3.322 and GD 10.4; KSA 6.159, for example). For a further discussion of this, see Ainley (1988) and Witt (2009). 129 ASZ 1.1; KSA 4.31. 126

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past by making the present innocent, and thus birthing a future.130 This ‘making innocent’ is not merely to consider everything in a blissful immediacy in the sense of the redeemer type, but the ability to make creative and redemptive translations (Über-setzungen) of the past, hence the importance of the child and childbirth in Nietzsche’s philosophy – the pains of childbirth are made-good and the past redeemed the moment the child laughs,131 and so does a created truth the moment it is evokes laughter.132 It should also be noted that Nietzsche is not wholly critical of either the Socratic attitude or the redeemer type, for the former has an important seductive quality to it while the latter shows no need to negate the world in any way (one of its chief merits being that it has no need for dialectics).133 Put otherwise, while the former is seductive and clever, the latter is noble and idiotic.134 For Nietzsche, temporality and the burden of the past on the present is a genuine problem that requires a creative philosophical response, and despite its belligerent name and some rather odious interpretations that have couched it in overly militaristic terms, Nietzsche’s response comes in the form of will-to-power: Nietzsche’s attempt at philosophical redemption.

3.6 Wille zur Macht: philosophy as redemption The concept of will-to-power is probably the most famous and most misused aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy, doubtlessly due in large part to it being couched in a pseudo-theoretical vein via the posthumously published Wille zur Macht, which, as discussed in the 130 According to Stambaugh (1994: 143), Nietzsche thus agrees with Spinoza’s (1994: 196; E2.D6) statement that, ‘By reality and perfection I understand the same thing’, and understood in this way, the past can in some sense be forgotten and life can begin again. 131 Laughter kills even the spirit of gravity (ASZ 1.7; KSA 4.49); as Sybylla (2004: 327) puts it, ‘Laughter, for Nietzsche, is the greatest (bodily) affect because it throws off the spirit of seriousness that looks regretfully or rancorously to the past, and mocks at the false pretensions of self and others. Laughter, then, is a way – the best way – of overcoming ressentiment against time and subjection to embodied values, habits and memories’ (see also Cousineau (1991: 63–78)). Further discussion of ‘making-good’ in distinction from ‘being-good’ will be entered into in chapter four. 132 Nietzsche writes that every truth should be called false that is not accompanied by at least one laugh (ASZ 3.12.23; KSA 4.264). 133 AC 32; KSA 6.204. 134 AC 37; KSA 6.209 & AC 29; KSA 6.200.

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introduction, is cobbled together from variously edited and manipulated snippets from his notebooks. However, just as the eternal return does not provide a theory of time, will-to-power is not anything like a theory of space either, even though it is occasionally couched in such a way as to allow such an interpretation. This ambiguity has led considerations of Nietzsche’s will-to-power to polarise into two broadly competing perspectives: it either represents an attempt at a metaphysical explanation of reality (or at least offers a principle of ontological explanation),135 or it is offered as a metaphorical or rhetorical device that undermines such ontological pretensions.136 However, as long as the role of redemption is ignored, any such interpretation will remain only partial at best. This relation between will-to-power and redemption need not be overlooked, however, for they are intimately linked from the very first published articulations of the concept in ASZ. In the section ‘Of Redemption’,137 Zarathustra complains that he walks among people as if among fragments and limbs,138 and his task is thus to collect and compose these into a unity,139 which requires redeeming the past from ‘it was’ into ‘I wanted it that way’.140 Nietzsche is explicit here in having Zarathustra state that it is the will (‘I want’) that redeems itself,141 though this is hindered by the sense of vengeance caused by the feeling of impotence in the inability to change that which has passed (and that everything will pass).142 It is the will, which, as discussed in chapter two, refers to a complex affective relationality for Nietzsche, that is able to redeem or ‘take something back’ from the past in order to open up future possibilities. As also discussed in the aforementioned chapter, this temporality is a specific problem

135 Again, proponents of the will-to-power as a metaphysical device invariably rely heavily on the notebooks. Proponents of Nietzsche’s will-to-power as a metaphysical explanation (or at least a principle of explanation) include Aydin (2007), Danto (1965), Kaufmann (1974), Magnus (1978), Richardson (1996) and Schacht (1983). Ansell Pearson (1997: 108) notes how the will-to-power works best as a genealogy of value, but is at its worst when it becomes part of a normative framework. 136 Proponents here include Kofman (1993), Strong (1985) and Nehamas (1985). 137 ASZ 2.20; KSA 4.177. 138 ASZ 2.20; KSA 4.178. 139 ASZ 2.20; KSA 4.179. 140 ASZ 2.20; KSA 4.179. 141 ASZ 2.20; KSA 4.181. 142 ASZ 2.20; KSA 4.179–180.

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of consciousness as it fragments the body and relates the present in terms of the past, thus bringing about an awareness of the impossibility of ‘breaking time’ and the inevitability of everything passing away,143 meaning that salvation from this conscious perspective can only be one of blissful freedom from temporality;144 or in other words, the deathlike non-affective state of ‘not-willing’. However, if it is the will that is the ‘liberator and joy-bringer’ when it is not hindered by the weight of the past, then it is the will-to-power that offers something more than a mere ‘reconciliation with time’,145 for it offers a metaphorical transference or Über-setzung of the past that frees the present of its sense of vengefulness and the desire to blame and punish. From the very first articulations of the concept of will-to-power in ASZ, it is couched as marking a certain way of translating or transposing the signs of the imagination and is thus a metaphor for a metaphorical process in the precise sense discussed in chapter two;146 a process that can be witnessed in the genesis of various codes of value where old values or chaotic relations are mastered and translated into new values.147 However, the will-to-power is also a teaching that has heuristic value.148 There is thus a double aspect to the concept of will-to-power in these initial articulations, for it is both a concept and a teaching that casts a new perspective on the formation of values, while at the same time providing an evocative name to the process that it articulates. As a teaching, the will-to-power acknowledges that the present is experienced through the codes of the past (language), but that this is not to be overcome merely by refuting or ignoring these codes in a meditative coping, or by submitting to a higher absolute that subsumes these terms; rather, a new way to relate to the present is offered via translating or transposing the terms of the past. While consciousness might be a problem insofar as affectivity and transience become experienced in terms of a coded memory that translates the present in terms of the past while introducing an ominous sense of temporality, the will-to-power provides 143 144 145 146 147 148

ASZ 2.20; KSA 4.177. AC 7; KSA 6.173. ASZ 2.20; KSA 4.181. ASZ 2.20; KSA 4.177. ASZ 2.12; KSA 4.146. ASZ 2.12; KSA 4.149.

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a sense in which the codes of the past might be translated in terms of the affective genesis that they witness rather than denouncing transience in favour of timeless ideals or a blissful absolute.149 To understand this rather complex manoeuvre, the will-to-power must be understood as doing more than merely adding knowledge to the conscious intellect, for it destabilises the dominance of consciousness in order to provide a sense of the affective-relationality at play in its judgements and formulations, and thus of a changing relationship between consciousness and extra-consciousness. As can be seen from the early articulations of will-to-power in ASZ, it attempts this by appealing to conscious thought insofar as the will-to-power cogently articulates a way for consciousness to reconsider its own activity as being creative rather than reflective; that is, it is not merely the case that the intellect grasps the world through ‘immaculate perception’ like a mirror,150 because the commitment to the ‘thinkability of all being’ betrays a will (an affective relationality) to ‘make all being thinkable’.151 In a rather elliptical way, the will-to-power thus offers itself as a direct competitor to other worldviews or ontological positions by putting forward the creative power of the will; but this is done in a more destructive sense than as a straightforward replacement by exposing the affects at play in a judgement as to what exists. Will-to-power thus plays a role parallel to that of the eternal return, but in terms of space rather than time. Just as the eternal return seduces the Socratic nihilistic image of time into a challenge that exposes it to the multiplicity of perspectives and affects in any given moment, so the will-to-power seduces consciousness into precisely the same situation when it comes to claims concerning bodies. A famous passage demonstrates this well where Nietzsche criticises physicists for their bad philology because they interpret nature as being governed by a set of inalienable laws (just as the Socratic reduces every moment to an inalienable image of time).152 Nietzsche suggests that someone else could read out of the same ‘nature’ that while it is ‘necessary and calculable’, this is not because of laws but

149 As Blondel (1991: 23) remarks, ‘Nietzsche’s project is therefore executed as a genealogy, exposing the origins of the Ideal in the evaluating affects’. 150 ASZ 2.15; KSA 4.157. 151 ASZ 2.12; KSA 4.146. 152 JGB 22; KSA 5.37.

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due to a lack of them as ‘every power draws its every consequence at every moment’; that is, immanently without any reference at all to transcendent laws (which is something that Spinoza’s philosophy also affirms). Nietzsche concludes this passage with the remark that if people rebuke this claim by saying that this itself is only an interpretation, then ‘so much the better’. While this ending is deliberately enigmatic, it is fairly clear that what is not being aimed at here is the replacement of a theory of nature’s conformity to laws with one that insists that nature conforms to the concept of will-topower – but neither does it necessarily lead to a relativistic claim that this is ‘merely’ a matter of interpretation.153 Nietzsche remarks twice in this passage that the theory of the laws of nature is an interpretation rather than a text, that is, it offers a reading of nature rather than reflecting what nature is in-itself – but that does not mean that there is no text, far from it. The interpretation does indeed express something of the text, but this text is the ‘terrible ground-text’ of homo natura rather than the text of nature.154 If it can be shown that nature may just as cogently be interpreted as totally indifferent to laws, then it is not ‘nature’ that shows itself in a theory, but a certain affective genesis that composes an idea of nature, and Nietzsche suggests that the insistence of nature’s conformity to law expresses a modern inclination towards equality – everyone and everything being equal before the law. It is tempting here to sum this up by saying that the knowledge gained is always of oneself or at best of humanity, but not of the world or nature.155 This would, however, once again posit a text where there is only interpretation, for it would be to posit an inalienable chasm between humanity and the outside world (or 153 A trap that Davey (1990: 282) falls into when he writes that according to Nietzsche’s perspectivism, we have the nihilistic freedom ‘to project whatever meaning we like into existence’ (282), because ‘what appears to sentient beings as an external world is an interpreted or constructed world’, while ‘constructed worlds are not readings of an actual world but interpretations of a subject’s own affects’ (277). As Strong (1985: 173) points out, ‘If there is nothing besides perspective ... then the obvious conclusion is not that the world cannot be known but, rather, that it is in the nature of the world as we experience it to be known. There is no action in the world that does not embody all that we need to understand it, providing only that we do not insist on understanding it according to a mistaken and arrogant notion of the subject’, which is seemingly what Davey manages to do. 154 JGB 230; KSA 5.169. 155 Nietzsche’s pre-Zarathustra texts present this sentiment at times (for example, M 48; KSA 3.53), but this perspective recedes in his later philosophy.

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between what something is for us, and what it is in itself, to use more Kantian terms), when it is precisely an affective genesis that is key here. Some sense can thus be made here of Nietzsche’s rather odd coinage of the human as the ‘terrible ground-text’ of homo natura, for it posits an unstable relation between ‘homo sapien’ and ‘homo natura’, or consciousness and extra-consciousness. For according to Nietzsche, the human has long been interpreted from the perspective of conscious reflections on extra-consciousness as if they were separate entities, thereby scrawling ‘overly enthusiastic interpretations’ over the human in terms of honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge and heroism of the truthful.156 The task Nietzsche sets of ‘translating the human back into nature’ is not so much a matter of redescribing the human as a natural being, but of translating the conscious moral codes of humanity via their affective geneses, which involves the entire multiplicity of homo natura. Translating the human back into nature thus looks for an extra-moral understanding where consciousness is considered in the same sense as a skin that ‘betrays something but conceals even more’, which is not to suggest that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of an underlying reality, but that consciousness never exists outside of a relation to an extra-consciousness that its codes betray, yet when taken in abstraction, conceal.157 Nietzsche’s response to the criticism that his will-to-power is only an interpretation itself is simply: yes, of course it is, for interpretations, like all ways of describing phenomena, are translations (metaphorical transferences or ‘carryings-over’ of affective relations); but this has not answered anything, for the important point is the qualitative manner of the translation involved. Both nature conceived as conforming to transcendent laws and nature as lawless might be equally as cogent, but it is not the narrow perspective of the conscious intellect that Nietzsche is interested in – it is how the grammar of consciousness betrays an affective relationality that is key.

156

JGB 230; KSA 5.169. As Lingis (2005: 69) puts it, ‘Words, though they be abbreviations and simplifications, have overtones; they echo not only in other words but in the depths below them’. 157

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Considering interpretation in terms of will-to-power thus provides a way to evaluate, and even more importantly, redeem interpretations. The physicist’s claim that the world conforms to law and the spirit of gravity’s claim that time is circular are both cogent interpretations of space and time, and both articulate some form of permanence that subsists through transience and thus offer ways to overcome temporality. Yet as discussed above, such monocular perspectives are exposed by the thought of the eternal return as involving dysphoric translations of experience where the multiplicity of perspectives at play in any given moment are negated. The very need to provide transience with a reality grounded in some form of permanence or transcendence that negates multiplicity betrays a dysphoria of affective relations, for joy does not need a meaning and a justification at all (it is not a mental comparison between states of affairs) – joy wants only itself and recurrence. Insofar as it is the living moment that demands recurrence, and not any conscious decision, the test of the eternal return provides a glimpse into the extent to which a will is euphoric in the face of this, for it is only joy that wants recurrence, while sadness and dysphoria are merely dragged along under the shelter of justificatory ideals (hence the spirit of gravity). There is no conceivable moment without euphoria, therefore, for a moment is synonymous with a joyful overcoming that has always-already been made, that always-already is being made. As Nietzsche puts it through the poetic prose of Zarathustra: Have you ever said Yes to one joy? Oh my friends, then you also said Yes to all pain. All things are enchained, entwined, enamored – – if you ever wanted one time two times, if you ever said “I like you, happiness! Whoosh! Moment!” then you wanted everything back! – Everything anew, everything eternal, everything enchained, entwined, enamored, oh thus you loved the world – – you eternal ones, love it eternally and for all time; and say to pain also: refrain, but come back! For all joy wants – eternity!158

158

Nietzsche (2006: 263; ASZ 4.19.10; KSA 4.402).

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Whereas sadness involves a sense of dysphoria, thus wanting an end (though still wanting, and is thus redeemable),159 joy ‘wants itself and eternity, just as it is’.160 Insofar as there is a moment at all, therefore, it is as a euphoric carrying-over or translation of transient relations, while depression and dysphoria are merely dragged along like the ‘spirit of gravity’ on Zarathustra’s back. However, this is as far as the thought of the eternal return can go. It might expose dysphoria, but it only does so to the extent that is exposes how one’s life has already been lived, and the experience of the present is thus still burdened by the past (and perhaps even more so). Furthermore, because the ‘moment’ of the eternal return also exposes the unbreakable immanence of the living moment, there seems to be nothing that can be done about the weight of the past either (which is why the eternal return could be the most nihilistic of thoughts). That transience cannot be arrested means that every present moment is a carrying-forward of all that has preceded it – but it is not only the grammar, language and values of the past that inform the present moment, for these are also a sign-language of certain affective-relations that involve both conscious and extraconscious perspectives, or what is both remembered and forgotten. The concept of will-to-power thus seeks not only to examine what a judgement or value invokes or calls upon from a conscious memory of past experience, but what it evokes in terms of calling out from its affective genesis: is a joyful desire for recurrence and eternity evoked, or a dysphoric will for negation and nothingness? Either way, the important point is that they are both callings and thus bear witness to a translative process that wants and thus births a future, no matter how fragile this may be. While the affective pull of transcendent ideals might have dissipated (as the death of God witnesses),161 this should not be seen as a loss, because the manner in which such ideals have been articulated and translated into transient experience betrays a wanting-will (an affective relationality) that births some kind of future. The articulations of will-to-power where it is couched in terms of being the essence of life, which appear in later texts in

159 ASZ 4.19.9; KSA 4.402. As he notes elsewhere, the sad want above all to be somebody else, which is a sad, impossible hope itself (GM 3.14; KSA 5.368). 160 ASZ 4.19.9; KSA 4.402. 161 ASZ 2.12; KSA 4.149.

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particular,162 need not be taken in a metaphysical sense for it has already been established as a metaphor of a metaphorical process – a metaphorical process that translates or transposes certain affective relations so that a future may be birthed, even if it is the tiniest and frailest of futures out of the mire of sadness, dysphoria and nihilism – where even every no of ascetic ideals are shown to give birth to so many tender yesses.163 Will-to-power is thus Nietzsche’s ultimate and final commitment to the immanence of affectivity, for it explicitly refrains from grounding affectivity in any particular signs of affective relations, whether these be images, words or concepts. When Nietzsche writes that life is will-to-power, it is meant in precisely this sense, namely that will-to-power is not any ‘thing’, but rather names the translative processes that move ‘away from’ and ‘towards’ various signs of the affective-imagination where seeing is always seeing-something. The will-to-power is therefore most importantly a feeling of power that for Nietzsche is experienced in overcoming or translating and incorporating various aspects of experience into an intensifying movement. Such a feeling of power can be accomplished via composing a truth (a value or ideal), a concept, a work of art or even a successful military campaign – but the feeling of power should not be confused with wanting signs of power, something that Nietzsche suggests can actually bear witness to a feeling of impotence; will-to-power may be found in less ostentatious circumstances, such as a greenhouse.164 The feeling of power that Nietzsche articulates here is experienced via overcoming resistance in euphoric compositions, that is, through

162 See FW 349; KSA 3.586, JGB 13; KSA 5.27, JGB 259; KSA 5.208, and GM 2.12; KSA 5.316. As Kofman (1993: 99) remarks, the will-to-power is not a metaphysical concept to the extent that metaphysicians ‘take the text of nature for a collection of symbols to be deciphered, whereas they read ‘literally’ the falsified text of consciousness, a secondary and metaphorical text, a symbolic and symptomatic mask’, but ‘There are those who, by forgetting the metaphorical status of the will to power, have managed to see Nietzsche as the last metaphysician, who simply inverted Platonism’, even though ‘the will to power is not an essence, nor even an explanatory concept, but a simple metaphorical name’ (1993: 96). 163 GM 3.13; KSA 5.367. 164 In a note Nietzsche remarks that the most powerful might be found tending greenhouses, while those who desire to rule are often slavish (KSA 9.252). Nietzsche also identifies the desire to have power as being a sign of dysphoria (AC 9; KSA 6.176), while coming to power in an institutional sense stupefies (GD 8.1; KSA 6.103).

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translations or carryings-over where transience is carried-well.165 The metaphorical relations between perception-signs, abbreviations of signs (words, images) and concepts (or grammar) are no longer considered here merely in terms of transpositions between different aspects of experience, but as bearing witness to a qualitative translative process that overcomes and rebirths the past and thereby overcomes the nihilism of temporal existence. To utilise a more practical example, an evening with friends can be interpreted as expressing an intense will-to-power where food, drink, smells, ambience, music, spatial arrangements, temperature, conversation, smiles, glances, gestures, humour and so on are translated and composed into a euphoric transient refrain despite the fact that all these elements rest upon inherited linguistic and cultural norms. At the end of the arrangement, everyone might affirm that they had had a ‘good’ evening and that they must do it again sometime. However, if someone were to write down the proceedings in a ‘guide to having a good evening with friends’ in order to repeat the affair, this would be to confuse the particular contents of the composition with what was good about it, for the value or significance of the evening rests with the qualitative way in which the particular aspects of the event were translated and composed in an affective relationality. Nonetheless, this is precisely the kind of thing that philosophers end up doing when they disconnect values from their affective geneses and articulate them as if they ought to be applied to various situations. This is when philosophy becomes ‘moral philosophy’, or straightforwardly moralistic. Kantian moral philosophy with its ‘categorical imperative’ (and deontology in general) is perhaps the archetypal example here with its moral invocation to act according to universal rules. Indeed, Nietzsche directly reproaches the categorical imperative, but as befitting his focus on affectivity, it is not the question of whether or not it is in error that is interesting: Apart from the value of claims like ‘there is a categorical imperative in us,’ the question remains: what do claims like this tell us about the people who make them? ... Many moralists would like 165 Just as will-to-power is a feeling of power, Nietzsche writes in a note that so is joy (Lust), while happiness (Glück) is related to a consciousness of this feeling (KSA 13.254).

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to wield power and impose their creative whims on humanity; many others (perhaps even Kant himself) want to make it clear through their morality that ‘the worthy thing about me is that I can obey – and it should be the same for you as it is for me!’ – in short, even morality is just a sign language of the affects!166 Again, the focus is placed here on the genesis of the ideal in question – a genesis which, as the end of the quote suggests, is an affective one. Furthermore, the diagnostic role of will-to-power can also be seen here as the genesis of the categorical imperative is translated as affirming a particular type of person’s ability to obey – something that is important in periods of chaos or uncertainty, for example. More generally and importantly, morality as such is analysed as a ‘sign language of the affects’ and ultimately as a ‘bad translation’. Indeed, the whole realm of morality and religion belongs to ‘imaginary causes’ for Nietzsche167 precisely because it mistakes the affectivity of the will (of complex relations of affects) with its correlative content (its metaphorical sign-chains),168 resulting in misleading formulas that ‘doing this and not doing that’ will lead to happiness.169 Nietzsche’s point is that it is not particular phenomena that cause or hinder joy (thus following Spinoza), but that joy involves euphoric translations of experience and thus need to be achieved. Nietzsche is famously sceptical about the whole idea of cause and effect, seeing it as, like other explanations, a translation of activity or a particular way of relating that selects certain aspects while ignoring others.170 What is important is thus the qualitative genesis of values and not judging values, for while the signs of the affective-imagination might be measurable and comparable, the qualitative manner in which they are translated and composed can only be evaluated in terms of their genesis. Nietzsche thus articulates the will-to-power in terms of a revaluation of all values,171 for it does not merely judge inherited values, but re-evaluates them in terms of their genesis.

166 167 168 169 170 171

Nietzsche (2001b: 77; JGB 187; KSA 5.107). GD 6.6; KSA 6.94. GD 6.4–7; KSA 6.92–96. See also AC 15; KSA 6.181. GD 6.2; KSA 6.89. See FW 112; KSA 3.472, for example. GM 3.27; KSA 5.409.

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The paradigmatic example here is the discussion of ascetic ideals in the third essay of GM. Just as the purposes and utilities of punishment are so many signs of a continual process of re-interpretation rather than betraying an essence or an ultimate purpose,172 Nietzsche addresses the question of the meaning of ascetic ideals by noting that they have meant many things in many different circumstances.173 One of the difficult tasks is thus to distinguish between ‘the relatively enduring’, namely the custom, act or ‘drama’ of a certain sequence of procedures, and the fluid aspects, namely the sense/ meaning, purpose and expectations associated with these procedures.174 As far as Nietzsche is concerned, there is something more enduring, relatively speaking, in the acts or the dramas of a phenomenon than in its meanings or purposes, which is to say that the latter is even more fluid than the former. This needs to be borne in mind when considering Nietzsche’s task of asking after the meaning of the ascetic ideal, for it soon becomes apparent that it involves a vast plurality of meanings.175 Rather than ask after the meaning of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche thus turns the question towards asking after the ‘dramatic’ phenomena that make no sense without it;176 in other words, the bodies whose affective genesis is inseparable from the ascetic ideal. To this end, Nietzsche suggests that while the artist177 and the philosopher178 use the ascetic ideal, only the priest’s existence stands and falls on this ideal, for the priest values existence insofar as it can be turned against and denied.179 Indeed, the ascetic

172

GM 2.13; KSA 5.313–316. Nietzsche discusses the meaning of ascetic ideals in the third essay of GM, and affirms the manifold nature of ascetic ideals explicitly in GM 3.1; KSA 5.339. 174 GM 2.13; KSA 5.316. 175 GM 3.5; KSA 5.344. 176 Deleuze (1983: xi & 76–77) emphasises this point succinctly when he notes that, ‘One of the most original characteristics of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the transformation of the question ‘what is ... ?’ into ‘Which one is ... ?’ For example, for any given proposition he asks ‘which one is capable of uttering it?’ Here we must rid ourselves of all ‘personalist’ references. The one that ... does not refer to an individual, to a person, but rather to an event’ (ellipses in original; see also pp 76–79 where Deleuze discusses this approach in contradistinction to the Platonic approach to philosophy as the search for essences, and May (2009: 63) who also discusses Nietzsche’s genealogical approach in terms of ‘diagnosing the affective origins of metaphysical beliefs’). 177 GM 3.5; KSA 5.344. 178 GM 3.7–10; KSA 5.349–361. 179 GM 3.11; KSA 5.361. 173

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refrain is paradoxical in the highest degree insofar as it proceeds by refraining from joy itself.180 However, as Nietzsche is quick to point out, the ascetic, representing ‘life against life’, is simply senseless.181 From the perspective of the body, and even more importantly, from the body as the site of affectivity, ‘life against life’ is an absurdity for it is simply inconceivable that the living body could be negated in non-affective terms, for all dysphoric judgements about the value of life place a demand upon experience and alter affective relations rather than dispensing with them; as Nietzsche remarks, a condemnation of life by somebody who is alive can only be a symptom of a particular kind of life.182 By creating various doctrines, practices and interpretations that devalue temporal existence, the ascetic priest places great demands upon experience and thus creates ways of living that are extremely difficult to achieve, meaning that this great ‘negater’ of life is also one of its greatest yes-creating forces in the joy experienced in achieving such challenging feats.183 However, Nietzsche notes that the ascetic priest’s ‘monstrous’ way of evaluating’184 is not an exception, but is so widespread that Earth might even be considered the genuinely ascetic planet.185 In other words, the drama of the priest as the embodiment of the ascetic ideal has stemmed from a general need to avoid the nihilistic threat of a horror vacui by providing existence with various meanings and, above all, values.186 The important point being that, despite the content of the ascetic ideal that claims to deny the body, it has been promulgated as a way to reinvigorate and intensify affectivity to produce ‘excesses of feeling’ that combat slow, senseless misery in favour of ‘a religious interpretation and justification’.187 From this perspective, religion can be viewed as a method of ‘stimulating affects’ to ward off ‘deep depression’.188 As discussed above, such remedies might only be palliative devices 180

GM 3.11; KSA 5. 363. GM 3.13; KSA 5.365. 182 GD 5.5; KSA 6.86. 183 GM 3.13; KSA 5.366. See also FW 27; KSA 3.400, where Nietzsche discusses the affirmer (Bejahende) concealed within the renouncer (‘Der Entsagende’). 184 GM 3.11; KSA 5.362. 185 GM 3.11; KSA 5.362. 186 GM 3.1; KSA 5.339. 187 GM 3.20; KSA 5.388. 188 GM 3.17; KSA 5.377. 181

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that end up causing graver dysphoria when they are taken as ideals to apply to life, but the important point is that even those ideals that deny affectivity and negate affective relations in favour of some transcendent and timeless value involve an affective genesis.189 Seen from this perspective, Nietzsche’s GM is, like ASZ but in a different style, another attempt to redeem the history of morality by firstly exposing its nihilistic tendencies, and then redeeming the demands that it places upon the present by tracing the ‘wanting-will’ that their affective geneses betray. This ‘redemptive’ analysis of the GM is enabled by the concept of will-to-power above all else, for in every ideal that encourages a withdrawal from life and activity, will-to-power offers a perspective from which to see some form of creative attempt to overcome dysphoria or the temporality of existence, even in the most nihilistic of these. The sanitisation of the will-to-power as a metaphysical explanans thus completely destroys its metaphoricity and the affective and redemptive role that Nietzsche relates it to from the very first articulations of the concept in ASZ. With will-to-power, Nietzsche raises the philological demand when interpreting the texts of philosophy, for it insists upon refraining from judging the content and signs of the text (the values, judgements, truths and so on) in favour of tracing the affective and genitive senses of the text in the evocativeness of its composition. Rather than merely providing an understanding of the values and ideas that have birthed the present, such a reading aims to gain a sense of the qualitative manner in which the terms of the past have been translated, composed and carried-forward into the present. This avoids becoming mired in old claims and arguments that may no longer have any evocative force, which is perhaps one of the gravest dangers of philosophy. As discussed in relation to Descartes, Cartesian arguments may be circular, ‘bad’ and easily refutable, but what about the affective genesis that they evoke? The cogito is, in one sense, a rather affirmative translation of the various aspects of experience: here I am ... I think I feel something ... this might be illusory ... but I think ... I exist ... I do not need to know what I feel to know I exist ... I do not need a definition of what I am 189 As Nietzsche notes, just because somebody interprets their feelings in such a way, this is not to say that this is a correct interpretation, for it may rather betray a tendency that remains overlooked (GM 3.16; KSA 5.376).

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to know that I am. Through such nuanced translations, he dispensed with many of the categories of scholastic thinking that weighed down and hindered thinking and activity, and recomposed a philosophy that calls out from an affective genesis that poses a new way of thinking and being (the Meditations evokes far more than Descartes can capture under the signs of the cogito, ‘I’ or God). That the cogito installs a new form of restrictive transcendence is problematic of course, and the demand that this places on the present in the shape of Cartesian ontology is doubtlessly a sign of palliative dysphoria. However, simply refuting Descartes’ arguments cannot answer this demand at all if its genitive sense is not redeemed, which is to say, traced and evaluated in terms of its euphoric affirmation of certain perspectives and dysphoric negation of others so that the former can be rebirthed and recomposed in translative processes (concepts) that are adequately evocative (that do it justice, so to speak).190 Spinoza’s response to Descartes in his Ethics is paradigmatic of this. Descartes achieves a great deal in evoking the activeness of thinking as a living process that can undermine the dogma that inhibits it, but at the same time he negates bodily perspectives and the imagination as subservient to the mind and understanding. Spinoza does not set out to refute Descartes’ arguments (even if various propositions can be read as doing so when contrasted to Descartes’ philosophy), but rather responds to Descartes’ evocation. Yes, there is something particular about thinking and its ability to trace the genesis of the signs of the imagination, but this is not a separate process to the imagination, because the imagination and the understanding, inadequate and adequate ideas, are experienced immanently. Spinoza thus redeems something of the affective, genitive sense of Descartes’ philosophy (the manner in which it overcomes the past and births a new way of relating), while alleviating the burden that it places on the present with its negation of the body, thus birthing and calling for a new way of relating in turn. The same may be said of other philosophical concepts: their metaphorical translations of inherited ideas, terms and values – and of other aspects of experience both conscious and extra-conscious – provoke new ways of relating that 190 As Nietzsche puts it very succinctly in a note, in every movement there will be dysphoric and euphoric relations, and it is thus a case of distinguishing these to rebirth the latter (KSA 10.343).

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place a demand upon the present. By naming and translating this process as will-to-power, Nietzsche provides a perspective from which to attempt a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;re-evaluation of all valuesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; without reducing them to objects of consciousness to be judged therein. Instead, their qualitative geneses can be assessed so that any demand they place on the present can be redeemed rather than simply refuted.

4 Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect

As the previous chapters have attempted to show, affectivity is not just an element of Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies – affectivity as such plays a crucial orientating role. Now the details of this role have been outlined, three interrelated factors behind this ‘affective turn’ or orientation can be drawn out. Firstly, they are both committed to the ineluctable transience of living experience – experience that is always-already significant and felt as moving from and towards various relations. Seeing, as Nietzsche puts it, is always seeing-something and never a pure, immaculate gaze upon an external world, while the transience of this seeing is alwaysalready carried well or badly in terms of euphoric or dysphoric transitions – joy and sadness in Spinoza’s terms, good or bad translations in Nietzsche’s. Their philosophical commitment to the immanence of affectivity means that the image of philosophy as a search for knowledge that can provide ultimate answers as to what is good, evil, right or wrong is thus dispensed with, for these are ultimately signs that bear witness to certain affective relations, and it is this that is important for philosophy. Secondly, this orientation around affectivity allows for a genealogical approach to interpreting the ideas, values and signs of experience via their affective geneses. These can be ideas that bear witness to a joyful carrying of transience or overcoming of temporality, or burdensome signs that involve dysphoria. For Spinoza, the great burden of his time was religion and monarchic rule with their heavy semiotics grounded in a benevolent God who created the world and 156

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to whose representatives and laws people were supposed to adhere to, while for Nietzsche it was largely a repressively moralistic image of ‘Man’. Neither Spinoza nor Nietzsche set out to argue over the reality of these images; rather, they accept them as a host of perfectly real ideas and signs that affect how people experience the world. The task of philosophy is not to refute these – ‘what have I to do with refutation?’, as Nietzsche once acerbically remarked1 – but rather trace their affective geneses in order to show their particularity and contingency and thus rob them of their affective pull on the imagination, while also showing how they overcame a problem and thus engendered a future, no matter how fragile. Thirdly, orientating thinking around affectivity allows Spinoza and Nietzsche to make philosophy the pursuit of knowledge as the most powerful affect. At no stage do they appeal to any unaffected ground or form of transcendence to justify their philosophies. Any knowledge they construct thus begins and ends in joy and thereby engages with problems that are genuinely experienced. Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche is thus genealogical and creative: the genealogical project traces the affective genesis of the ideas, values and signs of experience, while the creative project calls forth new translations that can repeat the joy they inherit into yet-to-be determined perspectives and affective relations. If philosophy fails in either of these aspects and becomes a mere harvester of knowledge, then the best it can hope for is insignificance. This point is described by Nietzsche in the second of his Untimely Meditations in a discussion of the uses and abuses of history: We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it, even though he may look nobly down on our rough and charmless needs and requirements. We need it, that is to say, for life and action ... We want to serve history only to the extent that history serves life: for it is possible to value the study of history to such a degree that life becomes stunted and degenerate.2

1 2

Nietzsche (2006b: 5; GM Pre.4; KSA 5.250). Nietzsche (1997: 59; UB2: Foreword; KSA 1.245).

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History, and for that matter, philosophy or any area of knowledge, must serve life because there is no conclusion to life and thus no conclusive knowledge – life is transient, affective and precarious. This is why Nietzsche is so critical of Socrates, for he makes life a servant of knowledge and sets the stage for Plato, Christianity and the idolisation of the ascetic ideal. The same impetus for action is clearly shared by Spinoza. He died while writing the deliberately interventional Political Treatise, which frequently criticises philosophers for their self-conceitedness and aloof attitude towards practical matters, as this passage amply demonstrates: They [philosophers] believe that they are thus performing a sacred duty, and that they are attaining the summit of wisdom when they have learnt how to shower extravagant praise on a human nature that nowhere exists and to revile that which exists in actuality. The fact is that they conceive men not as they are, but as they would like them to be. As a result, for the most part it is not ethics they have written, but satire; and they have never worked out a political theory that can have practical application, only one that borders on fantasy or could be put into effect in Utopia or in that golden age of the poets where there would naturally be no need of such.3 Any philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche must therefore also avoid the tendency for moral interpretations concerning how it would like the world to be and instead engage in the ‘messy’ vicissitudes of life by working towards a knowledge that genuinely affects our experience of the world. This book will therefore conclude with two key aspects for any philosophy that takes its inspiration from the ‘affective turn’ of Spinoza and Nietzsche based on the points outlined above. Firstly, philosophy must resist its tendency to moralise about how it would like the world to be. This does not mean surrendering to immediacy, but rather being ‘untimely’ without pretending to be timeless: it must engage with the world as it is and answer the demands placed upon the present via tracing their affective, historical geneses.

Spinoza (2002: 680; TP 1:1).

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Secondly, this in turn poses the challenge of composing provocative concepts that call forth new translations, perspectives and affective relations to repeat the joy we inherit; in other words, the provocation of yet-to-be-determined bodies. The purpose of this concluding chapter is thus to take a closer look at the role of philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche following the two aspects outlined above. The chapter is thus split into two parts, with the first of these concentrating on the idea of redeeming the past by tracing its affective genesis, while the second part will look at philosophy as future-orientated. The first part will therefore begin with a discussion of how both Spinoza and Nietzsche consider conducting close textual analyses of our inherited texts as being a central philosophical task as this allows us to trace the genealogy of the present. This emphasis on the importance of textual analysis links to their shared suspicion of the ‘seduction of language’, to use Nietzsche’s phrase.4 This tendency leads to a confusion between thinking and speaking and the reification of the signs of language into objectively existing entities, which for both Spinoza and Nietzsche is paradigmatically expressed by images of ‘Man’ and ‘God’, and for Nietzsche the subject–predicate grammatical structure that posits an agent behind actions and thus a dysphoric level of blame and responsibility. Text, however, offers itself more readily to a genealogical analysis that takes into account a wide range of factors in its production. The ‘silence’ of the text where there is no author to question is thus an advantage insofar as the signs themselves, rather than the conscious intentions of the speaker, become the focus of the analysis. Philosophy, however, has classically taken language and dialogue as being intimately related to thinking and has been hostile towards the rhetorical powers that the written word can have on the reader’s thought processes. This concern is most famously expressed in Plato’s Phaedrus where Socrates criticises writing, but it is also present in a very important figure for modern philosophy who has already been discussed in this book, namely Rene Descartes. This chapter will thus begin with Descartes in order to highlight precisely why the dominant modern form of philosophy that centres on consciousness, subjectivity and language is highly suspicious of

GM 1.13; KSA 5.278.

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the written word, as this will provide a platform to show why this is certainly not the case for Spinoza and Nietzsche. Again, it is the orientating role of affectivity in their philosophies that is the key factor here, as text provides the material to look beyond consciousness and the subject to the affective geneses of the signs we inherit. Therefore, after the discussion of Descartes, the focus will turn to Spinoza and his interpretative strategies as set out in his TheologicalPolitical Treatise in particular, including his so-called ‘truth of meaning’ and ‘truth of fact’ approaches. Here it will be suggested that Spinoza makes a remarkable move by highlighting how we need to interpret text in two different ways: firstly by trying to trace the affective genesis of its production (just as we can do for anything else that exists in nature), and secondly by evaluating the extent to which it bears witness to an expression of thought regardless of the particularities of its production. Expression thus plays a key role in Spinoza’s interpretative strategies. After this, the discussion will them move on to Nietzsche’s genealogical approach by beginning with a crucial contribution that he makes to the understanding of the relationship between language and affectivity, namely its metaphoricity as a form of translation. Building on this, it will then be suggested that language can be analysed in terms of it being both ‘invocative’ and ‘evocative’; that is, it can both call upon a past to be re-presented (the meaning of the terms) and evoke a particular affective genesis or perspective (its singular composition). This metaphoricity is easily overlooked, however, if ephexis or restraint is not shown in the interpretation of texts. In other words, just as Spinoza suggests that we should take care not to destroy the expressivity of a text by forcing a ‘truth of fact’ reading upon it, Nietzsche insists upon the importance of withholding judgement in order to trace out a text’s affective genesis. Examining this aspect of Nietzsche’s genealogical approach will then lead into a discussion of the final seduction of language: its grammar. Nietzsche famously remarks that he fears that we are not rid of God because we still believe in grammar, meaning that we need to think beyond this reductive structure in order to trace the affective genesis of a text’s production. The concluding part of the book will look more closely at the provocative nature of philosophy that Spinoza and Nietzsche present and its orientation towards the future. Here it will also be suggested

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that Spinoza and Nietzsche offer two different ways forward. Whereas Spinoza looks to augment joy through the discovery of commonalities (hence the importance he places upon reason), for Nietzsche joy is augmented through overcoming resistance and thus appropriating the signs of experience into a joyful pathos; Nietzsche thus has a ‘tragic’ rather than ‘rational’ vision of philosophy. However, they are both in agreement when it comes to forging a new orientation for philosophy that dispenses with its inherently moralistic tendencies and instead fosters new ways of thinking and experiencing the world. They thus provide philosophy with a specific task in distinction from the arts and sciences. The book will thus conclude by suggesting that whereas science attempts to restrict affectivity within invocative systems that can recall its objects from any perspective and art attempts to be evocative and call out from the most singular of perspectives, philosophy is provocative insofar as it composes concepts that call forth new translations of experience and yet-to-be-determined perspectives.

4.1 4.1.1

Redeeming the past Descartes and philosophy’s graphophobia

As mentioned above, there has been a long history of philosophers being suspicious of the written word, and this remains true right into modernity and the paradigmatic concerns of Rene Descartes. In fact, given Descartes’ antipathy towards writing, it might be fair to ask why he wrote at all. Descartes’ texts often present themselves as being suspicious not just of the changing physical world around them, but the written words they contain. This is doubtlessly due to the position discussed in the opening chapter, namely that for Descartes only proper self-reflection and self-understanding can pave the way to negotiating the external world with any certainty, so his texts presumably only add to the confusion and misunderstandings that his readers may already have. Descartes is explicit in his concerns over the written word, and in this regard it is interesting to consider the prefaces of his works to see how he justified their dissemination. From these prefaces, three interrelated points of concern can be ascertained. Firstly, he was acutely aware of the authority that texts

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have and the limitations that this places on thought;5 secondly, he was very keen to have his work published in the vernacular as well as in Latin;6 and thirdly, he made it abundantly clear that readers should only use his texts as propaedeutic devices to allow their own rational capabilities to shine through. All these points come to the fore in the reason he gives for writing his Discourse in French rather than Latin. He did this, ‘in the hope that those who will avail themselves of their natural reason alone, may be better judges of my opinions than those who give heed only to the writings of the ancients’.7 This is a clear statement of Descartes’ and his followers’ attempt to distance themselves from what they saw as scholasticism’s dogmatic adherence to Aristotelian thought; but Descartes himself had his own specific reasons for this and breathed new life into Augustine’s introspective orientation.8 From a strictly Cartesian perspective, texts should be placed with ‘the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things’ that need to be suspended from thought in order to begin thinking properly from some certain, introspective foundation.9 Descartes might therefore be expected to publish exclusively in Latin for the educated who were properly thoughtful enough to use his texts (as Spinoza did), but as mentioned above, it was precisely those educated in the schools of medieval Europe who confused the written word of the ancients with the existential experience of truth. Thus, because the general public remained untainted by the authority of the schools, they had a greater possibility of enjoying their rational capacities – if given the proper guidance. This guidance would not be didactic but more along the lines of a Socratic process of elenchus, although more reliable, repeatable and methodological (in other words, more scientific, more Cartesian). In

Descartes (1970: 80; Prefatory note to Discourse on the Method). Descartes (1996: 6–7; ‘Preface to the reader’ from the Meditations). 7 Descartes (1970: 80; Prefatory note to Discourse on the Method). 8 As Matthews (2001: 267) notes, ‘Descartes is perhaps the most Augustinian of modern philosophers, even though Descartes himself declined to acknowledge that there was any signiﬁcant afﬁnity between his own thought and that of Augustine’. The similarities between his position and Augustine’s were even pointed out to him by his contemporaries, although as can be seen from his letter to Colvius from November 16th 1640, he played this link down (Descartes 1991: 159). This is unsurprising seeing as he considered himself only to be following his own ‘natural light of reason’, as everyone else should. 9 Descartes (1996:15; Meditations 1.23). 6

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fact, Descartes had an almost infallible faith in the ability to educate anybody’s mind to right reason: ‘there are almost none ... so dull or slow of understanding that they are incapable of sound opinions, and even of attaining all the highest sciences, if they were trained in the right way’.10 The foremost value of a text for Descartes is therefore that of its methodological rigour; it is an artifice for thought, but nonetheless one that can aid thinking from the distractions inherent to the senses. He even offered some methodological suggestions for reading his texts: I should also have here added a word of advice as regards the method of reading this book, which is that I should desire it first to be run through in its entirety like a novel, without forcing one’s attention unduly upon it or stopping at difficulties that may be met with, so that a general knowledge may be arrived at of the matters of which I have treated; and after that, if it is found that the reader wants them to be examined more carefully and has the curiosity to inquire about their causes, it may be read a second time in order to notice the sequence of my reasoning.11 Descartes is keen to avoid giving any authority to his text, suggesting that the reader only reread his work ‘if it is found that the reader wants [it] to be examined more carefully’. The importance of rereading the work does not, therefore, merely lie in the problems readers might have in seeing the truth of the text, but rather in exercising and concentrating the mind so that the readers might be able to see the truth for themselves. This is why Descartes values the importance of objections and criticisms of his work, and even published them alongside his own Meditations: ‘In the Discourse I asked anyone who found anything worth criticising in what I had written to be kind enough to point it out to me’.12 This provides a valuable service for Descartes, for as he says of his Meditations, it is a book ‘which is not very large, but whose volume has been increased, and whose matter has been much illuminated, by the objections many very learned 10 11 12

Descartes (2000: 227; Preface to Principles). Descartes (2000: 227; Preface to Principles of Philosophy). Descartes (1996: 7; ‘Preface to the reader’ from Meditations).

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persons have sent me in regard to them, and by the replies I have made to themâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.13 This helps to recreate the sense of a dialogue where the internal processes of thought can be played out between active agents, thus going some way to make up for the lack of responsiveness inherent in texts, which tend to inform rather than question and respond, and thus obscure the existential processes of thinking. This is precisely what is so remarkable about the Meditations, Descartesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; first full exposition of his foundational philosophy â&#x20AC;&#x201C; despite the scientific ambitions of its author it is written entirely in a conversational and processual manner, which is further embellished by the accompanying objections and replies. As discussed in the opening chapter, the Meditations claims that in order to be able to think at all properly and to have any secure knowledge, it is vital that we know the nature of God and ourselves, namely that God is perfect, eternal and immaterial, and that we consist of a body and soul, the latter being individual, eternal and immaterial, and that which is our true essence. However, these things cannot merely be brutally stated on a page in this manner, because we have to come to see these things by the internal processes of thought. The Meditations is thus the recording of a conversation that Descartes has with himself, or in other words, the internal movement of his own thought. The fictional status of this conversation is of little importance if the existential nature of thought shines through; for what is fundamentally at stake is opening up the possibility for truth as such, and not individual truths. Consider the vital opening passage of the third meditation: I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses. I will eliminate from my thoughts all images of bodily things, or rather, since this is hardly possible, I will consider all such images as vacuous, false and worthless. I will converse with myself and scrutinise myself more deeply; and in this way I will attempt to achieve, little by little, a more intimate knowledge of myself. I am a thing that thinks ... of that I am certain.14

13 14

Descartes (2000: 228; Preface to Principles of Philosophy). Descartes (1996:24; Meditations 3.35)

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The first thing to notice is that although this is a written passage, it is simply impossible to write whilst actually performing the described actions. Perhaps this indicates one of the problems that Descartes has with writing: it simply states things. For Descartes it is not enough to state that we are necessarily thinking things as if this were just a fact that needed recognition; rather, Descartes invites the reader to go through the process of introspection in order to discover for him or herself that modes of thought ‘exist within’. This foundational truth is not something that can be pointed at on a page, which is why he cannot begin by merely accepting a definition of man as a ‘rational animal’.15 If it were merely a case of interpreting and assessing the correct information, then a machine would be able to understand the necessary connection between thought and existence; it would be able to respond to its own question, ‘what am I?’ Of course, a machine could end up producing such an answer from a given input, but for Descartes a human being can arrive at such a position without any input at all (or at least regardless of the particular input).16 The Meditations thus provides a kind of existential analytic that aids us in beginning to think properly, while the later Principles of Philosophy builds on this by providing a more rigorous methodological framework upon which to orientate our own reflective processes, which is why it is ‘better to read beforehand the Meditations’.17 In a sense, Descartes is not out to teach the reader anything with his texts, but rather to aid readers in becoming aware of what they already are underneath the garb of the body and its confusing perspectives, namely a conscious, rational being. The special ontological status of this conscious rational being thus cannot strictly be deduced from a mere text. It is just possible that if you give enough monkeys enough typewriters, one of them might flawlessly recreate the entire works of Shakespeare; but from a Cartesian standpoint, this in itself would not be particularly remarkable. What would be remarkable would be a monkey that could respond to the question as to whether or not it wanted to, for it is

Descartes (1996: 17; Meditations 2.25). Descartes (2000: 234; Principles 1.12) argues that one of the biggest causes of error is that people do ‘not observe that by “themselves” they ought merely to understand their minds’. 17 Descartes (2000: 229; Preface to Principles of Philosophy). 16

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this responsiveness that expresses thought, and this thought remains irreducible to a body (be it that of an ape or human). Descartes makes this claim explicit in the fifth book of his Discourse, where he argues that if we were to make a copy of an animal and a human in machine form, we would not be able to tell the difference between the machine and the animal, but we could tell the difference between the machine and the human, because a machine: could never use words or other signs, or put them together as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For one can well conceive of a machine being so made that it utters words, and even that it utters words appropriate to the bodily actions that will cause some change in its organs (such as, if one touches it in a certain place, it asks what one wants to say to it, or, if in another place, it cries out that one is hurting it, and the like). But it could not arrange its words differently so as to respond to the sense of all that will be said in its presence, as even the dullest men can do.18 Today we have the machines that Descartes envisages here of course, with computers programmed with voice recognition and so on. However, no matter how sophisticated they become, computers lack spontaneity and responsivity in the presence of others.19 How spontaneous a machine’s responses would need to be before this lack became imperceptible and the machine’s status problematic has been the subject of numerous science fiction novels and movies of course, but this is unsurprising if the dominant perspective remains Cartesian – for this dilemma is ultimately unanswerable from Descartes’ position. According to Descartes, animals are indistinguishable from machines, insofar as ‘it is nature that acts in them, according to the disposition of their organs – just as we see that a clock composed exclusively of wheels and springs’;20 while humans are indistinguishable from animals, insofar as ‘they have many organs corresponding to our own’. However, what does distinguish the human from the animal and the machine is the fact that ‘there

Descartes (2000: 72; Discourse 5). As Lyotard (1991: 118) famously remarks, ‘Is a computer in any way here and now? Can anything happen with it? Can anything happen to it?’ 20 Descartes (2000: 73; Discourse 5). 19

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are no men so dull and so stupid (excluding not even the insane), that they are incapable of arranging various words together and of composing from them a discourse by means of which they might make their thoughts understood’, whereas, ‘there is no other animal at all, however perfect and pedigreed it may be, that does the like’.21 In other words, in all outward appearances, the human, animal and machine operate by the same rules, but only the human has a zone of interiority that remains distinct from and irreducible to these rules. This has nothing to do with bodies however; if an ape or a machine could spontaneously respond to a human, then we must grant them this interiority, or in Descartes’ language, a soul. Descartes’ position is, therefore, far more remarkable than it is often made out to be (such as the claim that he makes a ‘category error’).22 Again, it is not too difficult to see why Descartes is seen as an inaugurator of modern philosophy (perhaps even of modern thought), in that he grounds the specificity of the human being without appealing – at least in the first instance – to any kind of theological notion of divine creation. The human is distinct from the rest of the world not through its divine birth, or even through its birth to a certain kind of species, but rather through a certain experience of the world; and this experience is expressed through the spontaneity of language via conscious thought. We could never be mistaken for a machine, even if it were an exact copy, because ‘it is morally impossible that there should be sufficient diversity in any machine to allow it to act in all the events of life in the same way as our reason causes us to act’.23 Even if the theological notion of divine creation is no longer believed in, it is clear for Descartes that humans have an experience of the world that is irreducible to their bodies, while every other nonhuman can only react according to the conditions of their bodies; they are unresponsive, amoral and thoughtless compositions of matter. Although this is a rather uncompromising position that few would subscribe to completely, the irreducibility (or transcendence) of human experience, alongside the intentionality, responsivity

Descartes (2000: 72; Discourse 5). This is Ryle’s (1949: 18–23) famous criticism, who argues that Descartes applies the wrong words to things. 23 Descartes (1970: 116; Discourse 5). 22

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and linguisticality of subjectivity, have gone on to create the only serious philosophical foundations to any humanism that relies upon the idea of the human as a sui generis being.24 Descartes’ philosophy is still doubtlessly caught in a theological world vision, but his insistence upon the foundational necessity of analysing the transcendentality of human experience makes him thoroughly modern: and this experience is grounded in consciousness and language, which find their immediate and unmistakable expression in speech. 4.1.2 Spinoza: interpretation as redeeming expression As discussed throughout the preceding chapters, this reduction of living experience to the transcendent image of the human, or more precisely, consciousness and language, is precisely what Spinoza and Nietzsche seek to overturn with their focus on affectivity. For Spinoza, orientating one’s thought and activity, or mode of being, around one particular ‘dominion within a dominion’ – be that of God or Man – risks a host of sad and depletive affects as such images impinge upon experience with a whole structure of inadequate ideas. By the time we get to Nietzsche, God is already dead, to coin his phrase, and it is the transcendent image of the human that he is particularly concerned with overcoming, and he thus produces sustained critiques of the elevated status of consciousness and language in particular in order to draw attention to the perspectival nature of experience and the ineluctable affective relations therein. Both Spinoza and Nietzsche thus offer a different vision for philosophy. The task is no longer to discover what something ‘is’, because we do not experience anything that remains permanent and unaffected (even our desire and ideas change over time as new relations are diminished and established). As Nietzsche famously puts it, ‘nothing with a history can be defined’, meaning that it is precisely the history and not the supposed phenomena that is of interest.25 This also means that truth and falsity as such are of no real concern for philosophy either, which is a point that Spinoza makes 24 As Derrida (2008: 87) notes regarding the long held distinction between human and animal in Western philosophy, ‘the path that leads from Descartes to Heidegger ... appear to be many and varied, but they bring together in a single system nonresponse, a language that doesn’t respond because it is fixed or stuck in the mechanicity of its programming, and finally lack, defect, deficit, or deprivation’. 25 GM 2.13; KSA 5.317.

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abundantly clear, for how can an idea be false or wrong? According to what extrinsic standard? Any idea is real and has a reality insofar as it affects the experience of those who think it. The question is not one of the truth or falsity of ideas, but of their adequacy: do we understand the geneses of our ideas and can we recompose them so as to actively organise and enhance our encounters? This shared vision leads Spinoza and Nietzsche to another remarkable connection, namely their shared interest in textual interpretation and the manner in which they elevate its importance above that of perhaps all other previous philosophers. This is not a mere coincidence, however, as it goes hand in hand with their re-evaluation of consciousness and language. As discussed above, Descartes was extremely suspicious of written texts precisely because they distract from the authority of conscious rational processes; Descartes thus shared the phonocentrism of philosophy that goes all the way back to Plato.26 Spinoza and Nietzsche are notable exceptions to this tendency due to their refusal to give consciousness a special status. Spinoza was in fact the first philosopher to take textual exegesis and interpretation seriously,27 for not only are texts the very materials of philosophy as a practice – and it must be remembered that philosophy is an activity after all – but they also provide us with traces of the affective relations that have influenced the ways in which we have come to describe and understand our world, and thus offer much more than the conscious thoughts of a particular subject. Spinoza is innovative in this regard with his insistence that a text should not merely be reduced to its accuracy as a form of representation, because as discussed in the opening chapter, representation has more to do with the signs of the imagination than with accuracy or inaccuracy regarding something outside of thought. Spinoza’s approach to text is rather more nuanced in that he attempts to recover a text’s expressive force by tracing out the affective-imaginations that might have produced it – which is possible seeing as interpreting a text should 26

As famously pointed out by Derrida (1997). Curley (2001: 320–321) suggests that Spinoza might even be considered as one of the most important early figures, if not the founder, of hermeneutics in the modern, scientific sense. Tosel (1997: 158) points out however that Spinoza consciously avoids the path taken by later hermeneuticians such as Schleiermacher and Dilthey in opposing physical explanation and meaningful comprehension, by making the interpretation of texts to be the same as interpreting other aspects of nature. 27

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be like interpreting anything else in nature. The questions that then emerge relate to the kind of body (as an affective site) that the text might relate to, and the extent to which it bears witness to expressive thinking. Spinoza’s approach to interpreting texts is particularly interesting therefore, for it not only involves grappling with intentions and meanings, but also the text’s genesis and the affectivity that it expresses. To this end, Spinoza develops two axes through which to approach a written text. Firstly, a text for Spinoza expresses a certain affective-imagination, so a reading needs to trace out the bodily site (the affective-imagination) that might have produced it, which may or may not be possible due to lack of resources, scant knowledge of the language in use, lack of relevant contextual information and so on. Secondly, a text can also be considered insofar as it bears witness to thought as an irreducible form of expression. This is the extent to which Spinoza can claim that the method of textual interpretation ‘does not differ from the method of interpreting nature, but rather is wholly consonant with it’.28 A text might be like any other aspect of nature, but it is also a human product and thus involves the problem of expression discussed in chapter one; that is, which aspects of the text bear witness to the images of certain affective imaginations, and which aspects bear witness to expressive thinking. As already mentioned, to deal with this problem, Spinoza delineates two kinds of textual strategies commonly referred to as the interpretation of the author’s meaning on the one hand, and its validity on the other. This forms Spinoza’s rather modern ‘critical historical’ method,29 which considers a text both in terms of its ‘truth of meaning’ and ‘truth of fact’.30 To establish the truth of meaning or intention of the text, a proper understanding of the language of the text as it was used in the particular historical period is paramount, along with as much knowledge as possible of the historical factors in play, including the biographical background of the author, who the author is addressing,

Spinoza (2007: 98; TTP 7.2). For a discussion of the remarkably modern account of interpretation offered by Spinoza, see Lang (1989). 30 These are ‘two quite distinct and largely unconnected things’ according to Israel’s (2007: xi–xii) reading. 29

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the manner in which the text was developed, how it was received, copied, distributed and so on.31 In such a reading, it becomes possible – at least to some degree – to reconstruct what the author means. When it comes to scripture, for example, the difficulties in interpreting many of the passages are not due, Spinoza contends, to a lack in our interpretative capacities as if only a few blessed or elite interpreters can understand the mysteries of the text.32 The difficulties are rather due to the nature of the bible itself, namely its haphazard construction, mistranslations, poor editing, suppression of certain passages and altering of others, poor or fictional historical records of the authors and the conditions under which the texts were written, and so on.33 This means that portions of the text remain either obscure or downright insensible and should be considered more as curios than as profound mysteries to be uncovered.34 Spinoza thus removes any authority from those who portend to have a divine religious power to understand the mysteries of the text, as well as those who claim to have an exceptional philosophical acumen to understand their rational complexities; when it comes to interpreting texts, we need not succumb to the authority of the priest or the philosopher.35 We should rather bear in mind that a text, like all other phenomena, has a certain historical genealogy that will always remain somewhat obscure, but about which some things can be known, and through which we can, if properly aware of them, render what is written in the text intelligible despite these limitations. Spinoza offers some examples to explain this. When it is written that Christ tells us to turn the other cheek, it seemingly contradicts the Law of Moses that he otherwise recommends (taking an eye for an eye).36 This could be read as a profound mystery or as a complex puzzle to be rationally understood, but not so for Spinoza. Luckily there is some historical information to understand what is written here, as Christ’s audience at the time was an oppressed people living in a corrupt state with little to no justice and on the 31 An early commentator on the TTP, Richard Simon, called this interpretative approach ‘critical history’ (see Tosel 1997: 158). 32 TTP 7.19. 33 TTP 7.15. 34 TTP 7.17. 35 TTP 17.20; 17.22. 36 TTP 7.7.

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verge of collapse. A teaching to ‘turn the other cheek’ can thus be taken as sound advice to try to restore some form of justice by halting the chaos of unfettered vengeance. Moses, however, was trying to legislate for a well-ordered state where a strong principle of justice was necessary, meaning that the edict to ‘take an eye for an eye’ was deemed to be appropriate. There is no profound mystery here therefore, and only a seeming contradiction, because the historical knowledge surrounding the construction of these texts helps us to understand that they were meant for different people in different circumstances. The letter of the text can thus be stuck to, so to speak, but only by having some grasp of its historical horizon. However, there is also a philological task here, as often only further textual analysis can help. Spinoza offers the example of Moses’ claims that ‘God is fire’ and ‘God is jealous’.37 Taken literally, these statements are easily understood, but they are fairly obscure as long as it is maintained that fire cannot be jealous; philosophically speaking, these statements could be dismissed out of hand as nonsensical. Further textual analysis however reveals that Moses takes God to have no similarity to Earthly things, meaning that the fire reference must be taken metaphorically, and furthermore that fire is often taken to mean anger and jealousy in other passages. Seeing as Moses teaches that God is jealous and does not claim that God lacks emotions or passions, the first two statements can be reconciled, again by sticking to the letter of the text. If contradictions and obscurity remain after such analyses, then this must either be due to the fact that the historical sense is lost or the author is simply insensible, and not because the text holds some kind of profound mystery – and this holds for the bible as well as any other text. To establish the ‘truth of fact’ of the text, on the other hand, it is necessary to subject these meanings and intentions to philosophical scrutiny to see how well they hold up to critical analysis; but in no way should the understanding of meaning be dominated by the question of its truth.38 The bible, Spinoza argues, makes little sense under philosophical analysis as it essentially consists of various attempts to teach

TTP 7.5. As Tosel (1997:157) points out while discussing the relation between meaning and truth in Spinoza, ‘Meaning is not exhausted in the order of the true: the excess of meaning that is at the same time its lack of truth is precisely the paradox of writing’. 38

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very simple things by using vivid imagery to invoke obedience.39 This does not mean, however, that the meanings and intentions of scripture are invalid, merely that they need to be understood in their proper historical frame of reference so the bible cannot be used and abused as having some kind of mystical authority. This being said, while this ‘truth of meaning’ and ‘truth of fact’ reading of Spinoza’s textual strategies is doubtlessly a fairly cogent description, there is something far more interesting going on if the focus is switched to the question of expression. The critical-historical analysis of a text is extremely meritorious and useful, chiefly in combating mysticism and false authority. With a thorough critical and historical analysis of a text, what is previously held as having absolute authority – such as the bible as the word of God – can be properly assessed as having a historical genesis with certain conditions behind its production, which can then be scrutinised. Furthermore, what appear to us as timeless values and ideals can be traced back in history to uncover their contingent development and historical geneses, thus showing that they were produced under certain conditions and are thus potentially damaging in other circumstances – as the examples of ‘taking an eye for an eye’ and ‘turning the other cheek’ suggest. As for the so-called ‘truth of fact’ reading, this does not so much have to do with meaning or intention as with the text’s truth as such. However, Spinoza explicitly states that the question of a text’s truth should be suspended in order to discover the text’s meaning through the critical-historical approach outlined above.40 Spinoza insists that if a text is merely subjected to the level of its philosophical truth, then it can become obscure and worthless, but if the meaning of the text is properly understood, then it can be seen as an expression of a certain act.41 However, subjected to philosophical truth procedures, a text might lose its particular form of expression and merely appear as nonsense. With this one of the core theses of the TTP is arrived at: the bible is not a book of philosophical truth, but one of certain meanings that can be organised into their most universal aspects, which, as stated above, essentially involve the moral invocation of 39 40 41

TTP 13. TTP 7. TTP 7.17.

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obedience.42 A ‘truth of fact’ reading here would obscure this, while the critical-historical reading restores the sense of the text insofar as it is an expression of certain historical affective-imaginations, while at the same time warding off any attempt to endow the bible with any mystical truth. It is largely correct, therefore, that for Spinoza it is the collapsing of the distinction between these two different types of reading that causes problems.43 Nonetheless, the problem with this account is that it is doubtful whether it is ever really possible to discern distinctly between the appropriate approaches to a text – the two examples that Spinoza offers are the bible as requiring the ‘truth of meaning’ approach, and Euclid’s geometry as requiring the ‘truth of fact’ approach;44 but even if this is accepted, there remains a lot of grey area in between these extremes. While the task of tracing out a possible site for the production of the text is an interesting one, whether or not the text is true ‘as such’ is rather problematic. However, this depends, of course, on precisely the function of truth in Spinoza’s philosophy, and as discussed in the opening chapter, on closer inspection it is a rather nuanced one. For Spinoza, truth ‘requires no sign’,45 meaning that we need to avoid confusing the extrinsic signs of thinking (words) with thought itself as a power of expression. This means that the truth of a text does not relate to its accuracy as a form of representation, but to the extent that it bears witness to thinking as an expressive force. A rather cryptic remark that Spinoza made concerning his own philosophy may be useful here. Spinoza once wrote in a letter of correspondence that while his philosophy might not be the best, he knows that he understands the true philosophy.46 This is striking for many reasons, not least for its divergence from the classical Socratic–Platonic position by not equating the best with the true. It thus sounds highly counterintuitive, at least to the philosophical ear, so what could be meant by this? As discussed in the opening chapter, Spinoza shifts the emphasis away from thought as representation, and thus the idea of a sliding

42 43 44 45 46

TTP 13. As Israel notes (2007: xii). TTP 7.17. TIE.36. See Spinoza (2002: 949; OP 4.316, Letter 76, Spinoza to Burgh, 1675).

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scale of accuracy for thought. Whether or not a philosophy is the ‘best’ will not depend on how accurately it represents, but in the particular context it is considered in. Spinoza’s philosophy may very well not be the best, therefore, for in particular circumstances it may lead to undesirable consequences. Nonetheless, Spinoza does seem sure that he understands the true philosophy due to the extent to which it bears witness to thinking as an irreducible form of expression. Spinoza does not need an external measure to gauge the truth of his philosophy, because as discussed in chapter one, we do not know something to be true unless we know that we know it is true.47 Spinoza knows that his philosophy is true through the experience of its intensity – it leads him to beatitudo,48 to the most intense form of joy, namely: amor Dei intellectualis (the intellectual love of God).49 As obscure and admittedly bewildering as Spinoza’s amor is, it seems to involve a form of self-affectivity that is realised in the thought that joy is not dependent upon random encounters (as it is in our immature state), but rather finds expression in the manner in which we can compose ourselves in our encounters via our power of thought.50 In other words, joy becomes independent of the particularities of experience without negating these in favour in some kind of transcendent beyond – it is not the love of God that Spinoza experiences in his philosophy, but the intellectual love of life. The question of the truth of a text thus depends upon the extent to which it bears witness to thought as a form of expression without grounding itself in the signs and images of its composition. Insofar as a text represents a state of affairs, it is interpretable in terms of invoking the affective-imagination of a particular body or bodies (or a socio-historical set of circumstances, if one prefers), but insofar as a text affects the reader as an expression of thought, it opens up new possibilities for thinking quite apart from any particular state of affairs it mentions, thus provoking new thoughts and new ‘texts’, either in the form of written works or other bodies. A written text, 47

E2.P43. E5.P33S. 49 E5.P32. 50 This seems to be the thrust of part five of the Ethics, which involves the disassociation of affects from objects and images (E5.P2), and a reengaging with these in terms of an immanent relationality, characterised in the conjoining thought of Deus sive Natura (E5.P14). 48

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like any other sign-emitting activity (such as speech) is therefore not merely something to be interpreted and understood, but something that affects, and an expressive text not only affects the ways in which particular things are thought about, but thinking as such and thus the entirety of our experience. This is why Spinoza repeatedly reiterates that thinking should not be confused with words, which are signs of the imagination, for it will remain trapped and inexpressive. Language thus heralds the danger of endowing certain signs with a special orienting meaning or as providing an underlying ground of possibility, a danger that Nietzsche calls ‘the seduction of language’. For Spinoza, theologians and prophets (and often philosophers for that matter) work precisely by augmenting the mystifying aspects of signs and orientating meaning around them as if there is something secretly profound in a word, thing, object or place that only a chosen few could truly understand. Spinoza’s critical historical method of interpreting scripture consists, in large part, in demystifying such signs through careful textual practices. When a sign is offered as having some profound meaning, Spinoza interprets it as having a particularly powerful genesis within an affective-imagination,51 and therefore a rigorous examination of the historical context is necessary in order to try to trace out what this sign expresses qua the expression of this affective-imaginative process. However, when a text’s composition bears witness to expressive thinking, then it is irreducible to any particular phenomena that the text may invoke, and thus affects the thinking of the reader in a more radical sense. This means that on the one hand a reading can be undertaken that traces out the site of a text’s production to redeem its genitive sense, while on the other hand a reading of a text can also engender an entire reorientation of thought. The expression of a text thus affects the reader either through the images that it invokes, the evocativeness of its genesis or through the thinking that it provokes, which is a crucial distinction that will be elaborated on below. Furthermore, a text thus affects readers and those to whom its contents are conveyed, meaning that texts, like all else, can nourish or poison. Accordingly, Spinoza seems to have spent a great deal of energy in composing his texts to have

TTP 2.6.

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a provocative affect in terms of structure, style and language.52 This is unsurprising given that Spinoza is committed to the affectivity of the text and to the idea that knowledge and learning is to be gained through finding common, joyful connections, meaning that the deleterious affects of the satirist and the theologian are to be avoided.53 By writing in Latin rather than the vernacular, Spinoza also hoped to avoid causing sadness among the uneducated, who were wilfully kept in ignorance and would thus be likely to find his texts offensive, especially when agitated by theologians.54 There are thus two general questions that Spinoza poses to a text. The first is: what does it mean, or rather, what does the text express insofar as its composition is orientated around certain signs of an affective-imagination? The second is: what is its truth insofar as it bears witness to thinking? The first question involves ‘what’ the text expresses, the second question involves its degree of expression, and if a text should be approached like everything else in nature, this is because every text has an embodiment that characterises it: a text is both an issuing-from (an affective site enmeshed in a historical horizon), and a carrying-forth (an affective traversal across new bodies). In a radical departure from Descartes and much of classical philosophy, textual interpretation thus lies at the heart of philosophy as it enables an understanding of the particular geneses of the concepts, ideals and values that inform and burden the present, and thus to help thinking anew.

52 Both Strauss (1952) and Yovel (1989a) suggest that Spinoza writes in a double style that is both exoteric and esoteric (Strauss 1952: 182–183) or of a ‘Marrano’ style (Yovel 1989a) that consists of double-entendres whose radical sense can be decoded by certain people while escaping the wrath of censorial authorities (Marrano here refers to the Sephardic Jews of Spain and Portugal who practiced their religion through codified means to escape detection). One example Strauss (1952: 194) offers is when Spinoza ‘indicates to the more prudent readers the precarious character of the very basis of all theology’ by leading the reader ‘insensibly toward criticism of the authority of the Bible itself’ by using such words as ‘ancient’ in a venerable sense while slipping occasionally and subtly into a derogatory sense of ‘rude and obsolete’. Strauss (1952: 185) furthermore suggests that Spinoza offers his more radical thoughts in the middle of his works where they are less exposed to superficial readers. Given Spinoza’s reception, however, it seems that he was not Marrano enough. (Nietzsche also discusses the manner in which a writer might appear incomprehensible so as to appeal only to a select audience (FW 381; KSA 3.633)). 53 See E4.P35S. 54 See Spinoza (2002: 882; OP.4.227, Letter 44, Spinoza to Jelles, 17 Feburary 1671).

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One philosopher that Spinoza’s interpretative strategies does resonate with strongly, however, is Nietzsche and his genealogical approach discussed in the previous chapter, for this is precisely the attempt to trace out possible sites of production that provide the phenomena under analysis with their expressive force; but again, this seems to have gone almost entirely unnoticed.55 This is doubtlessly due to the fact that the orientating role of affectivity has been overlooked in both cases, because Spinoza’s interpretative strategies and Nietzsche’s genealogical approach both attempt to trace the body or the affective relations that the text bears witness to. This is also why Nietzsche insists upon the metaphoricity of language as a sign-producing translative act, which is an important contribution that opens up a new way of conducting genealogical analyses after Spinoza’s innovative approach to textual interpretation. 4.1.3 The metaphoricity of language While philosophers since Aristotle have highlighted the important role of metaphor in language use – Aristotle himself stating that ‘the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars’56 – Nietzsche’s extension of metaphor to describe the whole of language (and even perception) marks quite a departure. 57 The oddness of this stance towards language has led to all kinds of readings of Nietzsche’s work because it has to do with the very manner in which his philosophy is presented. If Nietzsche seriously insists that language is metaphorical tout court, as he seems to do, then his philosophy seemingly undermines itself to the extent that it can only be taken as a poeticism rather than offering any real insights (including the insight into the metaphoricity of language). This reading of Nietzsche forms, to a large extent, the so-called

55 One exception is Kofman (1993: 178–179 n.23), who in a note writes that, ‘For this art of reading with philology as its model, it is again Spinoza who provides Nietzsche with a forebear’, due to the fact that, ‘For Spinoza, nature does not signify but it expresses itself’. 56 Aristotle (1924: 1459a; De Poetica 1459a). 57 See Murphy (2001: 23–30) for further discussion of this.

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‘post-modern’ Nietzsche where the radical indeterminacy of language means the death of meta-narratives and of philosophy as such.58 Much depends, however, on what Nietzsche means by metaphoricity. If it concurs with Aristotle’s classic definition, namely that, ‘Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy’,59 then critics of Nietzsche have a point when his generalisation of metaphor is considered as nonsensical to the extent that metaphor can only be meaningful if it can be compared to a literal terminology, and if there is no such thing then metaphor itself is rendered meaningless.60 Nietzsche’s insistence on the metaphoricity of language thus places his philosophy in a very precarious position indeed. However, while metaphor plays an important role throughout his works, the rather cavalier attitude of the unpublished essay that has been made famous by postmodernists and deconstructivists in particular, namely ‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne’, or ‘On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense’,61 is not repeated in any significant manner in his published work.62 Indeed, this essay 58 While commentators such as Cox (1999: 1–2) and Vattimo (1988) find it reasonable to call Nietzsche an instigator of postmodernism for related reasons, Gemes (2001), Jovanovski (2001), Sadler (1995) and Solomon (1990) are all highly critical of such a suggestion. 59 Aristotle (1924: 1457b; De Poetica 1457b). 60 As Clark (1990: 69) puts it, just as when it comes to the meaning of true and false, ‘we deprive ‘metaphor’ of determinate meaning if we deny the possibility of its opposite’. However, as Emden (2005: 65–123), Murphy (2001) and Schrift (1985) note, Nietzsche has a rather nuanced idea of metaphor that generalises it as a basic characteristic of language and perception, as has already been intimated above and will be discussed further below. Furthermore, given Nietzsche’s (JGB 2–3; KSA 5.16–18) suspicion of identity and opposite values, Clark’s critique is also rather dubiously applied here. 61 KSA 1.873. 62 Murphy (2001: xviii–xix) disagrees here and references the preface to MM2 where Nietzsche suggests that unpublished essays such as WL expressed his genuine thinking at the time, rather than his public work (MM2 Pre1; KSA 2.370). While this may be the case, this same passage also suggests that this way of thinking is something that Nietzsche moved on from and overcame, for he remarks that WL was written during a period of writing about Schopenhauer and of deepening that which had been hitherto known as pessimism, a pessimism that he came to criticise Schopenhauer for (FW 370; KSA 3.622), and counterpoise the tragic artist to (GD 9.24; KSA 6.127), who is decidedly not a pessimist.

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contains a rather odd mix of positivism where ‘nerve stimulations’ are considered as being fundamental, while their eventual interpretations are claimed to be inevitable poeticisms that break human understanding off from the rest of the world in a rather absolute fashion, thus sitting uneasily with his later work orientated around the immanence of affectivity. After stating that a word is merely a ‘reproduction of a nerve stimulation in sound’, therefore consisting of two metaphorical transferences from nerve stimulation to image and to sound, Nietzsche goes on to make the following infamous passage that seems to leave philosophy in a very sorry state indeed: What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.63 If language consists of metaphors two stages removed from the initial nerve-stimuli of experience, then philosophy is the mistaking of metaphors for truths after it has forgotten about the metaphoricity of language – philosophy is simply the forgetting of metaphor.64 Some commentators see this as an extremely positive insight that finally uncovers the essentially poetical nature of philosophy,65 but what can really be done with such a statement? What sense can even be made of ‘nerve-stimuli’ when every single word is merely the metaphor of whatever one of these might be? Again, it is important to bear in mind that this essay was never published by Nietzsche, and that such unequivocal passages cannot be found in his published 63

Nietzsche (1979: 84; KSA 1.880). This is Kofman’s (1993) famous reading of Nietzsche, though without the pessimistic overtones that Nietzsche uses here. 65 For example, de Man (1979: 111) comments that this ‘deconstructive’ passage of Nietzsche’s ‘reminds us ... of the figurality of all language’, meaning that philosophy ‘turns out to be an endless reflection on its own destruction at the hands of literature (1974: 48; see also de Man (1975)). 64

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work. Nonetheless, as a thought experiment it has some merit from which Nietzsche’s later philosophy can be said to draw inspiration, as one of the most important points here is the fact that there is no necessary relation between language and the extra-linguistic. This obviously has some striking parallels with the semiotics of de Saussure,66 but for Nietzsche the crucial role is played by affectivity. Whereas the early unpublished essay talks of nerve-stimuli as originary points of reference, thus introducing the danger of a crude and largely nonsensical physiological reductionism where every word is a metaphor of a metaphor of a ‘nerve stimulus’, Nietzsche’s later work dismisses this in favour of discussing language in terms of involving a process of abbreviating the signs of perception (or of the affective-imagination). From this perspective, language can be considered as both metaphorical and literal insofar as it involves a translation (Über-setzung) from the signs of the affective-imagination to the abbreviated signs of language, which in turn alter the affective relations of experience. As odd as this may sound, the key lies in making a distinction between what, following the description of Spinoza’s interpretative strategies above, will henceforth be called a sign’s invocative and evocative aspects; in other words, a sign can both invoke (from the Latin invocare, meaning ‘call upon’) other signs and their associated relations, or evoke (from the Latin evocare, meaning ‘call out’) the affective genesis of its expression. As already noted, it makes little sense to insist that language is essentially metaphorical (in the sense of substituting proper with improper terms) because the literality that provides metaphor with any sense is thereby denied. However, as neither words nor the things they might refer to can be posited as providing a ‘proper’ or positive, non-affective ground, words must therefore be considered as metaphorical to the extent that they only ever involve affective relations, which are transitions rather than ‘things’. A word such as ‘stone’, for example, could be taken as referring to an object to which the word is applied, but this breaks the immanence of affectivity insofar as it posits a non-affective object ‘out there’ that words are directed at or derive directly from. Once this position is rejected, 66 See de Saussure (1995: 68), for example. However, in the final analysis Nietzsche’s semiotics has greater resonance with Peirce, insofar as Peirce allows affectivity to play a far greater role than the rather intellectualist approach of de Saussure.

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then the word ‘stone’ can only be said to refer to a broad set of affective relations which incorporate a host of bodily experiences as well as expressions in terms of narrative structures and analogical uses; as Nietzsche notes, any nameable phenomenon is part of a signchain of ever-new ‘interpretations and adaptations’.67 The word is thus metaphorical to the extent that certain affective relations are ‘carried-over’ or translated into the word ‘stone’. Such a metaphorical transference is reductive of course, because as Nietzsche notes in WL, the word ‘leaf’ refers to countless cases of singular experiences of ‘leaf’,68 but the reality of a non-affective object to which the word refers to cannot be made any real sense of (including Nietzsche’s talk here of a ‘nerve-stimulus’). The word ‘leaf’ invokes affective relations that involve certain relations or vestigia of the imagination, to use a Spinozist term, so that ‘leaf’ is a certain happening and affective transition that is carried-over into the descriptive word, and it is to this extent that Nietzsche considers words to be ‘abbreviations of signs’, that is, as mnemonic signs that recall a linguistically communicable arrangement of vestigial signs.69 However, words are also literal insofar as they are affective and compose themselves with the affective relations of experience. In fact, it is simply difficult to make any real sense of much of language use unless affectivity is taken into account, otherwise why would people talk about the weather so much? Equally importantly, words are also mnemonic, that is, they invoke simplified and communicable forms of affective relations. Words might be metaphorical in the sense that they carry something over from affective experience into a different form of expression (the experience of a sentence involving the word ‘leaf’ is not the experience of an event that involves that which is called a ‘leaf’), but insofar as they invoke other signs and evoke a particular genesis, they are literally affective; that is, words literally do something as much as any other aspect of affectivity. Nietzsche is very aware of this, and his later work does not consider the metaphoricity of language in terms of a transference between a nerve-stimulus, image and word, or in terms of simple word substitution, but of the carrying-over of affective relations into 67 68 69

GM 2.13; KSA 5.314. KSA 1.880. JGB 268; KSA 221 is key here.

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words that are literally affective themselves. The metaphoricity of language thus consists in the carrying-over of affective relations between ‘vestigial’ and ‘mnemonic’ signs, and not merely between linguistic signs that simply replace and stand in for each other ad infinitum.70 While Nietzsche’s early characterisation of philosophy as the forgetting of metaphor still informs his later work, metaphor itself comes to be reconsidered in terms of affectivity rather than in any kind of dualistic model of an unfathomable ‘real’ world and resultant words.71 There is another important aspect of the metaphoricity of language however, because as discussed in chapter two, affective relations are not entirely carried over into words, for there is an excess to any given experience that exceeds such metaphorical transference. This is important in order to avoid following the aforementioned WL by creating an image of language as falsifying experience. The point here is the same as with consciousness, namely that insofar as words are taken to indicate a disembodied perspective of ‘real’ unaffected (unchanging) entities they falsify the body, but to the extent that words form part of our affective relations it makes no sense at all to consider them as falsifying (the affect that is felt from the experience of any given sentence cannot be said to be ‘false’ in comparison to some other kind of ‘true’ affect). Language is always in play in relation to a non-linguistic affectivity, for the excessive nature of the latter cannot be carried over entirely into the former.72 The

70 This seems to come close to Peirce’s semiotics, whose fate at the hands of postmodernism described by Short (2004: 237) seems to resonate strongly with the fate of Nietzsche at the same hands. Short notes that the post-modern reading of Peirce as promoting an idea of unlimited semiosis that depends entirely on conventional codes leads to a ‘relativism and irrealism’ that is ‘utterly opposed to Peirce’s own view’ (see also Shapiro (1998: 315–316)). In a striking parallel to Nietzsche, Short describes Peirce as claiming that a ‘final interpretant will not be a true theory but, rather, an appropriate action or a just appreciation’. 71 The overlooked role of affectivity would thus seem to account to some degree for the divergence in recent Nietzsche commentators between ‘Nietzsche as philosopher’ (including Deleuze, Heidegger, Clark, Schacht and Kaufmann) and ‘Nietzsche as stylist’ (Derrida, Blondel, Kofman, Nehamas and Shapiro, for example) (see Murphy 2001: 13). 72 As Blondel (1991: 36) notes, if Nietzsche’s texts attempt to ‘articulate the body’s saying (dire)’, then they can only do so by transgressing discourse so that the latter’s ‘other and ... origins can show up’ – and metaphor is paradigmatic of this transgressional movement.

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image of the human as being disconnected from the world ‘in-itself’ because of the mediation of consciousness and language is not one that Nietzsche’s philosophy can make sense out of, outside of the fact that perhaps a perverse kind of pleasure is taken in the exercise of such a cruel judgement, for we are supposed to know just enough to know that we cannot ever really know.73 It is also senseless to suggest that the world is a linguistic construction, for not only would this deny that any non-linguistic body has a meaningful (that is, significant) world (which is to deny its affective relationality and render it non-living),74 but also that no experience can exceed the expressivity of language. As already discussed, the plurality of affectivity radically destabilises such a position and suggests that experience is only partially, yet immanently, mediated by mnemonic signs, even if their composition might be the most affective aspect of experience for those with a highly developed consciousness. Thus, while both Spinoza and Nietzsche recognise different orders of signs, with Nietzsche the metaphoricity of the translation between these orders is key. Spinoza’s vestigia of the affective-imagination are, for Nietzsche, perceptual signs, and the importance of treating these signs as affective and only as invocative to a certain interpreting body that relates the sign to a previous experience (and not as such), is maintained by Nietzsche. If this is overlooked, a strange situation emerges of an endless circularity and exchange of words for each other without relating to the non-linguistic traces of perception or the affective-imagination. Vestigia mark affective transitions of experience, but the manner in which this is encountered may be radically indeterminate. A facial expression, for example, may be extremely unnerving and fail to invoke anything insofar as it is nuanced in such a way as to be provocatively singular (a typical example of this might be the facial expression of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa). The event may have little to call upon, but it nonetheless calls out for some kind of response, for it has already affected the relations at play in the situation. A word such as ‘troubled’ might be used to describe

GM 3.12; KSA 5.364. Heidegger’s (1995: 176 & 267) suggestion that animals are ‘poor in world’ (Weltarm) and that they cannot really die but only ‘come to an end’ (because they do not properly exist), is perhaps the most explicit relating of the non-linguistic, non-human body with lack and non-living (which is criticised by Derrida (2008) and Harman (2002: 60)). 74

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this singular experience (an observer might say to somebody, ‘why do you look so troubled?’), but the experience itself cannot be said to invoke, in any simple sense, previous experiences of this particular affect – the singularity of this experience means that it is essentially evocative and thus calls out from a singular affective genesis. On the other hand, insofar as vestigia are invocative, they do recall generalised, communicable signs that recollect simplified affective relations (many people would relate rather straightforwardly to the word ‘troubled’ upon hearing it). Words, therefore, can be considered as invocative insofar as they recall affective relations both in terms of simplified images and, in a less direct manner, other words and signs; if a word fails it is thus because it is misunderstood, and not because it is radically singular. For words to invoke successfully, a suitable degree of consciousness is necessary that can recall the appropriate meanings associated with the signs being used. However, evocation does not depend on words or on consciousness, for the singularity of an affect means it cannot be reduced to some past meaning that can simply be called upon to satisfy the demand that it places upon the present. This results in a rather odd position, however, in that language thereby appears to be the act of recollecting, and only refers the listener or reader to certain mnemonic associations that the words invoke. Descriptions of what is happening or about to happen, or of singular affective experiences, can thus only be articulated in terms that refer to what has been, and to what has commonly been translated from what has been. This problem is linked to the metaphoricity of language of course, for language results precisely from a carrying-over of singular affective relations into general terms that can invoke these in a general form. Insofar as language is reduced to a mnemonic structure that refers to images of generalised affective relations, which is to say, insofar as it is a semiotic system, it evokes little to nothing because it lacks the singularity of affective relations (of the falling of autumn ‘leaves’, of a ‘smile’).75 However, the complexity of their composition means that they must also be considered in terms of the manner in which they call out – through what they evoke. Words as signs or images thus merely call upon and are subsumed within reified images that they

See GD 3.3; KSA 6.76.

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represent, but their composition also calls out from an affective genesis that provide such signs and images with their genitive sense. When it comes to interpreting a text, this approach is somewhat at odds with the axis under which a text is normally considered, namely its meaning or what the signs of the text are supposed to signify. This becomes related to a sign’s mnemonic aspect (the affective relations that are invoked), but there still remains an ‘excess’ of the text’s evocative aspect. A text may therefore be considered as having meaning and significance, which, while not strictly separable, do not collapse onto each other either; but as Spinoza points out, this indeterminate difference between meaning and significance is often erased in favour of the former so that meaning and significance become the same thing. A potential problem that emerges with Spinoza’s insistence upon the vestigial nature of language is, however, that the evocative nature of language in composition is not particularly stressed or given any precedence over other vestigial compositions, for it is thinking and not language itself that traces the geneses of vestigia. While such a position affirms his commitment to the immanence of affectivity, the highly evocative manner in which language is composed seems to warrant more attention than Spinoza is prepared to give it, who generally treats language with suspicion and as a stumbling block for thought. With this suspicion, Spinoza pre-empts Nietzsche, though the latter engages much more with language and on the manner of its composition and evocativeness. Nietzsche seems to be largely in agreement with Spinoza however, which is unsurprising because both must consider all signs as betraying some kind of affective relation. This means that a written or spoken word, or sound, colour, or any other kind of determinable feature, can be invocative if it recalls certain affective relations in an abbreviated, repeatable and communicable form. This is indeed precisely how Nietzsche often describes language, namely as an abbreviation that reduces the complexities of experience into generalised, communicable signs that recollect (invoke) simplified affective relations.76 As already discussed, for Nietzsche language and consciousness go hand in hand and develop with the need to communicate experiences quickly and easily.

JGB 268; KSA 5.221.

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However, this complex transference of affectivity into an abbreviated form means that its metaphoricity gives it a particularly affective and evocative sense – a sense that is all too often lost in the rush to cast a ‘moral’ judgement on the truth of a text, which is why Nietzsche insists upon the need to show ephexis or restraint in interpretation. 4.1.4 Ephexis and the ethics of reading As this chapter has suggested, both Nietzsche and Spinoza raise the importance of textual interpretation and introduce a more rigorous form of philology within philosophical practice. Rather than treating a text as expressing the conscious intentions of an author whose basic experience of the world and the ways in which it makes sense largely cohere to a transcendent and communicable schema of meaning,77 the metaphoricity and evocativeness of the text need to be addressed and the ways in which it expresses various relations between a plurality of perspectives.78 For this an art of philology is required that can read ‘facts’ without falsifying them through ‘interpretation’.79 While this sounds out of place for a philosopher who is famed for claiming that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’, what is often overlooked is the fact that Nietzsche never directly makes this claim in his published works, and only explicitly once in a note that contains a specific critique of positivism that is immediately followed by a critique of the subject and the suggestion that the positing of a subject behind an action, or an interpreter behind an interpretation, is to make the same error as the positivists do when they posit facts.80 This context is important to take note of, because the main point Nietzsche is making here is not that there are no facts, rather that there are no facts in the positivistic sense,

77 As Stegmaier (2006: 31) notes, ‘We do not have to assume a general reason, a transcendental consciousness and general meanings of signs. On the contrary: with the rejection of these assumptions, we can more easily make sense of individuals orientating themselves both as individuals and in common’. 78 As Blondel (1991: 33) remarks, for Nietzsche there is a strict link between philology and genealogy, for a dogmatic reading is one that is non-genealogical and ‘scorns the depths of drives’ that are invested in any cultural phenomenon, which is aided by the effacement of the genealogy of words and text by language itself. 79 AC 52; KSA 6.232; see also KSA 13.460. 80 KSA 12.315.

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that is, a ‘facticity’ that reveals or provides a fundamental ground.81 In this note on positivism, Nietzsche goes on to suggest that there are certain drives that interpret the world and produce perceptions and facts as ‘foreground-estimates’. These facts and perceptions are ‘real’ in that they have a genuine affective pull, but they also make little to no sense abstracted from the affective movement (or bodies) that they relate to. This is why when it comes to the relationship between facts and interpretation, the phrasing that Nietzsche utilises in his published work is, ‘There are absolutely no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of the phenomena...’.82 In other words, any particular phenomenon has no particular status abstracted from an affective relation, but insofar as it relates to a particular will or drive it does have a value or status as not merely ‘something’, but as something significant. Indeed, there are no positive phenomena at all outside of an affective relation that interprets it as something significant from a particular perspective. The mistake of a moral interpretation, or of a falsification of a ‘fact’ through interpretation (which amount to the same thing), is that a particular phenomenon or piece of text is examined in abstraction and thus emptied of its affective genesis, and then judged within a schema of meaning and value that is supposed to apply to all phenomena. Falsification of a fact is thus achieved by abstracting a phenomenon from its affective genesis and thus interpreting it morally, which is why the quote above about falsifying facts through interpretation is aimed at theologians in particular (though is equally applicable to philosophers too, hence the Socratic dwarf’s inability to follow Zarathustra into the moment without negating and judging it according to an ideal scheme). To avoid this moral interpretation, Nietzsche suggests that what is needed first and foremost is ephexis in interpretation, whether it is a matter of books or weather conditions (thus mirroring Spinoza’s claim above that a text is to be interpreted just like anything else in nature).83 Ephexis is Greek and means to check, pause or stop, and this is a matter of retaining a manner of ‘care’, ‘patience’ and ‘refinement’ in the ‘desire to understand’, which echoes Spinoza’s

81 Elsewhere Nietzsche once again notes the affectivity invested in the desire to make reality ‘real’ in an absolute sense (FW 57; KSA 3.421). 82 Nietzsche (2001b: 64; JGB 108; KSA 5.92). See also KSA 10.98 and 12.147. 83 AC 52; KSA 6.233.

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imperative to try to come to terms with the meaning of a text before considering its truth. Another translation of ephexis would be to refrain, and this is an invaluable attitude that must be adopted during the interpretation of a text if the pathos is to be drawn out. Ephexis is largely missing from modern philosophy (and in modernity in general) according to Nietzsche however, and this is not surprising given the dominant grounding role handed to consciousness. The Cartesian attitude discussed in chapter one and at the start of this chapter is paradigmatic here, for to refrain in a Cartesian manner is to block out everything that interferes with consciousness as much as possible and withdraw within oneself to find the conditions in which the world is properly represented, thus providing a method with which to analyse everything and anything that might be represented within consciousness. From here, everything can in principle be known because the conditions of knowledge are immanent to the thinking subject, and all one needs is a right method. Ephexis in interpretation, which is a hesitation that does not presume in advance that whatever is to be interpreted can even be understood, is thus a rarity in a modernity that celebrates its subjectivity and ‘objectivity’.84 Nietzsche suggests that an interpreting eye must become accustomed to ‘repose’, ‘patience’, ‘letting things come to it’, ‘withholding judgement’ and ‘perusing and encircling the individual case from all sides’. This is not to suppose some kind of neutral perspective with which to interpret a text or state of affairs, because Nietzsche follows this up by stating that this requires a ‘hostile repose’ of being slow, suspicious and resistant in order to let the new and the alien approach.85 Through exercising caution and suspicion rather than quickly imposing an interpretation on a text, a text can be allowed to affect the reader and place a demand that cannot be presumed in advanced. As Nietzsche acerbically notes, to read in this way, one need almost be a cow than a modern reader,

GD 8.6; KSA 6.108–109. Ricœur (1970: 32–33) astutely notes this when he calls Nietzsche, along with Freud and Marx, masters of suspicion, where ‘to seek meaning is no longer to spell out the consciousness of meaning, but to decipher its expressions’. This is a sentiment echoed by Foucault (2000: 272), who notes that Nietzsche, Marx and Freud have not multiplied signs and given new meaning to that which had none, but have ‘changed the nature of the sign and modified the fashion in which the sign in general can be interpreted’. 85

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for it requires ‘rumination’.86 Nietzsche thus has Zarathustra shake his head despondently at a disciple precisely for not ruminating or exercising any ephexis in interpretation after telling him his dream.87 The disciple immediately interpreted the dream in terms of symbolic gestures that represented the life of Zarathustra, thus providing a moralistic interpretation that destroyed the evocativeness of the dream in his haste to understand it, and thus the thinking that it may have provoked. The same danger exists when reading a text, for if it is presumed to be even principally understandable in advance, then what is new or strange may never be allowed to approach. The philosophical attitude of interpretation thus involves a different approach to a text than a more ‘scientific’ reading would suggest where a text is treated as a recording of information that needs a correct method to expose. A philosophical reading rather involves an initial withholding from imposing an interpretation on a text so that it might be allowed to evoke a unique carrying-over of transience and the singular manner in which it calls-out to the present. However, it may be interjected here that Nietzsche’s will-to-power contradicts this insistence on showing restraint and not forcing an interpretation onto a text. This would indeed be the case if willto-power were conceived as a grounding principle that explains phenomena, rather than as a metaphor. As mentioned in chapter three, Nietzsche’s articulations of the will-to-power sometimes allow a reading of the former kind, though only after it has already been established that the will-to-power should be understood in the metaphorical sense. With this in mind, it is perfectly possible to speak about will-to-power as such (as a translative process), and particular wills-to-power (the translative processes of certain philosophers, for example). Will-to-power does not judge a text however, nor does it impose an interpretation upon it; rather, it provides a name and a sense for the translative processes that the text bears witness to (its singular appropriations and translations of inherited terms). Considering the translative process of values, ideals and concepts in terms of will-to-power thus provides a non-judgemental form of evaluation. Will-to-power thus corresponds with a general Spinozist and Nietzschean demand for an ethics of reading that withholds 86 87

GM Pre.8; KSA 5.255. ASZ 2.19; KSA 4.176.

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from casting judgement and thus refrains from imposing a moral interpretation. This is not an easy task by any means given that, as discussed in chapter two, language is inherently moralistic in the manner in which consciousness ‘grammaticises’ experience into ‘literal’ identities that can be made responsible for the actions and affects that it encounters, thus erasing itself as a perspective and form of translation: Language ... sees doers and deeds all over: it believes that will has causal efficacy: it believes in the ‘I’, in the I as being, in the I as substance, and it projects this belief in the I-substance onto all things – this is how it creates the concept of ‘thing’ in the first place.88 Hence Nietzsche’s fear: ‘I am afraid that we have not got rid of God because we still have faith in grammar ... .’89 4.1.5

God is in the grammar

In order to achieve the ethics of reading that both Spinoza and Nietzsche set out, it is thus necessary to look beyond the grammatical structures towards the affective genesis of their production, for grammatical structures reinforce a particular way of translating activity where every action is tied to an agent of some kind (even in the event of rain we say ‘it is raining’). In a pertinent note, Nietzsche points out the seductive habit of taking ‘memory-signs’ such as ‘I’ that relate to a particular perspective of what is seen as being the cause of seeing as such.90 This concern is precisely that of Spinoza’s too, for it is in the continual reproduction and imposition of transcendent images upon our affective relations (such as ‘I’) that leads to the fatal confusion of words, images and ideas. The main problem here is the imposition of an image behind affective relations when it is said, for example, that ‘I am walking’.91 Behind the activity of walking and the relations 88

Nietzsche (2005: 169; GD 3.5; KSA 6.77). Nietzsche (2005: 170; GD 3.5; KSA 6.78). 90 KSA 12.162. 91 Agamben (1999: 234–235) points out that Spinoza utilises his native language of Ladino (an archaic Spanish spoken by Sephardim at the time of their expulsion) to explain the meaning of the reflexive active verb as an expression of an immanent cause, that is, where agent and patient are one and the same. The verb Spinoza uses 89

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that this involves, something is posited that is other or indifferent to the activity itself – ‘I’ am walking, but ‘I’ could be doing something else right now. For Spinoza and for Nietzsche, such sentences are potentially dysphoric because they claim some kind of unaffected being engaging in one particular activity when it could just as easily be engaged in another (thus producing a moral image of culpability due to an apparent freedom to have done otherwise). An alternative description might be that ‘whilst walking, other activities are being invoked that might or could be done’, which articulates an experience of walking while certain ideas and images are immanently produced, rather than abstracting a subject from the activity and claiming that in another world it could either be walking or doing something else, as if the activity has a secondary, predicative nature. For as long as there is affectivity (that is, the feeling of transience), then there is transition and hence a transcendent entity behind activity can only be imagined (in Spinoza’s sense, as an image that subsumes the vestigia of the imagination), which is not to say that such images are not extremely affective. Nietzsche’s critique of grammar is thus that it reinforces a perspective that relates in terms of transcendence in transience, where instead of words bearing witness to a ‘going over’ or ‘passing away’, they produce an image of something that ‘climbs beyond’ the transitory.92 This is where the importance of the metaphoricity of language comes more prominently into play, for language is precisely that which bears witness to a ‘carrying over’ of certain transient, affective relations into relatively (and temporarily) stable signs. As such signs or vestigia, they do not essentially differ from the horse tracks in the sand that Spinoza compares them with, because both bear witness to transient, affective relations. As long as the metaphoricity of vestigia in general, and language in particular, is forgotten or ignored, then they are reduced to invocative semiotic systems that re-present something beyond them, namely images of transcendence under which they are subsumed. The fate of language is particularly is pasearse, which roughly means ‘to-walk-oneself’, where the action and the agent are indistinguishable. As Agamben (1999: 235) notes, this is highly paradigmatic of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence, where Being is pasearse. 92 These are the etymological roots of transience (from the Latin ‘trans’ meaning ‘across’, ‘over’ or ‘beyond’ and ‘ire’ ‘to go’) and transcendence (from the Latin ‘trans’ meaning ‘across’, ‘over’ or ‘beyond’ and ‘scandere’ ‘to climb’).

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compelling here due to its metaphoricity withholding an immense evocativeness – though in composition and not as a referential system of words.93 A trace in the sand might be evocative in its singularity, its particular form, shape, depth, length and so on, especially if such a trace has not been witnessed before, but insofar as it is recognised as a horse track, then it seems reasonable to suggest that it has a purely invocative function that would lead a farmer to the image of a plough upon seeing one. It also seems reasonable to suggest that the word pomum would lead a Roman to the image of an apple upon hearing it, since this also has an invocative function. Nonetheless, it must also be admitted – as Spinoza does – that vestigia are always experienced in multiplicities that are extremely complex,94 and it is this complexity and relationality that is evocative, as can be witnessed in works of art and in certain experiences. To put it curtly, evocativeness increases in singular compositions where no image of transcendence can even be felt as subsuming the relations involved; there is no representation here but a ‘calling out’ or pure possibility that demands a response. There are certainly works of art that do this, but it is only by disregarding the vestigial nature and metaphoricity of language that written texts are supposed to be merely invocative and representative where metaphor and ‘style’ are considered mere adornments obscuring a particular meaning, or perhaps even hiding the fact that it is not meaningful at all.95 The main hindrance to the evocativeness of language is thus its representative function where it is taken as re-presenting or making present something that is absent: aliquid pro stat aliquo, as the motto for semiotics has it.96 While it would be absurd to deny that this is

93 As Lingis (2005: 69) remarks, although Nietzsche ‘does declare that all words of self-consciousness are but herd signals, contrived for utility and communicability’, he ‘also says that the recent exorbitant development of the language of self-consciousness awaits artists who will use this language not to register the truth of the impulses ... but rather to consecrate, intensify, glorify, and consume them’. 94 See E2.Post1; E2.P15 and E3.P51. 95 As Ricœur (2003: 51–52) notes, the strictly rhetorical theory of metaphor as the substitution of improper for proper terms considers metaphor to have a purely ornamental function, and thus obscures metaphor’s creative, metamorphosing role that Ricœur (1973) even suggests births new ways of relating to the world; see also Derrida (1982: 207–273) and Murphy (2001: 144–145). 96 As the semiotician Eco (1993: 17) puts it, ‘what happens in Mind, whatever it can be, even a dance of little gnomes, stands for something else. This (aliquid stat pro

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an essential aspect of language, it would also be fatal to its expressive force if this was all it was taken to be as it would render it a lifeless formal system of signs.97 Following Spinoza, all the vestigia of the affective-imagination could be considered as aliquid pro stat aliquo, namely as traces that bear witness to affective relations, although linguistic signs have a relatively more stable and sophisticated system of reference. By the same token, the evocativeness of vestigia in eluding subsumption should also not be denied language, especially in its various forms of composition where it can no longer be reduced to the meanings of its terms or a transcending image. However, insofar as language is a system of communication, it only fails if it does not adequately invoke. This is most evident in oral dialogue, where any given utterance is essentially taken as presenting something to the mind of the interlocutor.98 If there is any confusion or doubt here, the speaker can be questioned and asked to rearticulate the utterance so the proper image of whatever is being made present can emerge. This is precisely why there is a long suspicion of the written word in philosophy from Socrates to Descartes and beyond: text cannot be entered into dialogue with.99 A text just stands there, mute and unresponsive, and the intended meaning – what the words are supposed to re-present to the mind – cannot be uncovered through a dialogical process. As it has been famously noted, this is paradigmatic of a ‘phonocentrism’ of Western discourse where written texts have been reduced to having a secondary, substitutive status.100 However, the ‘silence’ of the text is not necessarily a disadvantage, because the impossibility of asking for a reformulation means that it is perhaps easier to avoid treating its composition as substituting an image under which it is to be subsumed – readers have to provide the composition with its genitive sense. In this way,

aliquo) is the definition of the sign, or of the semiotic process, since the ancient times. Thus Mind is a semiotic business’. 97 See GD 3.3; KSA 6.76. 98 Again, Aristotle (1987: 12; De Interpretatione 16a) sets the scene here when he writes that spoken sounds are symbols of mental experiences or affections of the soul, and written words are symbols of spoken sounds. 99 See Plato: (1961: 520–525; Phaedrus 274e-279c), Derrida’s (1981) extended analysis of this dialogue, and Blondel (1991: 93). 100 See Derrida (1997). Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 205) suggest that ‘the subordination of graphism to the voice induces a fictitious voice from on high which, inversely, no longer expresses itself except through the writing signs that it emits (revelation)’.

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the evocativeness of language composition is perhaps more potent in the written word than the spoken, insofar as the presence of the speaker heralds the danger of the enunciation being taken solely as representing a particular meaning that is trying to be expressed. With this the metaphoricity of language is obscured by metonymy, that is, the singular transference of affective relations is ignored in favour of language reproducing an image that different words might be more apt for. It would be pointless, however, to merely invert the Platonic/ Cartesian image of speech and writing and favour the latter over the former, for both the written and the spoken word are potentially just as invocative and evocative. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the prejudice of language as making something absent present is potentially exacerbated by the presence of the speaker. The potential complexities of the composition of language means that its evocativeness is perhaps second only to music (at least Nietzsche would seem to think so), although insofar as it involves ‘the infinite use of finite means’,101 language expresses a musicality of its own in terms of a limitless compositional potential that exceeds the finitude of the terms it utilises, and this compositional potential is precisely where its evocativeness lies.102 However, perhaps the most limiting factor to language’s composition and thus to its evocativeness is grammar, insofar as this involves a strict organisation of its elements into a determinate form that is orientated around the subject–predicate structure (at least in Indo-European languages). Such a structure utilises words to re-present or make present that which is absent, namely the image of states of affairs conjoined to beings. This holds regardless of whether or not this is couched in terms of substance or of subject, which for Nietzsche imply each other precisely because they both posit a transcending image that arrests transience where affective relations are immanent ‘to’ someone or something.103 In a sense, grammar enables language to be ‘scientific’ to the extent that it renders it a mnemonic system where the structuring 101

This is Humboldt’s famous remark (in Chomsky 2000: 6). Highlighting the importance of this for Nietzsche, Fink (2003: 5) notes that he is a ‘master of composition’, while each book has ‘its own unmistakable individual sound’. This is not merely a happy coincidence for Nietzsche however, but a necessary condition for writing philosophy. 103 KSA 12.465. 102

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of words invokes particular phenomena in particular relations, and if an utterance fails in its invocation then it can be merely reworded and/or structured so that the same phenomena can be recalled in a different way. Hence Nietzsche’s remark that it is unsurprising that Indo-European philosophies share similar concepts, given that they share a basically common structure of grammar that reduces thinking from the act of ‘discovery’ to mere ‘recognition’ and ‘remembering’ according to this structure.104 Care needs to be taken here not to identify this criticism with a general criticism of grammar however, for it is rather the subject–predicate system of grammar that Nietzsche points out as being reductive in a potentially dysphoric manner (a bad translation or ‘carrying-over’ of affective relations). For signs to have any sense, some form of coherent relationality must be produced, and if this is to be called grammar then all well and good. Nietzsche highlights however that our particular linguistic subject– predicate system of grammar is symptomatic of a moralised body where the perspective of consciousness dominates as a unity even though it is only a bodily fragment, while it is the multiplicity of the body itself that ‘grammaticises’ signs of the affective imagination and is productive of sense.105 The affective power of language will thus differ depending upon the level of consciousness involved, the invocative use of signs and the evocativeness of composition, and if this provokes a significant change in any affective relation then this cannot be considered as anything other than ‘real’.106 Language can thus be considered as involving the metaphorical transference (or translation) of the complex vestigial signs of experience into invocative signs that recall simplified arrangements of the former, while at the same time ‘literal’ insofar as it intervenes and reorganises the affective relations of experience via its evocative composition.

104

JGB 20; KSA 5.34. As Blondel (1991: 206) notes, ‘Prior to the body, there is no order or relation or text, and the world is the greatest possible multiplicity. A text comes into existence only through (or for) drives, which reduce this “absolute” multiplicity. But this reduction is not, like that of the intellect, the introduction of unity: if the body interprets, it does so as affects’. Klossowski (1997: 29) also notes that for Nietzsche the body coheres with itself, but this cohesion is achieved through numerous deaths and rebirths as impulsive movements of the affects form and deform it. 106 As Ricœur (1973: 111) puts it, poetic language ‘may change our way of looking at things, a change which is no less real than empirical knowledge’. 105

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A typology is worked with in translation theory that may help to produce a better sense of this in its distinction between three types of text, namely informative, expressive and vocative.107 Informative texts aim at giving information to the reader and ‘contain mainly theme words and factual language with conventional metaphors and sayings’, expressive texts provide insights for the reader into the thinking and the style of the author and are characterised by ‘leitmotivs and figurative language and may be in the first person’, while vocative texts focus on the readers and attempt to persuade them to action and ‘often include token words and its language is compelling and may include original metaphors’.108 Interestingly enough, figurativeness and metaphoricity feature in all three kinds of text that are operated with here, and these in turn are distinguished insofar as their focus is orientated towards the writer (expressive), the reader (vocative) or the textual object itself (informative). This typology is thus not concerned with the truth value or the literality of the text (such as whether texts are fictional or otherwise), because figurative prose features across the board. Rather, texts are treated in a symptomological fashion insofar as they betray something of the writer, something demanded of the reader, or some state of affairs concerning both. In all three cases, texts are considered as doing something; that is, conveying, demanding or informing. This typology has some clear resonances with the above discussion insofar as text is both betraying and doing something. However, once this ‘something’ is considered in terms of affectivity, then this typology needs to be considered as three aspects of text rather than as describing three different types of text that refer to different objects. ‘Vocative’ does not describe a kind of text but is the modality of text insofar as it is always a potential calling – a vestigial semiotics that invokes (calls upon) past or constituted affective relations and a composition that evokes or calls out from an affective genesis that demands a response. In other words, a text’s expression awaits the ethical interpretation or ‘redemption’ that its composition evokes, which, following Spinoza and Nietzsche, is precisely the task of philosophy.

107 108

See Roberts (1995). Roberts (1995: 72).

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Provoking the future

4.2.1 Ethics and redemption As this book has attempted to show, the philosophies of Spinoza and Nietzsche are both committed to orientating thought around the immanence of affectivity. Furthermore, they reinforce each other and produce a powerful combination with Spinoza’s careful and considered process of reinterpreting the nature and status of our thoughts and ideas, and Nietzsche’s insistence on reengaging with the perspectival nature of experience. However, care must be taken not to merely assume that Spinoza and Nietzsche offer a way into a certain field of philosophy or area of specialisation. Strictly speaking, a label such as ‘philosophy of affectivity’ would be misleading as there could be no real way of understanding the preposition ‘of’. Affectivity is not an object of study in any straightforward sense; affectivity can be named and described in different terms, but doing this is a way of altering the manner in which we affect and are affected, and not a way of learning how to control or avoid affectivity from an insulated and unaffected viewpoint. Knowledge, therefore, cannot be an end in itself or even the purpose of philosophy, even if it remains as its core. Here we arrive at the crux of philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche: philosophy is given a complete reorientation in terms of its purpose and practice, which is, following Nietzsche’s own characterisation of his affiliation with Spinoza, to make knowledge the most powerful affect. A certain relation to knowledge has always lain at the heart of philosophy, of course, with its very name stemming from the love (philo) of knowledge (sophia). However, as the etymology shows, it is precisely the relationship to knowledge that is crucial and not knowledge in and of itself. The classical relationship is, as Nietzsche points out, an ascetic one where the love of knowledge is expressed in terms of dedicating or even sacrificing one’s life and earthly existence to the pursuit of the desired object, and in this sense it has been, and perhaps largely remains, deeply theological.109 This finds its ultimate expression in the Socratic dictum ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’.110 The ascetic ideal thus lies at the heart of this classical 109 110

See GM 3.25; KSA 5.402, for example. Plato (1961: 23; Apology 38a).

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image of philosophy where the value of life is grounded in the spiritual pursuit of virtue and the ‘good’ via the acquisition of knowledge, thus the ‘bizarre formulation’ of Socratic philosophy: ‘reason = virtue = happiness’.111 The idea that if we know what good and evil are then we can act in accordance with virtue and thus attain happiness paints a rather ‘bizarre’ picture for Nietzsche, because it makes joy and affirmation dependent upon knowledge. Nietzsche is Spinoza’s heir on precisely this point, because for Spinoza it is only possible to gain knowledge through joy. However, it is clear for Nietzsche that the Socratic image of ‘Platonism’ has come to dominate Western thought (echoing the famous phrase that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato), particularly in the guise of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which in the end is Plato for the masses.112 The alternative approach outlined by Spinoza and Nietzsche conceives of philosophy as a creative enterprise that augments and intensifies the joy that is always already experienced in transient experience, rather than as a normative practice that searches for happiness through the knowledge of what ‘is’. Thus, perhaps the biggest challenge for philosophy is to break away from its theological pretensions and moralisation of life. Philosophy should have nothing to do with pronouncing what is good, evil, right or wrong once they are understood as affirmations that bear witness to certain affective geneses. As Spinoza puts it, ‘As far as good and evil are concerned, they are nothing positive in things, considered in themselves, nor are they anything other than modes of thinking, or notions we form because we compare things to one another’.113 The notion of sin, for example, occurs when we compare two things with each other from different points of view.114 Thus, we call Peter bad if he fails to conform to our idea of ‘Man’, whereas the only idea that Peter really conforms to is the idea of Peter. Good, evil and sin are thus 111

GD 2.4; KSA 6.69. JGB Pre; KSA 5.12. It is Whitehead (1978: 39) who remarks that philosophy is ‘footnotes to Plato’; however, he continues that this is not through a ‘schematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings’, but ‘through the wealth of general ideas scattered through them’. Whitehead thus points to the evocativeness of Plato’s texts as providing inspiration for philosophical practice, something that is invariably overlooked when the cliché of ‘philosophy as footnotes to Plato’ is often invoked. 113 Spinoza (1994: 199; E4.Pre). 114 ST 1:6. 112

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‘only modes of thought’.115 However, these modes of thought have an affective genesis and are not merely analysable as ideal objects. As discussed in chapter one, for Spinoza something is called ‘good’ because it is desired – it is not desired because it is ‘good’,116 meaning that ‘each one, from his own affect, judges or evaluates, what is good and what is bad, what is better and what is worse, and finally, what is best and what is worst’.117 What is good and bad is thus expressed immanently in our thoughts and activities, and is not something that is ascertained though the accumulation of knowledge. Indeed, ‘Knowledge of good and evil ... is itself an affect of joy and sadness’.118 Knowledge has an affective genesis and whatever it affirms bears witness to this, and not to what is ‘good’ as such. This also means that virtue, another pillar of classical philosophy, also has an affective genesis and is linked directly by Spinoza to conatus: Virtue is human power itself, which is defined by man’s essence alone ... that is ... solely by the striving by which man strives to persevere in his being. So the more each one strives, and is able, to preserve his being, the more he is endowed with virtue.119 A virtuous life is one that is acted out in accordance with its ‘essence’; that is, a life that affirms whatever is held to be good and increases its power to affect and be affected. Thus, anyone who sees clearly that ‘he would in fact enjoy a more perfect and better life or essence by engaging in villainy ... would be a fool if he did not do just that’.120 The priest or theologian might condemn this and tell people what they ought to do, but this can only be an attempt to force people to conform to a particular image of reality that may in fact be deleterious. This does not mean, however, that we have to accept a crude relativism where all value judgements are deemed to be of equal worth. Such judgements can be genuinely dysphoric and bad for the bodies they interact with, but defeating them requires more than mere negation: it requires the intervention of a more potent idea that 115 116 117 118 119 120

Spinoza (2002: 56; ST 1:6). E3.P9S. Spinoza (1994: 175; E3.P39S). Spinoza (1994: 210; E4.P19D). Spinoza (1994: 210; E4.P20D). Spinoza (2002: 834; Letter 23 to Willem van Blyenbergh).

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can allow for the dominance and repetition of joy – it requires, as the title of Spinoza’s masterwork indicates, ethics. Perhaps here, however, an important point of diffraction occurs between Spinoza and Nietzsche. As discussed in the opening chapter, for Spinoza common notions are key to this ethics as they express an understanding of the commonalities between either all bodies or between particular bodies and are thus potentially available to all thinkers.121 Rationality itself thus refers to a becoming-active of thought that understands commonalities and genesis so the thinker can actively compose the affective relations of experience – and the more commonalities discovered and reinforced, the greater the joy experienced across a community of bodies. For Nietzsche, however, the thinking of such commonalities already betrays a metaphorical transference where the singularities of experience are reduced and generalised, for the rendering common of bodies, experiences and meanings can only be the product of a long process of homogenisation that already betrays a recoiling from suffering and a need for survival.122 Nietzsche suggests that groups of human beings who share many similarities have always had an advantage over the more selective, refined, strange and those who are difficult to understand.123 Spinoza does not disagree here, for the more commonalities that are discovered and the more common one becomes in relation to others, the greater the advantages enjoyed and the more joyful relations entered into.124 What often obscures these commonalities is not that people have different and conflicting ideas, but that the ambiguity of language causes unnecessary misunderstandings, for when people contradict each other most vehemently this is either due to them having the same thoughts but using different words, or thinking of different things altogether so they mistakenly think each other to be in error or absurd – the problem here is thus a misapplication of names.125 For Nietzsche, however, it is the very act of naming and of changing the senses of terms that is important, because this betrays a translative process that breaks with the past

121 122 123 124 125

E2.P37–39. See Deleuze (1988: 54) for a further discussion of this. JGB 268; KSA 5.221. JGB 268; KSA 5.221). See E4.P35. E2.P47S.

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and gestures to a future. To create new names is thus to create new ‘things’,126 for such translations can rebirth the genitive sense of that which is inherited. Simply put, for Nietzsche naming is a noble art whose mastering of that which it inherits betrays a euphoric affective relationality,127 while for Spinoza it is the ambiguity of names that obscures the commonalities that all bodies share, and more importantly that human bodies potentially share, and even more importantly that certain human bodies can potentially share in friendship – if this is identified, then the path is open to an active and ‘democratic’ organisation of affective relations. This difference is not only a technical issue, therefore, because it affects their conceptions of philosophy and how it can serve transient existence. Spinoza and Nietzsche have a shared orientation insofar as they both affirm the impossibility of arresting transience, meaning that all relatively stable relations (bodies) encountered are perpetually threatened by a bad carrying-over (sadness or dysphoria), which is a particular problem for a conscious body that perceives through the codes of the past and which carries the knowledge of the inevitable demise of such codes. Furthermore, as consciousness translates experience in terms of the past (language), the present seems continually burdened by its values, ideals and demands. Nonetheless, they differ when it comes to the question of how to redeem this situation. As mentioned above, for Spinoza such redemption arises through the formation of common notions that can connect the commonalities of bodies and ideas and understand their geneses, thus displacing the force of the dysphoric images of the affective-imagination (including guilt, responsibility, sin and so on) through a reorganisation and reconnecting of adequate ideas. For Nietzsche, this redemptive process is a metaphorical one that arises via non-sequitur translative processes – it is not common notions or adequate ideas that are important here, but ‘interpretation’ in the sense of ‘adaptation’ (Zurechtmachung) and ‘transformation’

126

FW58; KSA 3.422. GM 1.2; KSA 5.260. See also Nietzsche’s discussion of the Romans’ ability to conquer by translating their inheritance in their own terms (FW 83; KSA 3.438). For further discussion of the ‘noble’ art of naming in Nietzsche, see Strong (1988: 194) and Vivian (2007). 127

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(Verwandlung).128 Discovering commonalities is thus eschewed by Nietzsche in favour of finding the assimilable.129 From this perspective, the understanding of commonalities is in fact an appropriative interpretation that renders common, rather than discovering it, and is perhaps the least redemptive seeing as it largely relies on what has already been made common and is thus anchored to the past. There is thus a link in Spinoza between reason and active joy that is alien to Nietzsche, who even suggests that those who can compose in the ‘grand style’ might have to lack knowledge so they are able not to see what is common and can thus ‘inappropriately’ transpose and compose between different forms of expression;130 for in the end what is common has, according to Nietzsche, little value, while the whole idea of a common good is a contradiction in terms.131 Spinoza’s common notions do not comprehend reality sub specie aeternitatis according to Nietzsche, but sub specie Spinozae;132 they bear witness to Spinoza’s curiously joyful ‘logic’.133 Ultimately, while Spinoza and Nietzsche both refrain within the immanence of affectivity and begin and end thinking in joy, for Nietzsche joy involves the euphoric appropriation of the phenomena of experience and not discovering commonalities. Spinoza poses a problem for Nietzsche however, for if Spinoza’s idea of common notions and of discovering common connections is rejected completely, then the danger emerges of a return to the unsustainable pessimism of WL and the claim that we are forever cut off from each other and the world through arbitrary metaphorical processes. However, this is only really a danger if metaphor is taken here in the traditional sense of exchanging improper for proper terms (or words for ‘nerve-stimulations’), for once the whole idea of proper terms (or a positive ground) is rejected, then any phenomenon will alwaysalready be ‘something-for’ a perspective of an affective relation. 128 Murphy (2001: 62) notes that the close link between metaphor as transference and interpretation needs to be borne in mind to understand precisely what Nietzsche means by interpretation. 129 See FW 118; KSA 3.476 for example, where he discusses the joy in transforming something into a function of oneself, and FW 228; KSA 3.511 for his criticism of trying to mediate between two thinkers. 130 JGB 253; KSA 5.197. 131 JGB 43; KSA 5.60. 132 AC 17, KSA 6.184. 133 See KSA 12.214. For a further discussion of this, see Nabais (2006: 151).

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The joy or euphoria of such a relation is absolutely real and cannot be grounded in any unaffected being for either Spinoza or Nietzsche, and although Spinoza’s rational search for commonalities should be a sign of suffering for Nietzsche, it is resolutely amoral and affirmative, meaning that Spinoza actually poses a problem for Nietzsche’s genealogy. Nietzsche thus has to find some kind of element in Spinoza that bears witness to sadness or dysphoria, and he thinks he discovers this in the idea of ‘perseverance’ in the heart of Spinoza’s philosophy – his conatus. Attacking Spinoza’s conatus is a strange thing to do, however, as it uncannily pre-empts Nietzsche’s will-to-power. Indeed, at a first glance there seems to be very little difference between these two concepts at all. To begin with, Spinoza’s conatus is equated with power – ‘potentia sive conatus’ – and not something that expresses power.134 Indeed, this power is nothing other than the very essence of any ‘thing’. Whatever might be said of what something ‘is’, it is only ever known, felt or experienced as the very ways in which it affects or is affected, that is, as a relatively stable yet mutating set of affective relations. No act can be said to deviate from an essence or from a ‘correct’ or ‘true’ path, because there is no essence or path outside of the activity itself, meaning that Spinoza’s conatus is ‘beyond good and evil’ and seemingly synonymous with Nietzsche’s will-to-power. Oddly enough, however, of all the aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy that would be easy to criticise from a Nietzschean perspective, such as his geometric method and metaphysics of substance, attributes and modes (which Nietzsche simply puts down to the fact that they were writing in different eras), it is the concept of conatus, the one aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy that seems so obviously Nietzschean, that Nietzsche’s most considered criticism of Spinoza focuses on. While Nietzsche praises Spinoza for freeing much of thinking from teleology and moving the world beyond good and evil,135 he still sees a residual form of teleology active in the concept of conatus in the formula ‘strive to persevere in being’ as it promotes perseverance as a general goal and principle for existence.136 Nietzsche thus tends to 134 135 136

E3.P7D. GM 2.15; KSA 5.320. JGB 13; KSA 5.27.

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associate him with a kind of crude Darwinism137 that explains life in terms of a ‘struggle for survival’ and ‘survival of the fittest’, principles that Nietzsche is dismissive of.138 Indeed, these principles can be seen as another version of the ascetic ideal that negate multiplicity, transience and affectivity in favour of a universal law, thus providing a meaning to make suffering sufferable. However, Nietzsche’s willto-power articulates the manner in which the ascetic ideal translates its suffering and places a demand upon experience, thus witnessing a redeemable feeling of power or overcoming that births the possibility of a future. For Nietzsche, therefore, will-to-power articulates more than a struggle for survival or a teleological principle,139 whereas Spinoza’s conatus does not. This, however, is a rather unfair criticism of Spinoza, for it is by no means certain that his conatus is equivalent with any such principles.140 For this to be the case, Spinoza would have to posit that there are determinate organisms in existence that strive to maintain themselves and to survive the hostile external world. As reiterated throughout this book, this cannot possibly be the case, because Spinoza refrains from positing any separable, individual beings outside or behind affectivity itself. To persevere is to affect and not merely to remain in stasis, and to persevere in Spinoza’s sense is also to strive to increase in power in Nietzsche’s, and not merely to survive.141 It is tempting to suggest that Nietzsche’s reading of Spinoza’s conatus is somewhat partial and focuses on a narrow formulation rather than drawing out its consequences in relation to Spinoza’s philosophy as a whole. However, a little further probing shows that there is a significant difference here, even if the terms of Nietzsche’s criticism are a little misleading. Although they both philosophically refrain within the immanence of affectivity, the key 137

FW 349; KSA 3.585. GD 9.14; KSA 6.120. 139 See FW 349; KSA 3.585, JGB 13; KSA 5.27 and GM 2.12; KSA 5.316. 140 As Della Rocca (2008: 295) puts it, ‘Nietzsche should know better. Far from thwarting the will to power ... Spinoza extols the will to power as much as (perhaps more than) Nietzsche does. Spinoza does not seek the “destruction of the affects”; rather, he seeks to purify them, i.e. to make them more powerful, more active)’. Yovel (1989b: 111) also notes that ‘Spinoza, too, speaks of enhancing the power of existence (and of action) as his goal’. 141 See Yovel (1999) for further discussion of Spinoza’s philosophy going further than mere survival. 138

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point of diffraction comes in the ways in which they conceive of the joyful composition of affective relations. For Spinoza, this occurs in the meeting of affects and in their positive connection, which is precisely Spinoza’s meaning of joy (a euphoric transition). Even though this may mean some relations are destroyed as a consequence, it also requires an active arrangement of affective relations that rely on mutual reinforcement. This links to Spinoza’s use of the word ‘perseverance’, for as can be seen throughout part three of the Ethics, a joyful affective relation demands perseverance and the intensification of a wide web of affective relations that maintains this relationship. Thus, any attack or devaluation of something that is held to be ‘good’ will be felt as sadness, which means dysphoria in the power to affect and be affected. Anything that causes dysphoria will thus be deemed to be ‘bad’ and thereby avoided or possibly destroyed, while anything that affirms whatever causes ‘joy’ will be allied with and reinforced. This is extremely close to what Nietzsche means when he writes about the desire to strive to find the optimum conditions to expend strength and to achieve a maximal feeling of power,142 except that whereas for Nietzsche it is the overcoming of resistance on the way to expending strength that provides the path to euphoria (triumph over that which causes sadness), overcoming resistance for Spinoza has a secondary role to that of connecting and relating. Put more simply, whereas joy in Spinoza relates to a common connection and is thus aided by reason (which thinks in terms of the common and necessary rather than contingent),143 for Nietzsche joy relates to the overcoming of resistance in the composition of a certain relation of driven (will-to-) affects, meaning that the ‘strongest drives’ ‘subjugate both reason and the conscience’.144 Spinoza is thus perhaps a ‘scientist of ethics’ and Nietzsche an ‘artist of redemption’, although it is the pursuit of joyful knowledge that ultimately binds them together. They thus set out two interlinking yet diverging perspectives that set the challenge for any philosophy orientated around affectivity. On the one hand stands Spinoza who creates an ethos to seek out the widest and most rigorous affective relations that demand

142

GM 3.7; KSA 5.350. E2.P44. 144 JGB 158; KSA 5.100. Nietzsche directly relates joy and desire with mastery and transformation (FW 118; KSA 3.476). 143

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perseverance, while on the other stands Nietzsche who seeks the one intense pathos that can affirm the living moment by translating any and all particular paths that run through it. In a sense, Spinoza is closer to classical, Socratic philosophy insofar as this is orientated towards creating an ethos (though without appealing to the stabilising force of logos). It is also clear why Nietzsche feels closer to the pre-Socratics and tragic Greek culture145 than to the post-Socratic philosophising world,146 in that his seeking of an intense, affirmative pathos is, as he himself writes, thoroughly Dionystic, artistic and, most importantly, tragic: all else can perish in the triumph of one intense pathos that not only bears this questionable perishing, but wants it too. For all that Nietzsche finds inspiring in Spinoza, his philosophy is simply not tragic enough. Yet, Spinoza remains Nietzsche’s anomaly.147 Despite Spinoza’s rationalism and ‘mathematical hocus pocus’,148 he is thoroughly amoral, beyond good and evil, and hits upon some important insights.149 Most importantly, Spinoza manages to affirm every event and moment with joy as expressive of his own existence.150 In any given event or moment, nothing is expendable or lamentable because it expresses that which makes existence possible and is thus redeemed through its joyful experience: Spinoza is able to ‘see the moment’. Nietzsche thus names Spinoza as an anomaly, a ‘single case’ in philosophy –151 a one-off who somehow manages to appropriate the rational discourse of Western philosophy and translate it into amoral, affirmative terms. It is this point that is absolutely crucial, for Spinozist ‘ethics’ and Nietzschean ‘redemption’ both aim to achieve the same thing, namely overcoming morality.

145

See KSA 13.293, for example. In an explicitly anti-Socratic note, Nietzsche remarks that ‘philosophy has little to do with virtue’ (KSA 11.271). 147 According to Negri (1991), Spinoza’s nuanced philosophy means that he is the anomaly of philosophy. Klossowski (1997: 7) also remarks that for Nietzsche, Spinoza’s system (along with Heraclitus’) is consecrated to a particular case, and thus differs from the majority of philosophical systems. 148 JGB 5; KSA 5.19. 149 GM 2.15; KSA 5.320. 150 KSA 12.214. 151 Citing his ‘sui generis’ concept of God, Yovel (1989a: 175) notes that, ‘Even among rationalist philosophers, Spinoza was unique to the point of solitariness’. 146

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4.2.2 Good and bad, good and evil As discussed above, Nietzsche astutely recognises Spinoza’s move to take philosophy beyond good and evil. However, while Nietzsche accepts this Spinozist orientation of morality as a ‘sign language of the affects’, to use Nietzsche’s own phrasing, his understanding of language as metaphorical, together with the fact that for Nietzsche joy is achieved through the manner in which resistance is overcome, allows him to develop this process further. Whereas Spinoza highlights the problems involved in confusing words such as ‘good’ with ideas or things and instead insists that there is an affective genesis behind such an affirmation, Nietzsche investigates this genesis further to make an interesting and important distinction between the joyful act of naming something ‘good’ or ‘bad’ on the one hand (what he terms as a ‘noble way of evaluating’), and on the other the moral and reactionary interpretation of something as ‘evil’ and thereafter deriving something as being ‘good’ from this negative judgement (which he calls ‘slave morality’ resulting from ressentiment). Once again, affectivity is key here, for noble evaluation affirms as ‘good’ that which enables the continuation and intensification of joy, while its contrasting evaluations of ‘bad’ demarcate rather than negate that which is felt to be different, other, or even a threat. Nietzsche suggests some etymological pointers here, such as the Greeks linking ‘bad’ with low, unhappy and as having a sense of misfortune, rather than as that which is simply bad as such.152 While this might be dismissed as rather speculative, the important point lies in the extent to which an evaluation ‘makes-good’ rather than judges something to be evil, as these involve two different ways of interpreting, or more precisely, qualitatively different translations. On a semantic level, the utterances of noble evaluation and slavemorality might amount to comparable normative judgements, but Nietzsche maintains a subtle difference here by posing noble evaluation in terms of ‘good and bad’ and slave-morality in terms of ‘good and evil’.153 The terminology of ‘noble’ and ‘slave’ is a little misleading as this tends to invoke images of historical aristocracies and slave classes, which is compounded by Nietzsche’s introduction of Greeks,

152 153

GM 1.10; KSA 5.270. GM 1.16; KSA 5.285.

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Romans, Celts, Vikings and so on into the discussion; however, it is clear from the most pertinent sections of JGB and GM that Nietzsche is describing the affective genesis of different values and not a straightforward historical account, which is why philosophical genealogy should not be confused with history. The purpose of genealogy is not to establish actors and facts, but rather to trace the affective genesis of whatever is being investigated; the subject of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals is thus ‘the whole, long, hard-to-decipher hieroglyphic script of man’s moral past’.154 It is thus the script, text or signs that trace out the human moral becoming that Nietzsche is interested in. Telling in this regard is the fact that Nietzsche later referred to this analysis in GM as the first ‘psychological’ analysis of the counter-concepts of a noble morality and a morality of ressentiment.155 The vital difference between noble evaluation and slave morality is thus not strictly historical and does not even rest with the obvious one articulated by Nietzsche, namely that noble evaluation involves an affirmation of what is good and thereafter derives what is bad from that, while slave morality negates what is considered to be evil and then derives the value of good from this in a secondary sense. This is important, yet merely a correlate of the translations involved, for noble affirmation is ultimately identical with a joyful carrying-over of affective relations into the values themselves, and thus bears witness to euphoric metaphors or Über-setzungen; that is, good translations. The moral judgements of slave morality born of ressentiment are conversely bad translations: they attempt to cope with sadness by negating the perceived cause. As discussed in chapter two in relation to the eternal return, joy needs no justificatory meaning and rather wants itself and eternity (joy demands recurrence), which is precisely the characterisation that Nietzsche applies to the noble,156 while sadness needs a justificatory meaning in order to find some kind of alleviation and termination and is thus ‘dragged along’, which is exactly how Nietzsche characterises the slave of slave morality.157 As a product of sadness, slave morality needs something other than itself in order to provide it with

154 155 156 157

Nietzsche (2006b: 8; GM Pre 7; KSA 5.254). AC 24; KSA 6.192. GM 1.10; KSA 5.271. GM 1.10; KSA 5.271.

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a meaning and a value, and this is why it is slavish: typical examples include groups who identify themselves in contradistinction to others, such as nationalists who derive their own value from notbeing-foreign, or the self-righteous who define themselves as ‘good’ simply because they are not criminals and have not broken the law. Noble and slavish are thus only accidentally identifiable with any historical actors or groups, for the qualitative difference lies in the articulation that Nietzsche makes between the geneses of ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ and their correlative concepts of ‘good’.158 Most importantly of all, this distinction draws attention to the contemporary uses of such terms – which Nietzsche suggests contain a mixture of both modes of interpretation159 – to show that there is a qualitative difference in the senses of different normative judgements, and that it is only at a certain point of abstraction that they can be compared as if they issue from the same starting point (the conscious subject or ego) and apply to the same actions and objects. This, however, is precisely the manner in which slave morality operates, namely by suggesting that because a person or particular people do not do something, then everyone else should also refrain from doing it, thus derivatively affixing an affirmative value to dysphoric moral prohibition.160 Nietzsche demonstrates this with a parable of a lamb and a bird of prey. While lambs have good grounds to dislike eagles, they have no grounds to reproach eagles for carrying them off. To make a bird of prey blameworthy for its activities would be to presume that it is free to act like a lamb and not like a bird of prey; but to demand of strength that it not be expressed as strength is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it not be expressed as weakness.161 Although the ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ terminology can be somewhat misleading if they are taken as absolute rather than relative terms,162 the important point is the absurdity of judging the activities of living, bodily multiplicities from the perspective of the seemingly detached, neutral judgement of consciousness, for consciousness never exists on its own. This is the kernel of Nietzsche’s critique of 158

GM 1.11; KSA 5.274. See JGB 200 & 260; KSA 5.120 & 208, and DFW Ep; KSA 6.53. 160 GM 1.13; KSA 5.278. 161 GM 1.13; KSA 5.279. 162 Nietzsche explicitly remarks that strong and weak are relative concepts (FW 118; KSA 3.476). 159

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the subject later on in this passage, for a neutral substratum (the subject) is necessary to provide morality with a pure consciousness that is accountable apart from particular circumstances and affective relations.163 A theoretical levelling thus occurs where everyone is supposed to be thinking and acting from the same starting point, but such a point can only be stable, fixed and identical in abstraction once the singularities of affective relations have been negated. The concept of good derived from not doing something that another supposedly identical subject does is, in Nietzsche’s terms, a bad, dysphoric translation that offers a way to be good (do not do this or that), but cannot make good. Conversely, the noble concept of good does not offer a way to be good at all, but makes-good via a translation of experience into affirmative terms that enable the continuity and repetition of its euphoria, and thus has no need to be grounded in or contrasted to anything else. Thus, while slave morality merely justifies and gives meaning to suffering, noble evaluation provides a way for joy to recur – both of which find their most philosophical expression in Plato (as discussed in chapter three). That these concepts both involve joyful feelings is not in question, for even the ascetic priest enjoys a feeling of power via the various ways suffering is translated.164 The difference lies in the qualitatively different senses of making-good and being-good, rather than in the content of the affirmation. This breaks from the Platonic tradition of philosophy that maintains that it is the good that is desired, and rather follows Spinoza when he writes that something is called good if it is desired.165 The question here does not concern what good ‘is’ and whether this is correctly applied to the content of a value judgement, but the manner in which whatever is called good betrays an affective relationality: are affirmative values derived from that which alleviates suffering, or through that which enables joy to recur? A crucial difference here rests with the fact that only suffering needs a justificatory meaning; as Nietzsche puts it, it is not suffering itself that has been the horror of humanity, but meaningless suffering, for this interminably threatens the sense creation

163 As Strong (2006: 101) puts it, slave morality consists in ‘altering the moral grammar of the erstwhile noble’. 164 GM 3.13; KSA 5.366. 165 E3.P9S.

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of consciousness.166 Interpreting suffering in a manner that gives it a meaning is thus a way in which to alleviate it too,167 which is precisely the role of the ascetic ideal. It saves humanity from suicidal nihilism by providing a way of ‘being good’ in the vicissitudes of the temporal, but it neither redeems nor makes-good. ‘Beyond good and evil’ thus does not mean ‘beyond good and bad’ for Nietzsche,168 for it is always a question – and a difficult one at that – of evaluating good or bad translations; and this is a specific task for philosophy. 4.2.3

Neither art, nor science, but la Gaya Scienza

Here we arrive at the crux of philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche. With this emphasis on an ethics of interpretation and conceptual composition in the form of common notions or translations, Spinoza and Nietzsche move philosophy away from the classical Platonic image and provide it with a distinct role amongst the arts and sciences. Following the discussion of the metaphoricity of language and signs in general, art, science and philosophy can now be considered as three different ways of composing the signs of the affective-imagination, and thus three different modes of affection or kinds of bodies. The distinction between art and science can be seen in the manner in which art is eminently vestigial and evocative in its expression, while science is mnemonic and invocative insofar as it restricts affectivity in favour of the recollection of regular and repeatable terms. Philosophy, however, has often floundered between art and science in its ambiguity as a vestigial and mnemonic discourse, which may be to the frustration of many and even seen as a weakness. While art produces immediately tangible results insofar as it is evocative, and science insofar as it shows itself to be repeatable and reliable, philosophy has a hard time in showing precisely what it does. Philosophical concepts are notoriously vague and unstable, and when compared with the mnemonic regularity of scientific terms that explicitly aim at clarity, reliability and repeatability, philosophy looks to be a very

166

GM 3.28; KSA 5.411. Interpretation is a translation and thus the signs of pain can be, to a great extent, translated into meaningful phenomena that explain or even ‘justify’, and thus alleviate, the suffering (see GM 3.15; KSA 5.372). 168 GM 1.17; KSA 5.288. 167

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poor relation – but neither can philosophy hope to be as directly and immediately evocative as the arts. Thus, the split between analytic philosophy, which has a closer allegiance with science, and continental philosophy, which tends towards art, really does philosophy no favours at all. Indeed, when analytic philosophy aims for clarity and objectivity, it easily ends up becoming a dry, academic subject of specialists arguing over the precise meaning of terms in a disconnected way that does little to affect anything or anyone, but when continental philosophy attempts to be more poetic, it often appears as a shadow of the literary arts to which it appeals. Spinoza and Nietzsche can contribute something important here insofar as their evaluation of philosophy is not orientated towards constructing an accurate picture of reality that can merely be invoked (as a science), nor in a poeticising of reality to evoke a particular experience (as an art), for both are committed to the affective dimensions of knowledge. Just like Spinoza before him, Nietzsche’s evaluation of knowledge does not rest on whether or not it is an accurate portrayal of what ‘is’, but to the extent to which knowledge can redeem and creatively rearticulate the genitive sense of that which provides our lives with meaning.169 Nietzsche’s ambivalent stance towards science comes into play here, because insofar as science represents an antidote to dysphoric idealist interpretations of the signs of temporal existence, ‘long live physics!’170 The value of the natural sciences lies in the extent to which they can seriously question moralistic interpretations of reality and weaken their affective pull.171 The sciences thus have an important preliminary role insofar as they challenge the validity of dysphoric idealist/religious interpretations and claims.172 Perhaps the most important of these

169 See Smith (2003) and Yovel (1989a: 153–171) for further discussion of the redemptive powers of knowledge for Spinoza. It must also be remembered that active knowledge is only possible through joy for Spinoza, so it is actually joy that redeems. 170 FW 335; KSA 3.560. 171 It is perhaps not a coincidence, therefore, that Nietzsche’s so-called positivistic period where the sciences are championed (typically in MM) comes just before his mature critiques of morality where the role of the sciences are downplayed (such as his GM), for this period allows a weakening of the ideals of the dominant moralities in order that alternative interpretations may be offered. 172 Nietzsche considers idealism and theology to offer the same basic perspective on reality, namely to assume the right to look at reality from a superior standpoint and consider all that is beneath it with a kind of contempt (AC 8; KSA 6.174).

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challenges has been made against the idea of sin and blame, for the more complex our awareness of various activities becomes, the more complex the picture of their geneses becomes too, and as discussed in chapter three, it is the overcoming of guilt and blame that is vital in the process of redeeming the past.173 This being said, Nietzsche is critical towards the sciences when they are merely taken as providing a more accurate account of reality. In this regard, moderns are still ‘too pious’ and take their flame from the Platonic–Christian fire where God is truth, and truth is divine,174 for this ‘faith in science’ travels the same nihilistic will-to-truth of Plato in that it denies the perspectival. It posits a reality that we have some kind of confused awareness of, but which we can have a better and more accurate picture of once we acquire the correct method (which is why Descartes remains such a key figure of modernity). Scientific method encourages a certain ‘seriousness’, a ‘cooling of the affects’ and a ‘slowing down of the tempo of life’ in order to capture what is really going on, which is precisely to deny the perspectival in place of obtaining the one true perspective of the real.175 Furthermore, the inability of science to say anything meaningful about the experience of music is what decisively uncovers its limited foreground role for Nietzsche, for this shows that it is unable to redeem the genitive sense of that which it analyses: Suppose one judged the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas – how absurd such a ‘scientific’ evaluation of music would be! What would one have comprehended, understood, recognised? Nothing, really nothing of what is ‘music’ in it!176 As a singularly evocative form, science cannot render music invocative without completing emptying its expression. Music expresses a singular affective genesis and it is responding to this that is key and not reducing it into a mnemonic structure. Nietzsche can therefore 173 Nietzsche even suggests that the idea of ‘sin’ has been used as a way for religion to combat science, or at least that knowledge became sinful because it caused doubt in religious dogma (AC 48–49; KSA 6.226–229). 174 FW 344; KSA 3.574. 175 GM 3.25; KSA 5.403. 176 Nietzsche (2001a: 238; FW 373; KSA 3.626).

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take the same approach to assessing the works of musicians such as Wagner as he can to the works of Plato by responding to what they both evoke – for music, just like morality, is a ‘sign language of the affects’.177 Indeed, the parallels between his ambivalent assessment of the Wagnerian and the Socratic are striking. Wagnerian music, like Socratic philosophy, expresses a sickness and a form of decadence and is a ‘great corruption of music’.178 However, while Wagner lacks la gaya scienza,179 his ‘cleverness’, inventiveness and seductive capacities are,180 like Socrates’, considerable. This ambivalence towards Wagner is paradigmatically expressed by Nietzsche’s comments on Wagner’s Parsifal, for while it his greatest masterpiece as ‘a stroke of genius’ in the ‘art of seduction’,181 it is also, if taken seriously, the product of an ‘insane hatred for knowledge, spirit and sensuality’ and a ‘return to morbid Christian and obscurantist ideals’.182 Thus, Wagnerian music and Socratic philosophy are both great seducers of fragmented affective relations as they offer a way to unite them under a domineering imposition of meaning. Socrates turns thinking into a dialogue and Wagner does the same to music; indeed, while the latter’s music is perhaps ‘the worst ever made,’ he was a great innovator to the extent that he immeasurably increased ‘music’s capacity for language’.183 Nietzsche doubts whether Wagner was a musician at all as he needed a narrative and a literature in order to convince people to take his music seriously,184 and a musician would never reduce music to a mere means.185 Like Socrates, Wagner remained an orator where erratic and fragmented gestures are tied together via a narrative that reduces music to a mere means of representation; just as life is reduced to serving knowledge for Socrates,

177 KSA 10.261–262. Even music, the most precious form of expression for Nietzsche, is a sign language for the affects, and just like the morality of a philosopher (JGB 6; KSA 5.20), the music of a musician betrays something of a certain affective relationality (a relation of affective drives). 178 DFW 5; KSA 6.21. 179 DFW 10; KSA 6.37. 180 DFW 5; KSA 6.21. 181 DFW 13; KSA 6.43. 182 GM 3.3; KSA 5.342. 183 DFW 8; KSA 6.30. 184 DFW 8; KSA 6.30. 185 DFW 10; KSA 6.36.

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music is reduced to serving an ‘idea’.186 Wagner empties the evocativeness of music and threatens to obscure its creative and form giving role as a singular affective composition; as Nietzsche puts it, music is where the passions enjoy themselves without relying on any external purpose or phenomenon.187 This evaluation is impossible to make from a scientific perspective, meaning that while it offers a useful interpretation of reality insofar as it breaks down many of the competing invocative structures that various forms of dysphoric religious morality rely upon,188 it eradicates the affective genesis of that which it analyses and is thus potentially just as moralistic as any religion. For example, when so-called New Atheists make claims such as ‘the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other’; ‘Either he exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say something pretty strong about the probability’,189 the affective genesis of religious symbolism is completely removed and it is reduced to the banal level of whether or not the signs recall ‘objective’ bodies. The point is, of course, that such symbolism has a genesis and involves a whole orientation of meaning and translating experience; the question of religion is thus never a simple one of whether or not a particular entity ‘exists’ outside of this experience. If certain signs are encountered as dysphoric (religious or otherwise), therefore, then it is tracing their affective geneses that is key and not merely refuting the existence of a ‘thing’. This is why good philology (interpretation of signs) is good physiology (enablement of the multiplicity of the body) for Nietzsche, and vice versa,190 for good interpretation involves tracing the genesis of a sign or symptom, and not merely negating it with other signs into a reductive order. As discussed above, this requires a certain ethics that, rather than taking philology and physiology as methods of interpretation that recover or uncover a truth or an underlying meaning or phenomenon, takes

186

DFW 10; KSA 6.35. JGB 106; KSA 5.92. 188 One of Nietzsche’s basic ways of evaluating a doctrine is the extent to which it is based on encouraging certain activities rather than prohibiting them (see FW 304; KSA 3.542), which is again linked to the orientating importance of affectivity. 189 Dawkins (2006: 50 & 48). 190 Blondel (1991) provides an extremely detailed account of the relationship between language and the body in Nietzsche’s works (see 1991: 201–238 in particular). 187

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the interpretative process itself as responding to the affects that are being evoked. The question as to whether philosophy is an art or a science is therefore a futile one. Insofar as it takes its flame from Plato’s fire, to utilise Nietzsche’s vocabulary,191 science is the discourse that values itself to the extent that it can recall, from any perspective, its object;192 which is precisely to follow Plato in erasing the perspectival character of living.193 Despite its futuristic veneer, therefore, science is in fact orientated towards the past insofar as it wants to be able to exercise increasingly minute levels of control over the environment and thus make it repeatable and predictable – it wants a knowledge that can accurately recall or call upon its objects. Science is thus inherently useful insofar as deviations are overcome so that its discourse contains the fewest discrepancies possible, meaning that its terms invoke precise states that can be recalled and utilised at almost any given point in time.194 Art, on the other hand, can be considered as any tangible expression that evokes affective relations from the most singular of perspectives, which also means of course that virtually anything can be, and often is, considered as art in a given context. At its purest, art is an evocative expression that redeems the singularity of experience from the invocative structures of language, consciousness and ultimately science. Art thus speaks to the present through its singular expressions that elude the categories of the past. On this general but important level, scientific and artistic discourses oppose one another insofar as the former values invocative compositions and the latter evocative, but the question remains as to what expresses a philosophical composition. The answer, following Spinoza and Nietzsche, is that a philosophical composition is one that is genuinely provocative in the strict sense of the term’s Latin root, namely provocare meaning ‘call forth’. Thus, where science ‘calls

191

FW 344; KSA 3.574. As Ricœur (1973: 104) notes, scientific discourse is orientated towards a pure form of invocation where, ‘All readers are in a sense one and the same mind and the purpose of the discourse is not to build a bridge between two spheres of experience, but to insure the identity of meaning from the beginning to the end of an argument’. 193 JGB Pre; KSA 5.12. 194 As Ricœur (1973: 104) puts it, the purpose of scientific language is that ‘the meaning remain the same all through the arguments’, which ‘is secured by the one to one relation between name and sense and by the indifference to the context’. 192

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upon’ repeatable sets of affects (mnemonic bodies) and art ‘calls out’ from a singular affective genesis (vestigial bodies), philosophy ‘calls forth’ for new ways to affect and be affected (yet-to-be-determined bodies). Provocative is thus not merely meant here in the sense of being controversial or aggressive (both of which Spinoza and Nietzsche are in various ways, though not merely for the sake of it); rather, it is meant in the sense of provoking a new way of thinking, living and acting. Philosophy is thus orientated towards a future that is carried-well in the repetition of the joy that life presents us with; for to repeat the quote from Spinoza that started this book, ‘no one has yet determined what the body can do’.195 This provocative aspect of philosophy is not something that Spinoza and Nietzsche invented of course – this aspect is clear all the way back to Socrates’ self-description in Plato’s Apology as a ‘horsefly’ that ‘never stops, all day long, coming to rest on every part of you, stinging each one of you into action, persuading and criticising each one of you’.196 However, Spinoza and Nietzsche raise the provocativeness of philosophy to the fore by engaging in the affective genesis of knowledge and explicitly making it serve transient experience. They thus provide philosophy with a distinctive role amongst the arts and sciences that Spinoza calls ‘ethics’ and Nietzsche ‘redemption’, which, strictly speaking, is something that art and science are incapable of. While science invokes relatively stable relationships to navigate the vicissitudes of transient experience and art evokes singular affective expressions, neither of these provoke the yet-to-be in the same manner as philosophy can in the manner in which it engages in the present by translating the past. Science can instigate changes in our relations that allow for joy – though largely in a haphazard way with significant bouts of sadness too, while art does have a redemptive function insofar as it evokes singular affective relations rather than overcoming their variability. However, just like the ‘redeemer type’ discussed in chapter three, art is also ‘naïve’ in its immediacy and has difficulty in provoking the joy that its evocativeness bears witness to; indeed, art can even betray a moralising tendency when it is reduced to the representation of certain values

195 196

Spinoza (1994: 155; E3.P2S). Plato (1997: 101; Apology 30e).

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and ideals (although as Nietzsche discussed in relation to Wagner above, at this stage it is probably not even art at all).197 This fragile yet crucial distinction between art, science and philosophy can be highlighted by returning to Spinoza’s example of the blind man discussed in chapter one. A straightforward scientific definition of blindness is ‘a lack of vision’,198 meaning that a blind man is thus a ‘man who lacks vision’. Such general definitions are clearly useful and of great utility and allow, for example, the incorporation of certain facilities in public buildings that maximise the possibility of joyful affective relations for blind people in these spaces. Furthermore, scientific analyses of states and conditions also help to dispel stigma attached to them and remove any sense of them being the individual person’s fault. However, when such definitions are applied to a particular individual and used to define who they are in some essential way, then they become ‘bad translations’ or moral interpretations because it is only through comparing a singular being to an ideal or to something that they are not that lack can be introduced into their existence, for this says nothing about how they affect and are affected by the world. As Spinoza says, it is just as absurd to say that a stone lacks vision as a blind man, seeing as vision is not a part of a stone’s or a blind man’s affectivity. Such a judgement, meanwhile, may actually inhibit the manner in which a blind man engages in the world, and the way that others engage with him, as he carries a self-reinforcing sense of ‘lack’ and ‘deficiency’, thus causing him a sadness that he has to find a way to cope with (and it is here where religion is most tempting and where Nietzsche points out the historical talent of the priest to thrive in the easing and maintenance of suffering through sustaining an acute sense of lack).199 Art, however, can express something of the singularity of the existence of a blind man in the evocativeness of its composition. Artistic expression eludes categorisation and reduction and can play an important role in redeeming the singular affectivity of a particular perspective or moment and loosening the categories of thought that we apply to the world. However, given the singularity

197 Nietzsche does, however, note a general tendency in art to moralise (see GD 9.24; KSA 6.127). 198 http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003040.htm, accessed 26.04.15. 199 See GM 1.15; KSA 5.283 for example.

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of its expression, it cannot intervene in the definitions and categories that are used to organise our experiences in any distinct sense and delineate the positive aspects and limits of their application while creating new terms that provoke a new way of thinking. Philosophy, however, can achieve this by tracing the affective geneses of the signs (words, ideals, values and so on) involved in dysphoria. How has it come about, for example, that we define whole groups of people according to what they cannot do? What problem does this overcome? What dysphoria does this result in? How can we provoke new perspectives and ways of thinking that are potent enough to dissipate this sadness? These are some of the questions that Spinoza in particular explicitly traces and attempts to combat with a range of concepts. In brief, Spinoza can say that defining people by what they cannot do is the result of inadequate ideas and general notions that are reinforced and fostered by certain systems of power – it is very much in the interest of certain influential people to define people in terms of lack and deficiency to keep them exactly where they are and thus overcome the problem of instability in social structures. A concept such as conatus combats this, however, as it provokes a new way of thinking that only considers singular beings in terms of their affectivity, that is to say, in terms of what they can do. It thus calls forth new perspectives and ways of affecting and being affected that were barred by ‘confused and mutilated’ ideas that hindered what the body might actually be able to do. Philosophy thus recognises the crucial role that invocation plays in our imaginations and thus ‘maintains the customary words’, to use a favourite phrase of Spinoza, in order to draw upon their utility and affective pull. As much as Spinoza and Nietzsche are opposed to the moralistic images of ‘God’ and ‘human’ respectively, they still invoke the terms in their philosophies, but in a newly translated manner: ‘God’ becomes ‘God or Nature’ or Natura Naturans (‘nature naturing’) in Spinoza, while the ‘human’ becomes the ‘indeterminate animal’ and the ‘terrible ground-text’, amongst other incarnations. This translation is possible because they trace the affective geneses that these images evoke. These evocations call out from singular affective perspectives that bear witness to a manner of either willing eternity or coping with dysphoria, and are thus, at least to some degree, euphoric expressions. The task is thus to find a way to redeem this expression via translating the invocative signs into new

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compositions that can provoke the joy that they evoke – that can birth a future. Philosophy, therefore, is extremely difficult and rare, and is thus an extremely vulnerable and precarious practice insofar as it can appear nonsensical to interpretations that try to make it cohere to what is already known. Nietzsche highlights this fragility by repeatedly remarking that there are few readers for his texts and none capable of hearing his ASZ.200 This is because, as Nietzsche puts it, his text has a ‘style’ that communicates ‘an inner tension of pathos through signs’.201 If the reader simply cannot connect with the affective genesis that these signs evoke, then the text in question will prove very hard on the ears indeed.202 As Nietzsche notes in what seems to be a rather puzzling remark at first, nobody can get out of things, books included, more than they already know, for it is impossible to have an ear for something where there are no experiences.203 This seems odd because books, or at least books of philosophy, are obviously written as aids that provide access to knowledge that the reader might not possess. Nietzsche seems to come close to Descartes’ position that books are propaedeutic devices that inspire the reader to start the introspective process of thinking for themselves, rather than that which provides the reader with direct access to knowledge of things. Something else is intimated here however, for it is not that text is the outward expression of something that can only be understood introspectively, but that a textual composition bears witness to an affective genesis that cannot be heard unless it resonates with a conducive pathos. Nietzsche goes on to remark that if a book speaks of that which goes beyond even rare experience, then nothing will be heard, though there will be an ‘acoustic illusion’ that nothing is there. This also concurs with Spinoza’s insistence that in order to understand a text, the site of the text’s production needs to be traced out, and if this proves impossible then a text may remain forever senseless. Nietzsche suggests that his Zarathustra is necessarily senseless to the majority of readers for precisely this reason, namely that it might be impossible

200 201 202 203

See EH 3.4; KSA 6.304, for example. EH 3.4; KSA 6.304. GM Pre1; KSA 5.255. EH 3.1; KSA 6.299–300.

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for modern readers to hear its singular pathos. 204 However, such a provocation should not be seen as mere bravado, for it is, in a very strict sense, inseparable from the dissemination of the text it refers to – Nietzsche’s texts are littered with remarks questioning the number of possible readers that they may have. 205 At the same time as writing his texts, Nietzsche warns against the temptation of trying to understand them too quickly and easily (a reader needs ephexis in interpretation), which he takes to be such an ingrained modern tendency that it will be a long time before his texts might become readable.206 That his GM might appear incomprehensible and ‘hard on the ears’ is not necessarily the fault of the author, Nietzsche insists, for one has had to have spent a great labour reading his earlier texts, which are ‘not easily accessible’.207 This is especially true of ASZ, which cannot be known unless its every word has deeply ‘wounded’ and ‘delighted’ so that the ‘halcyon element’ out of which the book was born may be enjoyed. The emphasis on understanding here is on the ability to ‘hear’ the conditions out of which the book was born; that is, the pathos or affective site of production. Again, that this is a matter of acoustics is not accidental, for just as sounds can alter affective relations both extra-consciously and consciously, so can a text for Nietzsche – Wagner’s music makes him ill,208 it depresses him (makes him dysphoric, he carries it badly), and so does idealist philosophy.209 Reading philosophy thus requires more than having a good understanding of the variations of the text’s meanings. Nietzsche even suggests that his texts have been least understood in Germany,210 which highlights how the pathos of his texts is at least as important, if not more so, than the language used. Those who think they have understood him, Nietzsche suggests, have generally only made something out of him after their own image, which has often 204

EH 3.4; KSA 6.304. See, for example, M Pre.5; KSA 3.17, FW 383; KSA 3.638, GM Pre.8; KSA 5.256 and EH 3.1 & 3.4; 6.298 & 304. 206 GM Pre8; KSA 5.256. 207 GM Pre1; KSA 5.255. This is perhaps why the metaphoricity of the will-topower and its redemptive role might be missed if its early articulations in ASZ are overlooked. 208 DFW 1; KSA 6.13. 209 FW 372; KSA 3.623. 210 GD 9.51; KSA 6.153 and EH 3.2: KSA 6.301. 205

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even been his antithesis (such as an ‘idealist’).211 In such a case the text may have been understood insofar as its meanings have been convincingly interpreted in a defendable manner (its invocative relations have been coherently reassembled), but the pathos or affective site of the text’s production has been misheard entirely and thus morally interpreted. Indeed, if philosophers are hard to understand, it is not because they are especially clever, but because they constantly experience extraordinary things,212 which means that they have extraordinary pathos to communicate 213 – and few philosophers may even possess the necessary style to be able to communicate it.214 Nietzsche’s texts are particularly difficult to hear, it seems, because of the multiplicity of inward states and experiences that can be called upon, meaning that he has the most multifarious ‘art of style’ to call upon.215 Although Nietzsche consistently questions whether or not he has really been heard, he often seems certain that he will be heard eventually. There is a definite prophetic overtone to much of Nietzsche’s writings, where Übermenschen, philosophers of the future and free spirits are regularly announced as almost appearing on the horizon.216 All this could be written off as stylistic bravado, except that a philosophical engagement with the metaphoricity of language means that its texts can play a creative role in provoking the pathos or bodies that ‘posthumously’ provide the text with its sense; and the rarer the pathos of the text, the more it must ‘create’ its readership by becoming the first language for a new series of experiences.217 Nietzsche’s preface to his AC is a case in point, where he writes that this book belongs to those who are perhaps not even alive yet – those

211

EH 3.1; KSA 6.300. JGB 292; KSA 5.235. 213 Nietzsche even suggests that philosophy itself is the art of transfiguring variously experienced affective states into the most spiritual form (FW Pre.3; KSA 3.349). 214 EH 3.4; KSA 6.304. 215 EH 3.4; KSA 6.304. Alexander Nehamas (1985) famously bases an entire interpretation of Nietzsche around this passage, noting the importance of style in Nietzsche’s works as involving ‘controlled multiplicity’ (1985: 7). However, as Winchester (1994: 148–149) points out, Nehamas’ austere emphasis on artistic self-creation tends to drift into a questionable aestheticism. 216 See ASZ 1.22; KSA 4.102, JGB 42–44; KSA 5.59–63 and FW 343; KSA 3.573, for example. 217 EH 3.4: KSA 6.300. 212

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who might even understand his ASZ – before following this up with a typically enigmatic suggestion that his works are necessarily to be misunderstood by his contemporary readers, and that the day after tomorrow belongs to him because ‘some are born posthumously’.218 Such a declaration in a preface to a work is odd to say the least, for it is to suggest that what follows will necessarily be misunderstood. While this has an obvious rhetorical function insofar as it challenges the reader to rise to the task ahead, it also confirms the strategic value of writing for Nietzsche, for not only is the text waiting for its readers, but also calling for them – provoking them.219 Nietzsche goes on to describe the conditions under which he is to be understood – amongst other things, a reader must be honest in spiritual things until they are hard, be skilled at living on high mountains above the pitiful babble of politics and national self-interest, be predisposed to questions that nobody today has the courage for, have courage for the forbidden and have new ears for new music and new eyes for what is most distant.220 In essence, Nietzsche is describing his Zarathustra here, meaning that in order to understand Nietzsche’s texts, and above all his ASZ, the reader must be ‘Zarathustra’. This is an obvious point to make insofar as the signs of language are invocative and therefore recall arrangements of affective relations that require a conducive pathos, which in turn requires suitable experiences, but the suggestion here almost seems to be that a text can only be understood by those who do not need to read it, echoing the sentiment cited above that nobody learns more from a book than they already know. The important point to bear in mind here is that it is not Zarathustra speaking in ASZ or Nietzsche’s other texts, but a prose that forms the first language of a new set of experiences that might come to provoke the pathos that can retrospectively provide it with the sense that 218 AC Pre; KSA 6.167. Nietzsche repeats the fact that some are born posthumously in EH 3.1; KSA 6.298. 219 Nietzsche even suggests that a writer might not want to be understood, and thereby incomprehensibility is not necessarily an objection to a text for the writer might be in some sense selective over those who are being communicated with (FW 381; KSA 3.633–634). Kirkland (2004: 595) suggests that this explains his harsh language, because ‘Nietzsche knows that the greatest means by which an author might keep inappropriate meanings from unfit audiences is not by employing encoded writing, but by way of the shallowness of readers themselves’. 220 AC Pre; KSA 6.167.

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its affective genesis evokes. If this is so, then Nietzsche’s texts are necessarily of the day after tomorrow insofar as they express a new pathos or affective relationality – to understand six sentences from ASZ, Nietzsche remarks, is to have experienced them, and thus to have reached a higher level than his contemporaries could attain. 221 If there are readers today that can understand Nietzsche’s texts better than the author’s contemporaries (or perhaps even the author himself), it is not because they understand the meaning of the text better, but because they have a sense for the problems finding their first articulation here and are more disposed to them – they are able to be affected by them – and hence find the pathos of the text to have a greater significance. This might not be possible however, if such problems were not provided with an experimental vocabulary and expression in texts such as ASZ. In this sense, Spinoza and Nietzsche could thus be seen as being ‘born posthumously’ and ‘belonging to the day after tomorrow’ to the extent that their philosophies contribute to new perspectives that redeem the expression of their work. When they first wrote their books, they were both vilified as they were interpreted by entrenched moral perspectives. What did Spinoza mean by making God inseparable from the dirt underneath our feet? What did Nietzsche mean by Christianity being nihilistic? The provocativeness of their texts merely grated against the invocative structures of contemporary ideals and values. In this way, they wrote from their time, but not for their time; they wrote for a future in an ‘untimely’ manner by providing a morphemic language that offers itself to new translations. If philosophy fails to do this, then it will either disappear, or worse, either marginalise itself in idiosyncratic and barely comprehensible artistic prose, or cling to the coattails of science and plead credence in the form of a rigorous form of invocation that establishes increasingly arcane and complex systems of signs. This latter danger is witnessed by philosophy’s academic and technical specialisation, where various divisions are filled by experts of semiotic distillation who work within particular branches, such as epistemology with its many sub-divisions, and who become experts at manipulating

221

EH 3.1; KSA 6.299.

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idiosyncratic invocative sign systems while occasionally evoking their singular affective geneses in specialised publications. The question remains, however, as to what they provoke. What do they call forth? What new ways of thinking and acting, let alone joy, do they birth? The depressing answer to that question is what drove Nietzsche to leave the university and stopped Spinoza from ever joining it, even though there is no necessary reason why philosophy should not thrive there. The problem is, perhaps, that the institution of the university is ultimately geared towards science and semiotic distillation – the reduction of perspectives to a small community of repeatable codes. Spinoza and Nietzsche counter this fate with the insistence of orientating thought around affectivity and thus responding to the demands that are always-already placed upon living experience, rather than those of a small intellectual clique. Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche does not dismiss the importance of this scientific rigour, but rather draws upon its affective pull to create provocative conceptual compositions that ‘prepare the way’ for the new. Nietzsche explicitly and provocatively elaborates this point in a highly pertinent section of JGB that is worth quoting at length as it expresses the sense in which philosophy traces the affective geneses of the past and how it uses this to call for the new, rather than merely building a knowledge than can call upon the ‘truths’ of the past to apply to the present: I am going to insist that people finally stop mistaking philosophical laborers and scientific men in general for philosophers ... The project for philosophical laborers on the noble model of Kant and Hegel is to establish some large class of given values (which is to say: values that were once posited and created but have come to dominate and have been called “truths” for a long time) and press it into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or politics (morality) or art. It is up to these researchers to make everything that has happened or been valued so far look clear, obvious, comprehensible, and manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even “time” itself, and to overwhelm the entire past. This is an enormous and wonderful task ... But true philosophers are commanders and legislators ... True philosophers reach for the future with a creative hand and everything that is and was becomes a means, a tool, a hammer for them. Their “knowing” is

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creating, their creating is a legislating, their will to truth is – will to power. – Are there philosophers like this today? Have there ever been philosophers like this? Won’t there have to be philosophers like this?222 4.2.4 Affectivity and philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche thus consists of a double aspect, namely, an ethics of interpretation combined with the composition of provocative concepts. Even if the suggestion that philosophers are those who create concepts is thought to be too strong a suggestion,223 conceptual composition remains central to any sense of what it is to philosophise. Following the discussion of philosophy above, however, such compositions must be considered as extremely nuanced and not merely words in the sense of labels or terms that apply to things or states of affairs. As discussed in relation to Spinoza’s common notions, concepts do not represent or re-present an image that subsumes their terms, but provoke the thinking that can rebirth the genitive senses of that which is evoked. The only confusion that takes place between philosophical concepts and ‘ordinary language’, therefore, is when an attempt is made to understand the former in terms of what they are supposed to invoke, meaning that they appear to be an unnecessary complication and even a ‘mis-invocation’ or misapplication of words. 224 To claim that philosophy confuses ‘ordinary language’ is thus no more or no less strange than to claim that music confuses ‘ordinary sounds’. Certainly, philosophers ‘do something with words’ but this doing something is composing concepts, which means that they are not speech acts in any conventional sense, but rather translative acts that respond to the demands of the present through a provocation of thought.

222

Nietzsche (2001b: 105–106; JGB 211; KSA 5.144–145). This is Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994: 5) suggestion, taking their inspiration from Nietzsche (KSA 11.486–487). 224 The six rules for a ‘happy’ performative speech act suggested by Austin (1962: 14–15) are paradigmatic here, for they rely on the following of conventional language use for a successful invocation. As this book has suggested, however, language composition has an evocativeness that exceeds any convention or invocation, which enables the redemption of the latter’s genitive sense and the composition of philosophical concepts. 223

228 Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

Ultimately, perhaps the most significant contribution to philosophy that Spinoza and Nietzsche make is the insistence upon responding to the demands posed by the euphoria and dysphoria encountered in living, transient experience. Philosophy can respond to this demand by ‘sounding out the idols’225 and tracing the geneses of that which affects us with sadness – the moral interpretations that burden the present – and composing the joy they bear witness to into provocative concepts that open up a space for new perspectives and ways of translating experience, such as Nietzsche’s will-to-power. 226 As soon as a concept is unable to do this and becomes a ‘mummified’ invocative sign that judges life, then its genitive sense needs to be redeemed – not merely understood, affirmed or refuted – so that its burden on the present can be displaced. Philosophy is thus an ongoing task and something that needs to be achieved. This drive is clear in Nietzsche’s reading and translation of Plato – a figure who remains a constant presence throughout Nietzsche’s work due to the fact that Plato’s texts promise so much more than the great burden that their morality has placed upon us: It seems that all great things, in order to inscribe eternal demands in the heart of humanity, must first wander the earth under monstrous and terrifying masks; dogmatic philosophy was this sort of a mask: the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, for example, or Platonism in Europe. We should not be ungrateful towards dogmatism, but it must nonetheless be said that the worst, most prolonged, and most dangerous of all errors to this day was a dogmatist’s error, namely Plato’s invention of pure spirit and the Good in itself.227 Plato places a tremendous demand and burden on the present by negating the multiplicity of perspectives at play in transience, thus

225

GD.Pre; KSA 6.57. Kofman (1993: 142) sums this up succinctly by noting that the will-to-power ‘can be posited only by one who has been able to multiply perspectives and compare them, one who has noticed that interpretation as such, in its differentiated multiplicity, is made possible only by a hypothesis like this’. Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for various French essayists seems to be due in large part to this ability to incorporate a large range of perspectives and styles in their work (see EH 2.3; KSA 6.285, for example). 227 Nietzsche (2001b: 3–4; JGB Pre; KSA 5–12). 226

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engendering dysphoric relations where transience is devalued in favour of timeless ideals. Nietzsche does not simply oppose Platonism theoretically or even refute his arguments and positions, which would not answer to Plato’s demand at all, but rather proceeds with ephexis and attempts to draw out the pathos of his texts. Plato articulates a nuanced translation of experience that betrays general dysphoria insofar as life is deemed to be something that needs justification – a need that joy lacks entirely. As discussed in chapter three, however, a genealogical analysis of the genitive sense and qualitative manner in which Plato translates experience into such ideals reveals a double aspect. On the one hand, his translation betrays a suffering that creates a meaning for itself by placing a demand upon experience (the ascetic ideal), which in itself births a fragile future,228 while on the other, the crucial role played by eros in Plato’s philosophy bears witness to a euphoric translative process that produces an idealisation of the joyful desire for recurrence and eternity.229 As Plato has Socrates say, once ‘the entire soul is throbbing with excitement’, it ‘despises customary decency and taste, which it used to take great pride in’ and rather wants to be ‘as near as possible to the object of its longing’ – in other words, the past is ‘forgotten’ and overcome by the wanting-will.230 Born of a desire to repeat the joy that life presents us with, two of the crucial questions that philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche must pose are, therefore: what are the ‘confused and mutilated’ ideas that cause us sadness and how can we expose their affective geneses? How can we compose and disseminate provocative concepts that call forth new translations that can repeat the joy we inherit in yet-to-be determined perspectives – yet-to-be determined bodies? In their different ways, these are the questions that both Spinoza and Nietzsche pose in their philosophies in their attempt to redeem and rebirth the affectivity they experience. Their works are only of value,

228 Most of post-Platonic philosophy seems to belong to this ascetic translation for Nietzsche, or at least insofar as it has been dominated by morality (KSA 12.259). 229 This is particularly evident in The Phaedrus and The Symposium (Plato (1993)) – consider the following passage of Socrates recounting his meeting with Diotima from the latter dialogue, ‘All human beings are pregnant, Socrates, both in body and soul, and when we come of age, we naturally desire to give birth ... Pregnancy and procreation instil immortality in a living, mortal being’ (1993: 44; 206c). 230 Plato (1993: 108–109; Phaedrus 251c–252b).

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however, insofar as any burden they place on the present is redeemable through the evocativeness of their composition – through what they provoke: What are your fatherlands and motherlands to me? I only love my children’s land, the undiscovered, after which I set my sail and hotly pursue across the seas. In my children I will make good that I am my father’s child: and thus the past is redeemed.231

231

KSA 10.463.

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Index Acampora, Christa Davis, 101 affective turn, 7, 156, 158 Ainley, Alison, 139 amor Dei intellectualis, 16, 36, 175 amor fati, 9, 129–32, 135 Anderson, R. Lanier, 112, 133 anomalous monism, 47–9 Ansell Pearson, Keith, 141 Anti-Christ, The, 105, 112, 114, 115, 116, 120, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 142, 148, 150, 187, 188, 203, 209, 213, 214, 223, 224 Apollonian, the, 70 Apology, The, 5, 120, 198, 218 Arendt, Hannah, 132 Aristotle, 5, 178, 179, 194 art, 193 as evocative, 212–14, 217–19 ascetic ideal, the, 9, 110, 117, 133, 151, 152, 198, 205, 212, 229 attributes, 20, 46–51, 76–7, 92 problem of, 46, 47, 76 Augustine, 162 Austin, John Langshaw, 227 Aydin, Ciano, 141 Bailey, Thomas, 101 Balibar, Etienne, 17 Beavers, Anthony F., 33, 49 belief, 30–3, 86–7, 191 Bell, David, 13 Bennett, Jonathan, 33, 46 Bergson, Henri, 13 Berry, Jessica, 132 Beyond Good and Evil, 2, 68, 69, 72, 75, 76, 79, 80, 87, 89, 90, 98, 101, 102, 103, 109, 111, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120, 128, 129, 130, 131, 137, 143, 144, 145,

148, 150, 179, 182, 186, 188, 196, 199, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 215, 216, 217, 223, 226, 227, 228 Birth of Tragedy, The, 68, 91, 124 Bittner, Rudiger, 108 blame, 8, 71, 142, 159, 210, 214 blind person example, 41–2, 219 Blondel, Eric, 17, 69, 84, 92, 112, 114, 139, 143, 183, 187, 194, 196, 216 body, the and ascetic ideal, 152, 205 becoming moral of, 106–9, 120–1, 196 and consciousness, 81–2, 86–97, 102–3, 108, 134, 142, 202 in Descartes’ philosophy, 21–2, 27 as durational, 37–41 as forgetting, 105, 116 as guide, 72 and imagination, 29–32, 56 modification, 43–4 as multiplicity, 77, 85–7, 91, 95, 196 redemption of, 133–5, 139 as unable to determine thought, 46–50 as ‘yet-to-be-determined’, 18, 67, 218 Brann, Henry Walter, 73 Broughton, Roger James, 88 Brown, Steven, 37 Case of Wagner, The, 91, 112, 118, 130, 210, 215, 216, 222 categorical imperative, the, 149–50 Charlton, William, 35 Christianity, 110, 115, 117, 119, 121, 125, 133–7, 158, 214, 215

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246

Index

Clark, Maudemarie, 70, 123, 131, 179, 183 cogito, 8, 16–30, 74, 111, 153–4 Cohen, Mark, 122 coherency, 77, 80, 92, 135, 138 Comay, Rebecca, 133 common notions, 6, 20, 58–67, 201–3, 212, 227 compare general notions comparison, 42, 44, 79, 146 conatus, 8, 63–6, 200, 204–5, 220 see also will-to-power, relationship to conatus confused and mutilated ideas, 5, 55, 220, 229 conscience, 100, 107 consciousness as bodily fragment, 94, 111, 134, 142 as epiphenomenon, 81, 92, 93, 96, 145 as falsification, 71, 82, 95–6 as linguistic communication, 89–90, 97, 116, 134, 168–9, 186, 191 in modern philosophy, 111, 189 and morality, 99–109, 191, 196 as a perspective, 70, 81–99 and temporality, 114–16, 121 and will-to-power, 143–5 see also body, the; thinking Cousineau, Robery Henri, 140 Cox, Christoph, 112, 179 Danto, Arthur, 11, 112, 141 Davey, Nicholas, 112, 144 Davidson, Donald, 47, 48, 49 Dawkins, Richard, 216 De Interpretatione, 194 de Jonge, Eccy, 64 de Man, Paul, 180 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 181 death of god, 1–2, 55, 76, 147 decadence, 124, 135, 138, 215 Deleuze, Gilles, 11, 16, 17, 35, 47, 50, 51, 62, 64, 66, 69, 82, 83, 92, 127, 151, 183, 194, 201, 227

Della Rocca, Michael, 6, 35, 40, 205 democracy, 1, 14, 34, 53 deontology, 149 Derrida, Jacques, 91, 168, 169, 183, 184, 193, 194 Descartes, Rene, 7, 18–28, 29–32, 45, 66, 74, 83, 153–4, 161–9, 177, 194, 214, 221 desire, 4, 29, 57, 63, 76, 88, 168, 229 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 169 Dionysian, the, 70 Discourse on the Method, The, 162, 163, 166 Donagan, Alan, 46 Doubt, radical, 19, 22, 27 drives, 75–7, 80–4, 87, 102–3, 109, 114–17, 120, 206 dualism, 26–7, 45–8, 54, 95 dysphoria, see sadness eagle and lamb parable, 210 Ecce Homo, 76, 118, 122, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131, 135, 137, 138, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 228 Eco, Umberto, 193 ego, the, see subject, the Emden, Christian, 76, 179 ephexis, see interpretation, ephexis error (as privation), 32–3, 38 eternal return, the, 9, 121–31, 143, 146–7 euphoria, see joy Euripides, 124 expression, 38, 45–54, 58, 66, 77, 78, 160, 168, 170, 173–7, 181–2, 203 extra-consciousness, 90–2, 100, 104–9, 115–16, 143, 145 Fink, Eugen, 69, 127, 195 Foti, Veronique, 34, 58 Foucault, Michel, 189 Freud, Sigmund, 189 Gatens, Moira, 30 Gemes, Ken, 101, 179 genealogy, 103, 115, 156–9, 178, 209

Index

Genealogy of Morality, On The, 7, 58, 64, 69, 70, 76, 79, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 126, 128, 130, 133, 134, 137, 139, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 157, 159, 168, 182, 184, 190, 198, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 219, 221, 222 general notions, 55, 58, 59–60, 63, 220 compare common notions Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 138 Goetschel, Willi, 13 Gospels, The, 134–5 grammar, 96, 108, 109, 116, 159–60, 191–2, 195–6 Gray, Richard, 93 Gregg, Melissa, 7 guilt, 71, 136–7, 202, 214 Harman, Graham, 184 Haserot, Francis, 46 Hatab, Lawrence, 101 Havas, Randall, 117 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 14, 15, 226 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 11, 14, 127, 128, 168, 183, 184 Heraclitus, 127, 207 Houle, Karen, 64 human, the as desire, 29, 63, 88 as homo natura, 71, 144, 145 as the indeterminate animal, 64, 220 as ‘Man’, 9, 29, 55, 63, 67, 115, 157, 159, 168, 199 as the sick yet interesting animal, 105, 116, 134 translating back into nature, 145 Human all too Human, 68, 95, 100, 106, 107, 179, 213 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 195 Husserl, Edmund, 32

247

ideas adequate and inadequate, 20, 38, 45–55, 50–4, 58, 61, 63, 168, 202, 220 clear and distinct, 25–30 imagination, 28–33, 37–8, 54, 58–60, 67, 82, 85–6, 154, 176 intellect, the, 30–3, 44–7, 62, 143 interpretation, 72, 96–9, 101, 132, 144–6, 160, 168–70, 177–8, 187–90, 202–3 critical-historical method, the, 173–4 ephexis, 160, 187, 188–90, 222, 229 truth of fact, 160, 170–4 truth of meaning, 160, 170, 173 see also morality, and interpretation; will-to-power Israel, Jonathan, 13, 14, 170, 174 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 13, 14 James, Susan, 44 Janaway, Christopher, 69, 70, 73, 101, 108, 112, 131 Jovanovski, Thomas, 98, 179 joy in authoritarian rule, 54 confusion with signs, 57–8 difference between Spinoza and Nietzsche, 203–7 as a felt modification of the body, 36–7, 41–3, 75, 79, 93, 102 in knowledge formation, 51–3, 61–3, 77, 157, 199–200, 220–1, 228–9 and morality, 149–50, 208–11 relationship with time, 116, 121, 129–31, 146–7, 202 see also knowledge Joyful Science, The, 2, 72, 73, 74, 76, 88, 89, 94, 95, 97, 100, 101, 106, 114, 115, 116, 119, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129, 138, 148, 150, 152, 177, 179, 188, 202, 203, 205, 206, 210, 213, 214, 216, 217, 222, 223, 224

248

Index

Kant, Immanuel, 24, 111, 150, 226 Katsafanas, Paul, 17, 89, 94 Kaufmann, Walter, 11, 47, 141, 183 Kirkland, Paul E., 224 Klossowski, Pierre, 17, 69, 99, 103, 116, 139, 196, 207 knowledge as composing experience, 18, 213 in Descartes’ philosophy, 21–3, 164 as expressing a way of being, 59 from random experience, 20, 21, 36, 52, 56, 58, 59, 62, 64, 82, 175 intuitive, 63 as the most powerful affect, 3, 68, 73, 157, 198 in Plato’s philosophy, 120, 158, 199 rational, 31 as serving life, 5, 157–8, 218 three kinds of, 31 see also common notions; general notions; ideas; perspectivism; truth Kofman, Sarah, 17, 93, 97, 141, 148, 178, 180, 183, 228 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 44 la Caze, Marguerite, 7 lack, 41–2, 52, 168, 219, 220 laetitia, see euphoria Lang, Barel, 170 language as abbreviation, 90, 93, 116, 145, 149, 181, 182, 186, 187 as distinct from thinking, 55, 58, 77 as evocative, 160–1, 181, 185–7, 193–7 metaphoricity of, 160, 178–86, 193–7, 223, 227 seduction of, 9, 159–60, 176 see also consciousness, as linguistic communication; grammar; thinking laughter, 128, 129, 140

Leibniz, G., 70, 83–8 Leiter, Brian, 101, 112 Lenzer Heide fragment, the, 117, 122 Lingis, Alphonso, 132, 145, 193 Lloyd, Genevieve, 30 Lloyd, Henry Martyn, 7 Loeb, Paul, 17, 123, 124 Long, Anthony, 44 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 166 McDowell, John, 93 Macherey, Pierre, 15 McKeon, Richard, 13 Magnus, Bernd, 11, 12, 131, 141 Marx, Karl, 189 Mason, Richard, 30, 33 Matheron, Alexandre, 33 Matthews, Gareth, 162 May, Simon, 151 Meditations on First Philosophy, 16, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 32, 66, 67, 104, 154, 162, 163, 164, 165 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 32 metaphor, 76, 92, 94, 97–9, 142, 145, 148–50, 178–83, 190, 193, 203 mind, 21, 27, 32, 38, 43, 44, 46, 49, 50, 53, 193, 194 minute perceptions, 83, 84, 88 modernity, 21, 22, 26, 108, 111, 161, 189, 214 modes, 34–5, 39, 48–9, 55, 65, 212 moment, the, 93, 94, 104, 105, 124, 126–7, 131–2, 143–7, 207 monism, 13, 45, 51, 92 morality being-good and making-good, 208, 211–12 challenged by science, 213 good and bad, 200, 208, 212 good and evil, 125, 129, 199, 200, 208, 212 and interpretation, 188–91, 219, 228 morality of mores, 106 as sign language of the affects, 69, 150, 208

Index

morality – Continued slave morality, 137, 208–11 see also body, the, becoming moral of; consciousness; sin; will to punish Moreau, Pierre-Francois, 13, 14 multiplicity, 8, 9, 70, 72, 77, 85–7, 89, 94, 103, 113, 120–1, 127, 131–2, 143–6, 196, 223, 228 Murphy, Timothy, 17, 76, 98, 134, 135, 178, 179, 183, 193, 203 music, 91, 195, 214–16, 227 as sign language of the affects, 215 Nabais, Nuno, 17, 129, 203 Nadler, Stephen, 25, 82 Naess, Arne, 64 naming, 201–2, 208 Negri, Antonio, 17, 65, 207 Nehamas, Alexander, 112, 123, 131, 141, 183, 223 nihilism, 8, 110, 111, 117–21, 128–30, 133, 153 umsonst (all is in vain), 117, 128 noble barbarians, 137, 139 noble evaluation, 208–9, 211 On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense, 92, 179, 182, 183, 203 overcoming, 69, 80, 111, 114, 118, 120, 121, 125, 128–30, 132, 146, 148, 161, 205–8 overman, the, 125, 130 Owen, David, 101 parallelism, 46, 77 Parkinson, George Henry Radcliffe, 15 Parnet, Claire, 64 Parsifal, 215 Pascal, Blaise, 137 pathos, 72, 126, 161, 189, 207, 221–5 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 181, 183 perception, 25, 26, 29, 31, 34, 83, 84, 86, 88, 93, 99, 149, 178, 181, 184, 188

249

Perebroom, Derk, 44 perfection, 42–3, 140 perseverance, 65–6, 200, 204–7 perspectivism, 69, 83, 84, 94, 112, 113, 132, 144 seeing-something, 112–13, 127, 148, 156 pessimism, 73, 130, 179, 203 Phaedo, The, 123 Phaedrus, The, 159, 194, 229 phenomenology, 15, 32, 82 philosophy as confusing first and last things, 106 as creation of evocative concepts, 220–1, 227 as denying the perspectival, 111–17 as misunderstanding of the body, 72 as moralistic, 87, 119–21, 149–50, 158, 161, 199, 207 phonocentrism of, 169, 194 prejudices of, 111 as provocative, 154, 159, 161, 217–21, 226–30 see also truth, and philosophy Pietersma, Henry, 32 Pippin, Robert, 108 Plato, 5, 9, 10, 37, 110–11, 117–21, 123, 132, 133, 148, 151, 158, 159, 169, 174, 194, 195, 198, 199, 211–12, 214, 215, 217, 218, 228–9 Poellner, Peter, 69, 101, 112 Political Treatise, 5, 35, 73, 158 positivism, 179, 187–8 post-modernism, 98, 179, 183 power potentia sive conatus, 65, 204 potential, 17, 51, 65, 67, 204 potestas, 65 prehistoric labour, 105 priests, 138, 151, 152, 171, 200, 211, 219 Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, 20, 28

250 Index

Principles of Philosophy, 163, 164, 165 punishment, 100, 136, 138, 142, 151 reason, 26, 44, 203, 206 redeemer type, the, 133–40, 218 redemption, 133–41, 153, 202, 206, 207, 212 Reginster, Bernard, 112, 123 resentment, see ressentiment responsibility, 99–102, 106–7, 137–9, 159, 191, 202 see also morality ressentiment, 137, 140, 208–9 revaluation of all values, 150 Rice, Lee, 33, 49 Richardson, John, 80, 101, 141 Ricoeur, Paul, 189, 193, 196, 217 Ridley, Aaron, 101 Roberts, Roda, 197 Ryle, Gilbert, 167 Sadler, Ted, 133, 135, 179 sadness, see joy salvation, 111, 133–5, 138, 142 Savan, David, 58 Schacht, Richard, 6, 11, 141, 183 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 169 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 68, 73, 134, 179 Schrift, Alan, 76, 132, 179 science, 10, 122, 212–19, 225–6 as invocative, 212–17 scripture, 171, 173, 176 Seigworth, Gregory, 7 Shakespeare, William, 74, 165 Shapiro, Gary, 131, 183 Sharp, Hasana, 34 Short, Thomas, 183 signs, 50, 54–7, 97, 184 as invocative, 60–1, 160, 181–6, 193, 195–7, 227 sign-chains, 57, 98, 103, 134, 150, 182 see also imagination; language Simmel, Georg, 122 sin, 14, 131, 138, 199, 202, 214 Smith, Daniel, 83

Smith, Steven, 213 Socrates, 5, 9, 17, 110, 111, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 140, 143, 158, 159, 162, 174, 188, 194, 198, 199, 207, 215, 218, 229 Soll, I., 123 Solomon, Robert, 73, 179 sovereign individual, the, 100–7 Stambaugh, Joan, 132, 140 Stegmaier, Werner, 7, 11, 69, 79, 99, 136, 187 Stenner, Paul, 37 Stewart, Matthew, 6 stoicism, 44 Strong, Tracy B., 11, 94, 101, 111, 112, 132, 141, 144, 202, 211 subject, the, 33–4, 46, 70, 71, 73–6, 93, 99, 107, 111, 144, 187, 189, 192, 195, 210–11 dominion within a dominion, critique of, 38, 71, 72, 168 substance, 15, 32, 34, 35, 39, 40, 46, 47, 54, 76, 84, 85, 112, 134, 191, 195 Deus sive Natura, 16, 66, 175 natura naturans, 66, 220 Sybylla, Roe, 140 Symposium, The, 229 temporality, 9, 36, 39, 41, 110, 115, 116, 119–22, 124–32, 134, 140, 142, 146, 149, 152, 153, 156 see also body, the; consciousness; transience Theological-Political Treatise, 14, 52, 53, 54, 57, 160, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176 theology, 18, 27, 85, 111, 112, 167, 176, 177, 188, 198, 199, 213 thinking confusion with language, 77, 159, 176, 196, 201, 215 and consciousness, 81–93, 97 expressed in texts, 170, 174–7, 186 as genealogical, 67, 154, 186 and imagination, 29–31

Index

thinking – Continued as an irreducible form of expression (attribute), 38, 44, 46–58, 66, 174 as metaphorical, 177 and philosophy, 220–7 as sign-language of the affects, 75 sub species aeternitatis (under a species of eternity), 36 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 2, 100, 115, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 153, 188, 190, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225 Tosel, Andre, 169, 171, 172 traces, see signs tragedy, 70, 118, 124, 161, 207 transcendence, 5, 9, 27, 28, 39, 59, 76, 85, 95, 111, 115, 120, 123, 144–7, 153, 154, 157, 167, 168, 175, 187, 191–5 transference, see translation transience, 5, 18, 34–6, 67, 75–8, 102, 105, 110, 114–21, 124, 127–8, 130, 133, 146, 147, 149, 156, 158, 192, 195, 202, 205, 218, 228–9 see also body, the; temporality translation, 76, 77, 93–4, 98–9, 109, 110, 115, 118, 140–50, 153–6, 160–1, 178–9, 180–7, 190–1, 195–6, 201, 202–3, 208–12, 219–20, 229 Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, 30, 33, 45, 51, 52, 60, 174 tristitia, see sadness truth as non-representational expression of thought, 50, 86 and philosophy, 113–14, 162–5, 174–5, 226 will-to-truth, 117–21, 214, 227

251

see also ideas, adequate and inadequate; interpretation Twilight of the Idols, 2, 69, 70, 90, 91, 100, 102, 107, 115, 118, 119, 120, 123, 125, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 148, 150, 152, 179, 185, 189, 191, 194, 199, 205, 219, 222, 228 Ulfers, Friedrich, 122 Untimely Meditations, 104, 105, 157 utilitarianism, 72 Vattimo, Gianni, 179 vestigia, see signs Vinciguerra, Lorenzo, 17, 56 Vivian, Bradford, 202 Wagner, Richard, 73, 91, 215, 216, 219, 222 Walther, Manfred, 14 Whitehead, Alfred North, 199 will to punish, 100, 138 will-to-nothingness, 114, 121 will-to-power as affective, 69 as destabilising consciousness, 143 as interpretative, 144–50, 190, 228 as redemptive, 140–2, 153–5 relationship to conatus, 204–5 Will-to-Power, The, 11, 12, 140 Winchester, James, 69, 223 Witt, Mary Ann Frese, 139 Wolff, Christian, 14 Wolfson, Harry Austryn, 46 Wood, David, 123, 127 Woolhouse, Roger, 35 writing as provocative, 175–7, 223–5 Wurzer, William Stefan, 5, 6 Yovel, Yirmiyahu, 6, 7, 13, 15, 17, 33, 65, 66, 82, 177, 205, 207, 213