avoirdupois (nietzsche)
I start to read Ecce Homo, and I start to feel Nietzsche going mad. And the feeling is a little bit uncomfortable. I know where he was. The difference is that I didn’t begin by publishing my philosophy. But, like him, I’d be a fool to pretend I didn’t understand the force of my work. Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t involve the public in my exploration, as much as I had expectations at the outset that I would be understood more or less immediately. When I began, I felt like an outsider, but I believed that when I finished my work, I would be just like everybody else. Instead, when I finished my work (or, at least, completed the basic cycle), I realized why I was different from everyone else. Nietzsche was already tacitly committed to his earlier, published expectations, as much as he officially withdrew them in Zarathustra.
All of this comes up because I finally begin to understand Nietzsche and his importance. Hitherto, he had simply looked like the father of nihilism to me.
I came into philosophy by experience and not by study. The only professional ‘philosopher’ I encountered taught the single philosophy course I took in college, the ‘history of modern philosophy’, theoretically Descartes to the German Idealists. But the course, as I may have mentioned, was an indoctrination and not an exercise in Socratic exchange. And the professor was a snurled idiot locked into a wingless Humean dilemma, a self-castrated intellectual who wanted to pass the knife around as a condition for further elevation into the high art of pseudo-think. Naturally, I demurred.
At the same time, reading extended squibs of the major philosophers gave me a legitimate base. I understood both Leibnitz and Kant, with an initiatory kind of intuition. That is, their solutions had an empirical depth for me. But, of course, the classroom experience, as a student, left me soured on the recent western tradition and convinced that it consisted solely of post-Humean, self-disappearing analytical dust.
I had already had my experience of the ambivalence of time – as I’ve documented here, among other places – in a moment of insight into the Special Theory of Relativity. Time encloses at least two perspectives. The analytical takes us out of the moment into sequence and ‘objectivity’. But cause begins in the here and now. I might have almost gotten to this level of expression, at that point. But if I did, it was the result of Faulkner’s theory of time, and not any identifiable ‘philosophy’. For me, the experience had been an immediate, intuitive resolution of the ‘old knots of fate and free will’, but I was still not sure how.
It was not until I tried to learn Sanskrit by transcribing the Devanagari script of the Upanishad while I ponied along in translations that I began to develop both an understanding of and expression for the structure of the moment of experience. Watching the dance of the two late ‘gods’, Prajapati and Hiranyagarbha – the point of cause and the ‘golden egg’ or ‘golden womb’ of the whole – as they define the moment as the ‘great body’ and unfold the causal process of consciousness within it, I began to register the process as reflective awareness and find the vocabulary for principles and performance. I call them ‘late gods’, although, in fact, they have a relatively longer history, particularly Prajapati, but their use in Upanishad entails a precise, if embracing, ‘philosophical’ function – a late development.
I had other tools that came into play, at that point, formal tools that allowed me not only to extend and deepen my understanding of the reflective, but also to resolve some of the basic questions that automatically come up when we assume that consciousness and value are mutually structured, so that what we experience is not immediate or self-evident, but a consequence of an automatic reactive process, learned through a personal creative act and applied through a culturally developed and socially transmitted field of interpretive knowledge.
The Idealists had come up to the door of reflective awareness, but immediately fell into the pit of ‘reason’ as logical analysis. So everything beyond that – the legitimate delineation of the reflective process and the resolution of many of the basic problems that the recognition of this process occasions – is both revolutionary and the product of the work of the present writer.
But, as a consequence, I was essentially outside the traditions of western philosophy. Of course, this is paradoxical, since both the problem I addressed and the basic source of the intuition that flowered into the answer came directly out of the tradition, if not of western philosophy, at least of western enquiry and orientation. But I did not return to readings in western philosophy until I had already started to unfold the core definitions and delineating structures; at which point, intimations proved actualities, and the study of western figures helped flesh out the basic work. But, even so, for the last ten or fifteen years, the primary targets in the western tradition date backward from the Idealists. Only now am I finally in a position to begin accepting and assessing more than the most cursory encounters with later 19th century and 20th century philosophy.
Gilles Deleuze finally introduces me to Nietzsche. A few months ago I found an early French edition of his Nietzsche et la Philosophie in a thrift store. Perhaps it was abandoned because of the recent publication of an English translation. But, in any case, the cheap copy led to the far more expensive translation. My French is basically strong enough, but I don’t trust it. I could hear the importance, but not trust the precision of my interpretation. I had also started to look at Deleuze’s generation of French philosophers. It finally all begins to fit together.
No doubt the various stripes of analytical philosophy – if I may use that term as a kind of generic to embrace the Anglo-American philosophy of late 19th and early 20th centuries and much of the Vienna circle – persisted and developed. This, however, is the movement that by mid-20th century was already beginning to speak of the ‘death’ of philosophy – and with reason. The critical study of logic had essentially ended the presumptive equation of logic and analysis. Logic, according to this process, is intimate with linguistics. And since the academics who were not diverted into the development of computers have followed this process into linguistics and the bridging regions with mathematics, no one, it seems, has returned to the original question to wonder what this says about analysis.
But now I find that much of Continental philosophy of the 20th century has developed in an alternate stream, a stream that consists largely of a series of misinterpretations of Nietzsche – one might almost say, in a dialectic of misinterpretations. A third branch, the forceful phenomenology of Husserl, emerges from Brentano’s voluntarism and brings the force of both psychology and the Idealist understanding of reflection to bear on the ‘phenomenon’, the immediate manifestation of experience, in terms of the ‘phenomenological reduction’. But this ‘phenomenological reduction’ finds no subsequent takers as an analytical tool. What does not simply dissipate is engrafted into the traditions of Heidegger and his disciples.
The stream of misinterpretations begins with Heidegger. And the error is peculiarly consistent. All of the major figures try to reify the message of Nietzsche according to their own understandings of philosophy and analysis, however much they may have been ‘illuminated’ by the ‘joyous science’.
Nietzsche claims that the essence of his philosophy is to be found in what is commonly labeled the ‘eternal return’ or ‘eternal recurrence’. The full phrase is the ‘eternal recurrence of the same’. And while the translation is exact in terms of traditional correlations, I have the feeling that certain overtones creep in in the English that are not necessarily Nietzsche’s intention. ‘Eternal’ has a substantive force that is perhaps inappropriate. Nietzsche seems to be denoting an endless or ceaseless process, while ‘eternal’ in English suggests something relatively ‘concrete’ in itself. At the same time, Nietzsche goes out of his way to insist that this ceaseless function is not within sequential time. Apparently it is a function of time. And, if I understand aright, the ‘return’ is the ‘again arriving’. While the dictionaries consider the equation absolute, it is neither a ‘turning again’ nor an ‘occurring again’. I can’t find an equivalent in English, so, simply for the sake of difference, let us say ‘reversion’ – a ‘ceaseless reversion of the same’.
And the references are ambiguous, if not paradoxical. But, I would suggest, the paradox is intentional. At certain points, Nietzsche is willing to act as if this were literal: we are always going to return to just this point – just this moment in just this context. But he uses it, in this instance, as a moral weight. If this is the case, our responsibility is overwhelming and impossible. How can we take total responsibility for this moment? Because this is the implicit force of the vector: if we are doomed to repeat this moment endlessly, it is because we cannot take total responsibility for it.
But the answer is implicit in the phrase. The moment itself is the ceaseless reversion of the same. The sameness here is the ‘self’, not as a common or manipulated idea, but as the moment itself. The moment is self-fulfilling. And the self-fulfillment of the moment is the final expression, nothing added, nothing lost. That self-fulfillment of the moment is the essence of the ‘overman’. It is the creative essence of the overman in that moment, the pure act of creativity as the moment. It is Zarathustra as pure self-realization.
In other words, Nietzschean philosophy is a teleology of immediacy. ‘Teleology’ is technically imprecise, since it contains the concept of ‘end’, as if an external. And, of course, it is precisely against ‘external ends’ that Nietzsche argues – or rants and declaims, if you will. The value is the moment itself. We cannot find value outside the moment. Nature, in all its ramifications, subjective and objective, draws us out of the same which is the always of this moment. The only antidote is the ceaseless reversion to the same.
But the problem here is that the ceaseless reversion to the same precludes a formal structure. When Nietzsche identifies the key as power and the will to power, he is accurate. The only immediacy of value is as power. But without a structure of psychology, if not of formal analysis, power degenerates into fascism, the preemption of the individual in the name of institutional force. If ‘pure value’ first of all appears as power, how do we distinguish value from power, to identify the powers which are the legitimate forces of value?
Nietzsche’s insistence on the absolute immediacy of value precludes any analysis, even a tangential understanding of the structures of consciousness and the nature of vocation as the process of value. So Nietzsche’s would-be disciples fall back into all the errors he scourges, beginning most clearly with Heidegger and his dialectic of Being and becoming. The fact that Being falls over at some point into non-being does not alter the reifying force of the structure. It becomes precisely the kind of edifice that Nietzsche despised and attacked. And the subsequent thinkers who tried to bring the cumulative modern history of Nietzsche to bear on literary analysis only refine the intellectual scrum that Nietzsche exploded with his cosmic kick.
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