Part Nine: What is Noble? (Was ist Vornehm?)

小心

What follows are personal reflections on some of the main ideas and themes that I picked up from a reading of the last chapter of Nietzsche’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil’: What is Noble? It is, of course, by no means exhaustive. Following previous entries, $ refers to the section number (standard across translations and editions) and the number to the page ref in my Kaufmann, 1992, Modern Library Edition.

1/Aristocratic Radicalism and the Will to Power

The final chapter opens with clear statements of Nietzsche’s ‘aristocratic radicalism’: “Every enhancement of the type ‘man’”, Nietzsche declares, “has been the work of an aristocratic society … that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other” ($257/391). Nietzsche also praises the “noble barbarian castes” who “hurled themselves upon weaker … more peaceful races” ($257/391) and argues that society “must not exist for society’s sake” but instead as the scaffolding “on which a choice type of being is able to raise itself to its highest task and to a higher state of being” ($258/392). We must be clear that Nietzsche is not arguing for a return to the values of a ‘barbaric primitive culture’ (Carlisle, 2003). He admires not so much the cruelty and violence of the ‘masters’, but the affirmative, creative origins of their values; and he is critical of the reactive nature of ‘slave’ morality which rests on a corrupt foundation of ressentiment. This is extended in section 259 through a discussion of the will to power as the law of being throughout the organic stratum (“life simply is will to power” p. 393). The will to power is understood as the differential and genetic element of relations of force to force (Deleuze, 2001). The concept of force is, by nature, victorious (overpowering, appropriating) because the relation of force to force, understood conceptually, is one of domination: when two forces are related one is dominant and the other is dominated. Nietzsche thus understands “the slowly arising democratic order of things” ($261/399) and the demand for equality in nineteenth century Europe as the triumph of reactive forces – where the weak have conquered, where the strong are separated from what they can do, where the slave who has not stopped being a slave prevails over the master who has stopped being one (Deleuze, 2006). Here nihilism triumphs and the will to power becomes a “will to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay” ($259/393). Will to negation.

2/ Master Morality and Slave Morality

Section 260 introduces and distinguishes between ‘master’ and ‘slave’ morality (Nietzsche would clarify and develop this analysis a year later in Genealogy of Morals). Immediately, however, Nietzsche makes it clear that these two types are often combined within one culture, and “even in the same human being, within a single soul” ($260/394). This helps to explain why moralities, often assumed to be rational and coherent, usually turn out to be riven with tensions, hypocrisies and contradictions. In ‘noble’ societies, the masters will dominate the slaves, and so what is good and valuable will be determined by the “noble type of man” ($260/395). Taking pride in their strengths and talents, the noble human is thus a creator of values and new principles of evaluation (Deleuze, 2001). Unable to take revenge on their oppressors by means of force, the slaves label the aggressive, arrogant ethic of their masters as ‘evil’, and preach values such as humility, meekness and pity ($260/397). In effect, this ‘slave morality’ makes a virtue out of necessity, turning weakness into moral virtue and expecting everyone to conform to it. According to Nietzsche, the ethical teachings of Judaic law and Christian love spring from the thirst for vengeance exercised by the weak upon the strong ($219): from “the weight of negative premises, the spirit of strength, the power of ressentiment” (Deleuze, 2006: 114). Nietzsche argues that it is through the slave revolt in morality that the famous opposition of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is born ($260/397): ethical determination, that of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (understood in a vitalist sense of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’), gives way to moral judgement. The good of ethics has become the evil of morality, the bad has become the good of morality. Life is thus judged according to values that are said to be superior to life: “these pious values are opposed to life, condemn it, lead it to nothingness; they promise salvation only to the most reactive, the weakest, the sickest forms of life” (Deleuze, 2001: 78).

3/ Suffering and the Mask of Illness

Skipping forward a few sections, in 270 Nietzsche introduces the theme of suffering and its relation to noble life, arguing that “profound suffering makes noble; it separates” ($270/410). “By virtue of his suffering he knows more than the cleverest and wisest could possibly know, and that he knows his way and has once been ‘at home’ in many distant terrifying world of which ‘you know nothing’” ($270/410). This is interesting in relation to Nietzsche’s own health and illness. In his illness, Nietzsche saw a point of view on health; and in health, a point of view on illness. As Deleuze writes, “illness is not a motive for a thinking subject, not is it an object for thought: it constitutes, rather, a secret intersubjectivity at the heart of a single individual” (p.58). Illness as an evaluation of health, health as an evaluation of illness: such is the ‘reversal’ the ‘shift in perspective’ that Nietzsche saw as the crux of his method and his calling for a transmutation of values (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo). As long as Nietzsche could practice the art of shifting perspectives, from health to illness and back, he enjoyed, sick as he may have been, the ‘great health’ that made his work possible. We thus return to the importance and virtue of the mask. Illness is thus understood as a mask that conceals and expresses other kinds of forces – forces of life, forces of thought. However, and as Nietzsche’s final years testify, masks can become paralysing, no longer shifting and communicating, merging into a death-life rigidity. The overall paralysis marks the moment when illness exits from the work, interrupts it, and makes its continuation impossible (Deleuze, 2001: 64).

“Recreation? Recreation? You are inquisitive! What are you saying! But give me please”

“What? What? Say it!”

“Another mask! A second mask!” ($278/414).

4/ The Force of Laughter, The Shock of Thought

Skipping forward again, this time to section 294 where we have an interesting section on laughter as an attitude toward the world, toward life, and toward oneself. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche (1992) writes that “laughter means: to rejoice at another’s expense [schadenfroh sein], but with a good conscience” ($200). For Nietzsche, laughter becomes less a physical phenomenon than a symbol of joyous affirmation of life: it is not a consolation for our weakness (ala Hobbes) but an expression of joy, a sign of our power (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 382-383).

I also particularly like sections 292 and 296 which are beautifully written accounts of thought. In $292, for example, Nietzsche describes ‘the philosopher’ who is constantly struck by lightning bolts of thought; “who is perhaps himself a storm pregnant with new lightnings; a fatal human being around whom there are constant rumblings and growlings, crevices and uncanny doings” ($292/420). For me, this has clear resonances with Deleuze’s (2004) perspective on thought in Difference and Repetition, where he writes that subject does not choose to think, but is instead forced to think through the shock and contingency of an encounter (p.176). Thought is thus recast as a creative and ontogenetic force that pulses through and deterritorialises actual bodies. In $296, Nietzsche argues that this thinking is not contained in the designations, manifestations and significations of language as owned by the subject. These are only partial expressions of it: pale reflections of its flash (Massumi, 2002). The “colours” that we scholars, writers, “mandarins with Chinese brushes” give to our (re)presentations of the event of thought are thus “always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and feelings that are autumnal and yellow!” ($296/426-427; See also Dewsbury, 2010: 158).

“We immortalise what cannot live and fly much longer – only weary and mellow things! And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thought, for which alone I have colours, many colours perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds: but nobody will guess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved – wicked thoughts” ($296/427)

References

Carlisle, C. (2003) Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: ‘Why insist on the truth?’ Richmond Journal of Philosophy. 4

Deleuze, G. (2001) Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Zone Books

Deleuze, G. (2004) Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum

Deleuze, G. (2006) Nietzsche and Philosophy. London: Continuum

Dewsbury, J-D. (2010) Language and the event: the unthought of appearing worlds. In B. Anderson and P. Harrison (Eds.) Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography

Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2009) Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Massumi, B. (2002) Like a thought. In B. Massumi (Ed.) A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari.

Nietzsche, F. (1992) Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: The Modern Library

Beyond Good and Evil - Chapter Eight: Peoples and Fatherlands

Note: references given in brackets refer to the paragraph numbers, rather than page numbers, as between us we appear to have quite a broad collection of translations / editions.

Chapter eight of Beyond Good and Evil sees Nietzsche address the topic of nationalism, in relation to what he refers to as an emergent 'European Spirit'. Nietzsche opens the chapter with a nostalgic encounter with Wagner's Meistersinger overture, describing its "certain German massiveness and abundance of soul" (240). There is, it seems, something undeniably 'German', in Wagner's composition; in Nietzsche's own words, this is something "multifarious, unformed, and inexhaustible" (240) that is typical to the German tradition. However, moving into 241, such practices of 'hearty fatherland-ism' are portrayed in less favourable light, perhaps as more of an arbitrary fancy rooted to the past? The reader is introduced to a population of 'Good Europeans' - a group that Nietzsche appears to align himself with. Even these Good Europeans, Nietzsche argues, are liable from time to time to indulge in the kinds of 'fatherland-ism' made manifest in the previous encounter with Wagner - "hours flooded through with feelings for the nation, patriotic anguish, and all sorts of other archaic emotional convulsions" (241). Whilst such nostalgia for the nation might be unavoidable, Nietzsche emphasises the need for a quicker digestion and metabolism of these indulgences, as he puts it; we should avoid getting caught-up or 'lumbered' with the "atavistic attacks of fatherland-ism and attachment to the soil" (241). In these opening sections, Nietzsche appears to be opening-up a problem space by re-contextualising national identity in relation to the possibilities of a European future.

Moving into 242, Nietzsche's re-orientation towards 'Europe' touches upon the theme of environmental determinism - choppy waters for geographers, perhaps! According to the narrative, Europe was witnessing the gradual emergence of a more nomadic human. Interestingly, Nietzsche stresses the importance of physical - i.e. bodily - changes, supposedly as nomadic movements encourage a more adaptive human, "having a maximum of adaptive skills and powers" (242). As was mentioned in Friday's reading group, we might want to question such a reading of Darwinian evolution. For me, it does seem to be flavoured with a heavy dose of Lamarckism, in that it suggests an environmentally-determined evolution taking place over the course of centuries. On the other hand, perhaps this is less a question of environment, but instead of racial-mixing? Either way, I think the important point to take from Nietzsche's argument is that, in his own words, "this process probably ends with results that were least anticipated by its naive sponsors and apologists, the apostles of 'modern ideas'" (242). Thus, the intentions of democratic sponsors will always be exceeded by the physical inter-minglings of bodies and environments. Do we detect a hint of vitalism here?

The main body of chapter eight goes on to explore what Nietzsche sees as the strengths and shortcomings of various nationalities, placing each within the context of a European 'becoming'. Indeed, no 'nation' is immune to Nietzsche's onslaught of terse criticism. Populated by 'multifarious' souls, the youthful German nation escapes definition in its "maze of passageways" (244). In fact, Nietzsche portrays this uncertainty as a brilliant discovery for German philosophy - "the German himself is not, he is becoming, he 'is developing'" (244). However, the 'inner tightrope dance' of the German soul is also its weakness through its "boorish indifference to taste", and its inability to 'digest' the events that befall it. It seems, therefore, that these weaknesses are in opposition to the advent of the 'Good European'. According to Nietzsche, then, German music "was threatened by its greatest danger: to cease being the voice of Europe's soul and to deteriorate inter mere fatherland-ism" (245). Sections 246 and 247 address German literature, and its supposed lack of tempo, musicality, colour - in short, artistic creativity / expression. Personally, I think these two sections are among my all-time favourites, as we get glimpses of Nietzsche-as-writer, as an experimental sculptor of language. The approach is, in places, explicitly performative, at least in my translation: "How resentfully we face the slowly circling swamp of sounds without resonance, of rhythms without dance that Germans call a 'book'" (246). It would be interesting to do a bit of digging here regarding the translation, and whether or not such a translation retains the sibilance - indeed the resonances - of the German. For Nietzsche, the Germans' lack of linguistic musicality stems stems from a forgetting of the physicality of language, particularly the natural rhythms and colourations that emerge through the act of oration. Provocatively as ever, Nietzsche thus declares the greatest German masterpiece to be "the masterpiece of its greatest preacher: The Bible has ben the best German book so far" (247).

Moving on into 251, Nietzsche addresses the Jewish people, viewing the contemporary 'anti-Jewish' sentiment as "little becloudings of the German spirit and conscience" (251). Whilst bordering somewhat uncomfortably upon essentialism (e.g. German stomachs and German blood have found it difficult to deal with influxes of 'Jew'), Nietzsche positions himself in opposition to the anti-Semites. For Nietzsche, the Jews are a strong race, more than capable of ruling over Europe. This, however, is not the Jewish objective, and Nietzsche seems keen to propose an intermingling of Jewish and German races, as part of the coming 'European Problem' of "breeding a new caste to rule over Europe" (143).

What might the English contribute to the coming Europe? Not a lot, it seems, for to be English is by definition to be mediocre: "they are not a philosophical race, these Englishmen" (252). Worse still for Nietzsche, the English exhibit a 'boorish solemnity', their will-to-creativity shackled by the "Christian gesture and prayer and the singing of psalms" (252). At worst, "a penitent's spasm really may be the relative highest 'human' achievement that it can aspire to" (252). But perhaps, Nietzsche offers, dry Englishness is more suited to the creation of 'common facts', a la Charles Darwin (!). For Nietzsche, common facts are not enough; "in the end they have to more than to merely perceive, and that is to be something new" (253). In a defence of the English, and in light of STS, might we instead argue that Darwin's common facts required a creativity - and perhaps a personal transformation - par excellence?

With their promotion of 'art for art's sake', the French are painted in a more favourable light. Nietzsche also appears fond of a 'psychological sensitivity' characteristic of the French, and their ability to offer a "tolerably successful synthesis of North and South" (254). Most importantly, however, is the French propensity "to understand and accommodate those rare and rarely satisfied people who are too expansive to find their satisfaction in any kind of fatherland-ism" (254). Presumably, Nietzsche might place his own way of life within this rarer type. From a less cynical perspective, however, this is clearly a critique of a rigid identity welded to tradition and the past, and perhaps instead a call to imagine a Europe of fluid identities to come.

Nietzsche finishes the chapter by arguing that, contrary to the superficially divisive nature of contemporary politics, "Europe wants to be one" (256). There is, it seems, some kind of will-to-Europe, a trans-individual drive that should not be denied, "experimentally anticipating the European of the future" (256). This drive manifests itself, according to Nietzsche, through "abundant, impetuous art", and is ushered into existence by those "ruled by literature", who are often "writers themselves, in fact, poets, intermediaries and interminglers of the arts and the senses" (256). These 'good Europeans, it seems, are united in their modes of 'seeking' - "fanatics of expression at all costs". In my reading, there is something stubbornly egotistical in the heroism of Nietzsche's new Europeans, "nearly destroying themselves by their work". That being said, I can't help but turn the question back upon my self; what am I presenting, expressing, creating? And, perhaps, what are my own 'fatherlands' and 'hours of indulging' that obscure new opportunities? Ignorant of the destination, an 'experimental anticipation' is necessarily an act of creation.

BGE Preface/Part I & II - Bristol Friday 21st October

Well, eighteen of us met in the rather distracting hubbub of Hawthorn’s front room – and what follows is my partial resume of the discussion points we had over the two hours, spliced with a mixture of some of the angles I picked up on, and then some  themes we started to think about pursuing and thus returning to over the next four weeks. ($ refs to the entry whatever your translation and edition/the number to the page ref in my Hollingdale, 1973, Penguin Classic edition).

PREFACE

Supposing truth to be a woman (31)

We spent a fair ten minutes mulling over N’s provocative opening (surely his point?) – the humour more or less agreed upon, we read this as an allegorical definition of philosophy’s dogmatism when faltering in front of characteristics akin to those ascribed to woman, as inscrutable and seductive etc. as untruth: a pithy example then that short circuits. Not woman then as an object but nor woman perhaps  as C21st feminist theories might inscribe, i.e. as instigating a radically different set of frames of reference outside philosophy’s current tradition (perhaps, as the spirit/style of N might well be precisely this) [Derrida’s response to the question:’ If you had a choice, which philosopher would you have liked to have been your mother?” (Derrida Documentary – Dick/Kofman: chapter 15 of DVD].

Not being ungrateful to the dogmatist’s error: this started our discussion on the question of the system or metaphysics in N’s thought: this was contentious and disputed but it does point to the style at work: the error, in any case, revealing an agonistic creativity (we return to this below). 

PART ONE: ON THE PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS

What really is it in us that wants 'the truth'? ($1/33)

Discussed the idea that this challenges the dogmatism of metaphysical certainty, why 'we' - philosophy hitherto, and perhaps us still (note N directs much to us now - easy to be seduced by his writings and laugh with him when the humour is directed at you (see $) - seek/will truth. Two things struck us here it seems: (1) not to deny truth and its role in its 'regulatory importance' but that untruths fulfill this function too: hence the oft quoted 'The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding ... without granting as true the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a continual falsification of the world by means of numbers, mankind could not live ...To recognize untruth as a condition of life'  ($4: 35-6); (2) also noted the destabilization of the subject of willing the truth here - what is it that is in us that thinks, that thinks as desires, seeks out truth? Are we sure this doesn't come from outside our sense of atomistic individual thought blasting that apart too (even from within us/this is addressed of course in $19)? And further, that actually the selection of truth as traditionally conceived is value laden: philosophers are all actors and their convictions at some point appear on the scene (their conceptual personae - i.e. at once disparaging but also constructive for N. The Satyr Greek plays - 'The ass came along, beautiful and strong': I noted Maria F's ass earrings worn for the occasion, smart bunny!) So, no absolute truths as not ones for philosophers to discover, rather, and here N questions the honesty of philosophers (in his humourous put downs of Kant and Spinoza (something that we discuss again over Part III), this ambiguous appreciation and mockery of these philosophers - achieved quite a bit as a hermit etc!) to actually sort of valorize the prejudices in the title. 

Conscious thinking must still be counted among the instinctive activities ($3/35) A thought comes when 'it' wants, not when 'I' want it ($17/47)

A big theme for me here so I am going to strand together several threads connecting: affect to will to power, competing wills-drives organic but not atomistic that extend and critique distributed agency (Latour isn't Nietzschean enough?)/habit and plasticity/Speculative Realism (sure, all my convictions at the mo!). (1) The time at which Nietzsche is writing, not so much in terms of society and politics, but in terms of science - physiology. Why and how was N turning to this field of science? So perhaps my favourite quote of Part 1: Physiologists should think again before postulating the drive to self-preservation as the cardinal drive in an organic being [theories now of plastic deformation/auto-immunization?] A living being desires above all to vent its strength - life as such is will to power - : self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it - In short, here as everywhere, beware of superfluous teleological principles ($13/44) $15 is a rich perplexing argument addressing both phenomenology (phenomena in the sense of idealist philosophy) and SR (the external world is not the work of our organs) - i.e. sure our sense organs are phenomena too, so objects as well as subjects of the world, but N hints at going further than this through physiology. How? In his critique of 'immediate certainties' - now here we first briefly discussed pragmatism (mainly James) and then in more detail that $16 sets up $19 as the crux of Part 1. Thus: the philosopher must question: That it is I who think, that it has something at all which thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of an entity thought of as a cause, that an 'I' exists, finally that what is designated by thinking has already been determined - that I know what thinking is ($16/46) Using this to question why we (scientists/philosophers/in general) think in terms of cause and effect? Then to $19 and the will to power - feelings and thinking as will/will as the affect of command: of what? Of wills/forces against wills/forces. The punchline that comes: for our body is only a social structure composed of many souls - thus making sense of the idea that in will it both commands and obeys. It is only when we/it overcomes some obstacle that through the resultant effort that it appears - and we associate ourselves with the success, centered on the 'I'; but not if we now realize we are not atomistic but rather a collection of under-wills as well etc. And this illusion, untruth of the 'I' is the common philosophy of grammar - similar grammatical functions steal the interpretation always already. Of course it is here that we see the scale of N's project (also $54/81); and its antihumanism (forwards to Part III - the death of God is the death of 'man'; also $101; Foucault, OT - to pull oneself into existence out of the swamp of nothingness by one's own hair - N thus eschewing 'causa sui' and the myth that we can be the masters of knowledge etc). Also here: N's relation to the science (and that of physiology) - he doesn't valorize it alone because the project here is not to discover but to invent ($12/44) - i.e. invention draws in other experiences, expressionisms, encounters etc (OK, my prejudice for GD is immanent!)

Big questions we skipped over here - the question of freedom. We did discuss the notion of the myth of unfree will as well as that of free will: the question remains though: what do we think of the beat of strong and weak wills? This relates back to the indifference of nature: To live - is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is living not valuating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? ($9/39). How do we proceed with this? And how do we read N? Well, something I have been musing on: his method - he says after the first exposition of his will to power in BGE it is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable: it is with precisely this charm that it entices subtler minds ($18/47 - and I am appealing here, haha!!) And before that on the innate prejudices of philosophers, that what they lack is the courage of the conscience ($5/36) to admit their prejudices; and this is the method, this courage, if carried out, that will be the means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion ($4/36)

Ok so here I start folding PART TWO: THE FREE SPIRIT but continue on about N's method

What customary value-sentiments are resisted? He has given thus some of the logics - antithetical thinking/cause and effect/ a priori judgements - and rejigged them in much the same style and provocation as the opening sentence of the preface. Specifically, he is targeting Descartes, Hegel and Kant - immediate knowledge ($16/46), synthetic judgements etc. So he starts Part II with his method: the will to knowledge on the basis of a far more powerful will, the will to non-knowledge, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its antithesis but - as its refinement! ($24/55) And then: It is commanded by the conscience of method. Not to assume several kinds of causality so long as the experiment of getting along with one has not been taken to its ultimate limits ( - to the point of nonsense, if I may say so) ($36/67) - THUS: N's method, and the courage behind the provocations of his thought here, is the singular pursuit of the 'will to power' and his constant questioning of it so as not to fall down as its martyr (does that prevent if from being a metaphysical move?) It is almost then that the following sections in The Free Spirits acknowledges the  'vulgarity' and 'difficulty' of it: but then, like the power of censorship in society (a good ill given it spotlights the current 'unnacceptable' - being told something is unnacceptable usually makes me laugh)), it does this to set N' stage to distinguish the 'levellers' from the 'attempters [loved eloquent and tirelessly scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its 'modern ideas' ($44/72)] - and thus the distinction, again, perhaps?, 'unpalatable', between plant 'man' and herd animal. 

Well that is it for now - will probably add in a few additions over the week when/if I get the time: these would include, the affect in will/the ethics in N's method - the allusions to desiring a different world and overturning the existing one. The themes we had - why masks so prevalent? - why psychology a lure, and queen of the sciences? - is will to power then the metaphysical statement of N? - more to be said on the times in which N wrote, politically, socially, scientifically, and also personally.

P.S. [Derrida’ response to the question mentioned earlier: ‘it is impossible for me to have any philosopher as a mother’].

As a first time blogger (!) I am not exactly sure what will be useful, but am putting up my rather descriptive notes on part one of the reading (I must admit I’m only now starting the second part and this is already way lengthier than intended so will just proffer this for now). If my interpretations are too far off, don’t hesitate to correct me – as we learn from the preface, we women are not weighed down by the burdens of truth!... Bracketed numbers refer to passages in the Hollingdale translation...

As I see it, Part One serves as Nietzsche’s demonstration of an evaluative approach to truth, which asks, not ‘what is (the) truth?’ or even ‘what is the origin of the will to truth?’ but ‘what is the value of this will?’ – asked first in a general sense and then directed towards a method of diagnosing the values behind the will to truth and the impoverished psychology of those posing their unquestioning questions. Challenging the faith in antithetical values upon which dogmatic philosophy rests (eg. the idea that truth and falsity or illusion are opposed), Niet. invokes instead, as if to call into being, a ‘new species of philosopher’ bold enough to diagnose the necessary falsities of man and to recognise untruth as a condition of life. In passage 5 he gives the first indication of the meaning of the book’s title (a philosophy that ventures to recognise untruth as a condition of life ‘places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil’).

Continuing in his role as diagnostician of values, Niet. makes the claim that philosophy thus far has been a kind of ‘involuntary and unconscious memoir’ (6): beyond the drive to knowledge and the post-hoc rationalisations philosophers make (cf. Kant’s categorical imperative and Spinoza’s mathematics, which display the reactivity of a timid and vulnerable psychology) a moral drive can be discerned...as he puts it, in the order of the ranking of the drives, the philosopher’s morality is decisive. As a little detour, I was very pleased to see N’s brief mention of the indifference of nature (9) – something I’m especially interested in at the moment. For Nietzsche, this is really a lead into his statement of distaste for those who impose upon nature their own meagre moral ideals (as is the case in the Stoic’s (disavowed) imposition of his own self-tyranny over nature). This is the first of his short polemics against various classes of philosophical prejudice...

I have to say I struggled a bit with passage 10 – he sets out by denouncing as nihilists those who, as a matter of conscience, prefer certainty to the uncertainties and ‘beautiful possibilities’ of appearance... he then talks about those ‘stronger, livelier thinkers who are still thirsty for life’, suggesting that, while their critique of modern realism may well be motivated by nostalgia (by an attempt to recover from the vagueries of bodies and appearances the immortality of soul) they are nonetheless right to want to escape from the poverty of realism ... is he talking about Romanticism here? Next target is Kant... and Nietzsche makes it clear that ridicule is a more apt response than moral indignation to the widely accepted fiction of the faculty of synthetic judgment... he insists on the importance of inquiring into the necessity of such a fiction – again, I was a bit lost by his bit on the ‘noble idlers’, as charming as that slanderous term may be... Any thoughts on what/ who is he talking about here would be welcome!

Well, this is getting very lengthy, so I’ll try to speed up and make it a bit more general... After taking a brief stab at those who erroneously believe that self-preservation (as opposed to the will to power) is the dominant instinct in man, the ‘eternal, popular sensualism’ of physics, materialist atomism (though not necessarily the ‘soul hypothesis’ per se), the treatment of the organs as causal phenomena, the immediate certainty of the ‘I think’ and the dominant doctrine of the will are, in turn, rejected as mere exaggerations of popular prejudices. Throughout this little group of critiques, running from passage 12 through to 20 we get a sense of Nietzsche’s irritation with the confusion of event and interpretation, which lies at the heart of many of the philosophical prejudices he is outlining.

I was especially interested in some of the areas he explores in relation to the problem of the will. It is no surprise to find the word ‘affect’ following from his description of will in relation to a ‘plurality of sensations’, the sensations of the condition we leave and to which we go and of the transitions themselves, their accompanying ‘muscular sensations’ that tie will to habit, etc.... Here Niet. provides a very nice analogy to explain the erroneous confusion that seems to be constitutive of the will : like the ruling class that identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth, the will identifies itself as cause of the successful executive agents. In some ways, this section acts as a demonstration of his earlier claims that a philosophy that is beyond good and evil will recognise untruth as a condition of life – the logic of cause and effect are deemed conventional fictions only mistakenly treated as material things (leading, in this case, to the erroneous positing of an opposition between free and unfree will).

In the course of his exploration of how it is that the will derives an appearance of power (freedom) from its constitutive confusion of will with action as such, Nietzsche comes up with what is one of the most provocative statements in Part One for me : ‘...for our body is only a social structure composed of many souls’ (19). In fact, I’m going to leave it there and if this use of the word soul spiked anyone else’s curiosity, I’d be interested to hear/ think more about it!

Maria

Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil - prelude to a philosophy of the future (1886)

Towards a whole cartful of beautiful possibilities ... to recognize untruth as a condition of life

 So we begin this week with reading Beyond Good & Evil. The schedule is as follows:

Friday 21st October - 'Preface', 'Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers' & 'Part Two: The Free Spirit'

Friday 28th October - 'Part Three: The Religious Nature', 'Part Four: Maxims and Interlude' & 'Part Five: On the Natural History of Morals'

Friday 4th November - 'Part Six: We Scholars', 'Part Severn: Our Virtues'.

Friday 11th November - 'Part Eight: Peoples and Fatherlands', 'Part Nine: What is Noble?' & 'From High Mountains: Epode'.

The ideas in terms of the blog: each week one of us from the meetings in Bristol will blog a resume of the key points of discussion over the subsequent weekend. Additionally, please blog in precursive thoughts ahead of the meetings on that week's readings as new posts and comment on the posted resumes and other precursive thoughts as you see fit.

... if your ship has been driven into these seas, very well! Now clench your teeth! Keep your eyes open! Keep a firm hand on the helm! - We sail straight over morality and past it, we flatten, we crush perhaps what is left of our morality by venturing to voyage thither - but what do we matter!

January 20th, 1982 - Care, Life, and Old Age

Foucault begins the first hour of the lecture in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD with the prime of Stoicism up until just prior to the spread of Christianity. In this period of Roman Stoicism, including Aurelius, he emphasizes the importance of how a care for the self "...becomes co-extensive with life"(86), that philosophy is fundamentally, a constant attention to caring for the self (88), and, importantly, that the education of the young, is an education in the seriousness of "a proper care for the self"(90), so as to "become again what we never were"(95).

A question, of course, emerges: what does Foucault mean by "proper care"? It is worth noting, I think, that Foucault had long been interested in practices of philosophical self care, particularly monastic traditions. In early 1978 he travelled to Japan where, at the urging of Omori Sogen, a Zen master at the Seionji temple in Uenohara, Foucault lived as a monk for several days (Eribon, 1991, p. 310). There, as he noted later, he was less interested in a Buddhism as a religious (if it is that) ontology, than the practices, exercises and rules of Zen monastic care. He noted in an interview about the experience, that he was interested in "...life itself in a Zen temple, that is to say the practice of Zen, its exercises and its rules. For I believe that a totally different mentality to our own is formed through the practice and exercises of a Zen temple"(Foucault, "Michel Foucault and Zen," 1999, p. 110).

What is significant, perhaps, is his identification with the Stoic ethics as a rigorous exercise (what he called askesis) in co-extending self with life, and of a recognition within the broadly western ambit and tradition of a union between the experience of life, as the material of life, or what the Stoics called "nature", itself. The practices of self care are the means by which we become attuned to the dynamic un/enfolding of being-in-the-world. At bottom, a Buddhist practice speaks something to this responsibility, by which, in its rigorous attention to this ineffable Other of which we are also one (hence the emphasis in Foucault's lectures on the singularity of care), it is, as such, proper care, rather than simply spurious or aggrandizing (as in the case of Alcibiades). Foucault calls this former 'care of the soul' rather than the latter which is designated 'care of one's body' (96-7).

The soul then, it would seem, at least for the Stoics, and before the Christians got their trans-substantiative hands on it, that the concept of human matter and natural matter are one. Care for the self is care for the attunement of human experience with natural becoming. This is why, as Foucault emphasizes, if we are to govern justly. and thus well (according to the good, as Carlo reminded us), if we are to bring the city in alignment with the becoming of things in their natural dynamic, we must become familiar with the practices of attuning ourselves with, what the Stoics called, the "laws of nature", i.e. that of which we have been and must learn to become again. The Christian moment at the end of the 2nd century AD marked the beginning of the break from this singular recognition of matter. Recall that trans-substantiation is the Christian theological tenet that bread and wine become the matter of God in the celebration of the Eucharist, and ipso facto, that, because we are not matter in the mode of Jesus and thus God, we are ontologically distinct creatures, but ones who, through teaching (by priests, the church, etc), can come to know God, but not be the same stuff as God. (Incidentally, this is why Spinoza's monism and his Ethics was proscribed and placed on the Catholic Index.)

Foucault thus is tracing the emergence of a pre-transubstantiative ethics, and hinting at a means to conceptualize how one might return, but by becoming again what we never were (this is Nietzsche's eternal return par excellence) to an aesthetic ontology of careful attention.

His interest in monastic practice, particularly that of Buddhism, is helpful in perhaps seeing where he is going with his analyses.

Fascinating stuff.

But, it also can get away from him a little. Some caution might be needed, and I only draw attention, as I remarked during the discussion, to one small section of the second hour. In the second hour, he remarks on page 110, that "We should live to be old, for in old age we will find tranquility, shelter, and enjoyment of the self." I don't disagree with this sentiment, or the broad normative intent. Surely, yes, it is a laudable goal, and one that I would agree, should be striven towards. There is a long philosophical tradition of living to be old, whether in Aristotle, Confucius, Mencius, Pierre Hadot, or Simone de Beauvoir. But there is nothing necessary of old age that will be the case. Foucault forgets his own historical genealogy and method for a moment here. Simone de Beauvoir reminds us in her book Coming of Age that old age is our inescapable destiny (if we are lucky), but that its "lived meaning is specific to our historical, class and cultural situations" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/).

It feels somewhat apropos writing these comments about protecting the means to grow old in safety, tranquillity, and enjoyment when hundreds of thousands of people are, this very day, protesting the erosion of social security and pensions by our less than careful governors. (Indeed, I imagine David Cameron as a peculiarly gammon Alcibiades whom Socrates would chastise soundly; and, incidentally, refuse to bugger.) Nice sentiment, Foucault, but the safety and tranquility of old age as an ethical imperative, as de Beauvoir reminds, needs to be understood as and protected by the care of the polis, as much as the care of the self. Foucault might himself have been in a situation where the threat to the tranquillity of his old age safety was less pointed than it is for us today, and this less vexed or, indeed, privileged position might have led to his somewhat romantic generalization.

Anyway, for a reminder of Foucault's (and the Stoics) laudable maxim which must be protected, by careful selves qua the polis, whom better to remind the cost of not doing so than the inimitable John Prine.



Refs:
Foucault, 'Michel Foucault et le zen: un sejour dans un temple zen'. reprinted in Religion and Culture ed. Jeremy Carrette (Routledge, 1999).
D. Eribon, Michel Foucault. Trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991.

6th January 1982: first and second hour

• Striking shift of emphasis noted by Foucault, that the expression 'know yourself' is subordinated to the precept of care of the self (4)
• the role of the philosopher - as someone who awakens the people (questions about the extend of the people) - "to persuade him to care less about his property than about himself ... to consider less the things of the city than the city itself" (7). The horsefly analogy: "The care of the oneself is a sort of thorn which must be stuck into men's flesh, driven into their existence, and which is a principle of restlessness and movement, of continuous concern throughout life" (8).
• an event in thought - a general cultural phenomenon peculiar to a time yet that "is still significant for our modern mode of being subjects" (9).
• If the philosopher is one whom persuades people to care for themselves, what is this care for oneself that would so describe the parameters of philosophy? (i) a certain way of considering things, of behaving in the world; (ii) a certain form of attention, "a certain way of attending to what we think and what takes place in our thought" - meditation/self-reflection; (iii) actions exercised on the self by the self: "techniques of meditation, of memorization of the past, of examination of conscience, of checking representations which appear in the mind" (11)
• critique of the Cartesian moment - which reasserted the idea of knowing oneself over that of caring of oneself which erroneously "placed self-evidence at the origin" (14).
• a definition or use of the idea of 'spirituality' where philosophy is "the form of thought that asks, not of course what is true and what is false, but what determines that there is and can be truth and falsehood and whether or not we can separate the true and the false" (15). Three aspects of the subject as understood through three characteristics of spirituality (15-16).
• Critique of the Cartesian advocation of knowledge with internal formal rules of method and external cultural conditions, the milieu for performative efficacy etc. Curiously, and a question to return to, this is not spiritual: the key difference - in the modern age of the Cartesian "the subject is capable of truth, but that, such as it is, the truth cannot save the subject"; and in spirituality as philosophy, "the subject is not capable of truth, but that, such as it is, the truth can transfigure and save the subject" (19). Why does the subject need saving? Why is salvation important? Salvation from what? On whose terms?

***

• there cannot be knowledge without a profound modification in the subject's being (27; cf 15)
• shift from eros to polis crucial c.400BC through the edict: "Care of the self: the point at which the notion emerges is here, between privilege and political action" (36). This is Foucault's relation of philosophy to politics?
• [Notes on Techne (35)].
• Questions: what is the self? How does caring for the self develop knowledge of the techne necessary to engage the world (politically)? What is truth?
  

20 January 1982: first and second hour

13 January 1982: first and second hour

The Hermeneutics of the Subject

"I shall leave it to Death to determine what progress I have made ... I am making ready for the day when I am to pass judgement on myself - whether I am merely declaiming brave sentiments or whether I really feel them" - Seneca, Letter 26 in 'Moral Essays'; quoted in Foucault, HotS 2006: 505 and in Ethics 1997:105.

The idea is to read six lectures per week - around 20 pages each lecture; to then discuss these broadly lecture by lecture in the six lecture blocks; and to thus use this the Vibrant Matter blog to post thoughts lecture by lecture to archive points. So in a different way to previously, the idea is more to read through the lectures under your own steam, if you miss a week or two to keep up the reading, and for us all to extract the general methodological, philosophical and ethical trajectory of Foucault's late work - that in the second from last and last lectures rather wonderfully and movingly is very self reflexive on these terms.