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
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