Nietzsche
- Society of Singularity
Reason, Equivalence,
and Nietzsche's Society of Singularity
Terence Smith | Professor Julie Maybee | Philosophy 570 | May 1996
The triumph of reason which Socratic dialectics represents
is, for Nietzsche, the moment of the birth of a moral world order from
"a state of emergency" in Greek culture (1888a, "The Problem of Socrates"
#10). Nietzsche suggests that Athenian society was degenerating: "Everywhere
the instincts were in anarchy; everywhere people were but five steps from
excess" (#9). Socrates' "apparent cure"--the despotism of reason over the
unruly instincts--was only taken seriously because of this wider cultural
malaise. Socrates' method, Nietzsche insists, had its origins in "the lowest
orders" (#3). In line with his earlier evaluation of values, therefore,
Nietzsche presents Socrates' triumph as the success of a slaves' revolt
(1886; 1887). It is "the defeat of a nobler taste; with dialectics the
rabble gets on top" (#5). Nietzsche identifies this slaves' solution as
a decadent palliation of décadence, and consequently the history
of morality which arises from it is a "misunderstanding" (#11). I would
like to contest Nietzsche's conclusion that in order to correct the degenerate
influence of Socrates, and to re-establish what he terms a cultural health
based on noble values, it is necessary to resort to an aristocratic organization
of society, with its "prime requirement" of exploitation (1888b, #57).
Conceptual thinking, Nietzsche had claimed fifteen years
earlier, "originates through our equating what is unequal" (1873, 46).
In doing so, its concepts exclude particularity in order to posit the fiction
of a self-identical, meaningful construct which may be mobilised by a society
in the form of its language. This conceptual scheme imposes "the obligation
to lie according to a fixed convention" (47). Despite such an assessment,
however, Nietzsche does not suggest abandoning reason in the name of truth.
On the contrary, in Beyond Good and Evil he insists that:
[T]he falsest judgements (to which synthetic judgements
a
priori belong) are the most indispensable to us . . . . [W]ithout measuring
reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical,
. . . mankind could not live (1886, #4).
What is important about reason for Nietzsche is the use we
make of it: "to what extent is it life-advancing" (#4).
It is in this respect that he finds Socrates' use of reason
objectionable. It is "rationality . . . without instinct," and as such
is a "formula for
décadence," since "[e]verything good
is instinct" (1888a, "The Problem of Socrates" #11; "The Four Great Errors"
#2). In opposing itself to the instincts, the senses, and the body, reason
and its conceptual fictions are severed from the world. It is the body
which is immersed in the world's continual becoming, which is subject to
change and mutation, which connects us to history ("‘Reason' in Philosophy"
#1; #5). When severed from this connection the fictions of reason become
"illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors
which are worn out and without sensuous power" (1873, 47). Nietzsche rehearses
the conclusion reason comes to under such conditions: "What is, does not
become;
what becomes, is not" (1888a, "‘Reason' in Philosophy" #1). The
separation between becoming and being establishes the division of the world
into an "apparent" and a "real" one. This division enables the particular
mode of interpretation of the world that Nietzsche calls the moral world
order.
The moral world order is the practice of interpreting
the events of the world in terms of the fixed, abstract, alienated conceptual
scheme that is severed from its connection with the actual. The fictional
world of the concept is called the "real," while the actual world of "becoming,
passing away, change," the experience of non-identity and difference, is
called the "apparent" (#2). In interpreting the actual through the abstractions
of a closed, fictional construct, the moral world order is nothing more
than "a moral optical illusion" (#6). But it is not on that account harmless.
the particular employment of reason which it relies on--the use of imaginary
causes, effects, beings, science, psychology, teleology--engenders an anti-natural
morality (1888b, #15; 1888a, "Morality as Anti-Nature" #4). While anti-natural
morality is presented as the symptom of this particular use only, Nietzsche
nonetheless reminds us that it constitutes "virtually every morality that
has hitherto been taught" (#4). Anti-natural morality is one which "has
its roots in hatred of the natural (-actuality-), . . . [which]
is the expression of a profound discontent with the actual" (1888b, #15).
As such, its practice as a moral world order is profoundly unhealthy; it
is "the antithesis of life" (#25); it promotes "décadence values";
it establishes a society which "prefers what is harmful it it" (#6).
The society based on the moral world order is a society
of the priest. The interpretative scheme good / evil which it mobilizes
is a derivative of the real / apparent division of the world; where good
is established through "opposition to the preservative instincts
of strong life" (#5). Since these moral judgements are derived from "realities
which do not exist," i.e., the "real" world, Nietzsche asserts that "there
are no moral facts" (1888a, "The ‘Improvers'
of Mankind" #1). The improvement of the member of society under this interpretative
scheme is thus their imprisonment "behind nothing but sheer terrifying
concepts" (#2). These concepts--sin, redemption, soul, God, repentance,
temptation, the kingdom of God, the Last Judgement--are a means of getting
a grasp on the subjugated member; a means of control through interpretation:
"they are the actual levers of power, the priest lives on sins"
(1888b, #26). The use of reason which creates the priest's "real" world
of concepts is a ruse operating in the actual world of power. The division
is used "to infect the innocence of becoming with ‘punishment' and ‘guilt'
by means of the concept of the ‘moral world order.' Christianity is a hangman's
metaphysics" (1888a, "The Four Great Errors" #7).
Nietzsche's alternative is a use of reason that is not
predicated on a division. It aims at "a minimum in the range and number
of signs which achieves a maximum of energy of these signs" ("What I Owe
to the Ancients" #1)--that is, a reason situated in the body, working in
the service of the instincts; its "companion and echo" (1883-5, "On the
Gift-Giving Virtue" #1).
Today, . . . we see ourselves as it were entangled in
error, necessitated to error, precisely to the extent that our prejudice
in favour of reason compels us to posit unity, identity, duration, substance,
cause, materiality, being (1888a, "‘Reason' in Philosophy" #5).
The implication in Nietzsche's alternative formulation is
that this use of reason would avoid the elimination of particularity: "each
one of us should devise his own virtue, his own categorical
imperative" (1888b, #11). As a formula for such a practice to overcome
an elimination on a social level (through an anti-natural morality), one
of Nietzsche's maxims suggest that it is "by being ‘natural' that one best
recovers from one's unnaturalness" (1888a, "Maxims and Arrows" #6). The
closest model of a society that is not based on an anti-natural morality
he presents us with is the pre-Socratic Athenian. His use of the category
"natural," however, includes the activity of a human society, since Athenian
virtues were "produced, . . . [they were] not there from the beginning"
("What I Owe to the Ancients" #3).
It is this sense of the production of a society, the stylization
of its instinctual will to power, that I find missing in Nietzsche's elaboration
of the organization necessary for a healthy culture. In line with his critique
of the concept as an annihilator of difference, he opposes the idea of
human equality as an organizing principle for society, on account of the
same tendency to homogenization.
‘Equality,' a certain actual
rendering similar of which the theory of ‘equal rights' is only the expression,
belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man and man, class and
class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out--that
which I call pathos of distance--characterizes every strong
age. The tension, the range between extremes is today growing less and
less--the extremes themselves are finally obliterated to the point of similarity
("Expeditions of an Untimely Man" #37).
Nietzsche understands social equality as a secularization
of the principles of the anti-natural morality of Christianity:
[T]hus the mob blink--"there are no Higher men, we are
all equal, man is but man, before God--we are all equal!" (1883-5, "Of
the Higher Man" #1).
If, in its religious guise, human equality was founded on
a relationship to God, in its secular, contemporary shape, it is an equality
founded on the generalized equivalence of the market. It is this change
of foundation that forced Nietzsche's allegory of Jesus, the voluntary
beggar, to flee the marketplace and preach instead to a herd of cows: "‘mob
above, mob below! What are "poor" and "rich" today! I unlearned this distinction--then
I fled away'" (1883-5, "The Voluntary Beggar").
Nietzsche's alternative is a society predicated on an
order of rank, which he terms "a natural order"
(1888b, #57). He isolates three physiological types which constitute this
order: the predominantly spiritual--the elite; the muscular and temperamental--the
noble warriors; and finally, the mediocre type--the great majority. The
organization of society arising from this typology is an aristocratic one.
The establishment of a healthy culture necessitates a hierarchy based on
the "inequality of rights."
A high culture is a pyramid: it can stand only on a
broad base, its very first prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated
mediocrity (#57).
Rather than understanding the division of labour within a
society as historically manufactured, Nietzsche insists that for the manual
labour of the great majority, "specialization, is for them a natural instinct"
(#57). Nietzsche's solution for avoiding the loss of particularity which
he understands as arising from a society based on equal rights is thus
dependent on a reification and naturalization of the historically produced
division of labour--referred to by Nietzsche as pathos of distance.
While I would agree with Nietzsche that "[l]ack of a historical sense is
the original error of all philosophers" (1878, #2), I would further insert
the caveat "‘patere legem, quam ipse tulisti'"
(1887, III.27).
Nietzsche's alternative foundational principle is "[e]quality
for equals, inequality for unequals . . . . Never make equal what is unequal"
(1888a, "Expeditions of an Untimely Man" #48). Since the industrial revolution,
however, the generalized equivalence of capitalism has abolished any such
"natural" distinctions. It is this, rather than the French revolution which
Nietzsche blames, that resolves the "above" and "below" of society into
"mob." Marx describes this process as "[a]ll that is solid melts into air":
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of
ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away . . . . [The
bourgeois class] has resolved personal worth into exchange value and in
place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that
single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade (Marx and Engels 1848, 476;
475).
Nietzsche implicitly recognizes this situation, and has Zarathustra
urge: "You Higher Men, depart from the market-place!" (1883-5, "Of the
Higher Man" #1). I will suggest that just as Nietzsche recognizes that
"[t]here is nothing for it: one has to go forward" (1888a, "Expeditions
of an Untimely Man" #43), so the artificial resurrection of an historically
superseded, aristocratic division of labour is an inadequate means to realise
his vision of a society of singularity. Yet, as the many references in
his work testify, it is certain that Nietzsche thought the socialist programme
equally problematic.
Nietzsche ranks Socialism with Christianity, as a practice
founded on life-denying ideas. "The revolution," for example, is equated
in Nietzsche's mind with "the Last Judgement." (#34). Each serves as a
"Beyond"--"the phantasmagoria of ‘another,' a ‘better' life" ("‘Reason'
in Philosophy" #6). This use of otherworldly ideals, the interpretation
of the world through utopian ideas, is another form of imaginary revenge
on the masters' noble values. Socrates' rational truth, the Christian's
redemption from sin, the Socialists' revolutionary communism: all the products
of ressentiment, all historically successful, or soon to be successful,
slaves' revolts. While Nietzsche would not dispute the retort that his
own ideas are just as much conceptual "fictions," nonetheless, he insists
that "[i]t does indeed make a difference for what purpose one lies: whether
one preserves with a lie or destroys with it" (1888b, #58). The
distinction creativity / destructiveness thus allows Nietzsche to dismiss
the socialists and anarchists (the two are usually collapsed into one another
here), since he understands their ideas to be promoting destruction alone.
Nietzsche implies that his own ideas are not utopian,
not idols founded on a Beyond, but fictions grounded in the actual world
of the instincts. His criticisms are part of a "total critique," that is,
one which is affirmative: "We do not readily deny, we seek our honour in
affirming"
(1888a, "Morality as Anti-Nature" #6). Yet, perhaps the rhetorical force
of affirmation is insufficient if it is not accompanied by an identification
of the elements already present in the real world (not in quotation marks),
from which this alternative might spring forth. The imposition onto the
economic relations of modernity of a model for the organization of society
analogous to the Greek polis is known historically as fascism--a
reality very distant from Nietzsche's idea of a society of singularity.
The Enlightenment may have killed the Christian God, but capital and its
exchange relation, "a power external to and independent of the producers"
(Marx 1857-8, 146), is far from moribund--and if not alive, it is
at least undead. As Marx suggests in the Grundrisse,
In earlier stages of development the single individual
seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his
relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social
powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for
a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete
emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has
never advanced beyond the antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint,
and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up
to its blessed end (162).
Marx's final observation is not quite applicable to Nietzsche,
however, in that his critique of modernity remains a critique of the values
of bourgeois society. Both are materialist philosophers who insist (contra
Habermas' objection to Nietzsche) that "[t]his Enlightenment must now advance
further" (1881, #197). In addition, to a certain extent some of Nietzsche's
criticisms of the socialists may be legitimately levelled at certain strands
of the development of twentieth-century Marxism. The role of the party
as a third, mediating term in Marxist-Leninism, for example, may be said
to present the great majority with the choice "either slaves of the state
or slaves of a revolutionary party" (#206). Its distinction between the
socialist society as transition and communist as destination also results
in the promotion of a work ethic, largely derived from capitalism, that
is certainly ascetic. Yet, there are many other strands of Marxist critique,
and the tradition of critical-Marxism, for example, is very different.
Nietzsche's objection to the perceived demand of the socialists that the
masses be "prepared from today to tomorrow so that you wait and wait for
something from the outside" (#206) was shared by the Situationist International.
Adorno's formulation of "ideology" is a development of Nietzsche's critique
of the concept. Nietzsche's extension of this critique to the level of
society, then, is not as opposed to Marxism as it might at first seem.
Indeed, Nietzsche's understanding of socialism as only containing a destructive
moment demonstrates that, assuming he is referring to Marxism (and not
the nineteenth-century utopian socialists), he simply hadn't read Marx.
In conclusion, then, I would like to sketch out some of the ways in which
Nietzsche's total critique may be productively placed in dialogue both
with aspects of Marx's writings, and the theory and praxis of contemporary
Italian autonomia Marxism, as theorized by Antonio Negri.
Nietzsche's solution for overcoming a decadent society
is the cultivation of life-affirming values and practices. His evaluation
of that which is life-affirming is, in turn, theorized in terms of the
will to power:
I consider life itself instinct for growth, for continuence,
for accumulation of forces, for power: where the will to power is
lacking there is decline (1888b, #6).
As a result of Foucault's reworking of aspects of Nietzsche's
thought,
power is an increasingly ubiquitous concept in contemporary
social criticism. It has also played a predominant role in the history
of Marxist critique; although the comparison may invite confusion and a
loss of the specificy and originality of the Foucauldian usage. The Marxist
usage is notable for its double aspect: it is both an analysis of the power
of domination and exploitation by capital (the law of value) and an identification
of the collective power embodied by its wage-labourers (labour capacity).
This double aspect is present in the later Foucault, but has been developed
more fully by Deleuze and Negri. It is the latter's work on which I would
like to focus, especially given the way in which he locates his project:
"We would therefore like to situate our Marxism and our communism rather
in the great modern current of materialist critique" (Hardt and Negri 1994,
17). Drawing on Nietzsche, and especially Spinoza ("I have a precursor,
and what a precursor" (Kaufmann 1954, 92)), Negri formulates the increasing
productivity of labour under capitalism in terms close to what Nietzsche
might refer to as an increase in a collective will to power:
Living labour, then, even and primarily in its clandestine
existence, accumulates and assimilates to its own being the needs of liberation
of the exploited masses and makes this new being a power which is constantly
more productive. Productivity is the positive transfiguration of liberation
(Negri 1992, 92-93).
I will argue that Negri's development of communism from this
conception of collective power fulfils many aspects of Nietzsche's demands
of a society of singularity. Negri emphasizes the supercession of the individual
/ collective dichotomy which Marx prefigures. Consequently, he defines
communism as:
[T]he establishment of a communal life style in which
individuality is recognized and truly liberated, not merely opposed to
the collective. . . . [T]he collective potential is realized only when
the singular is free (Guattari and Negri 1985, 16-17).
Far from encouraging any kind of herd mentality, then, Negri's
communism involves the conscious cultivation of differences. What Nietzsche's
use of reason was to his critique of the concept, Negri's communism is
to liberal democracy. Communism here presupposes the abolition of exchange
value as the form of mediation for the producers' participation in the
world of consumption. "It is mediated," Marx claims, "rather, by the social
conditions of production within which the individual is active" (1857-8,
172). That is, particularity is not abolished by the objective mediation
of money, but is presupposed as general in its individuality. This individuality
is thus an historically produced singularity; "a power of the collective
individual, the liberation of singularity and the discovery and joy of
free, communal activity" (Negri 1989, 205).
Nietzsche continually emphasizes the affirmative nature
of the will to power: "Willing liberates: for willing is creating, thus
do I teach" (1883-5, "Of Old and New Law-Tables" #16). Similarly, the positive
aspect of Marxism is given pre-eminence in Negri's project. He stresses
the creative dimensions of productive power by reading labour as "a value-creating
practice" (Hardt and Negri 1994, 7). The emphasis on singularity in Negri's
project consequently leads to the kind of perspectival play in the realm
of values which Nietzsche promotes:
Each singular component of the movement develops systems
of value which should be considered in themselves, without requiring either
"translation" or "interpretation." These systems are permitted to evolve
in their appropriate directions and to exist at times in contradictory
relationships with each other. They don't participate any the less in the
same project of constructing a new type of social reality (Guattari and
Negri 1985, 94).
This sense of the development of autonomous modes of expression,
of the creative, singularized production of values through the labour process
(broadly defined), finds a more specific resonance in Nietzsche's discussion
of "Kant as moralist":
What destroys more quickly than to work, to think, to
feel without inner necessity, without a deep personal choice, without joy?
as an automaton of "duty"? It is virtually a recipe for décadence,
even for idiocy (1888b, #11).
This corresponds closely with Marx's account of alienated
labour. He defines three aspects of this process, two of which I shall
focus on here. The first is the alienation of the act of production:
[L]abour is external to the worker, i.e. does
not belong to his essential being . . . . [H]e therefore does not confirm
himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy,
does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh
and ruins his mind. Hence the worker feels himself only when he is not
working; when he is working he does not feel himself. . . . His labour
is therefore not voluntary but forced, it is forced labour (1844,
326).
The second is the alienation "from his own body, from nature
as it exists outside him" (329). When Nietzsche focuses on the drive towards
the "impersonal and universal" (1888b, #11) and the somatophobic use of
reason that the moral world order encourages, we can see how very similar
process are described by Marx, not in terms of will to power, but of labour
power. Thus, we may historically ground the activity of Nietzsche's "free
spirits" in terms of de-alienated labour. It is this which Negri
terms a labour of Dionysus: "Dionysus is the god of living labor,
creation on its own time" (Hardt and Negri 1994, 1-2). In cultivating the
creativity of this process, Negri's praxis describes a means for the transition
out of décadence into a more affirmative society. Perhaps then,
when Zarathustra declares "Free from what? Zarathustra does not care about
that! But your eye should clearly tell me: free for what?" (1883-5,
"Of the Way of the Creator") we are able, through such a praxis, to give
a suitable reply:
The living labor of this subjectivity is its joy, the
affirmation of its own power. "Labour is the living, form-giving fire,"
Marx wrote, "it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as
their formation by living time." The affirmation of labor in this sense
is the affirmation of life itself (Hardt and Negri 1994, 1).
Negri frames his project as "a total critique in the Nietzschean
sense" (Hardt and Negri 1994, 6). Nietzsche's sense, it would seem, is
taken from the affirmation of Goethe--he who experienced the "modern idea"
of revolution
with disgust (1888a, "Expeditions of an Untimely Man"
#48; #49). If the adherents of postmodernism are to be believed, however,
it would seem not even the aristocratic heights of high culture are immune
to capitalism's generalized equivalence. Perhaps Nietzsche's sense of "spiritualization,"
or "‘[g]iving style' to one's character" (1882, #290) offers a point of
possible connection between his intransigent aristocratism and a Marxist
desire to abolish exploitation. Marx had insisted that "the categorical
imperative [is] to overthrow all conditions in which man is
a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being" (1843-4, 251). The
plurality of Negri's process suggests, however, that the only way to do
so is to follow Nietzsche's insistence that "each one of us should devise
his
own virtue, his own categorical imperative" (1888b, #11). I
would suggest that Nietzsche's sense of a pathos of distance would, in
this process, become non-identical with the actual division of labour--that
is, actual exploitation would be abolished through the spiritualization
of difference. It is only on the condition of the abolition of that which
makes equivalent, that Nietzsche's "stylized character," and its "perfection
under a law of their own" (1882, 99), would be possible--given contemporary
economic conditions. Or, in Negri's words, "Communism is the only Dionysian
creator" (Hardt and Negri 1994, 21).
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© Terence Smith,
1996